Let's Talk Bees #78 - Your Beekeeping Questions Answered

Welcome to episode— oh, forgotten the episode. What is it? 78. Welcome to episode 78 of Let's Talk Bees. Before we go any further, I want to show you something very, very cool. Inside this hive, I have a frame queen bee cells. Let's get inside. So the cells on this frame here contain Oh, I'll tell you what, it got me right on the tip of the nose there. It is the most painful place in the world to get stung. It really is the most painful place in the world to get stung. Now that video there, How to Raise Free Queen Bees Using the Double Brood Box Method, will not appear on Black Mountain Honey. It's a very good video. If you want to watch it, you have to head over to 14 Day Beekeeper. It is our brand new page over on YouTube. Get over there, subscribe, and I'm sure you will like it. But I am here, I am doing Let's Talk Bees. We're going to talk, I'm going to talk for an hour about bees. It'll be brilliant. It is surprisingly one of my favourite hours of the week. I quite like getting up early on Saturday and going and doing stuff and talking about bees, and I have been out already this morning to pick up a swarm about 4 o'clock in the morning from my neighbour's garden, and I took it up to the forest, and I've been back here, and I've had a couple of Google Meets with my brother talking about stuff. Hello, Sam, if you're watching. It's pretty good. Saturday morning, 7:01. Right, so let me work out how to go full screen mode here. I think, I think we're all good. I need my— oh, where are we going here? I'm on my little screen. I'm going to put it over here, make sure we can see what is going on. There we go. Okay, let's go. Here we go. I need to see the comments. This is what's throwing me here. I need Zane here. Right, comments, we're good. Okay, a few people saying good morning. I'm not putting the comments up on screen because we're going to chop things up and do some fun things with the videos, but I am all set now. I'm on like a little tiny monitor so I can talk straight into you there. Here we go, John was the first one in. Hi John, how you doing? Hello to Jay, Walkerbee Honey, good morning. Right, first question. I've been told off for answering too many comments on here, so I need to get focused in on the questions is what people are telling me. Morning Lawrence, thank you for your help this week regarding the angry colony. You really do yourselves proud on your customer service. Look forward to calmer inspections going forward. Oh, well, thank you, that's very, very kind. We do our best, our absolute best for customer service. We don't like to ever let anyone down. When it comes to queen bees and introductions though, there are so many things that go wrong, and I say to people all the time, If there's something that like has gone wrong and there's anything that we've done along the way that's going to impact that, then we'll do our very best to help you out. So if we send you a queen and it arrives dead, we will send you a brand new queen or we will refund you. If we send you a queen and later on that season that queen turns out to be a drone laying queen, which can happen and is very frustrating, we'll replace that queen for you free of charge. However, and I just want to be really, really clear here with people, we will only replace those queens free of charge if it is our queen and you send it back to us, or we see that the queen has been killed and put on a little bit of paper. We get lots of requests, lots and lots of requests from people saying, I introduced a queen a couple of weeks ago, I've gone back in and she's a drone layer, and look at all these, look at all these drones on the frames. And then it happens a lot, you say, well, can you, can you send us a picture of the queen and send us, you know, it has to be like our queen, and they send you a picture, they say, either I can't find the queen there's just loads of drones everywhere, or they show you the queen and it's like this stumpy little black queen, and that's definitely not, definitely not the queen we sent, because the queen we sent was kind of marked, and yeah, it's not our queen. So we will replace them. We always do our best with customer service, but we do have to draw the line somewhere. I'm not referencing you here, Baz's Bees, at all. It's just a public service announcement, I guess, to make sure that people understand what we can do and what we can't do. And I think we're quite reasonable with what we can and what we can't do. I saw— I'm just going to say it, why not? I saw one of our competitors recently change their terms and conditions, which said if you order a queen from my competitor and it arrives dead, they will very, very kindly offer you a 50% refund on the dead queen that they just delivered to you. Brilliant customer service, brilliant. I love it. But anyway, yeah, no, we don't do that. So we try to look after people to the nth degree, try to overdeliver. but we can only work within kind of the boundaries that we've got. Like triggered on question 1, wow, there we go. We've got Tom, good morning Tom. Paul, good morning Paul. You are working somewhere today, Paul, very good. Says good morning. A few people saying good morning. There's quite a lot of people in here today, this is good. We're live streaming both on Facebook and YouTube and on Black Mountain Honey and on 14 Day Beekeepers, again that's 4 different places. Oh, Harubis says, have a sip of your tea if you need. I got coffee and I didn't fill it up, but I'm just gonna— I'm gonna finish my coffee. There we go. Which pens— I'm gonna say something else as well. I shouldn't say these things, but I'm just going to go out and say it. Which pens should you use to mark your queens? Now, I don't really think it makes a massive difference which ones you use. There's tons of different pens out there. I like an oil-based pen. As long as you're going to put a dab of paint on the queen, tiny little dab of oil-based paint, and then leave the queen in the cage so it dries and the other bees aren't coming in and smearing everything all over the place, then pretty much any oil-based pen will work. A lot of the graffiti pens are quite good, they're quite long-lasting. You just need to make sure, like I said, you need to isolate the queen and make sure that it dries and sets before it goes anywhere else, and then I've not found any issues with using those pens at all. So I've got a Molotov one, I've got a Klink one, the non-graffiti ones, I've got a Toma pen, Toma pens are really good. anything but a Posca, really. Posca pens are terrible, and it just frustrates me that people continue to use them. Now, the thing that I wasn't going to say was just, I saw— I see a number of videos of people doing various things on social media, but one of them was someone marking a queen bee. So it's like, here's a video on how to mark a queen bee. And like, when we mark our queen bees, we'll get the queen, we'll put her in a cage, we'll get a pen, we just go dot, little dot like that, leave the queen in the cage for a couple of minutes, let her dry, let the queen walk off. That's it, really, really simple. The video that I saw was just someone attacking a queen bee in a push-in cage or kind of one-handed queen catcher repeatedly, like 50 times over, like hitting it with a Posca pen. And I was like, it's marked, just let her go. Like, she's— you're battering this poor little queen with a Posca pen, what are you doing? But anyway, anything but a Posca pen. Posca pen is water-based, so I guess the argument is like water-based is better for the queens, but as long as you leave it to dry and you leave it to cure, It's going to have off-gassed by then, and I've been using all those pens for years. There's no fertility issues. There's no issues with queens dying. The only the only issue, and it kind of works with both pens really, is when you're when you're painting. I shouldn't laugh. When you're painting them, just don't don't try and get it everywhere. That's that's the main thing. When you're taking the pens out, this is the problem that most people get. You take the pen out, and they'll kind of look at it and say, "Right, there we go. I've got a queen," and they go to put it, and they they. Push down. They get the pen and they push the pen, the little retractable nib, and a massive gush of paint comes out. And everyone's done it. We've all done it. That's not how the pens work. Get the pen, go do do do do do do do. Pump out all the paint. Wipe off all the excess. Wipe it again. Wipe it a third time. Wipe it a fourth time. Then pop one little dab on your queen. Don't kill it. Don't try and repeatedly attack it twenty times with a Posca pen inside a one-handed queen clip. And that's it. It's very, very simple. So yeah, there we go. Anything oil-based and anything that's not torturing the queens in one-handed cage clips. Go and have a look, see if you can find the video. It's quite a fun one. Morgy says— I say it's quite a fun one, it's not quite a fun one, but it's an amusing one to watch because they're trying to teach you how to mark a queen and it's a disaster class. Right, Morgy275, thanks for the Black Mountain Honey F1 Buckfast queen. She arrived safe and sound and installed into the nucs, fingers crossed. I want to get more stories of what's going on with our Nukes like we, queens as well. But we we package up nukes, we package up queens, we send them out. People go through the process of like making them hopelessly queenless. They do the introduction, and then the story goes you doesn't happen. I need to build up some of those stories, don't I? We need to do. I don't know. I don't know how we're going to do it. We need to integrate some of those stories in. If anyone if anyone wants to be a customer side integrator collaborator, whatever we're going to call it, let me know. We'll be up for something like that. Drop me an email. blackmansinhoney@gmail.com. Have you ever tried Carpathian bees? They are calm bees, collect a lot of honey, and are economical in winter. So I have tried Carpathian bees, and I've had good experience with Carpathian bees as well, which is unusual because if I have good experience with something, I tend to carry it on. But at Melitta Bees, they had a beautiful Carpathian line, and it was probably one of the calmest colonies that I've ever really seen. And we were we were lined up to get more, and in and in 2024 they lost the mother. They they only had one mother. Normally they have like five or six different mothers, and they can interchange, and they're breeding. But they only had one Carpathian mother, and then they they lost her, and they lost her without any sort of reproduction. And then they couldn't get access to the line again, and then they got access to another Carpathian line that wasn't quite as good. So they just said not doing it anymore, which is really really. Like a big shame because I quite liked, I liked those genetics. But yes, I have tried them and I agree they are good genetics. Uh, right, where are we going next? Tom says, what is the difference between your premium queens and non-premium? We bought some premium, so we are curious. Thank you, Tom. Uh, good question, Tom. A lot of people ask that one. So as you know, all of the different bees have different traits and different genetics. Now we try to bring our best genetics that we possibly can to Blackman's in Honey and to our customers. Now It's a case you can have good queens that you graft from, and then you're at the mercy of the local drones. So it's not just about the genetics in the maternal side, it's about the genetics in the paternal side, but then also like your location, your topography, your ability to restrict the drone mating to the drones that you actually want. So I would say the difference between our standard queen and our premium queens just covers and straddles all of those little bits. Might be slightly more premium maternal lines, calmer maternal lines. They might be slightly better paternal lines that we're using. They can be different areas where we're able to achieve different mating successes. So the premium ones go into the area where we know that the isolation is going to be better than the standard ones. Now, are we talking huge differences here? Probably not, but marginal differences on top of an already very good product. can make the difference in those weeks or 2 weeks where you get