Let's Talk Bees #81 - Your Beekeeping Questions Answered

I think we're live. We are live. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to episode 81 of Let's Talk Bees. I'm going to jump straight in and get on with the questions here. So Christian and Dee says, have you ever worked with Dadant US hives? I'd be interested to hear your opinion of them and how they compare with other hive types you've used. So we don't use Dadant in the UK. I have had a little bit of experience with one. I've got one Dadant beehive at home that I have not yet assembled, but when I went to Malta last year, all of the hives There and across Italy, the standard is the Dadant. So I had a good play with the Dadant hives out there and I like them and they're nice big frames, similar to a 14 by 12 frame, a lot of the standard Dadant sizes. So you pull them out and it's like, whoa, that is a huge brood frame, potentially a challenge for demerets. I find the bigger the frame, the more difficult it is to do the demeret because you end up having too massive, massive brood nest to contend with. The other thing that I wasn't 100% comfortable with, with the Dadant, at least the ones that I was using over there, was that you effectively have— it's like Castellations, they're not quite Castellations though, but Castellations in the brood box, so the frames aren't self-spacing, so you put non-self-spacing frames into— like the spacing is baked into the box, which was just a little bit different to the way that I'm used to working. But yeah, no, absolutely fine. Dadant hives, got a little bit of experience with them and see that a lot of people in the US use them. Talking of Dadant though, I do Dayden Smoker, loved by Dayden Smoker. I've been meaning to reach out to Dayden about something to do with their smoker actually, so maybe I'll do that. Thanks for that, get my words out. It's like I'm doing it on the videos again, I don't finish my sentences and then I go again for a fresh take and I realize it's a livestream and I can't do that, so my apologies. Where's my hat? Second question from Christian Andes, again I'm butchering the name, says, in 14-Day Beekeeper you mentioned freezing super frames all winter. Won't the wax get brittle for spring use? So freezing frames, any frames really, is a great way of storing them if you've got space to do it, and it will keep them in prime condition. As wax gets cold, it becomes very brittle, so even the frames that we keep kind of in ambient temperatures over the winter become very, very brittle if you move them in those cold temperatures. But as soon as you take them out and let them go back to kind of like warm spring temperatures, the wax just goes very supple again, but it is a good note. Don't take them out of the freezer and start banging them around because they become very brittle and they will be damaged, especially new fresh season supers. If it's— you put some foundation in, the bees have drawn it out, and then you put it in the freezer or do whatever with it, those frames are going to be highly brittle. After a few years of cycles, they become much more rigid and much more able to withstand kind of any damage, but putting them in the freezer is a good idea. But you can put other frames in the freezer, you can put frames with stores in the freezer as well, See a lot of people filling up their freezers and making their partners very angry. So you need to get yourself a dedicated freezer if you're going to do that. I think I'm just going to have a sip of coffee. I just want to double check that my audio is working. I always dread coming on, doing it, looking at the comments up there, and then everyone's saying, can't hear you. Not that that's ever happened before. All the time. Right, okay, coffee. Morgie says good morning, and Morgie has a question about supering. Is it best to place a new undrawn-out super over the top or under the existing super, or does it not make a difference? So it doesn't make a massive difference. I always go in now, just put them on the top. The reason being is that the first super that you put on above the queen excluder, depending on the size of your brood nest, is going to be liable for some pollen going into it. So imagine that's your brood nest there, and then you've got your queen excluder and your super above it. If the colony wants a naturally kind of like a larger brood nest to take into account the brood and then the pollen and then like a buffer of stores around it, if you take a cross-section through the hive, you'll see you potentially get these rings of pollen going into the super, which isn't the end of the world, but it's not ideal. You don't want pollen in the super because it means that when you go to extract it, you're going to unbalance your honey extractor because it can— when you're spinning the honey around in the extractor, it can chuck out all of the honey quite easily. It can't displace the pollen, so you end up