Let's Talk Bees #80 - Your Beekeeping Questions Answered

Morning everyone. I have to put it over on this screen and then drag it over. It is very, very frustrating, but there we go. I think— no, it doesn't even work. I'm just gonna have to talk to the wrong screen. So good morning everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. It is episode 80, and whilst I mess around and have a little bit of fun trying to sort out the screen here, what I wanted to say was head over to the description of this link because there is Our weekly newsletter goes out at 6 PM every Saturday, and I've taken quite a lot of time going through and putting all of the relevant videos in there. So it's not just the videos that we've got going out this week, but it's it's all of the videos. It's weekends or videos from previous weekends, maybe like two or three years ago where swarm season hits, and it gives you the good advice. So I would recommend to everyone to go over there and have a look at that. I'm not gonna lie though. Yeah, I think I'm gonna have to just do it this way around. I was trying to. Trying to get away with nobody realizing there, but I need a green screen man. If you if if someone wants to be my green screen man or green screen woman, then I would be very welcome because I'm not good with tech, and the older I get, the less good I get with tech. I'm definitely not a tech head. Let's just say that. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to put it back over here and then maximize it. Doesn't want to work. Sorry, guys. We are doing the live stream this way today. So let me get the comments up. This is going to be fun. Actually, no, wait, tell a lie. I, I can just read it over here, can't I? Scrap all of that, we'll start again here. Welcome to Let's Talk Bees, episode 80. Sign up to the newsletter, and the first question is from Chris who says, good morning, Laurence. I hope the heat wasn't too bad up there. We're going to try a 2-frame queen trap this year against Varroa. I was wondering, is there a danger of the new brood becoming honeybound? So definitely yes. If you're going down the route of trapping the queen to force a brood break, which I think is a really, really good idea, then yes, that's going to be one of the risks that you will have, which is as you trap that queen and limit any laying or eliminate any laying, there's just going to be loads of space in the brood nest. And if you get weather like this, even in weather like this with the queen in there, they're filling it up, aren't they? But if you get weather like this or good weather with the queen trap, they will block it all out completely. So my recommendation to you would be, I don't know what your setup is, Chris, and I know you have a very specific setup, but for people to think about that first, to not think, right, I'm going to trap my queen to force a brood break to tackle varroa, and then kind of just go through that process and say, right, successful, the varroa have now been eliminated, and I've just got another big problem on my hands, which is I've got loads of honey downstairs in the brood box. So you can, you can do it in various different ways. I'm not entirely sure, like, I've not got a solution on the top of my head there, but I would just think about it. You will be forcing some form of honeybound status in the brood nest, and maybe this could be a solution, which is you just say, okay, I'm going to get honeybound frames downstairs in the brood nest. Once I get that queen laying back again, I'm going to put a new brood box in. I'm going to take the honeybound brood box, put it underneath the queen excluder in between, bruise all of the stores, and then hope that when the queen comes back into lay, the bees are not going to like that configuration where they have capped brood stores below the new brood nest that's going to be created, with the idea of pushing it up. So I think as long as you have some sort of strategy like that, Chris, you should be good. All right, next up we've got John saying good morning. Morning all, I hope everyone's okay. An early inspection to release queen tabs that was introduced in one hive on Wednesday, and a check on a quick— I can't read this— and a check on a combined colony this morning. Fingers crossed they're all okay. So fingers crossed for you, I definitely need someone with the green screen. I am struggling with the tech. Right, where are we going next? I've just scrolled all the way down to the bottom there. Yeah. Go back up to the top. I did, I did say this to Zane before though, in terms of like being embarrassed about making mistakes in front of people. I just got over it now. I think everyone's used to it. I think, I think you would all be surprised if I didn't make the mistakes. I've got my hat up here. And I've been putting this hat on at various points, and one of the things that I do is I'll start talking, yeah, I start talking and answering a question, and then I'll go off on a little tangent. You can see my eyes working there to try and access the different parts of my brain, but I'll go off on a little tangent, and then there'll be another tangent, and then sometimes I forget what I'm talking about. And I think this must just be an age thing, everyone does this. I think we have to have a rule, yeah, where this hat can live up there, and if I ever just forget what I'm talking about, I can just pull out the hat and say, Sorry, I've forgotten. Here we go, everyone's in on it. Michelle says, once I've demaréed a hive, can I keep putting frames of capped brood from the bottom to the top as long as the queen stays in the bottom and the emerged frames back to the top? Yes, you can. It's called a rolling demarée, and it is more effective than a demarée split, but there is a big but here and a real caveat. I've been helping a couple of people just with a little bit of advanced beekeeping advice And one of the things that we identified, and we don't know if this is what is causing the issues here, but it's just made me think about it in a slightly different way, is that a Demaray split introduces quite a lot of movement. It introduces a lot of movement of frames, not huge amounts, but more than not doing the Demaray split. And that movement of frames, when beginners or amateur beekeepers are taking frames out and putting them back in, there is a risk of killing a queen. So all I would say with the rolling Demaray is yes, you can do that. Yes, it makes the Demaray more effective. but also it's a lot more work and it introduces a lot more risk of potentially killing your queen. I have to say, taking capped frames from the top box— no, you're going to take— sorry, taking capped frames from the bottom box and lifting them up to the top, the bottom box is much, much less packed with bees, so you should be okay, and fine for experienced beekeepers, and I'm sure you're experienced enough, Michelle, but for everybody else, I would say, although you get a slightly small amount of benefit by doing the rolling demerare, I don't think for a lot of people, um, it's worth the risk. Julia Pollard says, good morning, Laurence. In kilograms, what would you recommend would be a healthy/unhealthy weight for a brood box going into winter? I have Pollinational hives, first year beekeeping. Now this is a really good question, and this is where a textbook answer could get you in a whole lot of trouble, and I'm in a lot of trouble. Because what people think is the honey season's over. Let's say the honey season's over and you've treated your bees for varroa. So let's get our bees up to weight. And if I said to you, it's 40 kilograms is the figure that I use. I lift up my beehives, my poly national beehives, and once they're at 40 kilograms, they're good to go for winter. Now, the problem with that advice, and this is where people can get in a mess, is that what time does it need to be at 40 kilograms? A lot of people get that wrong. They take the honey off, they treat their bees for varroa, middle of August, early September, and they say, right, I need to get up to 40 kilograms, so I'm going to pump the bees full of feed, and you couldn't do any more damage to your bees at that time of the season. This is what we teach people in 14-Day Beekeeper, this is what we're kind of spoon-feeding people as best as I possibly can, and I mean that in the nicest way in terms of giving everyone the granular level of detail. I've almost forgot what I'm talking about, I'm not going to go for the hat, here we go. The the forty kilogram rule is for the final weight going into winter. That's when I'm taking my apovar strips out. I take them out probably middle of October, and at that point they need to be forty kilograms there or thereabouts. I don't I don't worry if they're thirty eight or forty two, but something around that. The risk of feeding early, going in doing it middle of August back or back end of August early September, is that you go in, they take the feed down. People will probably feed the wrong feed at that time of the year. They'll probably go in feed two to one where really. That kind of August through to middle of September, 1:1 is what they want, and 1:1 is what you should give them because it's cheaper for you. Because all they're going to do with that feed is just burn through it, sustain themselves, like protect themselves against the robbers, defend whatever they've got against the wasps, but they're effectively going to turn that 1:1 syrup into bees, into brood, into winter