intense kind of honey flows. So we've seen that, we think the premium ones are a little bit calmer, produce a little bit more honey. I would say they're the 2 traits that you're going to see, but as I said, we're talking margins here. But at the other end of the spectrum, if people are thinking, oh well, I don't want to spend £50 or whatever it is on a premium queen, are the normal ones just as good? I would say, well yeah, go back to it, it is marginal gains A lot of people say, which one should I buy then? And I say, if it was me, I'd buy the cheaper ones. There we go. And a lot of people still go ahead and buy the premium ones there because they say, well, I want, I want the best of the best, so I'm going to go with the premium. But you'll be happy with both. What I would say is we are changing— not changing the way that we're selling the queens, but I just— you would have seen an email went out offering some of the premium queens on the Friday a slightly significant discount, 30% off discount. Now I'm happy to do that week in, week out. I'm happy to give people kind of that dual option, which is if you're— if you, if you know next week you need to make some splits, or you've made your splits already and you want some queens delivered next Thursday, they have to be delivered on Thursday, you can go ahead, you can book your queens in for either Thursday or Friday delivery at the standard price. Now if I've got any queens left over on the Friday, I'm going to put them up, I'm going to do an email, I'll drop people an email maybe Thursday night, Friday morning, saying there's a, there's a few spare. And we can do, we can do good discounts on those. We can do, instead of £50 for the premium, we'll knock them down 30% off and do them for £35. Now a couple of people have said, well, I'm just going to wait for the £35 ones. And I say, well, that's, that's fine. Like, this is kind of the reason that we're doing that. We might send you an email on Thursday night or Friday morning saying we've got some premium queens, we've got some F1 Buckfast, we've got some VSH, they're all here, you can buy them, and here's the discount. But we also might not do that. like this week is going to be touch and go whether there's any at all. So it's a bit of a risky one. If you've made your splits and you want queens coming like next Thursday, you can wait until Friday and see if we've got any queens, but if there aren't any, then you're a week behind. So we're just trying to offer that kind of flexibility so people who want the queens to book ahead can, and then if you want to get like the best discount possible and you're happy to run the risk of them being maybe like a week late or something, you could just wait for the discounts to come. They will come a little bit more repeated, repeatedly now that we're into kind of like the back end of the season. But I just wanted to be upfront and honest and transparent with that, that for us as a business, that is a useful model to follow. Like, we earn less money doing that, but it means that we can, we can ensure that every single queen that we get in is sold, which means like there's— we're not left with any queens. It makes our lives a lot easier. Um, and then for some people out there as well, it means like, you know, there's gonna be some discounts coming on a Friday, keep an eye on the emails. All I would say, so here we go, let's be honest, bringing a lot of honesty to Black Mountain Honey at the moment. We had 206, I think, queens that were left on that day. There was about 120 of them that had been previously booked in, so I had a surplus of about 80 queens. I sent the email out and they were sold out within 36 minutes. So don't think like, oh, we can wait for the emails and then we're going to get them. Like, there's a rush. People want those cheap queens, those discounted queens. Those perfectly good queens, but yeah, so there we go. I thought I would just give you a little bit of a breakdown of all of the stuff that is happening with the queens there because people, people need to make the decisions. So that's the difference. Andy says, morning Lawrence, hope Helen's doing well. I was wondering if you can requeen whilst doing a demeray. If so, how? You— I wouldn't requeen whilst doing a demeray only because, and I'm saying this because of like the stuff we're doing at Black Mountain Honey at the moment, When you're learning a new system or when you're following a process, with my small brain, I can only really follow one process well all the way through. And we're doing this kind of like with databases and stuff at the moment, and I say, well, I'm okay with that bit, I'm okay with that bit. When I start to put them together in my mind, it just all goes to pot. And I think that's the same thing that would probably apply here, which is if you're going to requeen whilst doing a demeray, I'd question, well, why? Why are you requeening whilst doing a demeray? And then if there's a valid reason for doing it, I'd say, well, maybe let's just go ahead and requeen and not do the Demaray. And if there isn't a valid reason for doing it, I would say, well, you're much better off— like, if you're thinking the queen's coming towards the end of her life, you might as well go ahead and do the Demaray and let her fill the bottom box and then just go ahead and take her out. And at the point where you're going to maybe move that top box and put it back underneath, I would just kill the queen and replace her at that point. So if it is just a straightforward requeening because the queen is not performing, then the demarais is the perfect, like, test for your queen because it's going to really push her to the limits of what she can actually do. And you might as well just— you might as well take all of that resource that is there. So no, I would say let's not do it at the same time. I would wait until afterwards. Here we go. You can see me trying to process multiple things in my head there and it's just not working. Here we go, right, here we go, let's get to the next question. Sorry, it zoomed up a lot, that's why, that's why we missed them. Here we go. Oh wow, there's a lot of questions here. Okay, let's get this sorted. Apologies for the little, little break, everyone. I just, I need to get the pictures here so I can see it. Here we go. I don't want to miss anyone out on their questions. This is it. Right, we are good. So we did Andy's one, right? Mr. DBT Darren says, "I'm up, I'm up, I'm up. Morning, Lawrence. Finally made it. Hello, 7 a.m." We're thinking about making it every 7 a.m. Every 7 a.m. Definitely not doing that. Thinking about making it every Saturday, and if I do make it every Saturday, I'm gonna do half on YouTube, and we'll do the other half over on Circle because I think there's a few comments coming up of people saying that they really, really do like the new home for 40. Beekeeper. It is live! A little bit of spit came out there, that's disgusting, sorry. I was excited though, it is live, it really is. So people are in, testers are in, into the new Fortinado Beekeeper and HiveQ community environment. I'm still not 100% sure what to call it, but it is really, really good. I'll maybe do some screenshots. Let's see what people are saying about it. Right, so John, are people saying stuff about the family? Hello? Here we go, right. Chris says, morning, Laurence, do you believe that miticides in beeswax is affecting drone fertility? Loaded question, if ever I've heard that one, Chris. I would say I don't know, but there is no doubt in my mind, having seen the wax production facilities at a number of suppliers, that the loop of people treating their bees, producing beeswax, that beeswax going into wherever to be made into foundation, and then nice clean foundation coming out the other end that people put back into their hives, oblivious to the fact that there could be anything in it. Is that what's going on, isn't it? So there's no way that stuff, miticides, whatever it is, other stuff is getting kind of baked into that process. Is it impacting things? I don't know. Like, you'd have to look at the studies and stuff like that. I would Drone fertility, like I would say, is probably the wrong thing to focus on here. I think mismanagement of drones is far worse. I see everyone doing this, which is, oh yeah, we don't use we don't use miticides because it's bad for the bees. So what we do is we just take out this our two frames of drones and just uncap them all and chuck them away, and all the all the mites are in there. And then people say, ah, queens aren't getting mated. Must be, must be all the miticides affecting the drone fertility. I'm not saying that you're saying that, Chris, but it's the same people that say that that chuck away all the drones that are in their colonies for varroa control, and then they moan that their queens aren't getting mated. And I was like, so maybe connected there, guys. There may be some connection there. So, so I'm very much a case, you know, I'm very much a man of loving the drones. Like, I put extra drone foundation in and I let the drones go, go wild and get as many as I can in the colonies. So we don't see, we don't see issues with that. We don't have many mating issues, like our success where we get our queens mated is very, very high. So I'm not looking at it and thinking there's drone fertility issues there. For us, it's, yeah, it's not an issue. Thomas says, morning Lawrence, how late in the season can you make up a nuc? Glad I was able to help spot the queen on the last video of the Zane's first nuc since you didn't manage to spot it during your inspection. Oh Thomas, oh Thomas, oh Thomas, oh Thomas. You need to watch episode 9 of Zane's First Nuke. I won't say anymore. It is— oh wow. Yeah, gutted. Right, where are we going next? I should not live. How late in the season can you make up a nuke? Right, the other thing I was going to say is I got some— I've been getting some consultancy advice with loads of things because there's just too much going on at Black Mountain Honey. And one of the things that they said to me that you will be aware of, anyone watching this, is They said you do way too much content, like way, way, way too much. You can't keep up with it yourself and you're making everybody else run around in a panic. Like, you're banging this drum really quickly and saying you have to keep up with me. And like, from a consultancy point of view, I'm looking at that and saying, I think it's not only unnecessary, the pace in which you're working with videos, but I think it's damaging as well for both your brand and your business and your YouTube channel. So Let's do it something— let's do a slightly different way. So we're going through that whole process at the moment, and oh, I've kind of— oh, let's go back to it. How late in the season can you make up a nuc? You can make up a nuc very, very late in the season, but it depends on the amount of bees that you need to put in it. Now, the reason that I went on a long preamble there was that Instead of just blindly focusing on going out with Zane and saying, Zane, right, we're going to film 14 videos today. We're doing this one, we're doing that one, we're doing this one. The consultant said, no, you just got to stop doing that. It's way too damaging. Why don't you do this instead? So what he said to me was, why don't you go back and like repackage up some of the older videos? And I said, well, you know, they're older videos. There's not a huge amount of value in them. And he said, no, you're definitely wrong. They might be dated. There's value in them though. Like the message is clear. repackage them. So it's relevant to this question here: how late in the season can you make up a nuc? What I went away and did, instead of going off and filming loads of new videos, is I went back through my back catalogue on YouTube and I found a series which was a step-by-step how to make up an overwintered nuc. It's like a 12-series, a 12-episode series, and it starts off like all the videos back then. It starts off with me doing a 6-minute preamble announcing what I'm going to do in the video. So I say, oh, hello everyone. Today in today's video, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. And then I go off and do it. So I didn't like the videos, but the content and the message was brilliant. So this is what I've done. I went ahead, I refilmed some intros to all of them. I sent them off