with like unbalance in the extractor, which means it wobbles. So we don't want pollen in the supers. So it comes back to this question here, which is if you put the first super on and the bees do this little pollen arc, and then you're thinking, okay, well, where's, where's best to put this next super? What you're suggesting is you lifting up the one that's got the pollen arc in it and putting another one in underneath. The bees could potentially look at that and say, what are you doing? I want that pollen there. Like, they're not going to move it, but they'll put in another pollen arc. So you're almost kind of baking in this pollen arc into every single super that you put in next to the queen excluder. And they're not always, they're not always going to do it, but you're opening yourself up to the risk. So my advice to you would be, well, if you just put it on top of that, you maintain the pollen arc. Okay, you sacrifice one super, it's gonna have a bit of pollen in it, but everything above it, if you place them directly on the top, should be fine. So my advice, place it on top. Good morning, Laurence. My aborted Demeray turned artificial swarm is due to have its queen given in the coming days. Have you introduced a new queen Into a freshly demerated bottom box. So no, I haven't. And this is where it's you go halfway down a process and then maybe a process doesn't go right, and then it's a case of well we need to fix this broken process. So I think you had like you say your abortus demerated because a swarm cell was missed, and then it's trying to fix like two sides of this demerated, and like the advice is or your question is will that work? And I was thinking. It might work, but I would— my advice always to counteract this is to say just split them back out again. The demarée works because of the connection and the separation between the queen and all of the forager bees up there. You don't need that setup now, so that setup now becomes really like a challenge for you because you've potentially got a queen down there with not that many bees. All of the bees are upstairs tending to all of the brood. It might impact on introduction of a new queen into a freshly demarée brood box. So I would, if it were me, what I would be doing is just compressing things back around the other way. I'd probably be taking— I'm not sure which way, I'm not sure which way around I would do it. I'd probably take the top box off, go and put the top box off somewhere else, make up some splits, and then leave me with a colony which is just the— like, if you do that, what you will ultimately end up with is more bees downstairs with the queen. I know you've not got a queen in there at the moment, but it will make introduction a little bit easier. So that's— that would be my recommendation for that one. If you have a failed demeroe split, is to just break it apart again, take the top box off, reset the colonies, get them back to a point where you know kind of exactly what's going on, and then give the queen the best chance of introduction. She needs— you need a lot of bees in there to get a good introduction. Uh, Morgan says, with your Bello Poly nucs at this time of the year, how would you have the vents disc set up? So for me, I'm very much, uh, I buy my Bello Poly boxes and I kind of glue a lot of the discs in. Yeah, all the time. It's I'll do it on the top like that. I do like for that to have the ability on the bottom to be able to take them out, but I do find, I do find sometimes I'm lifting boxes and they fall out and I think I'm just going to glue all of these in forever and be done with it. A lot of, a lot of solid floor design like that are fine, it's not an issue, but I definitely don't want to get down the road or the route of configuring a beehive kind of based upon those discs for different times of the year. I I think it's unnecessary tinkering. The bees kind of will cope either way. All I would say is make sure that the insulation is right, make sure that there is a little bit of ventilation at all times so the bees can kind of cope within this weather, and yeah, leave them to it. Right, I'm going to sip a coffee. Good morning, Laurence. I demarried earlier in the season and now have brood boxes full of stores. You mentioned last week about putting these above the brood nest for winter setup and removing the bottom box come spring. Is that simple or is there more to it? Thanks. So no, it is as simple as that. A lot of people have this issue with the Demarais. If you, if you do a Demarais split, which is taking your brood box, lifting it up to the top of the stack above the supers and finding the queen and placing her downstairs like that, so you essentially go from one, one brood box system to a 2 brood box system, but the brood boxes are separated. If you do that and you haven't treated all of the original brood box with any Apivar or any chemicals that are going to take the wax, then you can