brood, winter bees even more importantly. And you can't take the colony up to 40 kilograms until after that has happened. So if you feed them up early on, you block out all the winter bees. The winter bees can't be produced, which means that your overwintering size is massively reduced, which means that your success through winter is also massively reduced. Whereas if you do it the other way around— so this is the advice, and this is exactly the system we do recommend in 14-Day Beekeeping— which is take your honey off middle of August, This year, heads up, it's going to be earlier, probably going to be back end of July, something like that, depending on where you are, maybe first week of August at the absolute latest. But then go in, do your Apivar treatment, do whatever varroa treatment you want to do, give them a good period of varroa treatment to make sure that you're comfortable with them going into the second varroa treatment on the brood break in the winter. But then feed them, feed them 1:1 syrup and keep on just trickle feeding them 1:1 syrup all the way from when you take the honey off, so maybe first of August All the way through, I'm talking eight weeks here, six to eight weeks where you're just going to be going back in. If they need a bit of syrup, you're going to be giving it to them one or two liters, not that much. There's stuff out there. They're still going to be going out and foraging. You might go on to double brood at this time, and they might be building a really nice buffer, so you might not need to feed that much. This kind of two months, and I'm aware I'm going into a lot of detail here. This two months is the most dangerous, difficult part of the season, and it's the part of the season where. people get lots of stuff wrong. So you trickle feed all the way through, not worrying about weights, not weighing anything, you're just going in making sure the bees are alive and healthy and doing well. And then as you progress to like the back end of September into maybe early October, that's when I'm working on my weights. I'm going in and middle of September, back end of September, I'm confident that the bees have produced the winter brood, so it doesn't matter if there's any brood there now. The problem that you've got previously doing it the other way is you block out the brood nest, but as soon as the winter bees are there, they're in brood form, you can't actually overfeed the colony, and this is when you need to go in heavy. The winter bees are produced, go to 2:1 feed, feed them as much as they'll take and get them up to the 40 kilograms, and ticking all of those things together, you will end up with very healthy bees. Not only healthy bees, but bees that weigh the correct amount and bees that have the correct amount of winter bees. To get through. I know that was a long answer, but I think that'd be really useful for people, so thanks for answering that. Thanks for asking that one, Julia. Um, Sniggy says, what do people think about EPS hives over wood, good or bad? I'm gonna have a coffee. So there's the obvious disadvantages when it comes to EPS, which is expanded polystyrene. Um, there's other forms of that on the market as well, so make sure that you're getting the right one. The disadvantages are obviously it's, it's petroleum-based, and adding plastic into the environment. But I think that's about it in terms of kind of like the disadvantages. There are huge advantages when it comes to using poly beehives, but saying that, that's not— it's not to say that poly hives are for everyone. Like, I really do enjoy working wooden hives. I enjoy cleaning wooden hives and scraping and scorching, and I love the smell of cedar. So, so it's not to say like I'm completely all in on poly. I, I like both. I'm very much I like wooden hives, I like poly hives, I like, I like EPS hives. A few things you need to do though, you need to paint them, you need to make sure they're painted well. The difference between like well-painted and poorly painted or not painted EPS over a few years is dramatic. The UV gets in and it degrades like nothing else, whereas if you paint it with a proper like exterior-grade masonry paint, it will protect it, and instead of having a 5-year lifespan, you can have a 35-year lifespan. It's a massive, massive difference. So get your paint on if you've got any sort of polyhives. Uh, 4 PM here in Australia. Okay, that's pretty good time. I think it's hot over there at 4 PM. Wow. Uh, Joseph says, good morning, Lawrence, from a cooler Essex this morning. Hope all is well. It is nice, isn't it, to have a little bit of cooler temperatures back in? We're terrible for moaning about, about the heat. I've not moaned. I love the heat, absolutely love it. But I, I also can go and kind of sit in the shade when I need to. What do people think— oh, we did that one. Okay, Mark Lofthouse. So Mark says, good morning, decided to sit in the garden this morning, it is lovely. Okay, so we're listening in the garden, brilliant. Got more people from Australia. Pure Coastal Honey says, hello from Australia again, from Jamie. How do you go managing varroa without synthetics? We don't have brood breaks. So oxalic acid is probably going to be the one, and I know there's drama, isn't there, in the Australia at the moment, but probably worldwide with this one, where you could have used pure generic oxalic acid and now you have to go down the licensed route. But that is still an organic treatment, that's not a synthetic treatment, that is just like a pure naturally derived chemical that is very dangerous if you breathe it in as a human, but very, very powerful at killing mites on the back of bees. Doesn't do anything, like you said, doesn't do anything where it permeates below the brood cappings like formic acid would. I'm not a fan of formic acid, I'm really not a fan, especially not anywhere where it's hot like Australia. So without brood breaks, you don't have the brood breaks, so all you're going to have to just force those brood breaks. You see that in a lot of places, and I can't speak for your area of the world or the legislation because I'm not an expert in it, but you see it in other places in the world where they force a brood break 3 or 4 times a year, and then they'll go in with some sort of oxalic acid towel-based solution, and they're using whatever the product is, licensed product, and dipping the J-cloth towels in the solution and then folding it over the top bars, and you have numerous ones across the top bars once you force the brood break. The idea being that the bees transfer the oxalic acid around and it kills all the phoretic mites once you've forced that brood break, so there's no, there's no place for the mites to hide within the brood. That's probably the route that I would go down. It's not synthetic, And it fixes the non-brew break issue. Also though, take a look at the Sublimox. Not the Sublimox, always forget that. Take a look at the Sublimox if you want. The Instant Vap is going to be the handheld one that I use. Sublimox will do exactly the same job, blocks up a little bit more I find, and then you can sublimate and then you've not got to use the towels as well. But that's what I would go down. Matopka says, what are my bees not drawing the new comb? No wax work. I also put sugar syrup. I would say if your bees are not drawing wax in this weather in the UK, then there is a major issue. There's probably not enough bees there, there's probably not a queen, there's probably no need for them to draw it out. If you have all the conditions there for them to kind of actually draw comb at the moment, they will be drawing it because there is excess nectar coming in. Pink is honey, steen star, forgotten, it's been so long. Stein, no, steen, it's steen. Pink is honey, there we go, because stein's wrong. Good morning. Robert Tilton says, hi Lawrence, I hope the family is keeping well. Thanks for posting the queen on Thursday. Sent you an email showing she is alive and kicking. Excellent. I am behind on emails, as you can tell. Um, too busy writing newsletters and doing live streams, but I will, I will clear out all of the emails this weekend. It's a good shout though to say that, like, what we did this week was we, for the first time ever, we postponed all queen deliveries. Like, we have a lot of queens. There's 700 queens somewhere, probably. Like 680 queens now in my garage, and I'm babysitting them over winter, keeping them, uh, over winter— definitely not over winter, I'm babysitting them over the weekend, keeping them nice and cool. So there is— there's an, uh, there's— it's not the best air conditioning, but there is air conditioning in there, and it keeps it about like 16, 17 degrees, which when you go out from 30 degrees into there, it's like, oh, this is the nicest thing ever. But we did— we, we postponed all deliveries, so all of those queens will be sent out on Monday for delivery on Tuesday. But we said to customers, I don't want to dictate that we're not sending your queens out. I'm not comfortable sending them down to London or Kent or something like that because it's very, very, very hot. I don't want to give anyone a problem. You've ordered them. I said that they were available for that date and they are here. And I think with precaution, I think they should be fine. So I gave people that option and a few people did say, oh no, look, it's an emergency. Please can you send it down and just do whatever you can? So I did a video on this. There's a really long— I