to the editing team with the instruction to say, look, it's a 20-second intro. It's a 7-minute video. Compress it right down. Get all the key messages across. Give people the dates that they want. Show them the process. It gives you a step-by-step, week-by-week, 12-week process. It's called the Overwintered Nuclear System, and I'm going to be releasing it in like a couple of weeks' time because it is literally finished. This is the change that we're making at Black Mountain Honey. I'm trying to get away from going outside like I did this morning and collecting a swarm and doing a video saying, hey guys, I'm collecting a swarm at the moment, and they swarmed and it was a bit annoying. It's not really that valuable to anyone. And I'm trying to switch it up here where Thomas is asking, how late in the season can you make up a nuc? And I'm saying to you, Thomas, you can make it up pretty much at any time of the year. And it depends— and depending on the time of the year will depend, like, or will dictate the amount of resources that go into it. But I'm going to go one step further than that. I've produced a full 12-part series called The Overwintered Nuclear System That will be released in 2 weeks' time, and it's just going to give you a step-by-step, week-by-week process showing you how much brood to add, how many frames of stores to add, when to feed, when to put your treatments in, slowing the treatment— sorry, slowing the feed down, different ratios of feed, 1:1, 2:1, when you should do your final feed to make sure you're not backfilling the brood nest. All of that information is there. Now, I hope— And you Feel free to give me feedback on that. I think that's a much, much more valuable proposition to anybody, any beekeeper, than me just giving like a running commentary of what is going on. It's just become aware that I can't keep up, so I need to look backwards, take things out of the past, repackage it, and give you it in a really nice way. I've got loads of these to do, so really good question, Tom. I would say, how late in the season can you make up a nuc? I'll answer your question finally. If you want to do a one frame of brood and one frame of store split with a shake of bees, I would say you are at the absolute limit of that now. I'd probably advise moving over to 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, good, good shake of bees, maybe 2 frames shake of bees in as well, take it off to a new apiary, feed it up straight away, that should be okay. The thing that— the way of thinking of it is much better than thinking, right, how can I build up a colony that's ready to overwinter? Because you're missing out a really key point, a lot of people miss this point, which is How big do I need to build up this colony to protect itself from robbing bees and robbing wasps at the time of the year that they become bad? I've already seen wasps sniffing around some of the hives trying to get in. The wasp pressure is building. The robbing bee pressure will will get really bad once the flow kind of stops, and it could be a super compressed year again. It's looking like it's going to be that way. But yeah, just just try and stay try and stay ahead. Make sure you build up your nucs to be able to get ahead of the robbing bees and the wasps, and then you should be good. 25 minutes in, we've got 35 minutes left. I've not answered anywhere near enough questions here, right? Saw a good video on queen marking, and they used a small sponge to pin the abdomen to save them having to hold her with their fingers. I've seen that one, and I've seen the one with the band as well, putting the band down. I have to say, I'm more comfortable doing it with the fingers, but I like that one, John. I think that the band one is potentially a nice Um, yeah, easy way of not damaging the queen. Uh, Denby Honey Paul says, I'm so looking forward to receiving my Obsidian queen next week. I made a split for her yesterday. Are they very similar to Buckfast? Well, that is, that is a brilliant question, Paul, because it's very much on my radar, uh, to talk about this. So we removed the Obsidian queens. I went through this process, we've been going through this process with the consultant trying to consolidate stuff, and it's happening everywhere. It's happening on Black 19 Honey, it's happening on the website. We're We're consolidating everything. He said, you've got too many different types of Queen. You've just got too many different types. It's confusing for people. So we went through this consolidation process to take it from 13 different lines to 6. And one of the ones that didn't— it's not that it didn't make the cut. We were trying to position things in a way, like coming at it from a user experience perspective. We wanted to have 3 pairs. And it meant that the Obsidian didn't fit neatly into that. So we took the Obsidian away. And oh, people kicked right off taking the Obsidian away. Straight up, people were saying, why can't I order the Obsidian? Like, that's all I want, just bring, bring back the Obsidian. When are they coming back? When can I order them? And I said, well, they're, they're not, they're not coming back. Like, the plan is to not bring them back, just consolidate. And people said, I really think you should reconsider that. Like, they are by far and away my favorite one. Please, can you reconsider? And I said, well, like, we'll reconsider, but at the moment it's we can't do it because there's a big lead-in on them. We need to inform them that they need to do the grafts and they need to graft. And so it's 6 to 8 weeks away. And then another email came in and then another email came in and then lots and lots of emails came in. I thought, okay, this isn't— we need to do something with this here. And then an even more interesting development. And I'm just going to start bringing this guy in here now because it is moving quite quick. The person that I'm working with on the super cool idea, and when I say working, I do nothing. Like I respond to a WhatsApp and just say, that's awesome. So that's my, that's my involvement. They are working on a super cool hive scale idea. That's all I'm going to say. So it's a hive scale idea, does a little bit more than a hive scale, and if we get it off the ground, it is going to be the coolest thing in the world, and it will massively benefit anybody who's bought 14-Day Beekeeper or is over at HiveQ. I will say just that. So Also, I might as well plug it in there at the moment. You've got one week left for lifetime membership. If you're watching this and you've not signed up to 14 Day Beekeeper and you want lifetime access to HiveQ along with all the channel member videos that are living over there now, one week left, do not delay. But going back to the hive stand or the hive scale idea, this guy said to me, what do you think of your Obsidian lines? And I said, well, I really like the Obsidian line. Like, I'm a little bit gutted because I didn't want to have to remove them and I quite like them and they're, you know, they're very, very dark, they get to— people can blend in with other people's bees, so there is that as well. And he said, yeah, I think you might be missing something there though. And I said, oh, go on, what am I missing? And he said, can I just show you something? So we logged into this ecosystem where he has these hive scales and he started showing me something and this wasn't just like a snapshot, this was a lot of data. And it's interesting because it correlated with some data that I was shown last year that I was like shown for the first time, which was okay. But, but fundamentally it comes down to this: the data is showing that the Obsidian is producing more honey than the Buckfast, and in these 2 instances here, quite a lot more honey than the Buckfast. Now the Obsidian line is derived from a number of different genetics, but one of the genetics that's in there is, is the Caucasian bee, and the Caucasian bee has a very long tongue. So the Obsidian line has a longer tongue than the Buckfast line— really simple kind of property length of the tongue— which means that they're able to access different forage to the Buckfast bee. And this is exactly what somebody else said to me last year. They said, I've got like, I've got 10 hives here. Yeah, we almost set it up as a test. It wasn't deliberately done like that. They set it up as a test and said, got 10 of your Buckfast and I've got 10 of your Obsidian, and the Buckfast have produced 2 supers of honey for the spring. Like, I'm happy with that. Like, that's really happy with that. It's like 40, 50 pounds of honey, spring harvest. They said, but the Obsidian have done 4 supers each. Like, all of them, they've all done at least 4 supers, some are up to 5. And he said the colonies, like, you couldn't tell them apart. They're same, same size colonies. So he was saying there must be something going on here. It must be the tongue length. And it means— and the thing that I like most about that, and I'll talk about some of the negatives as well with it in a little bit, but the thing I love most about that is that they're going out and getting more honey, so they're going out and foraging more nectar, but the source of nectar that they're getting is a source of nectar that only like that bee can get, so it becomes a very exclusive honey. It becomes a honey that has properties and, uh, yeah, like taste potentially that is different from the honey that the Buckfast can produce. But here's where it gets a little bit interesting, because it was showing on the days where— and this potentially is sometimes a negative of the Buckfast, and, and one that the local, local people grade, let's call them that, like to kind of say, oh well, this is why you shouldn't keep Buckfast. But he was showing on the graphs how during the poor weather, the Buckfast was declining, whereas the Obsidium was in some instances declining but maintaining well. So it was proving that the Obsidian was a little bit more hardy, it was a little bit more able to go out in the drizzly weather and still go and find something. So we're bringing the Obsidian back. The Obsidian is very much back. We've been given a batch of Obsidian for every single week up until the end of July, and when I put them on, I think the first 3 weeks got sold out straight away. In fact, one of them sold out way more than we actually had, so I need to go back and reallocate some people. The Obsidian line is going to be back The hive scale idea is going to be used to show the differences between these queens. I'm really, really excited about this. Now, I don't think this is going to change my approach to beekeeping because the Obsidian line didn't do a number of the things that I liked it to do. They're super calm, um, they produce a lot of honey. There's quite a lot propolis there, so for people who don't like propolis, you might want to go down that line. But it was It was the rapid expansion of the Buckfast that I really like when it comes to my style of beekeeping. I think they maintain that temperament very, very well at the F1 generation as well, and if you're isolated, you can take that multiple generations down the line. It's just when the, you know, when they start going mating with AMM drones that things can get a little bit spicy. But all I will say is I'm going to bring that back. The evidence there for me is strong. I'm gonna have a look at that again and do it in a kind of a bit of a more technical way. I'm going to do some tests, test the queens, test the F1 Buckfast queens, test our UK-mated queens, test the Obsidian queens, do some tests on the VSH. And maybe we will compress things back down again in terms of product availability. But all I would say is I'll keep my options open and I'll look at the data because I think it's really interesting the way that the weather patterns are changing. The fact that it's just rained for 3 weeks solid here in North Wales, that robustness becomes a trait that's quite useful. But then if we get the really, really dry kind of nice long summers that we get not in North Wales, but when we do get them in North Wales, it's nice and the water table remains high, like the Buckfast potentially could outperform them. So I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna make long-term decisions based on like one or two sets of data. But what is— what is made clear to me is that I need to track that data. I need to show people what's