just extract the honey from the top box. So your top brood box becomes a honey super, you can just go ahead and extract it. If you have treated with something like that, you can't extract it like that. The honey is tainted. It's fine for the bees, but it's not going to be fine for humans. So that becomes a resource box, that becomes a box of stores, that becomes a box of frames for making up splits. Or the easiest one that Graham's referring to there is once you get to the end of the season, like, if you can just take off that box now and go and put it somewhere and keep the wasps away, keep the robbing bees away, keep it completely sealed, keep it in a freezer, do whatever you can protect it, get it through to the end of the season. But you can, it is as simple as that. You get to the end of the season, maybe you've got a brood box, single brood box, 4 supers on, just take your 4 supers off, don't extract the honey, take your big double or single brood, like a 40-pound brood box full of honey, and just go and place it on top, no queen excluder in the middle. So you've got your bottom brood box with all the brood in, the queen there, and you're just going to place another 40-pound brood box on top with all the honey. Leave them to it, like that is Perfect for winter. And then what you'll find in the spring is they'll get ready for winter and they'll put all of the honey upstairs and they'll have a brood nest down here, and then they'll just start moving up through it. And you'll get to spring and all the bees, most of the bees will be in the top box, the bottom box will be empty. You can just take it away, reset to a single brood system. The Demeray gives you loads of opportunities to do things like that. It's nice, it's a— you're constantly pivoting and toggling between double brood and single brood. on a single floor, and that's what makes the system so very effective. Morning, why don't you do mite counts before treating bees for varroa? Because on a scale of the number of hives that we've got, it's not financially viable to kind of prove what your hypothesis is, because you can just say, well, I'm pretty sure they don't need treating, and then you make your judgment based on that assessment, or you say, I know they need treating now, so I'm going to treat. I don't need to go in and say, well, I think they need treating now, I'm going to prove that they need treating and then go ahead and treat. Now, if I was— if I had like 3 or 4 colonies or 5, 10, whatever colonies in my back garden and more time to do it, then definitely I would try and limit the amount of chemicals that are going into it and I would refine that system. But at the moment, like, I know that an early or like a late summer Apivar treatment combined with a broodless break in November, December, and oxalic acid sublimation is very effective. Like, it keeps you way ahead of that varroa curve, especially taking off the honey early and doing the treatments early. So, so for me, I like— I think that's a much more powerful approach, which is saying instead of following the textbooks and doing Apivar in September and October in places where it doesn't actually work, I'm going to shorten my honey season massively Yeah, so I'm gonna— I'm not gonna have honey throughout this whole period here, I'm just gonna have honey here and then take it off and then give the bees what they need, which is a nice early treatment. I think for the bees that's more powerful than kind of like assessing the actual mite infestation on a colony-by-colony basis and then going ahead and treating anyway. So that is the reason I don't do it. It's good practice to do it, I think people should be doing it. I'll maybe do a couple of videos showing the methods that we would use, it would be like some sort of alcohol wash. But also, that's the other one, like the only real method that gives you an accurate result is the alcohol wash. So it's kind of on your conscience as well, which is if you're going to do that, you have to kill 200 bees to get the result to kind of confirm that you want to go ahead with a treatment that you were probably going to do anyway. And it's just weighing up those things for me, which is I know I'm going to treat, so I don't necessarily need to know exactly how bad that mite infestation is, and I don't want to kill the bees to get that answer. Borodar Lawrence, I hope the family are well. They're getting on very well, thank you. Premium queen received, thank you. We had a checkerboarded frame and cage went between stores and brood, so moved frames back delaying release 2 days. Is that okay? So any release post-day 8 shouldn't be an issue, as long as you've got onto that hopelessly queenless state where you've left them for 8 days post-split, taken down all the emergency cells, and then the queen goes in at that point. Everything after that, it's kind of is up for grabs. So if you if you wait 24 hours, pop the tabs, that's fine. If