spent the whole day filming this video. But I did, we sent them, probably sent like 20-odd queens out, all of them got through. Like, the amount of emails I got back, people saying, yes, they're good. So thank you for that, Robert. What I did was I went down to B&M Bargains and bought myself some sponges and then soaked like a sponge like the size of my hand and just slipped that in into like the queen packet and then rested the cages across it. And then when I put that back in the air-conditioned room, so like the moisture in the sponge stayed nice and cool. And then we got a delivery, we've got a collection from Royal Mail at half 5. We're so lucky with our collections. It's not like a lot of other Queen suppliers go— you'll see it on the website, you can kind of tell when their collection is. They'll say, um, we can dispatch same day if you order before 9 AM, which means like we're taking the Queens down to the post office at 9 AM or 10 AM. And for us, like, we can dispatch if you order before 4 PM, so we never take them down there because we get a collection half 5. know how we fluked the best collection ever. But I'm also friendly with the collection guy, turns up every single day. And I said, I don't want to put them in the back of the van. Like, if— can I put them in your front seat? Can I put this bag of queens in your front seat with the window down and you go straight to Chester? Because it's only 20 minutes away. And I said to him, I appreciate you might not be able to do that, and if you can't, it's fine, I'll drive them down there. He said, oh yeah, no, it's fine, I'll keep the window down. And he did, and he took them there, and every single one got through. So it was a good plan. And I'm glad that they all arrived safe and sound. Well, I'm going to have a sip of coffee. Oh, need more coffee. Norfolk Nigel says, good morning, Laurence. All set for Plan B and now receiving my queens on hopefully a cooler day next Saturday rather than today. Thanks for the ease of communication regarding this. That's very kind of you to say, Nigel. No problem. I am trying to get better at communication, trying to get better at customer service, and user experience is a big one, but the comms a part of that. So I had to make a decision. It was difficult, that one. I was thinking on Wednesday night, do I wait until Thursday? Do I wait until Thursday? The temperature might change. And I thought, no, I'm gonna make a decision, stick with it. There we go. And it, and it went well. So fingers crossed they're all, they're all good in the garage. I went in there this morning and checked and like refreshed the water and stuff, and they're just, they're just looking up like, yeah, we're fine, sweet, leave us. Darren says, morning, Lawrence, that nuc you gave me early April has finally covered both sides of every frame on the second super. Uncapped yet, but every frame is heavy. Is it too late to demeray or just super? Oh, that's a really good question, and I want to talk about doing demerays now because I've sent out the— I've sent out a couple of emails, I've sent out a couple of guides, got like a Wasp survival kit guide and then a PDF guide on how to complete a demeray. We sent that out last week, and I would say the demeray system here is perfectly timed. Like, you've got a nuc there, it's filled the brood box, it's now filled 2 supers. Nothing's capped, but you've got a brood box and 2 supers full. You are in peak swarming season. I know people kind of look at April and mainly May and like a bit of June. I guess we're kind of still, still in that position now as the swarm season, but I think they see it as like the build-up to the solstice. It's definitely— it definitely kind of lags after the solstice as well, because the trigger to the bees to say the solstice is here, the longest day is here, is going to be the sequentially shorter days. So as soon as they kind of get— well, as soon as they realize that, they're like, okay, slow everything down. And then you get like 3 or 4 weeks before you start to see the impact of that slowing down. And we're in that period now. We're in that, um, okay, the bees might be slowing down a little bit now, but you're not seeing the signs. The brood is still there. It's a few weeks away before you start to see those signs. So you're perfectly primed for a demerare. You're in perfect conditions for a demerare. And guess what? It works so, so well at this time of the year because the next 3 weeks are quite difficult when it comes to swarming. You'll see on the newsletters, it's very much, go out there with extra boxes, I'd be surprised if your bees aren't swarming, and you need to go and check this one as well, Darren. A good thing to add on there, I nearly took my hat off, is to do not do a Demaray if you see any signs of swarm preps, none at all. They have to be not preparing to swarm and then go ahead and do it. But the beauty of doing it now is that it gives you a 3-week relief through to early July. Like, the swarming pressure should start to subside then. So let's have a look at this one here, Darren. You've got 2 supers on it at the moment. I would say do a demerit. If we keep the weather, you're likely to be up to 3 supers, probably 4 if I'm being realistic. That gets you through the difficult part of the season, takes you through to maybe early— like, what's the date now? 27th of June. So it takes you through until mid to back end of July. And I would say, I'm not even joking, I think the season's gonna be finished by then. That's kind of roughly where we are. So I would say do the demeray now, get yourself up to 4 supers, and that's probably going to be it for the year. Here's what's even nicer though, yeah, with an early season, um, with a compressed season like that where you take the honey off earlier, like your best friend, your absolute best friend in the world is a top brood box of a demeray full of honey. That couldn't be any better. Do the demeray today, fast forward 4 weeks, let's say you've got a brood box 4 supers and then a box at the top that's full of honey, take the honey away, go and harvest it, get your top box of honey, put it underneath the bottom box. No, you don't even need to do that. This is why the system's so good, Darren. Just take the supers away. So you've got your brood box with all the queen in, you've got your supers there, and you've got your top box that's full of honey. Just take all of the supers away and leave them with the bottom brood box and the top box full of honey. you're fixed for winter. I'm going to go out and do a demaray this weekend, that sounds like a good plan. I think this is what I'm saying to people, it's likely that your bees are going to try to swarm this weekend. I think people are going to go out and find a lot of swarm cells. Go ahead, take the necessary action. If they're not swarming and you've not done a demaray yet, do a demaray this weekend, it is the time to do it. You never told us how you started your beekeeping story. Okay, well, I started it— I think I've done it a couple of times, but I'll quickly do it again. I started it with a huge swarm and landed in my garden after I was playing rugby. We packaged it up, gave it to the next-door neighbor, a couple of guys down, who was a beekeeper, and didn't think much of it, and entered my post-rugby routine, which was like have a bath and a curry. And then the same thing happened the following week, and I just thought, ah, here we go, this is— we need to do something here. So I collected them, and it changed my life. There we go. Darren says, also tell me why I'm an idiot for thinking about putting grafts into that top box I do a demeray? Um, it's poor impulse, emergency impulse, nowhere near enough beads. They would probably draw it out, you'd get stumpy little sails. Yeah, not an idiot though. Like, sometimes I'll look at that down and be like, oh, that's a really good idea, well done for highlighting that, well done for being brave enough to say it. So no, you'll never hear me saying anything like that, but, um, I'd recommend to not do that. Uh, Good morning, Lawrence, I appreciate your live streams, I learned so much from you. Thank you very much, Jean. Let's jump down. Hey Sam, says, I recently bought a Peter Stoffen Buckfast breeder queen to arrive on the 7th or 8th. Are these good breeder queens? What is the safest way to introduce the queen? So we've used Stoffen queens in the past. We don't use them anymore, but they are kind of on a peninsula, so you'll get isolated mating. Yeah, safest way to introduce the queen, I always just introduce them in exactly the same way. I think people get themselves in a bit of a pickle when they're introducing expensive queens and they think, well, I need a special cage or a special system, but the hopelessly queenless system is, is kind of foolproof, he says after doing Zane's first nuc and failing it many times over. We didn't fail that one and we're going to fix that, we're going to fix that one. That is what I would recommend, make up a split. A split in the same apiary is generally good if you're introducing a queen that you really, really want to take the best care of. I would take like 3 frames of brood, um, and a couple of frames of stores and all of the bees, and like shake in some extra bees as well, like a really nice big strong nuc. 3 frames of brood, 2 frames of stores, loads of bees. Take it to a different location in your apiary, so same apiary, yeah, and you're going to use the thing that