going on, the different traits, the different rates of expansion, the different crops, the different amount of honey coming in, the nectar coming in, all of that stuff. We need to track it and we need to give you visibility of that. And as I said, if you're a member of HiveQ, 14-Day Beekeeper, or over on our Circle community, you will get first access to all of that. I, I don't know why I'm answering questions like in 15-minute batches at the moment, but there we go. I'm gonna try and clip stuff up, huh? Right, uh, Julia says, morning Lawrence, hope your family is well. Thank you very much, Julia. How long should you leave a nuc to orientate before moving it How long should I leave them to orientate before moving it 3 feet? Oh, that's— that is an interesting question. I would say if you're getting a nuc and you're asking that question, how long should I leave them to orientate before moving it 3 feet, I would say just skip the step and just put it 3 feet away in the new location. If you've put it somewhere and you're thinking, oh, I shouldn't have put it there, I wish I'd gone 3 feet away or somewhere else like that, I don't think you really need to leave it any amount of time because I would just— I probably wouldn't move it 3 feet in one go. I'd probably just go back at the end of the day and move it a foot, and then go back the end of the day and move it a foot again. And you can do that indefinitely, you know, it's a really good way to move a hive like quite a long distance. You can just every single day move it 3 feet, just keep on going, and they come back and they find it every time because it's within that 3-foot or 3-mile rule. So I wouldn't worry too much about it, as long as there's no other beehives or anything around, they will find it very, very quickly. So I would just, yeah, bump it along a foot a day and you should be good. Electrical courses—that's a good way to get some get some advertising in there, isn't it? It says, "Morning Lawrence. Done a successful demo rate at the end of April, and it went great. I also enjoyed how it gave the colony to reorganize the frames instead of having lots of half-filled frames with winter stores." It's it's a good point about that the demo rate. It it's effective like the management of the comb for the beekeeper as well. It it gives you the ability to move stuff around. Maybe you've got like capped frames of stores or something like that and you want to rework that downstairs into the ever-expanding brood nest, you can go in and do that and move stuff around. So yeah, I'm a massive fan of the demure, my favourite technique ever. Morning all, it stopped raining, we needed it. Fab weather forecast here in Keynes for the next few days and the lime trees are starting to bloom. The bees will be happy, they were flying earlier today. It's funny, I think it's very important, yeah, for people to look at the weather and understand the impact that it's going to have on your bees both now and in the future as well. So I, I looked, I've been looking at the weather as all beekeepers do, come thinking what's going on. It is raining every single day, like hammering it down, getting battered by hail and everything this week, but then the weekend looks nice. So today 20 degrees and then like 21, 22, and it's a bit overcast, but it's gone from 3 weeks of saturated rain and like that's kind of our June gap, we had a 3-week June gap here, in North Wales this year. Terrible weather, but the ground is now saturated and the weather's coming back. And I look at that, and I said it yesterday morning on Circle, on 14 Day Beekeeper, whatever you want to call it, I said, oh, my swarmy sense is tingling. It was really going, and it's going strong now. So anyone who's out swarm hunting, this weekend is the weekend for you. But I did, I could just feel it because you've got all of those bees that have been confined, probably running out of space, And then like the weather's been bad, so they just can't get out. And then all of a sudden, lovely weather. Like yesterday was 18, 19 degrees, lots of sun coming in, really nice, tons of nectar going in, and then a nice forecast so that the weather is settled and the bees can sense that. And you combine all of those things together— oh, and the fact that it's, I don't know, a couple of weeks away from the longest day, so it is prime, prime swarm season— you just know it's going to be swarm central. So I put that on, I put that on the post saying my swarmy sense is tingling as a result of all of these things. I think it's a Perfect storm, and then half an hour later, literally half an hour later, Helen, my wife, came running in. She said, "There's a swarm in the garden. There's a swarm in the garden." She is allergic to bees, like majorly allergic. So I went out there, and there was there was a huge swarm in the garden. It was really really big. So I got some pictures, and I posted it saying, "Yeah, got it right. Got the prediction right." But it's not a difficult prediction to make. It's not like I'm I'm celebrating the fact that I. I'd predicted it and it wasn't like written in the stars. It was quite obvious it was going to happen. It's the first really nice warm day for ages. Any swarms that were going to swarm during that period are going to be backed up and now they've just got a perfect weekend to do it. But I'll give that advice to you if you're anywhere around here. Swarm season is here, very much so this weekend. That was yesterday, so then I spent the rest of the evening going and filming it and putting it in a box and getting Battered, and I mean battered. I took I took Ivy around there, took my little girl around there, got got her involved in the video, and we went round, and I looked at them. I thought I need to get the last cluster of bees like in the box, but I probably shouldn't. I probably shouldn't do it while my daughter's here. So I took I took my daughter home, came back, didn't bring my bee suit, and you'll just have to watch the video when it comes out. But yeah, needless to say, I took a few stings. Right, where are we going? Danny Cleo, morning. I bought a queen from yourself and introduced her perfectly fine, but on my 7-day inspection she had laid absolutely nothing. Now I know the weather has been really crap, so hopefully when I do my inspection today or tomorrow I see that she's now been laying. Is it normal for a queen to not lay if the weather takes a turn? Yes, like a thousand times yes. We get so many emails coming in, Danny, like this, people saying, I bought a queen, And I put her in the colony and she's not doing anything. She's just, she's not up to scratch. I'm not saying, I'm not saying this for you, Dan. I'm just saying I'm paraphrasing for customers here. And I say, well, like, if there's something wrong with the queen, we're more than happy to put it right. We stand by our product here. Send me some pictures. Send me a few pictures. And we always like to have a top-down picture and a picture of some of the frames. And just send me 5 or 6 pictures showing a variety of different things with the queen, and I'll let you know. I'll give you my thoughts and give you a bit of advice on what's going on. I've had five or six emails this week of this exact thing, where people saying I bought a queen, she's not laying, and they've all sent the pictures back, and every single one, bar none, this week have come back, and I've seen the following, which is frames with a bit of brood on. Maybe yeah, a little bit spotty the brood, but not not the not the worst brood, not the best brood. Queen's still there, and then on the first frame. No stores, like none, bone dry. Second frame, bone dry. Third frame, nothing, just a frame of nothing. Fourth frame, you get, you get the picture, is just bees, a little bit of brood, a queen, and nothing else. No pollen, no capped stores, no open stores, no nectar, no food, like literally no food. It's like they've not been fed for weeks. And then they go back to the question of the queen, like, oh, I bought a queen off you and it's not laying, is she okay? And it's like the Problem, definitely not the queen. And like, I can prove to people that it's not the queen because that colony there— and this is the advice I've been giving people all week— that colony there, take your supers off, feed them 6 to 8 liters of 1:1 syrup over a week, and then if she's not laying and you can't see eggs and larvae, then we'll replace the queen. Like, I guarantee she'll be laying. And this is what I would say to you. This is what I would say here, Danny, is it's exactly the same one here. So if you've got a colony where the weather's been really, really bad and they're going backwards and they've taken down all of the food and you've just got lots of dryness in the brood box or even lots of like capped stores. The bees need this incoming nectar to kind of make it work, but if you're seeing all of that, I would just recommend getting a good feed in there. The feed will kick-start her, the good summer weather will kick-start her. It can take up to 3 weeks for the queens to properly come back into lay anyway, so seeing— not seeing eggs after a week is nothing to be worried about. But knowing what I'm seeing from people, the emails that are coming in, I suspect you're going to have like quite a dry brood box and you need to go in and fix that. Fix the dry brood box by giving them some nice incoming food spread over a week. 1:1 sugar syrup simulates a flow, stimulates that queen, and then, and then you can come back and have a look at the queen. And if there's an issue, we always fix it, you know that. But I suspect there won't be an issue and you'll have a really nice, perfect, plump queen going around doing everything that she Thanks for the queens you sent out over the last few weeks, both successfully introduced and laying. Still got a Black Mountain Honey 2024 queen still laying like crazy. How long can you store capped supers before extracting? I really like that question and I've nearly been caught out by it again. I've done this every single year bar one, maybe two, and the one or two years that I did it, I said, right, I'm doing that every single year, that was the easiest thing ever. The mistake that I've made previously, John—I've just gone back to YouTube mode there. That's what I do when I'm filming a video. I'll kind of cut. Oh yeah, I get it wrong. Okay, right. Fresh cut, and you can't do that when you live stream. It's only because I was looking at your name. It's Johnny. I know you've got John ones. It's Johnny, isn't it? Johnny. So how long can you cap? How long can you store the cap supers before extracting? This is what I did in previous years. I used to go out and say, "Right, I'm going to go and do honey extraction." Sorry, honey harvesting today. Get all my honey supers off. I'll stack them in my honey extraction room overnight, put a nice floor, like a roof, upturned roof on the floor, up to a proper roof on the top, strap them down so that they're really nice and clean and fully secure inside my honey extraction room. Come home at the end of the day and you think, yeah, I've got a good job done. You go to bed and you have your dinner and you get up and you go to start doing the honey extraction the next morning and you're just— and you— I realize it every time and I'm like, it's all gone Like cold, it's cold. I was out at 4 o'clock this morning catching swarms, it is cold outside, it's single figures, 5 or 6 degrees or whatever it is, and if you leave honey overnight, even in a honey extraction shed, the temperature just goes right down and it makes honey extraction so much more difficult and so much more time-consuming, really frustrating. So the quick fix is just do this, it's the easiest fix in the world. Lower your expectations. Don't try and get too much done in a day, and do your days like this, which is get up in the morning, go out, blow out all the bees, take all your honey off, get your supers, take them back to the honey extraction shed, set it all up, and extract it. And it's done, and it's quick, and the honey just flies out. You get tons more honey out of the combs. You don't get anywhere near as many blown-out combs. Everything's nice and clean, and the Beauty, the one, the best, best bit about this is that you do it in a day. Yes, I say, I'm not recommending anybody to go and do this, gotta be super clear here, yeah, but just imagine this for an