you wait 72 hours, pop the tabs, that's fine. There's there's a few different ways there. So as long as as long as they're hopelessly queenless, they will be feeding the queen now through that cage, so she can stay in there for a long time. Some sometimes like I I've been back to some colonies where I did I did a video did a video down the road in one of the other apiaries where the queen. queen couldn't get out of the cage. She wouldn't get out of the cage at all, she just wouldn't leave. But I didn't realize that, and she was in there for about 6 weeks and went back in and she was still in the cage after 6 weeks, and the colony was like, what's going on? This is, this is a long time for the queen to be in the cage. But she was fine, she was quite happy in there. I just let her out and she got on with it. Good morning. Richard Mallion has given a Super Sticker, thank you Richard, very kind. He says, good morning, plan to make up some overwinter nucs next week. Should I do 1 or 2 frames of brood? Thank you. That is very, very scary how good the timing is on that one, Richard. I've got a guide coming out for this probably this week, and the answer is 2 frames of brew, definitely. So I'm trying to standardize a lot of systems at the moment to give people— just to make sure that they're doing the right things at the right time. People hear a lot about 1-frame splits, 1-frame nukes, or 2-frame splits, or sometimes 3-frame splits. So this is the system. This is what the PDF is going to be about. It's going to say The way that we make up nucs is we make up either 2-frame or 3-frame splits. In April and May, we have 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, good shake of bees. My phone's going off. In anything after June onwards, we convert it to 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, good shake of bees. And then it's relatively simple to do, and it's all about just kind of finessing that and timing it and making sure that the time that you make that split gets you to the point at the end of the season that you want to be. Now some people think, well, what does that mean? But it's the management of the colony that becomes difficult. So if you make, if you make in the middle of May, say, like a 3-frame split and you put your queen in and then it starts building up, you just need to have a plan for that. A 3-frame split in the middle of May is going to turn like— you could end up in a brood box with a couple of supers on. So just so you've got the boxes and kind of know what's going ahead. Whereas if you want to overwinter in the nucs, you know, you don't want to be making them up that early because then you're going to give yourself a bit of a problem. You give yourself a lot of work on scale if you've got to take the nucs from the nuc box and put them into a beehive and then do something else. And then if you want to sell it as a nuc, you've got to take it back from the beehive, put it into a nuc box. All of that time really stacks up. So the, the scaling the system is, is understanding exactly when you should be making a 1 or making a 2-frame nuc with 1 frame of stores, 1 frame of brood, or when you should be making a 3-frame split with 2 frames of brood, 1 frame stores, and doing it kind of almost at the exact right time for you. So that you end the year with a super compressed six frame nuc in the original box that you made it in. That's kind of what the PDF is going to go into, and giving people giving people the advice and the dates and when they should be feeding and what type of feed one to one or two to one, the different types, the weights that you should be getting up to, when to put the treatments in, when to do your salic acid sublimation. So I'm going to give away the full process of how we make up our nucs. That's coming very very soon. Jason's Bees Tree says good morning. Good morning to you too. Good morning to Jean. I'm going to drink some. coffee. Any advice for ants in feeders? We have loads, as well as how to deal with wasps, seeing as we are fighting insects currently. Yeah, so ants in feeders are a pain. They're not, they're not the end of the world, ants in feeders. It's more of a nuisance unless they start building the nest in there. If you want ants to stop going up though, you just need to, you need to put some sort of barrier up where they're getting in. So there's loads of different barriers that you can put up for ants. Big thing in America, a lot of US beekeepers have to deal with ants in a quite a serious way. It's not, it's not something that we, that we deal with out here too much. You see some people putting like ant powder down. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to be putting ant powder down. I'd try and go for a nice organic method of trapping the ants, like around the legs or something, stopping them going up. And then seems we are fighting the wasps. I've done my wasp survival guide already, and I've been saying it on the emails, and I've been saying it on the member kind of seasonal member videos, which I should add in at the moment. It's completely live now. You go over to hiveq.com, you can buy all of our channel membership videos, all of the early access videos from YouTube, access into the HiveQ community, and it is very, very cool community now. So that is live. It is the same price as YouTube, it's £8.99 a month. So for everyone, you might as well head over to hiveq.com. But the, the reason I was talking about that is the, the, uh, the problem that we're having with wasps at the moment and the advice that I've been giving people for a few weeks now on HiveQ is The battle is coming, like the major battle is coming. The robbing bees, the wasps of Varroa, and you're seeing it now at the moment. You're seeing kind of little wasps coming in and checking things out and turning up randomly on the frames. You're not seeing them overwhelming colonies yet, but that's just 2 or 3 weeks away. And if you've got colonies that are on 3 frames, if you've got a little 3-frame split that you move to another place in the apiary and it's not got that many foragers and you're waiting for it to build up and you're thinking, hmm, a couple of wasps buzzing around here, you have to fix those colonies now, but you really do, or you will come back next week, the week after, maybe 3 weeks' time, and they will be gone. They'll be dead. A lot of people try and tackle wasps when wasps become a problem, and it's impossible to do it. So fast forward 4 weeks, 6 weeks, it's going to be so bad out there. The wasps are going to be all over your beehives just trying to get into any single gap that they can, and if you've got a little piddly 3-frame split, they're going, oh, just don't tell them we're in here. Like, they are, they are goners. So what you need to be doing is making sure all of the colonies are queen right, making sure that all of the colonies have got sufficient foragers, like a density of bees, making sure that you're not spilling any syrup, making sure that you're not kind of like chucking bits of wax and attracting the bees in, attracting the wasps in. And I was going to say something else, I can't remember what the last bit of wasp advice was, but you need to take the action now. You have to go in there, take the action now, compress those colonies together. The other one was the entrance width, so if you've got big wide entrances, and you've got colonies inside that are struggling, you need to reduce the entrances down potentially to a single bee space. But do all of those things now and you might stand a chance. Don't kind of think, oh yeah, it's fine, the bees will deal with it, because they often don't. So yeah, good luck. Jean says, Lawrence, besides Buckfast queens, which other ones do you like? I quite like the Ligustica ones, the Ligusticas, like the Italian queen. I love the prolific nature of the Italian queen. I love the docility of it as well, they are super, super calm, but they are like, they turn food into bees, that is their job, that is their specialty, so they're very, like, they're very, very liable to starve if you take all the honey away. If you leave them with the honey, then they should be good, but I do, I like the Degustica queens. Darren says, I saw some data from the apiarist that freshly mated queens at 21 days post-emergence have stronger pheromone and more sperm than at 14 days. How long do your queens stay in the mating hive? So ours, we have like a standard kind of 4-week cycle for ours, but we'll go back in. So it's in between 4 and 5 weeks for our mating hive one, but we don't have as many cycles to manage as like people in Europe, so we can afford to leave them in there much, much longer. Some of them get upgraded. A lot of ours, we just have to take them out because we don't have the kind of the system for our UK one to keep them kind of confined in the boxes for that amount of time, so I'm often kind of going in, taking out queens when they're quite clearly ready, putting them into like a full-size brood box, and then they get up to like 2 or 3 weeks in there as well, so ours are much, much longer than normal. But it's interesting, I like the Apis website, I've got a lot of time for David, he's good, goes into huge amounts of detail. Also, our local beekeepers association is doing a Safari with bee inspector. What can we inspect? I've never heard of a safari with a bee inspector. I think they do some like like mini dash days, so it's they bring in diseased comb. They'll show you what EFB looks like. They show you what AFB looks like, obviously under very controlled conditions. And it and it is it's interesting to see because a lot of people can't see. I've never seen disease before, so it's good to see it kind of up close and personal. It's It's sometimes hard to spot. Like, I remember going and doing the DASH course, and they show you one frame, you're like, oh