normally you don't want to happen to your advantage here, which is you've made a nuc, it's got 3 frames of brood, loads of nurse bees, a couple of frames of stores, obviously no queen in there, but you've got old bees, you've got drones, you've got foragers, you've got like a full mix of everything. Now what's going to happen is over the next couple of days all of those bees are just going to fly off and kind of go out and forage and then they're going to go back to the original hive. All of the bees that do that are going to be your angry bees, they're going to be the foragers, they're going to be the old bees. It's going to leave behind just the nurse bees. Now you need to make sure that you don't put too much brood in there because you're going to lose a lot of those bees, so that's why 3 frames of brood and 2 frames of stores works quite nicely here, but you could do 2 frames of brood and 2 frames of stores as well. But effectively what's going to happen is you're going to come back and half the bees are going to be gone, and you're going to see, right, that split's gone from this down to this, but what is left behind is beautifully calm bees. Wait 8 days from when you made the split, knock down all the emergency cells. There won't be that many, but there will be a few, and then you're primed perfectly for a split like that. That— you'll get a really good introduction doing that. I wouldn't do anything different. JSCFB says, morning, Laurence. What bee line from your selections for sale are your favorite for everything you require? Oh, that's a good question, that one, and a difficult one. I would say the majority of my stock, yeah, is the standard F1 buckfast line, like the Melitta Bees line. And the reason is, is because it's easy for me to fill stuff up, so it's like, it's pure convenience for me. And also, I really do, I like the line as well. But then you've got to think of it from my point of view. When I'm, when I'm like doing any grafting or anything like that, we've got premium queens, like a lot of that work goes in and we just can't keep up with the demand, like anywhere near the demand. So I'm always scrambling to kind of like produce queens to, to send out to people. Uh, like the Lutz ones are amazing. Like I did a video for— there's a couple of videos coming up, there's some really, really good videos coming up It's just everything's changed. I'm nearly reaching for the hat here. Everything's changed and there's a lot of good videos coming up. One of them is one of my breeder queens swarmed. I was packaging up this breeder queen to send out to Just Alex because he's having a couple of breeder queen nucs from me, and the day that we were packing them up, it swarmed. So we had to do something with it. I don't want to give away the story. It's a really, really good video. Um, but though that was, that was, that was a Lutz Egger breeder queen. I've got loads of them, and just dealing with the breeder queens, because I have a lot of, a lot of, um, a lot of them dotted around the apiary, so I'm kind of more in tune with the breeder queens that we're grafting from than the kind of offspring that are going out. Obviously they're really nice and tested and prolific, and we've got some of them, but, uh, just dealing with the breeder queens is, is quite crazy. It's almost like they're a bit dopey, a bit just not, not with it, because they do not care that you're there. They're just like, yeah, Whatever, humans. So in terms of favorite lines, like my Lutz Egger breeder queens are amazing, and they're the only ones that I would graft from personally. But for what's, what's mainly in my apiaries, like production apiaries, it is a standard F1 Buckfast. But all of the Buckfasts that we sell are very, very good. They're calm, they're going to build up nice and strong, they're going to get you lots of honey. They're going to— I'm not going to say they're not going to swarm because all bees swarm, but they're not going to swarm anywhere near as much in a season as like a feral stock bee. I am so excited about the Obsidian though. Lots of people asking about the Obsidian. We're introducing a new line this week. It was supposed— they are in my garage, they're in my garage now, the Obsidian Premium. So we've got 2 Obsidian lines now. 6, 7, like that. Ivy will be proud. 2 Obsidian lines, um, and this is the most exciting one, and this is the data that we're working on at the moment, and a podcast that's already been filmed. There's so much that's been filmed that you've not seen yet. So Subscribe. But the Obsidian Queens are very, very different. They're very, very dark, which some people in the UK might like. They have a longer tongue. They can access different forage. They fly in cooler conditions. Now that's not to say they're better. They're definitely different. And for some people in the UK, it might be that something like that would be more useful for them. So I think my job as a result of this comment here is to get a number of those different lines, like all of the different lines, and set up the different apiaries so I can show you. kind of, this is the difference between them. Lots of questions being asked about that, so I will, I will take that one on as a job. I remember this name from this week's Queen Packaging, says, morning Lawrence, with wasps here, is it still okay to do 2-frame splits in Payne's Poly Nuc, thinking about defense? Cheers. So it's borderline now. I'm going down the route, if I'm doing it now, it's 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores. I think that's going to be my generic advice going forward as a minimum from now. However, you might just about get away with it. So if you're, if you're talking about a 2-frame split here with 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, yes, just about. I'd extra shake the bees in, and if you're going down the 1 frame of stores, 1 frame of brood route, I would definitely move them to another apiary. If you're making splits in the same apiary now, I'd go minimum 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, and just be careful doing it in the same apiary. The robbers will come back. So don't feed straight away. Makes life a lot easier if you can, you can do it in a different apiary. What's your name? My name is Laurence Edwards. Welcome everyone to my live stream. I turn up Saturday every 7 AM in the season, drinking coffee, talking nonsense, wearing hats, and I'm half an hour in, so I'm gonna have a sip. There we go. I would like to make up some splits to overwinter. How many frames of brood would be best to have in the brood box before thinking about taking splits. So as long as it's a healthy colony, as in like it's a healthy expanding colony, it's queen right, they are building up, then you can be quite aggressive with splits if you want to be aggressive. But you could have at this time of the year a 6-frame nuc and split it into 2 and just about get away with it, but you're kind of reducing the, the ability of both sides of those splits to grow and to defend themselves. So you could have a double brood at this time of the year, like full to the brim, 22 frames, and you could just split that like that and do a walkaway split. So anywhere in between 6 frames and 22 frames, something like that. If you've got a colony that's struggling, a colony that's weak, a colony that's trying to build back up, I wouldn't go in and take splits out. But I would say pretty much anything goes at this time of the year, just understanding the smaller parts, the smaller splits are going to have to be able to defend themselves. I wouldn't be splitting in the same apiary. We like split and move to other apiaries unless we're using it for our advantage, like bleeding our foragers. Split, take it off to another apiary, it means you can balance them a lot better, it means there's no issues with robbing, and then yeah, it's a good time of the year to get that done. Heads up again, so I have literally just finished a new email series which is called the Overwintered Nuclear System. So about 2 years ago I did a series on how to overwinter nucs, how to build them up, all the different timings, when to make splits, when to add the frames of brood in, how many frames of brood to add in there, when to do your treatments, what to feed them, like everything. It's a 12-part series, and I've just— I've gone through it, so it's been revamped. We've revamped Modern Affairs— Current Affairs, got it wrong, nearly wearing the hat. But it's going to be released soon, so keep an eye on the channel. I'll probably release that in a week or so. Get your name on the list, and then what we'll do is we'll just send you regular emails. You'll be able to watch all of the updated videos in that series, which would be quite cool. Robert Tilton says, how do you see the rest of the season panning out? So without a doubt, it's going to be a super compressed season. Without a doubt, it's going to be carnage. Have you seen the flowers? Have you seen the sun? I'm not saying it to you, Robert, but have you seen the expansion of everything? So here's really— this, this, this is exactly what is going on here. Yeah, we, uh, in the back, in our back garden, I started planting some vegetables got some strawberries and some herbs and some salad and lettuce and stuff like that. And we've now got rabbits just everywhere. Like, it's the worst rabbit season ever. And I don't mind rabbits. Like, they can come and eat the vegetables or do whatever, but like, there's