example. You've got a colony on a brood box and 4 supers, and you're thinking, we are in the middle of a mega flow here, I need another 4 supers urgently, but I've not got them. I want to extract my honey and put the supers back on on a day, but I've not got any spare boxes. You could do this, you could just go and take the supers off, go and put a big cardboard box or something over the hive just to give it some temporary shelter for the day so it's not getting like crazy robbed out. Just, you'd have to design something to do that to make it work. A big cardboard box would work though. Go and take the honey off, extract it really, really quickly, and just go and put it back on. And okay, the bees are going to be in a little bit of an awkward situation for a few hours, but a big cardboard box sorts that out. And then you just go back, take the cardboard box off, bump it, all the bees out, super's back on, and it's done in a day. Like, it's a very, very neat system. And I think for— not as if for beginner beekeepers, but for smaller-scale beekeepers who've just got like a few colonies, that is what I would be doing. Not the cardboard box technique, you don't need to do that. You can mitigate that just by having enough supers. Yeah. Or not taking them all off at once. It was just that the theory of it would work, but I think condensing down the harvesting and the extraction and doing it all in one day is very, very good for the beekeeper, it's very, very good for the bees, and it makes the end product superior, I'd say, because you end up with less wax going into it, it's going to be clearer, it's definitely easier. Oh, there we go, right, James says, we have a Black Mountain Honey Premium F1 Buckfast queen that was introduced successfully 3 weeks ago. After the first 7 days, we found eggs and larvae, week 2 capped worker brood and good pattern, third inspection today. I was— I'm reading this, I'm such a Not a pessimist, but just kind of ready for the reality of life. I was reading it thinking, oh, what's gone wrong with this one? It's gone well, it's gone well. There we go. They do normally go well. Right, Sam says, morning Lawrence, how was your honey crop this year? I have 12 production hives and have so far taken 250 pounds of OSR and bean honey. Taking them to 40 acres of borage next week, hoping for good weather. Well, lucky for you, Sam, the weather looks really, really good next week and We've had loads of rain, so the ground should be nice. The borage could yield very well. Borage honey is not only like the best yield to go in, but it is also my favorite honey. I love borage honey, really, really nice. So my honey crop, rubbish, terrible honey crop. I should, if I'd have followed my own advice this year, I would have taken the honey off whilst it was there, maybe like 2 or 3 supers on the best performing ones, 1 or 2 supers on the not so good performing ones. Forming ones. I would have taken that off and I would have double brooded and I would have fed. Gave loads of people that advice and then made splits later on. It would be— if you'd followed that advice this year and you kind of, you're 3 weeks into feeding through the June gap now on a double brood and they're thinning a double brood, like that split into 2 colonies and super up from here on in will produce tons of honey. Wish I'd followed my own advice, but I am, I live in a very, very different life this year where the bees are just not My priority, like I'm my wife's got she's got breast cancer and we've got lots of treatments going on. She's going through chemotherapy. We've got travel to the hospitals in Manchester. It's like an hour away, and then you've got to go for blood tests. You've got to go for all these different things. So where I would have had like evenings and weekends and and stuff previously to do the bees, I've not I've not got that anymore. So I had to make a decision, which was do I want to do I want to create the work of going and taking out my honey? emptying the supers and then doing more work and feeding them, or like, perfectly acceptable approach as well is the bees have got all of that honey, they've gone and foraged it, and I'm just going to leave them to eat it during the June gap. And they're doing very, very well at eating their way through it, so I've not got any honey, I've not done any harvesting yet this year, and everything will just roll over and I will do a single summer crop. But I'm not expecting it to be— I'm not expecting it to be good because it's just too Way too wet and way too rainy. But I understand for me the important thing is healthy bees, getting the bees through, keeping them at a point where if the good weather comes they will perform, and everything is like, yeah, it's lined up for the good weather, so I think it should be good. Mr. DBT says, also to add, the new home for 14 Day Beekeeper Hive Q is way better. Let's hope it is open to all soon. It is way better, isn't it? I'm pushing the IT guys, I'm saying, look, the testers are in, they've not found anything that's too broken, I don't think there's anything that's stopping us doing it now. So it is, it's one week away. Uh, it's, it's the, the final warning to everyone. I will send out a few emails, but it is the final warning if you want to get in for lifetime access. We've got one week left and then it moves to a monthly subscription model. Obviously that does not apply to anyone who is already in there. You are baked in for life. Um, Angus says, good morning, I'm grafting this weekend, any suggestions? Um, so be quick, be quick when you're doing it. A damp like tea towel over the cells is good just to keep them moist. If you're taking your time, you don't want them to dry out. Go for the smallest ones you possibly can. The way that I'm doing— I'm doing a video at the moment about timing, timing the eggs and getting them out. I say timing the eggs, waiting for the eggs to hatch, and then getting them out at the right time. So it's about timing the larva. So you're timing the eggs to hatch so you can access the larva about 6 hours old. But I can't see the larva very well at 6 hours old. Like, I'm going in and I'm looking, And my eyesight's pretty good, like it's not— I've got good eyesight, terrible hearing, good eyesight though. So I'm thinking anybody else, anybody who's got bad eyesight, I just, I think it's really difficult to get— to be able not to get the larva out, but to be able to see the correct age of larva. So I want to develop— I'm in the process of developing the, the no-look grafting technique, which is you're going to take a frame of eggs, you're going to do a thing with that frame of eggs and put it in a certain place and take it out in a certain time. And then you don't even need to look. You're going to know that all of that frame is going to have the correct size larva in there, or within the tolerances that you want. And then I use a Chinese grafting tool, and I just take my frame, and I do, I look in and say, right, I want that one there. And there'll be a bit of that. You don't want to graft the eggs. But then I take the grafting tool, and I just kind of put it in. Like, I'm looking at the camera at the same time, and I just get it out, and then it's out. And that sounds a bit weird, and it's definitely not best practice, the technique, because most people use the, the metal grafting tools. But I found with a good quality Chinese grafting tool— and sometimes you have to like sand down the little bamboo, uh, I don't even know what it's called, a little bamboo filament at the end because it's a bit too thick— but if you get it right, you get a good Chinese grafting tool with the bamboo filament ground down so it's nice and thin, you don't have to look when you graft. You just know that you've got the cell walls like that, and if you just poke it down, it kind of just curls round at the edge like that. So you, you can just graft and just kind of come out and they're just there. And then like the thing I like about the Chinese grafting tool is that the pickup I find is, is really, really easy. Your effect is like capillary action. You're just getting this little tiny larva to stick on the filament. And that— but what I like, really like about the Chinese grafting tool is you can be super, super accurate and delicate when you're putting the larva down. You can go in and really place it down nicely. So They're the things that I would look out for. Keep the, keep the larva nice and moist. Focus on clean pickup and clean takedown of whatever grafting tool that you're using. I see a lot of people do that when I've seen the things. People can pick them up fine, it's the putting them back down where the damage is done a lot of the time. For grafting colonies though, pollen. Don't underestimate the amount of pollen that they need. You could feed them, obviously you need a good pollen frame next to the grafts, but then feed them pollen. Like pollen, sorry. Feed them pollen substitute if they need it, or if you've got your own collected pollen, feed them that. Don't feed them generic non-irradiated pollen. Good way of getting disease in there. And then feed them one-to-one syrup. So you need you need a good amount of syrup going in there, good amount of carbohydrates, and obviously you need to set it up to make sure that they are properly hopefully queenless first. Jiksa Jiksa GG says, "Hi Lawrence, I was in my buckfast last Friday. I checked her yesterday and she is doing." Great, thank you. I love all the good stories about the queens there. Right, John, shout out to John as well. John, you are just a phenomenal man. Like, I think everyone needs to give a massive shout out to John because he's relentless behind the scenes on every single platform and doing screenshots and images and Circle and No Nonsense Beekeeping and HiveQ and just, you're always there, ever present. So thank you, John. I should probably answer your question as well then, shouldn't I? Removing three supers today and checking if three colonies have now got mated, so maybe in the market for one or two next week. Also checking on the buckfast queen received two weeks ago. Well, you know the score, John. Drop me an email. We'll get you sorted. Gizenable, Gizenable. Sorry if I butchered that. Gizenable says, "Morning, Lawrence. I've had to delay buckfast until next year due to surgery, but bought everything to start, including all foundation. Will it keep okay until next year if I keep it in the house and cool?" That is a really good question. So, so first up, best of luck with your surgery. I hope it all goes well. So if you've got foundation just like in a pack, say it's still in the plastic pack like that, yes, no problem at all. That will stay fine. All you want to do, yeah, keep it somewhere, keep it somewhere like I would say like room, room temperature. Don't worry too much about it. If you keep it somewhere that's cool, it's going to become brittle and could potentially break, but room temperature is fine. The bigger risk with foundation is that it starts to warp and starts to go like that. So if it's in the plastic, just keep it on a nice hard flat horizontal surface and it will stay good indefinitely, like a shelf in your kitchen or something like that, that kind of temperature, nice and flat. My wife would not let me keep it on a shelf in my kitchen, but you get the idea. If it's already in the frames, this is the better bit of advice, which is make up the hive. So get everything in the hive, build it all up, all of the frames in the foundation, all of the foundation in the frames. Go and stack it all up in the exact configuration that you would have it, where you're keeping the frames vertical like that. If you put the frames back onto that side now, all the foundation is going to sag and it's going to make your life really, really difficult. So if it's flat-packed and you've just got packs of foundation, keep it horizontal to keep it flat. If it's already in the frames, you need to keep those frames vertical, and the best way of doing that is just to build everything up and go and put the beehive outside somewhere, shake strap it all up, make sure nothing can get in, close off all the entrances, and then you don't need to store it anywhere. It could just be kept outside. It will be much colder there, the wax will go brittle, but as long as nothing's going in and getting it, it's not going to break. And then no problem at all using all of that