yeah, it's EFB. And they show you another frame, and you kind of, you start to get the hang of the things. And then they show me one frame, and I thought, well, I'm not really sure what is wrong with that frame. There's not that much wrong with it. Like, my guess was it was PMS, parasitic mite syndrome, because there was kind of like a little hole in one of the cappings. And they said, yeah, no, it was AFB, that one. And it was—they showed you why it was AFB, and it was just a tiny little bit of sunken capping. I was like, "Oh, I missed that one. Wow." And they said, "Yes, it's hard. It's hard to see it. At least with AFB, you get you get the ropiness test, and you can see that. And on the on the dash course, they show you that as well. So you can kind of get the matchstick in and pull it out. I still do wonder, though, why it's such an incredibly." viral— it's not— no, like spreadable, uh, can't get the right word out. What's it? Spore-forming. So if you're there like dealing with— I was, I was very, uh, cautious about not wearing any clothes ever again. I just burnt everything when I went there. But I'm sure they have a handle on it. But good to go, and a very interesting one, and they will talk to you, I'm sure, a lot about disease. So good luck with it. Morning, Lawrence. It's amazing that you're still doing all of these talks, as I know your wife's illness will affect you, uh, as much as it affecting your wife and children. Thanks for supporting us too. Oh, that's very, very kind. Thank you. Luckily for me, like, obviously my wife and children are brilliant, but this time slot is good. If I had to do it in the evening, I just— there's no possible way that I could do the live streams anymore. But 7 o'clock on a Saturday morning is actually a really convenient time because nobody's up yet, and then, you know, the kids will get up and they'll watch a bit of telly or something in it while Helen gets ready. So it's a good zone. And yeah, I feel the duty to come and do my live streams, and I enjoy them as well. They're good fun. When you do a split, do you do the newspaper method? Thank you for all your knowledge you share with us. So no, I don't. So the newspaper method I would only ever use like for combining colonies. I've never done a split with a newspaper before, but no, but my split, the way that I split like our nucs or any nucs that I'm making up, I always just move them to a new apiary. apiary. That's the biggest bit of advice that I can give. It makes it— get another apiary and then move all of your different queens off to the new apiary when you make your splits. It just makes feeding easier, it makes robbing much less likely, it means that the colonies are balanced. Yeah, that is, that is the way forward. As soon as we started making our splits and moving them to a different apiary, beekeeping became a lot easier. Morning Lawrence, the Blackmanston Honey Luxe queen arrived on Tuesday. I've done an inspection this morning and she's been accepted now. Not seen any eggs, but the queen is out on the cage walking, looking great. That's fantastic. I think that's— it's like job done when I see them on the cage. I'm like, yes, that's good. Barring any anomalies, it kind of— yeah, it's generally good news from there on in. But if there are any issues, let us know. Hello from America. I hope your heat wave has eased up. We have one here now, but it was only for a few days. We had a storm come through and cool things down a little. Oh, so we got through that heat wave and then They say there's another one coming. It's not the kind of same, is it? There's this 30 degrees C is forecast now, which for me is just like, that's why are we kicking off about that? That is like a nice warm sunny day. We want more 30-degree days here. What we could definitely do with though is a bit of rain. I have got about 3 jobs today and 2 of them involve coming and getting some water and going and planting some things that are dying because I've been, I've been kind of hanging on up at the forest thinking, no, it's going to rain in a bit. bit, and there's a big roof there that's gonna— like, it's a rainwater harvesting system there. It's an IBC with just a bit of gutter sticking off the roof, but it works and it fills up really, really quickly if you get any rain, and we've had none. So I've been ferrying up little tankers of water up there and it's still— it's still not doing any good. So I need to go up there and get some serious water into those plants or else they are going to perish, which is a bit sad. Good morning, Laurence. I have 2 hives, both with 6 supers, all full of honey and bees, but it's not capped. I keep adding supers as I'm following the 8% Bees rule. Should I stop adding supers? No, definitely not. Just keep on going. 