so many of them and they are just brazen. They're just like, yeah, we're eating your vegetables. And you kind of come out and you say, can you— like, they are my vegetables and you are eating them. And they look up and they're like, yeah, whatever. And then maybe they go and then 6 of their mates come back in. So populations are booming everywhere as a result of the sunshine, as a result of the copious amounts of nectar coming out. But what happens— and I've had lots of experience in seasons like this, you see it all the time— drought conditions will take over unless we get some rain. What we need now is we need a decent amount of rain. not just like a weekend thunderstorm, we need kind of like a couple of days of really good constant rain to saturate that ground again. The plants are in survival mode. Go, go and have a look at what the plants are doing at the moment. They are very much in survival mode. They are trying to like emergency flower, which is great for the bees, which is why we're getting all of this nectar coming in, but it compresses the plant season. So when the plant season compresses, obviously the forage season compresses. But all of these other creatures in the background have boomed. So rabbits, yes, booming population of rabbits because of the amazing weather and all of the nice green things that are growing and all of the flowers. And guess what has also boomed? Wasps. It's going to be carnage this year. It is going to be absolute carnage because instead of— my prediction anyway, I'm saying like it's definitely going to happen, this is my prediction— instead of there being a nice long prolonged flow kind of going all the way through to September, October. And well, that's what you get like in Wales if, um, if the season is normal, which is you get some sort of food available to them until the first frost. And it's like Himalayan balsam, and then that wipes it out. But you couldn't— it's quite manageable. You don't get a war zone. You don't get like, right, the flow has stopped from the 1st of August through to middle of September and we're in, we're in trouble. Now in the UK, you get that elsewhere, like further down south, people are calling it saying it's over. Like, it's done. There's nothing else coming in, and we're in the war zone now. So I see a huge compression of the season. I don't see people taking honey off middle of August. I'll probably be taking my honey off around middle of July, third week of July, something like that. It's 3 or 4 weeks away. The season is running out fast. It is your job now not to do everything you can to get the honey off. It is your job now to look ahead and say, right, in 4 weeks' time, are these colonies going to be able to survive the onslaught. Lots of people will get that wrong, lots of people will end up with dead bees, me included, because wasps are really bad generally at this time of the year, kind of as we progress now through to September, October, maybe a little bit before that, but I think this year is going to be really bad. You're going to have horrific robbing, there's going to be tons of wasps, there's going to be no forage whatsoever, and all of those 3 things combine to make Beekeeping pretty miserable, but life pretty miserable for your bees as well. The best thing you can do is set your colonies up for success now. Don't take off too much of their honey, or if you're taking it off, double brood them and feed them. Feeding the whole apiary fixes a lot of these issues. It means that the bees don't have to go out and rob, so you're artificially kind of lowering the robbing pressure from your own bees. It makes the bees much more resilient and able to kind of like defend themselves because they've got stores, so they've got something to defend. But more importantly than that, because you've been feeding them, they've got brood, so the brood emerges out, so their numbers are high. They're going to lose a lot of, a lot of, a lot of bees throughout this season. So yes, answer to your question, I see it panning out quite fast, super compressed season, and I think we need to do I think we need to take action now to make sure that it doesn't all go wrong in a few weeks' time. Oh, next one. Do you have a video on how to use an Apidea? We can't find one on 14 Day Beekeeper. So the Apidea videos won't be on 14 Day Beekeeper, they'll just be on YouTube. There's a few, there's a few on there about how to use an Apidea. I'm doing, I'm doing some of them at the moment as well. There is There's a video on YouTube, John Beager is generally quite good for this, it's about raising queens, and then I raise a couple of batches in some Apidaias to take you through the whole process. But yeah, it's not on 14 Day Beekeeping, that one, it's just free for everyone. My friend has a lot of hives— oh, it's hard to read that— so my friend has a lot of hives where there are apple trees, but due to pesticides or chemicals, his bees are dying and vomiting near the hive. Do you have any solution? Take them away from the pesticides or chemicals. It's really sad. Apple trees are one of the worst for it as well, um, because the nectar is relatively poor, so the bees don't want to go there. And you'll see, like, they not only spray the trees, but they cut away everything on the floor as well. So if there's nice wildflowers or dandelions and stuff on the floor, they cut all of them away, they spray the trees with stuff, force the bees onto them. I'm not, I'm not a fan of that. I, I would take the bees away and let the bees just freestyle somewhere where it is, um, where it's nice. No type of honey is worth that in my opinion. Morning Lawrence. Oh, I did that one, okay, a few duplicates there. Good morning Lawrence, I caught a swarm in my garden 2 days ago in an empty hive. I was too busy to move it immediately. Do I need to take it 3 miles away now to move it back to my apiary? Great question and a challenge on the 3-foot or 3-mile rule. Excellent challenge, Sam, and one where it doesn't actually apply. So normally the 3-foot or 3-mile rule is this: if you want to move a colony, you can move it up to 3 feet in any direction. If you move it any more than that, you have to take it 3 miles away, or else the bees get confused and they don't know where the beehive is. However, if that beehive swarms and throws out a swarm and it lands just somewhere in the apiary, in an empty hive, anywhere in the apiary in fact, they automatically reorientate to that spot if they stay put So if they're still there, that's it, you're all good, you can just leave them there and get on with it. It's a really nice one to know that one because it saves you quite a lot of work moving bees around. Yeah, using that one to great effect, Sam, well done. Hi everyone, I'm doing my first farmers market tomorrow. I hope everything is going good over there. I hear it's hot outside. It is hot outside, but it's very, very nice and much, much cooler today. Good luck with the first farmers market. I tried to do a split and it didn't turn out well. Placed the queen in a brood box with resources on bees, with the other split brood and no queen. One swarmed and one died. Oh, one swarmed and one died. Unfortunately, Jean, means that it's unbalanced. So the one that swarmed probably had too many bees in there and the split didn't come early enough, or all the bees went back to that one. And then the one that died is because all of the bees went back to the other one and left probably all of the brood there. Safest way, if you can possibly do it, is package them up when you make the splits and take it to a new apiary 3 miles away using the 3-foot or 3-mile rule. It perfectly balances the bees. So you've got, say you've got a colony of bees, got 20,000 bees inside the colony, and you make a split, 10,000 in one, 10,000 in the other. If you take one of those 10,000 bee beehives and take it to another apiary, then it's all good. You will remain at 10,000 in one and 10,000 in the other. If you make that split in the same apiary, you're probably going to end up with like 16,000 in one and 4,000 in the other, possibly 20,000 in one and nought in the other. Now the way to make sure that you keep some bees in the other one is to make sure that there is sufficient brood in there. Looking for much more like capped brood is what you want in that one because it means it doesn't need quite as many bees to keep it warm, but the bees will stick around for it. If you just make a split and take— so say you've got a double brood, people make this mistake, so you've got double brood like that, bottom box is full of brood, top box is full of honey, and you say, right, I'm gonna make split and you do that, that one's gonna die. No bees are hanging around for a box that's just full of empty honey or full of honey. They'll just get robbed out. They'll all stick over here. So you need to balance the bees and you need to balance the brood. I think that might be what's gone wrong here. If that's not what's gone wrong, then let me know. We can do it in the next one, but I think, I think that's probably what it's gonna be. So Jean says, what would you have done for that one there? I would have balanced the split a little bit more effectively, and I think that would have fixed it. Right, coffee. C1 says, when you have done a split on a healthy hive and it builds back up to the same place prior to the split, is there any more of that question? No, I think that is just, what do you do if that happens? That's good, you make another