next year, so you should be good. Best of luck with your surgery. James says, what's the best method to replace old brood frames? My nuc from another supplier has plastic spacers which are not spacing nicely with my Hoffmann frames, I want to slowly replace them. Oh, there's a number of different ways to replace brood frames. So you could do, you could do a— just trying to think— you could do a shook swarm. I'm starting off with like the most extreme version. You could do a shook swarm where you just, you have a brand new box, brand new frames of foundation, you shake all of the bees from your old box onto them, and you discard all of the old frames. Now I would not recommend that, that is way, way excessive, but it's a valid way of getting them across. I'll go through all of The downside with that is you lose, you lose all of the brood, which is obviously not what you want to do. Another way of doing it is to just get another brood box, so take that additional brood box and just put it on top, so you've got your original brood box with all the frames that you don't want and then your new brood box with all of the frames that you do want. The bees are going to start at the bottom and they're just going to kind of build up, so then they'll be filling both of those boxes. All you do is you find your queen, put her in the top box, queen excluder in the middle, So you've got old box with all the old frames, queen excluder here, new box with all the new frames and your queen. Wait 8 days— it's not— you see, I'm doing that, wait, I just getting the days right. Give it a couple of weeks. I always make sure there, give it a couple of weeks for all of the brood in the bottom box to emerge. Might be a little bit longer than that if you've got drones down there as well, but once it's all emerged, you just take that box away and then you're back to exactly what you want, which is your new brood box with the queen in, with all of the new frames, and then your bottom brood box just goes away. That is a way of doing it. There are other, there are other methods that you can use which are just, it's like, like Bailey comb exchange is what you, what it's called, where it's just a slower, more gradual way where you're moving the frames that you don't want out to the side and replacing it in the middle with newer frames of foundation. I would say if you've got an extra brood box, just double them up, so much easier. If you've not, Google Bailey Comb Exchange. Just follow the Bailey Comb Exchange and it will get you through it. It's a lot more work. It's probably—it's a lot more work, and I think it's probably more difficult on the bees. So I would go with the other one. Julie, Julius, Julius Hicks. There we go. Said sorry. I'm really bad because I'm reading it like that. I just can't read the names. Pulling honey tomorrow here in Northeast Ohio. Hi to everyone across the pond. Oh, hello! I love—I love seeing it. People dial in from elsewhere, but hello. Good luck with your honey pulling tomorrow. I just kind of can imagine that, going out, like flying out to America and just going and meeting some cool American beekeepers who are pulling their honey in northwest Ohio. It's like a film, isn't it? Like a bit of Americana. I'd be well up for that. Where's my American hat? I have still got my American hat. I don't think I've even done this yet, have I? No. Ah, I've got it on a live stream. Here we go. When when I went to wait till I get back on the camera. When I went to Narby, I I love my Narby video. Like it's the cutest thing in the world. Yeah, this is a really ah maybe cry now. When I got back from when I got back from Narby, we did the video and I showed my daughter the video. Like she she likes watching the videos and she came in. She was like watching it. Whoa like that and she was like. Dad, I said. Yeah, she said. What's a VIP? And I can't hear very well, so I said, what? She said, what's a VIP? And I said, Ivy, I don't know what you're saying. And this is like a common theme in our house now, which is I can't hear unless like I'm looking at someone and lip reading. So she's saying, what's a VIP? And I said, hell, I said, Helen, you need to come and like decipher what Ivy's saying here. She said, VIP? What's a VIP? She's saying she's asking what a VIP Is, but I don't know what that is. Anyway, we worked it out. Yeah, on the Navi video, on my name badge, it says Lawrence Edwards VIP, and obviously she's taken that as in that I'm like a celebrity. And I've said to her, like, you need to be really, really careful here, Ivy. I'm not a celebrity. Absolutely not a celebrity. Yeah, it's just in, in the bee world, like, if anyone goes over there and they're a speaker, then they get like a little, a little VIP badge like that. But it, it may be. Yeah, it was really, really cute. But anyway, in that video, in the Nabi video that she keeps on watching because she thinks like that her dad's someone special— he's definitely not— but in that video there is a little clip in it where I, I met a gentleman and he had this really cool hat. I've just given it all away by showing the hat. But anyway, he had this cool hat and we tried it on, and it's a segment. Like, if you've seen the Nabi video, you'll see there, there's a bit with me kind of like trying on this hat, and it's cool. And I do, I love I love the Americana. It's like it's like the partridge bit. I love a Dr Pepper. I can't even do it. But but Tex, you know, I love the Americana stuff. So I was saying to him about how much I like it. I like the hats, and I just think it's like quite cool. So anyway, came back to the UK, and like I came I came back to the UK after Navi, and it was it was it was a difficult, very very stressful time for me. And within like a week or so of coming back. Helen was diagnosed with cancer and we didn't know that before we went away, so a very, very difficult time in my life. And then all of a sudden Helen said, you've got delivery, don't know what it is, you've got delivery. And this hat— I can't put it on because of my thing— this hat turned up, yeah, with turkey leaf in it like that. And I'm just gonna— we're gonna do the rest of the stream with the hat on. I'm probably butchering it. But it came in the post with a note, and the note was just the nicest message I think I've ever received. And like, it's making me feel emotional now because it made me feel really, really emotional and like cry a lot at that time because it was, it was just, it was a nice note. It was just saying like, I really enjoyed connecting with you, and like you were talking about the hat, and I just, I had to send you a hat. And like, there's a, there's a turkey feather in it for good luck, and just really appreciate all you do. Like all the best, and it made me cry so much because like everything that was going on. But also, I just I love it when people go out of their way to like give you some feedback, to say something. And I'm a real strong believer in this. And anybody who works with me or anybody who like knows me and family, like I I am like that. If something is worth saying, I will say it to someone, and I'll offer the feedback, and I'll say, "Oh thanks, like that was really good. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much." And that's what that's what this gentleman did here. I'm really sorry because I forgot. I sent an email back. I've not actually had a response to my email, so if the person who is in the video is watching that, respond to my email. And if I've not got back to yours, definitely send it again. I don't think you have got back though, but oh, it made me so emotional inside for someone to have gone to that effort, to have gone and found the hat and made sure that they'd gone and measured it and made sure that it fits my head and got the turkey feather and to write The nice note, and then to send it. Like sending stuff from America to the UK is difficult. Fill in 101 different forms. But then for me to get that just unannounced and like to have such a nice message on it was really, really like powerful for me. And then this hat is is up there. Like it's in the studio. It's going to be going to have pride of place in my studio because it's like a sign for me that there's good people out there. That is a lot of really. Good, nice people out there in the world that want to do good things, and there's just there's a lot of horror as well, and it's easy to get caught up in the horror and fill your mind with all this rubbish. Going a bit deep now, but this this is like my my sign to say no, you don't need to do that because there's people out there that care. There's good people, and just focus on the good people. So I'm going to wear I'm going to wear my hat for the rest of the live stream. There we go. It is eight o two, so I've gone over time, but I've waffled on for so long today. So I'm gonna I'm gonna fire through. And if I get a shout out from any family members, I might have to go, but let's keep on going. Down the Allotment says, morning Lawrence, do I really need to see the queen when doing an inspection? Will seeing eggs, brood at all stages, etc., but no queen be okay? Absolutely yes, you do not need to see the queen ever. You don't. If you're seeing eggs and you're seeing a good brood pattern and you're not seeing swarm cells and the bees have enough space, definitely don't need to see the queen. Hi, I'm getting my first ever nuc today. Would you feed them 1:1 and how much? Thanks. So yes, I would feed them one-to-one. Anyone who buys nucs from us at Black Mountain Honey, we try and give them like as much information as possible. I'm going to improve that next year, so next year people are going to have like their very own like regimented feeding plan and telling them what to do at different stages throughout the season. But I think for anybody getting a nuc, a 6-frame nuc, the best practice is to feed. I would take your nuc, I'd put it on the hive stand today, I'd open up the entrance, I'd let them fly out, give them 24 hours to orientate. It's nice weather, so 24 hours would be sufficient. Then you take the nuc the next day, middle of the day, nice warm part of the day, take the nuc off the stand and put your beehive on it, transfer the frames over one by one. Nice if you can see the queen, don't worry if you don't see her, just get all the bees in and then tap out all the bees from the nuc so you know that the queen isn't in there, and then leave them for the day, and then the following day come back in and start feeding them 1:1 sugar syrup. Make sure that the bees are taking the sugar syrup down, so put the feeder on, whatever configuration you've got, then dribble a little bit of syrup down through the hole of the feeder or the hole of the polyashtral feeder, whichever one you've got, and don't go until you see the bees feeding. Once you see the bees feeding, then all is good. And I would say maybe 6 to 8 litres of sugar syrup is needed to get them to a point where you're going to put this queen excluder on. Now, it might be 2 litres, it might be 12 litres, I don't know. The trigger for you, the next stage here, is going to be you've got a 6-frame nuc going into, say, I don't know where you are in the world, so I don't know how many frames you've got in your box. Let's say a 10-frame box. You've got a 6-frame nuc going into a 10-frame box. When you're looking down from the top, you've got 6 frames of bees and 4 frames of emptiness. Once you've got 8 frames of bees and 2 frames of emptiness, stop feeding, put the queen excluder on, get your super on, and all should be good. Good morning, I had a super a month ago but they still haven't drawn out the comb. It seems like a foundation wall but vertically. Is there a way to encourage them up? brood across all frames. So it won't be a foundation wall vertically like that unless it's like plastic foundation. It's much, much, much higher likelihood that they're just not ready for it yet. Not ready for it yet. You've got all of the brood across the frame. So once you hit that, it ties in nicely to the other question there. Once you hit that trigger of 80% of bees in the brood box, I put the super on. But realistically, when am I going to get to a point of adding another super on after that? Maybe three or four weeks down the line, which means that when you put the super on, you're going to have two or three weeks of potentially nothing, no bees up there. And then all of a sudden, and you might it might be this weekend now. All of a sudden, you'll come back in. You'll be like, whoa! All drawn out, all full, mostly capped. You'll be like, oh, bugger! I shouldn't say that. But missed it, and they swarmed. So keep keep on top of it. That that is a there's a lot of that with beekeeping. It's like you stand there watching. Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. You come back. And they filled it, and I think that's probably what will happen there. In order for bees to draw out the comb, they need carbohydrates. They need to be fed, or they need a really good strong nectar flow. But also they need sufficient heat. So there needs to be enough heat in that box, not just in the brood box, but heat upstairs in that box, and a suitable compression of bees up there in order for the bees to produce the wax to draw it out. If you're missing any of those components, they're just not going to draw it out. But I think this weekend, go and have a look up in this weekend. I bet you they're drawing it out with. A good flow coming in. I am, I'm really itchy on my arm here. I got battered last night, really badly battered. No, not by anyone, by my bees, by the swarm actually, and it's— I've gone— I've not like reacted, but I'm just a bit itchy there. I reckon I took about 50 stings last night, so you will enjoy the video, let's just say. Electrical Courses is fine, isn't that? electricalcourses.com. Or whatever it is. Sorry, didn't mean to advertise. Just logged into my YouTube account. I'm a long-term follower, 14-day beekeeper member. Please move to every Saturday for these lives. They are fantastic. I think we need to move to every Saturday for these lives, don't we? Because it is— yeah, I think it makes sense. We— I will have to chop and change them though, so I'm going to do— I'll keep them every other week on YouTube and Facebook, and then we'll do one within the Circle community as well because there's tons of added functionality in there. Cool, and then what I like doing over there, what I think could be quite a cool way to do it over there is that I could just jump into the feed and I can have a look at what people have been doing. I can have a look at Darren's 80% graph success rate. Very well done, Darren, by the way. But yeah, I thought that'd be quite nice. And then I was speaking to the consultant about that yesterday, saying I thought that would be a nice take. And let me know if this is something that would be useful to you. Drop me an email and say yeah, that'd be great. But instead of maybe in addition to a live stream, but I think what would be a useful one is me. Dipping into HiveQ, our online private community of beekeepers, and going through the posts and just having a look and just kind of narrating it and saying, oh, look how well Darren's done with his 80% grafting rate. Darren is a serious person, he does not mess around, he does not mess around. I love it. But we could say, look, how good's that? 80% success rate first year. He's following all the advice, getting the grafts really nice, larva correct size. Brilliant. Just follow more of what Darren does and check out his amazing guide to converting from a Langstroth to a National or National to Langstroth, whichever way around it was. And then I'll kind of go to another post and try and think what other posts there were. Now I can't think of them off the top of my head, it's just the Darren Show. But maybe there's some advice in there where someone said, oh, my bees were looking to swarm today, there was 20 swarm cells, so I just took them all down and closed them back up. Maybe that was a post in there, and then I could pop in and say, well, What you've done there is you've kind of like half, half fixed the problem because you've now got them queenless. We need to wait until they're hopelessly queenless and you can add in a new queen. What you've done there is not going to stop the swarming. They're just going to create more and they're going to swarm anyway. So it would be me like commenting on the good stuff and saying this is really good, people could learn from it, and then me maybe like intercepting any of the badder stuff— not bad stuff, but any mistakes— and commenting over the top of it. I would like to do that style of video. I think that'd be useful, so maybe we'll do that one as well, that'd be cool. I'm really sorry for getting your name completely wrong, I need to have some glasses. Good morning, I have a question about the opening underneath the hive. When do you leave the ventilation open or when do you close it off? Is it a specific temperature? So really easy answer to this one. I keep my mesh floors open all year round and my bees have no issues whatsoever. Richard, who produces all of the nucs for Black Mountain Honey, keeps all of his bees on solid floors all the way throughout the whole year and has no issues with kind of ventilation or damp. So I don't think it makes a massive, massive difference. What is much, much more important about the amount of ventilation at the bottom, and my view is a little bit of ventilation at the bottom is good because it means that the bees can regulate the humidity within the hive and it gives the condensation a place to track out, but I would argue what is way more important is the amount of insulation at the top of the hive and ensuring that the sidewalls of the hive are less insulative than anywhere else. If you can ensure that, and you can ensure that by just making sure that the top, the area above the cluster where the crown board would be, where the roof would be, is heavily insulated. What that means is that all the condensation can only form on the sidewalls, and it will just form on the sidewalls, which are vertical walls, so it tracks out like that. It means that you don't have any condensation issues ever. If you do it the other way around and you have the walls more insulative than the roof, which in a lot of uninsulated hives can be that way, it can just be that everything is the same, so then the condensation can just go wherever it wants. You end up with the condensation forming above the cluster. Overwinter and it can drip on it, and then that's what causes issues. The bees don't mind high humidity, they don't like being wet, they don't like being damp, they don't like being cold. So yeah, focus on the top side, get it nicely insulated, and then I don't think it makes a massive difference. The only time that I'll ever put a tray in is if I'm doing any monitoring for varroa, and I don't do a huge amount of monitoring because the, the techniques that we teach in 14-Day Beekeeper kind of keep you ahead of that curve. Not to say that testing is bad, like I think people should do testing and you can do alcohol washes, you can look at the mite boards, it's good to look at the boards and kind of see what's going on and you can see the way that the colony moves and eats and moves through the stores during the winter, so it is good, it's just something that I've kind of adapted to not use. What are F0 queen bees and how are they made? So F0 is a term that is kind of incorrectly used, there's no It's not a technically correct term, although F1 is technically correct, but essentially it's a pure queen. So you're controlling the maternal side of that queen and you're controlling either through isolation or more likely artificial insemination, you're controlling the drone side. So imagine I've got a queen, imagine I've got a queen that's going out and mating today and I know that she comes from a breeder queen colony. I've controlled the maternal side, so I can say the maternal side is this. If she goes out and mates just anywhere, I don't really know what the paternal side's going to be. I can do my best to make it as high as I possibly can by drone flooding and making sure that there's good drones and separating them on your satellite apiaries and looking at the topography and looking at where the queens are likely to go and mate and doing all of those things, but I can't accurately or Definitively say it's this. This is the line. But if you artificially inseminate a queen, then you can do that. You can say the maternal side is this, the paternal side is this, and there you go. That's the queen. So that is that's what that's what a pure queen is. It's it's the fully controlled paternal side in conjunction with the maternal side. I'm loving this hat, by the way. Danny Cleel says hi again. On another one of my hives, I had a virgin queen that went out, came back mated. I know that. on an inspection, although I saw the difference in her. But after another 7 days, I did my inspection and couldn't see any signs of laying, and for the life of me, couldn't find that mated queen. Like I said before, I know the weather hasn't been great, but I went through the hive twice and just could not find her, and the bees were acting like they were queenless. What's your thoughts on this, please? I would say, Danny, the only way to tell if a queen has been out and successfully mated is to assess her brood pattern. That is it. There is no other way to tell. She could be the biggest, plumpest, chubbiest queen in the world. She might not have got mated properly. She might be a drone layer. So the likelihood is she's gone out, she's had a go at mating, the bees have said no chance, and they just bumped her off. That's what I would say. The weather's been terrible. You look at all— like, it's one of the biggest arguments that we hear for imported queens is like, you need to, you need to raise them in the UK. All the queens should be raised in the UK. We shouldn't be importing queens because it's whatever. And then it rains and it rains and it rains and it rains and it rains and it does not stop raining. And all the UK queen producers now, me included, are saying like it's really difficult to get any number of queens mated at the moment because the weather is so terrible. People's rates are going to be going down from 80% mating down to way less than 50%. Huge amounts of resource and effort that have gone into producing those queens is wasted. Like, you can't get it back. And I suspect that's what's happened with your one there, that they've gone out, tried to get mated, there's just not enough drones in the air, she's come back, she poorly mated, the bees have bumped her off, which is very, very sad. But I hope you get it sorted, Danny. Do you think the Obsidian line would be a good breed to use in Scotland due to the weather being less reliable? So I've always said this with the Buckfast ones, we've sent colonies up to the Highlands of Scotland, all the way down to Land's End down in Cornwall. Our genetics have actually been used all the way through last season across Canada, the exact same genetics, and the Canadians are coming back saying, really, really happy. Your bees have not only survived in the incredibly cold Canadian winter, like, they have thrived. They've done really, really well. So we've got experience all over the UK but into Canada as well. With our Buckfast breeds, and they will perform very well in Scotland. The only thing you need to be aware of is that if you get long prolonged periods of cold weather like this, or rainy weather, then you just have to take action. You can't expect the bees to kind of just keep on pumping out the honey. And it's the same, like, I've done this with my Buckfast bees this year. So instead of— but the bees, the bees got off to a flying start. Yeah, there was a week, literally a week of good weather, And they filled up like three supers. So when you get the good times, whether that's Canada, UK, Scotland, Scotland in the UK, but Wales, England, wherever, they'll fill it up really, really quick. Now what a lot of beekeepers do is they take the honey off, and then the cold weather comes in, and they're like, "Oh, these buckfast bees, they need so much feeding to keep them going. It's just they're not suited to the environment." And I think, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Let's back up a little bit. You just took three supers of honey off." So I've done that this year. They filled up the 3 supers of honey. I've not taken any honey off. That honey's been on there for like 3 or 4 weeks now, and they're just steadily working their way through it because it's their honey and it's their stores to get them through any inclement weather. And when the weather comes back again, we'll hopefully get a surplus later on in the year. So I think if people have that mindset when it comes to honey production, then it doesn't really matter in terms of the weather and stuff, because if the weather's poor, you manage the bees and they produce honey when it's good, and it kind of sees them through. And then if the weather's good, you end up with really, really big bumper honey crops. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. Like I say, Scotland, the Buckfast bees do very, very well up there. Joseph says, morning Lawrence, thanks for the great videos and content from North Farmbridge, Essex. Thank you very much, Joseph. Glenn Hillidge says, morning Lawrence, are your Caucasian queens going to be able soon? They produce so much honey when the others don't. Right, so Glenn, we need to sort your ones out as well. Yes, They will be back in some form. I know I've got an email from you as well that I need to get back to, but they will be there. I need to work out the earliest date I can get them to you, so I'll be back to your email. Dickie says, morning Lawrence, I was wondering if you got around to doing an update on the Anel smoker. I bought one a couple of months ago and I love it, but why oh why is there no on/off switch? Interesting, Dickie, that one. We— I did a little bit of tidying out this week and I came across my Anel smoker, and Zane said, where should I put this? Should I put this with the smokers? And I said, well, I don't know, like, I'm not going to use it. That sounds really bad. I'm not going to use it though, and the reason I'm not going to use it is because I just like a normal smoker. It's kind of my preference to be a normal smoker, and I like, I like the design behind it, but when I look at it in my collection of smokers, like, is it the first one that I reach for? No, because it's a bit of a faff. You've got to charge the battery up, you've got to have the pad, you've got to have all of that stuff. Great for places where you don't want fires to be created, like if you're in Australia and it's really dry. Something like that could, could save a lot of fires, but North Wales is very wet, so I don't have to worry about that too much. But yeah, so there could be an on/off switch, that would be good. But no, I'm not going to do an update on it because I don't use it anymore. But I do love the smell of the pads. The pine-infused pads that go in the Anno Smoker are the nicest smelling thing in the world. Maybe I will use it again. It's making me, it's making me think about the smell. It is a nice smell. Let me know how you get on. Martin Miller says, morning, Lawrence. I've learned so much from this morning's chat. So glad I found you all last year. 14-day beekeeper is amazing. 2 queens this week. There really is nothing I like more than getting positive feedback. And as I said, it's because I'm one of these people— ask my wife— who needs like lots and lots of feedback, like good feedback. I take the negative feedback on well, but I love hearing stuff like that, Martin. Like, I put my heart and soul into my business, into the Queens, into 14 Day Beekeeper, and like even, even into this chat here with my hat. Like, I— if I do something, I try and do it to the best of my ability. And when people like that and people say, oh, that was, that was valuable to me, thank you, I appreciate it, it just, it closes the loop. And I'm like, yes, I'm going to do that more. So thank you, Martin, I'm glad you're enjoying it all. Uh, GJ Tins— that's not right— but GJ Tins says, morning, beginner beekeeper here. 2026 is a learning year and then going for the plunge to get my first nuc in spring 2027. I'm looking to keep within our allotment. What breed of bees would be best? It's straightforward. I would go with a colony where you're going to have the calmest temperament possible. I would also speak to the allotment as well and make sure that it's compliant and that you're allowed to keep bees there and if there's anything that you need to do. The final thing I would say, keeping bees in an allotment, have a backup. Have to have a backup because you've got other people there the bees start going, even if the bees are swarming, they're not stinging anyone, people might get a bit scared and they might say, please, can you just take the bees away? Good to have a backup to take them away to. Also, I just, I quite like allotments, pottering around an allotment, that's good fun. What are you growing on your allotment? Random question back. And then what else would I say? Yeah, go for the calmest one, buy them from someone who's going to kind of back that up if anything goes wrong as well. You're saying the allotment is surrounded by houses and gardens? Yeah, so go for the very, very calmest colony that you can get. Our overwintered nucs come with UK-mated Buckfast queens, they're Welsh-mated actually, and they are from the very best location that we have in the UK and they are very, very chilled out, so you'll be liking them. Martin likes the hat. Good luck with your nuc next year. You're one of the good people, mate, you give us new beekeepers a safe place to learn and feel listened so always consider yourself as one of the best. Oh, make me gush there! Thank you, Ed, very kind. Tom says every Saturday should be the rule. I think, wow, are we that far behind? Okay, okay, I think, I think it's gonna have to go that way, isn't it? One of mine swarmed last week, wasn't able to catch them. James says, I would like to see you more active in HiveQ. There are some really experienced members but also a lot of beginners, so advice varies. So, so yes, I need to be more in HiveQ. But I, I've become aware of like my— not, not the capabilities, but like the, the— I don't know how to say it. The— there's only so much Lawrence time that's available. And if I, if I answered all the questions that were coming in, I'd, I'd be there 24/7 answering questions. We get, we get hundreds of emails each day, get hundreds of messages come through, we get hundreds of WhatsApps and texts and stuff like that. And even with Chrissy helping with the stuff now, it's is there's a huge, huge amount there. So in order for me to make it, uh, something that can grow and that can be scalable, it can't be reliant on me to go in and answer stuff. It just— it will never, never work. And I've never, I've never sold it on that basis either. So this is why the suggestion of me going in maybe on a weekly basis and doing like a bit of a summary of what's going on and looking at a few posts and offering up some advice in that format and then posting it to community I can tick off a lot more people, so it it will get me more active. It will get me commenting and answering on more people's posts, but in a hopefully like a more fun, engaging, and interactive way as well. And I just I'll be honest with that. I I don't want to. I've probably been caught up with that in the past of saying I'm gonna do this. You're gonna get this amount of Lawrence time or advice, and then it's grown like victim of our own success a little bit. I would I would say, and and massive thank you to everyone who's created. But the last thing I ever want to do is offer something and then not— for it to not live up to the expectations. So with, with HiveQ, the idea is as simple as this, which is there are some really experienced members in there, there are a lot of beginners, and you need to take the advice as it comes. We're going to work on getting more experienced people in there. We're going to potentially pay some experienced people to offer further support in there. I'm going to be training a brand new set of AI agents and bots that are going to live in there, and they are going to be like next generation, and they are going to only be able to access fully vetted information that I've personally vetted. So the knowledge transfer, I'm trying to do my best to give as much of that as I possibly can in a sustainable, potentially automated way, which I think, which I think is better for most people. Joseph says, I have a small nuc-sized queen-right colony, can it be combined with a large queenless colony? If so, what's the best method? It depends how small it is. I find one of the easiest ways of combining small colonies— say you've got a colony that's on 2 or 3 frames and you want to combine it— easiest way in the world, take the nuc, go and take it somewhere else, pick up the bees, shake all of the bees out, let them fly in to wherever they want to fly in. There'll probably just be another colony next door. If there isn't, Put the donor colony where it is and just kind of compress everything round and then just go and take the frames. If the frames are good, put them into a colony, boost the brood, boost the stores. Obviously make sure you find the queen and kill the queen on the small little split first, but you can overcomplicate things by trying to kind of like try and get a box of 2 frames and put it on another one with newspaper, and you just don't need to with a small colony like that. Just lift them up, shake them out, let them fly. They'll go into where they want to go in because you've removed the hive away. and then, and then you're back to square one. Maybe get some Witch Doctor gel on those stings, it will stop that itch sharpish. I've never heard of Witch Doctor gel. It's great, the itch has actually gone away now. I'm very, very lucky when it comes to not having a reaction to stings. Could have gone the other way, couldn't it? Did the same apiary split following your advice and yesterday saw the Lutz queen and eggs. Excellent! I definitely need to kind of like try and collect some of these stories from people success stories. John says, thanks, Laurence, for everything, and now to have a superb weekend with Ivy. Here we go, Helen, Lily, and Ivy. I couldn't even say it in the right order. Thanks, John, have a good weekend too. I'm going to call you X. She says— I don't know why I said she— Is that right? Got my Black Mountain Honey Queen yesterday, went to my hive I assumed was queenless, only to see eggs and signs of being queen right. Now I have a queen with nowhere to go, please help. Oh, get this one a lot as well. So you can make a split, you can make a split now, now that you've got your queen. Standard way that I recommend for people to make a split is this: you take your split, get a frame of brood, maybe 2 frames of brood, frame of stores, good shake of bees, take it off somewhere else, different apiary, wait 8 days, and then go back in, shake all the bees off the frame, take down all the emergency cells, take your new queen, add it in, wait 24 hours, pop the tab, leave it a week, feed them, Job's done. Yeah, so that's the standard process. Now, if you're— you've got the queen in hand, you can do that exact same process. Is it going to be as effective as doing it the other way? Maybe not that much, but it's really not that far, especially if you move it off to a new apiary. You're essentially restricting that colony to where they can go but dictating the size. You can just go straight in and put the queen in straight away. So if you've got a queen in hand today, do this: go and take 2 frames of brood, frame of stores, good shake of bees, put it into a nuc, take it off to another apiary, get the queen, put the queen in, in between 2 frames of brood, and leave the cage capped. Don't touch the caps at all. Feed them, come back in 8 days, shake off all the frames, take down all the emergency cells, pop the tab there and then, put the feeder back on, leave them for 7 days, and you should have a perfectly good split. Aaron says, how are we today? I'm very good, thank you. Darren says, let's chip in and get Laurence a buzzer for answering questions. Okay, we are, we are actually at the end. I think that's a good shout. Right, I've reached the end, 8:26. I'm going to take my hat off. I'm going to smash things up as I do it as well. I hope you all have a very swarmy summer weekend. It's going to be crazy this weekend. It's going to be good fun. Last warning, 14-Day Beekeeper lifetime membership with HiveQ bundled in, is going away for good. You've got one week left. I will stick a link in the description. I hope you all have a good weekend. I'm very, very excited. I am going to have a little bit of a rest. Uh, long answers every single time, and maybe we have just doubled the amount of live streams. But yeah, hope you have a good one, and I'll see you all next week.