6 supers full, I love it. So this is, this is pretty standard for this time of the year. Think of it from the bees' point of view. You've got, you've got 2 jobs, yeah? You've got go out and collect all of the nectar and then fan it back down to the right moisture level and cap it over. I'd say there are 3 jobs, but those last 2 jobs are compressed together. And the bees, like a forager bee, will be going out. They're like, right, bang, go out and get some nectar, bring it back in, and they pass it on to another bee. And just as they're walking out— I'm paraphrasing for the bees again— just as they're walking out, they say, you want to cap over some of that? And they're like, no, have you seen all the flowers? Like, we're out, we're getting nectar, that's what we're doing. And we're just in that period where it's copious amounts of nectar coming in. I said the wasp season's coming. The, the— if we get a continued drought, you're gonna have a lack of forage coming as well. So there's plenty of time for the bees to process all of that. As long as they're bringing it in, getting it to a point where it's not going to ferment in the, in the combs, so they'll bring the moisture content down a little bit, they're not going to bother with capping it yet. They're going to say, no, that's good, just keep on giving us space. As long as you've got space to store the nectar, we will keep on processing it, but we're not gonna, we're not gonna cap it just yet. If you did stop adding supers, they would start capping it because they're going to be like, well, there's no more room for nectar, so let's just, let's just cap it over. But you'll you'll introduce tons of other problems there. They'll start backfilling the brood nest, they'll almost certainly swarm, so I wouldn't worry about it. I would keep on adding supers using the 80% rule. Good rule, that one. Brilliant work, 6 supers all full of honey. You get to a point where they do stop, like you get to like 9 supers and they're like, that's too many supers, they're gonna stop storing it now, they might start moving on to capping, but as you see the forage drop off, they will get through all of that. What you might end up doing later on in the season though is going through, maybe you get to, let's say you get to 7 supers at the end, what you might end up doing at the end is going through and taking out like a super's worth of the worst frames and putting them on a strong colony to get it finished and then saying, right, the other 6 are all good to go. You just do a little bit of moving around. But also I would say the rule when it comes to uncapping, sorry, like harvesting the honey, I use the 80% rule as well. When it's done that. So as long as the frame is 80% capped, it's good to go. And don't worry if you've got one in there that's like 60 or 70% capped. You can put quite a few not fully capped frames into the extraction mix as long as it's not shaking out the nectar, as long as you're combining it with lots of 100% capped frames as well. But great work, 6 supers, loving that. Sip of coffee. Matthew says, what's your opinion on taking queens into their second winter? I'm taking a blue queen into winter 2026. Should I requeen my blue colonies? I've had a couple superseder swarm this year. So I think it's, it's down to your appetite to, to risk and spending. Nothing wrong with taking a blue queen into 2026, but just, you know, you just be aware that she might be slightly less— have a slightly lower probability of getting through the winter than a younger queen, and there might be a higher chance of superseder in the following year. But like, she might be a brilliant queen, so she might get 3— you might get 3 years out of her. I wouldn't I wouldn't worry about that at all, and if it's a good queen and she's healthy and her brood pattern looks good, and yeah, I would take her through and see how she goes. I wanted to ask if there are any benefits in extracting summer honey only at the end of the season or splitting it and doing it in 2 extractions? So it's a good question. A lot of people fall into that, they have like a spring harvest and a summer harvest and then potentially like a late summer heather harvest as well. And depending on where you are, you can get away with either 1, 2, or 3 extractions per year. So where we are in Wales, there's, there's like no oilseed rape anywhere near kind of the majority of our apiaries there, so we don't actually have to take a spring crop. You don't have to do it. Whereas someone down south who's in a field with loads of oilseed rape, they don't have that option. They— if they get an oilseed rape crop, they have to take it off because otherwise it will granulate in the combs. So you get these logistical kind of almost like mechanical properties of the honey that you can't change, and your extraction timing will be fixed by those. And then you can do it the other way around or look at it the other way around and say, well, I want to go down the uber-specialist route of honey. I don't want one big batch of honey and say, right, that's Black Mountain honey, 2026 honey. I want to