split if you need to, or you get a super on. Mark Jackson says, can you tell us which is your current favourite poly nuc? That is a good question because I would put the purpose in there as well. I'm just going to do that and I'll move that afterwards. If I'm transporting them in the post, I need a single molded unit. I can't have any bits, I can't have anything that needs strapping down, and it's better to screw it all up. So we send out our nukes in the— we send out our nukes in the Payne's Poly nukes. For ones that I've got at home, I, I've just upgraded all of mine to the Abello nuke. A, because they look really nice. B, because they're like Hugely durable, and C. I don't know what C is. I was going to come up with a good C, but I'll probably have to wear the hat for that. Let's put that on for a bit. Right, next up, Justin Parsons says, "Morning. How will the bees be with an inspection today?" So much better because it is cooler. I would wait until tomorrow if you possibly could. First thing tomorrow is probably going to be the sweet spot. You need to come back, everyone, next week and tell me how many swarm cells you found, because I think a lot of people will be thinking, yeah, the weather's good, the bees are doing well, I've not lost any swarms, I've got through it. And you might not realize that, like, the response to this week's heat wave isn't this week, it's next week. So come, come, like, anytime going forward now from, like, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday onwards, get good weather, it's going to be swarm central. Get your swarm traps at the ready because next week be wild when it comes to swarms. Needing to move a 6-supered hive, 6 supers and 1 brood, away from my home apiary, how would you go about this? I would harvest as much of it as I possibly can, so anything that's good, good to go, take it out and get it in ready for harvesting. The other way of doing it is you could just— trying to think of the best way of doing it. If you definitely can't lift it because it's too heavy, maybe you can lift a double brood, so maybe Blow all of the bees out of the 6 supers, put an additional brood box on to collect all of the bees, and then take that double brood there, get it on, and then put the supers back on. That would work. And then maybe use the additional brood for demerare. It's difficult moving big hives at this time of the year. 6 supers and 1 brood box is just like— it's on the limits of what 2 kind of fully grown adults could lift, I would say. It could be heavy. But you can get like a little a trolley, maybe put it on a trolley and move it. The problem that you'll have, I guess, is that you can't get it into a car or a truck, but if you've got a van, get it into a van, that could be a way to do it as well. I think the lesson here, Jason, has got to be move it before it gets 6 supers on. Sorry, I know that is completely useless for you, but yeah, for everybody else who's got 2 supers on now, move it before it gets to 6 supers. Picking up another local beekeeper split next week, he is unsure on the line, would you recommend requeening within the next couple of weeks, priority is overwintering and setting up for 2027. That's an interesting one because normally I would say, well, like, see what they're like, have a look, see what they're like, and speak to, speak to the beekeeper. It's, it's a split that a local beekeeper's done. He says he's unsure on the line, so it's probably just, it's feral stock. But see what the beekeeper says. He might not be happy with you requeening it with something else. All I would say is if you're, if you're looking for overwintering and setting up for 2027, And you know you want buckfast, and you know you want nice calm bees, and you want that prolific nature, and you're happy with kind of management surrounding that, surrounding that, then yeah, I would go ahead and just recreate straight away. What I would say almost you could say to them though, if they're happy with that approach, you could say to them, "Well, I don't need the queen. Just can I can I take the split without the queen, and you can keep the queen?" I appreciate that might be awkward, might be an awkward conversation to say, but I wouldn't want to. I don't want to judge the queen and say, "Oh yeah, you definitely need a new queen." You might be giving you a really good queen. So. It's quite a tough one for me to answer that. I don't want to force you down the line of requeening just because you know you want to set up for 2027, but maybe the beekeeper would give you a queenless split and then keeps everyone happy. I posted in Circle about what people thought on the Pagden method. Have you ever used this and do you have any views? So these are all very, very similar methods. They've all got different names, but they're all just effectively what you should do when you come across swarm cells, or what you should do to stop bees swarming. Everyone has their own little method that they use, like I like the Demaray method. So I stumbled across that quite early in my beekeeping. I wasn't a fan of any horizontal artificial swarm methods, I really didn't like them. The Pagden is one of those, I think. I'm terrible when it comes to like recalling information, I'm pretty sure it is though. So any sort of artificial swarm where you've got Bees in a beehive like that, and you say, "Right, they're swarming. Let's do this," is completely unsustainable in my opinion because it works in year one. You struggle with it in year two and year three. Like I can't, I can't do that anymore. Like I'm on four hundred hives, so I need to go to eight hundred or whatever it is. It just doesn't work. Whereas saying, "Right, I've got a colony here and I'm going to do this," and they're just like one beehive still. That's my swarm prevention technique. It's it's cheaper. It's easier. It's way more effective. It means I don't have anywhere near as much equipment. I don't need 2 floors, I don't need 2 roofs, I just need 2 brood boxes. So it's for all of those reasons, that's the kind of method that I recommend. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that method, like it's a valid method and it does work, but it just— it— I don't like the reactive nature of a lot of them. That's the problem with it. It's a case of saying, right, if your bees do this which is undesirable, then let's do this to fix it. Whereas I like saying, right, the bees are going to do something undesirable here, let's do something to stop them doing the undesirable thing. And I think that's the Demaray versus kind of all of the other horizontal artificial swarm methods, and that's why I like it so much. Is it okay to have 3 national standard brood boxes? So yes, it's fine, but it's unnecessary. It's a huge amount of work and it's very, very inefficient in terms of resources because you're going to lose tons of honey into it. I'd limit them to 2 if you possibly can. Martin says, morning Lawrence, I'm picking up a nuc next week. I won't get home until late in the night. Can they stay in the travel Correx overnight and transfer to a nuc in the morning? So first things first, we don't send our bees out in travel Correx, absolutely no chance, especially not in temperatures like this. I'm quite astounded that people are still sending out bees in Correx in this weather, so fingers crossed, Martin, that they get through. We don't like Correx. But definitely not if they're sending it incorrect. You need to be there, like we do the handover. The Royal Mail give you the parcel and you take it and put it in the beehive, like straight to the apiary. That is the recommendation that we give to people. So not even like, can they wait until later on in the day? I would be speaking to the supplier of the nuc and saying we need to rearrange the day. Definitely do not do that. I think if you did that, Martin, you come to them in the morning and they would be dead, every single one of them. I do not recommend it. I think go and find an alternative approach. Sorry, it's quite hard-hitting, I know, but I saw that one, I was like, oh no, I'm worried about this. James says, morning, Laurence, hope all is okay with you and family. Really quick question, I've seen a couple of people talking about putting stinging nettles in their smoker to help with varroa. Do you have any thoughts on this? I love this. You get this with everything with beekeeping. Here we go, I'll give you the example. This is my coffee, yeah, I'm gonna put my finger in my coffee, and it's got a special power. It means when you put your finger in your coffee, your eyes stay open. And look at that— finger in the coffee, my eyes are open. So there's only one conclusion that I can make here: putting my finger in the coffee means that my eyes stay open. Caffeine. Okay, so maybe there's a little bit of logic. That was a terrible example, but you get the idea. It's the same with a smoker. I'm going to put some nettles in my smoker. Put them in because it's going to help with varroa. Someone comes up with a great idea. Puff, puff, puff, puff, puff, puff, puff. Okay, the bees are not dead, everyone. The bees are not dead, right? Let's go to the next winter, right? We've not done any treatment. All we've done now is we've just puffed our bees with stinging nettles. Did the bees get through to next winter? Yeah, they did. And it's at this point people say, we're on to something here, guys. We are seriously on to something here. And then they do it the next year. They tell a few of their mates and a few of them are out there. And sorry if it's really condescending to anyone that is doing this, but I'm pretty sure it's snake oil. It's a myth. They go around second year, all their mates doing the same thing, and they say, the bees are not dead, yeah, we found this revolutionary treatment for varroa, it's called stinging nettles in the smoker, look, it works. Third year, which is when all of the colonies die because of varroa, that's just like standard cycle, the people who have been puffing their bees with stinging nettles saying this is the best treatment, they say, My bees died. Yeah, they died. It was the cold and the damp that got them. I was, I was treating them for varroa, the stinging nettles. It definitely wasn't that. We proved that in the previous 2 years. It was the cold and the damp that got them. And anybody that knows bees is like, they die from PMS. Like, they, they die from the impact of the mites, like the parasitic mite syndrome. Nearly forgot it. Uh, as a result of that prolonged exposure to the viruses over many years So the stinging nettles in the smoker has done nothing here. What you have effectively demonstrated is that the standard approach applies, which is don't treat bees for 3 years and they are probably going to be dead. There we go. So my thoughts on it are as clear as that, James. I think it's a load of nonsense, but I welcome people trying new things and like actually going through like a study, because if stinging nettles in the smoker was, was really, really useful, there'd be some sort of study that would go with that. someone would capitalize on it, no doubt, and have some sort of paid product for it. I don't think it's true. Earlier you said about having an early honey crop this year, what makes you think that? So I went into it previously, I think it will just be compressed. It's not necessarily an earlier honey crop, it's the, the war zone that is coming is going to be longer than it normally is, which means that I'm going to recommend to people to take the honey crop off earlier to protect it and preserve it. And not in a, oh, let's take the honey off for the bees. It's like, you're going to get robbed, you're going to be under severe pressure here, so I'm going to take that honey away, we'll look after it for you, and we're going to feed you, we're going to look after you during this really, really difficult period by feeding you, which lowers that robbing impulse across all of the bees in the apiary and means the bees are able to better defend against the wasps. It has like a double-pronged benefit for you. So some people could look at that and say, oh, just just interested in the honey, the honey is kind of irrelevant, yeah, because what you can't do when the honey is there is feed the bees, and what you need to do to prepare the colony to defend against the robbing bees and the wasps is to feed them, so you kind of have to take the honey off anyway, and then you get all of those additional benefits from feeding at that time. Makes life so much better, so much easier for the bees and the beekeeper. Well, we've got 8 minutes left, so I'll go, I'll go fast. Also, I want to use this nuc to boost the honey production colonies for next year. What's the best way of doing this? Move them to a hive, then take frames of brood, or from the 6-frame nuc? Okay, so if you're, if you just want to boost colonies, I would say first assess whether the colonies do need a boost. If you've got colonies on double brood, they don't need a boost. If you've got colonies that are on single brood and 8 frames, they don't need a boost. If you've got like a 4-frame split, And you're thinking, I could do with an extra frame of brood in there, that's where I'd be putting the frame of brood at this time of the year. I'd also probably say that, like, adding the frames of brood in, it's not a case of, right, add this frame of brood in here, get more honey out. It's not as straightforward as that. When you add brood in, you're adding in more bees. When you add in more bees, you're increasing the risk of swarming. Obviously, if you increase the risk of swarming and a couple of colonies swarm, you lose a lot of the honey from those colonies. So any marginal gains you get on the other colonies where it worked, you might lose more in the colonies that are swarmed. So my recommendation for you would be don't boost any production colonies. It's kind of too late in the year to be doing that with— to be able to get any measurable benefit out of it, especially doing quickfire. I think you'd be much better off just building up those 6-frame nucs and taking them through the winter as separate colonies. Francis says, hi Lawrence, 2 AM here in the United States. I did the demo rate, I made 464 pounds of honey. Right, so we need to clip that one to the nth degree. Francis Moore did a demeray and made 464 pounds of honey. Can we get a picture, please, Francis, or a video? Not to, not to like assess the evidence, but just as a snippet to say how amazing the demeray is. Wow! My favorite thing whenever I do this, whenever anyone talks in pounds, is I say, I'm going to make that better. So look, Francis Moore did the demeray. And made— let's see how good my maths is— 932 half-pound jars of honey. How close was that to 1,000? I bet the maths is wrong as well. Fantastic, well done Francis, that is very, very good news. Whereabouts are you? Because that's unheard of. It does sound more in pounds, like I know bee farmers in the UK in the very nice Goldilocks zone achieve similar-ish, yeah, like top, top end But that's amazing. I want 464 pounds of honey in my— sorry, 932 pounds of honey. No, it's not 932, I got it wrong, it's 928. I'm shocking, right? All those teachers all those years, they said you'll never have a calculator in your back pocket. Little did they know. Hi, can you still harvest honey from frames that have some wax moth in them? I've never come across this situation, but it was a hive that somebody was basically going to abandon. If I hadn't gone to them If I had— if you hadn't gone to them, you froze the frames and they're still currently in the freezer. I would not recommend you doing that. A, because you do not know what those frames have had on them. There could be chemicals, there could be pesticides, it could be, oh, God knows what else. But what you do know is that there's wax moth, so there's definitely going to be old gammy wax moth larvae that have decomposed and frozen and then probably defrost once they come out of the freezer, plus all of the trails and the detritus and the— no chance. I personally burn them. Burn every single thing that you've got there. There is no benefit to you there whatsoever. There's no benefit to you there. There's also no benefit to the bees there as well. What you've got there is a whole lot of unknowns. Is there disease? Is there pesticides? Why did those bees die? And what are you going to do with them? If you're not going to eat the honey, which I recommend definitely do not do, I would not give them back to the bees. It's even more risky. It's like saying to the bees, would you like some disease? And they say, what disease? You say, I don't know, but here you go, there's probably some disease in here. Burn it. Dig a massive pit, 2 foot deep, stick it at the bottom, burn everything, and encapsulate it. That's the safest thing to do. Sorry you've gone to all that work. Uh, right, where are we going? Oh, we're nearly win. No, we're not nearly at the bottom. Okay. Mark says in the latest episode, Zane. Ah, see, I do this on my videos. I told you that. I just I need to get into live stream mode. In the latest episode of Zane's First Nook, could you have done a demure, a demure? Um, possibly, but they kept on messing things up before we get to that point. We'll get there. We'll get there. Demby Honey says an absolutely great decision on not posting queens out. Good call, mate. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate it. I have to say, I'm blown away by the support from our customers. I don't think in previous years, like, I would have— I don't think I would have made that call in previous years for fear of, like, reputational damage, people thinking, oh, he's not reliable, and that— I don't know, I don't know the reason. It seems crazy now because it's a very logical decision to make, which is I thought it was too hot, and I know that I can keep the bees cool over the weekend. I know the bees are Fine, like they can stay in the cages for weeks. It's just not an issue if they're with me. I can keep them cool, and then okay, it's inconvenient for people, and there's going to be delays, but Monday for a Tuesday delivery is not the end of the world. But then overlaying that by saying, "Look, if you want us to send them, we will do everything we can to keep them cool in the post. Like if there's an emergency, we'll send them out for you," and going through that process and sending them out, and then everyone coming back and saying they are tip top. Nice idea with the sponge. It made me feel really happy, so it was a good decision. Hopefully we've not got to do it too many times. I don't think we're gonna have heat waves like that in the UK very many times this year, but it does, yeah, it doesn't, it looks like it's trending in the wrong direction, which is a little bit sad. We've got Simon, morning Simon. Morning Adam. Adam is definitely moaning about the heat. Glad this heat wave is on the way out. Yeah, it does seem like it's on its way out. Some people are struggling a bit, I think Adam's struggling. Hi Adam, by the way. Hi. Francis says, I'm on the 5th round of oxalic acid for mites, how many treatments do you do? So in the UK you're only licensed to do one, which is unfortunate, but if— 5th round, as long as you're doing it at 5-day intervals, which is the time to kind of ensure that you're getting the reproductive mites as they come out once the cells are uncapped, I would say 5 should be good, but you can obviously do a test to see if you need to do more. I would say you should be good with 5 though. Morning Lawrence from a not so sunny Kent, we've had some much-needed rain overnight, it might help extend the forage to the bees. We've just got the sweet chestnut flowering locally. Happy days. This is what I'm saying, John. We need rain. We need lots of rain. We need downpours and then sun for a bit and then another downpour. We need to completely saturate that ground again. If we let's talk another scenario. I'm saying at the moment weather looks good. We've had all of that sunshine. The rain's not here. The forecast looks like pretty good in terms of sunshine. So I'm predicting a compressed season. Let's say we get another. June gap— no, it's not a June gap, but that 3-week period where it just rained and rained and rained— that would be quite good now. That would be quite good, and it would slow down all of the honey production. It would give the bees the chance to process stuff. Okay, if you're on 4 supers, you might get knocked back down to 3 or 2.5 supers, but the risk of swarming will go down as well, and it'll make life easier. But then if you get another sunny period after that, like, you could be on for the best harvest I think anyone's ever seen in the UK. So it's all up for grabs still. I can only kind of like look ahead and make predictions on what I'm seeing, and at the moment it looks very dry. It looks like there's not a huge amount of rain coming. It looks like the rain that is coming isn't going to do what's needed because it's torrential downpours. It's just going to go straight down in the gullies. It's not going to make much of a difference to the water table. It's not going to suck it all in. So we want some prolonged rain, and then that should help things things. But like the flip side of that, the good side of that, is take your honey off at the right time, you're going to have a crazy bumper honey crop this year. Like some of the pictures that people are sending me, and I do welcome this, if you've got, um, Francis needs to send me the picture of the 464 pounds of honey, definitely, just to show what a Demerit can do. But if you bought a queen from us, if you bought a nuc from us and you've got like a good success story and you want to send some pictures through, or even I've worked out for people to do this on Circle now, so if you're part of the HiveQ community on Circle, you could just do a post kind of showing the steps and saying, started off with the nuc, got through to this point, they've built up, and now look, 8 supers or whatever. I know a lot of people are in that situation. Putting it in that format, I'll 100% share it though, because that is very, very useful. I have a drone laying queen following a natural requeening, can't find her. Can I put in a frame of eggs and allow them to raise another queen? Would the new queen kill the drone laying queen, or shall I shake them through a Queen at Sluga. So unfortunately, you have to find her. If you put a frame of eggs into a colony that's got a drone-laying queen, or even a colony that's got laying workers, they will—they're under the impression that they've got a queen. So all they're going to do is just turn like that. You're not going to get any emergency cells on that frame, so they won't raise another queen. You have to trigger the the queenless impulse before you add the frame of eggs in, and the only way that you can do that with a with a drone-laying queen is to find her and kill her. If you can't find her, probably like the likelihood is they've turned laying worker, which means that there isn't a queen in there, and some of the females, as a result of the lack of pheromone from no queen, have started laying eggs. The best way to tell actually is if you're like, if you're seeing eggs, if you're seeing multiple eggs in the cells and you're seeing multiple eggs on the side wall of the cells, that's a dead giveaway that you've not got a drone laying queen, but you've got multiple laying workers. And then my recommendation for fixing laying workers is It's not really a solution or a fix, it is just take the beehive somewhere else in the apiary, move the beehive, move the hive stand, leave nothing where it was, shake all the bees out and just go and refurbish the hive over winter. Let all the bees beg their way into any adjacent hives you've got, assuming you've got other hives there. It's a bit harsh, but there's no sustainable way to get laying worker colonies back on track. People say, oh, you can add a frame of brood in and then add another frame of brood in and add another frame of brood in, and at that point you can add a mated queen Queen in, and I say, well, kind of made a three-frame split there. That's a lot of that's a lot of resource for a three-frame split. Just that might not go well. You might as well just shake them out and then make up a three-frame split from the other colony and and pretty much guarantee that it's going to work. Justified Jester says yes in Australia. I think that forced brood breaks need to be promoted and introduced more. I think if there's an appetite to not go down the synthetic route, you're you're in. forced brood break territory, 100%. Uh, John says, also looking forward to receiving my Obsidian Dark Star Queen on Tuesday. Oh, we are super excited to send those out, John. I hope you're getting on well with it. Interested to see how it gets on down in Kent as well. Uh, Francis says, the flow is over where I am. I hope your wife is doing better. She is, she is doing well. The heat is a challenge. Um, but yeah, she's doing well. Thanks for asking. Nikki says, hello, just setting up for an event. We'll catch up later. Thanks for popping in, Nikki. Jean says, Lawrence, how many times a year do you test your bees and treat? So I don't test because the system that we use at the moment is very repeatable, and we don't see any signs of major varroa damage at the wrong time of the year. So we treat with kind of like, we use Apivar middle of August, but probably this year gonna be around 1st of August, and then we apply a different, like opposing oxalic acid-based treatment by sublimation during a natural brood break in winter using the 3-week system? Might as well tell you the 3-week system again for the UK because we're getting around to that period again. What everybody's trying to find in the UK when it comes to winter is this perfect broodless period. If you supplement oxalic acid into a colony during a broodless period like that, all of the mites are phoretic, which means they live on the back of the bees. There's none of them hiding away under the brood cappings because there's no brood. Now you can go inside your colonies in the middle of winter and start pulling out frames if you want, and you want kill your bees. I definitely do not advise doing that, but there's no other way to actually kind of confirm that the colony is broodless. So I say to people, go for rough timings. Treating them at the rough time with a little bit of brood is way better than going in and confirming it. But I use a little 3-week system, which is I know that roughly the bees are going to need their oxalic acid-based treatment, or the likelihood of a natural brood break is going to be around the winter solstice, so around kind of like 23rd However, sometimes you could be treating in November, sometimes you can be treating in January, so you, you have this kind of like moving range of when to treat. Earlier is better if you can get away with it because it just keeps the mites down nice and low, and you can do it twice. If you get 2 nice 3-week treatments in that November to January period, then you're going to get your bees in a super nice healthy way. But this is how you do it, this is how you work out if there's any brood in your colony without actually going in. You know your zone, November to January. You wait for the first cold trigger. So when you hear a crunch, a real crunch, you're walking on the grass and you hear crunch, big frost. Yeah, if you get a big frost that is not followed by kind of temperatures going back up to 20 degrees or whatever, but if you get a big frost and then daytime temperatures like 7, 8, 7, 6, something like that, after 3 weeks— so 3 weeks from the first big frost The idea is that that frost triggers the queen, triggers the colony to stop any brood laying, and then your 3 weeks gives you enough separation to ensure that anything that was there is completely emerged. And then you know you've got a very good chance of going in and finding that broodless period without going in and inspecting your bees. It works pretty much anywhere in the world where you do have a natural brood break anyway. It gives you that buffer and it gives you that flexibility to move things around a little bit. Um, Harry's Honeybee says, too late to start raising queens? Um, it's not too late to start raising queens, but it's much more difficult kind of setting them up now. We'll go through that.