say like, this frame is hive number 1, frame 001, and this frame is different from the frame next to it. I'm going to mark it like that. So some people go down that route as well, and they do, they only extract like individual frames of honey, put it in the extractor, and just get like 2 jars out of it, but you've got 2 super premium jars of very unique honey there. So I wouldn't say there's any benefits in extracting summer honey only at the end of the season, but there's, it depends what you want, it depends if you just want the easiest life, if you want the easiest life and you're not near any oilseed rape, then you can just do one One extraction end of the year, but you also need to be aware that you're absorbing a bit of risk there. So if you want the maximum amount of honey, you're much better off taking a spring harvest, taking all the honey, getting it in the buckets, dealing with the bees through the June gap, probably going to be feeding them, doing something to keep them going, keep them healthy, keep them strong, and then go again in the summer. That is almost certainly always going to outperform leaving the honey on there. One, because you're taking the honey away from the bees, which seems to make them Work a bit more. They're like, "Well, we need to work harder. We've got no honey here." But I was going to say, I was going to say two, and I forgot what two was. But there you go. One was pretty decent. I have to find my hat to wear it. Hopefully that was useful. But for me, we just do, we just do one big extraction at the end of the year this year. It kind of depends year on year what I do. In an ideal world, I would extract once in spring and once in summer. I think it's nice to have two extractions and two different types of honey. Laurence, how often do you replace your queen? So we replace ours on a 2-year cycle, we do. So every 2 years we'll go in and replace the queen, just because we have a lot of queens and we see the benefit of doing that in terms of overwintering success and then kind of honey yield as well. Morning Laurence, done a demaree in April which was successful. My Buckfast queen swarmed last week, lots of room, big flow, etc. Is this just something to accept After all of these, didn't read the instructions. Oh, very much so. We've had a couple of customers like message and say, like, I bought a nuc and everything was going right and they've swarmed, and it's just like, I can't believe it, like, you sold us something that didn't work. And it's like, well, I've not done that, but like, bees do swarm. So I wouldn't say it's something to accept, but it's something that 9 times out of 10, if you look at it and say, right, they swarmed, why did they swarm? Generally to do with the beekeeper. The bees will go off and do their own thing as well, but if you, if you clip your queens— so when the Buckfast queen swarmed, when the colony goes to swarm, if you clip the queen, like, they do a kind of fake swarm and then you get a cluster up underneath. So you come back to your bees and you're like, oh, they swarmed, but you've not lost a single bee. And it's things like that. So it's not, it's not accepting, it's not saying, well, oh yeah, I accept it, the bees are going to swarm, I'm going to come back and half the bees are going to be gone. But you could say there's 10 colonies here, I've done my Demaray, and now I'm going into like single brood management. I'll try and stay ahead of them, but like, what are the chances that they're all not going to swarm? They're probably going to swarm. So if I clip my queens, then I'm going to keep all of those bees there. It was the biggest uplift in honey that I got clipping queens because it keeps your bees there, it gives you the ability to do it. If you don't clip your queens, what happens is you build your colonies up, they'll be on like a brood box, 1 super, 2 super, 3 supers, maybe 4 supers, And then they swarm and you think, oh, that's annoying. And then all of a sudden that honey starts to go down, just goes, and then maybe the bees get robbed as well, but it never goes back up. Whereas if you, if you clip the queen, you can, you can kind of come back a lot of that time and say, okay, well, the bees are swarming, they're doing something, I have to do something here. What am I going to do? Tons of swarm cells all over the place and I've got clipped queen. And if you want lots of honey, the easiest thing that you do there is you say, right, okay, take the clipped queen, 2-frame split, take that off, another apiary, knock down all the cells except one, leave them to it. And that configuration there for 4 weeks is like honey central, tons and tons and tons of honey doing that, and you've not lost any bees. And it's just, it's the same thing, it's kind of saying, yeah, I accept that the bees are going to swarm, but I'm going to be ready for it, do something, I'm going to— here's my plan. So yeah, so don't feel down on it, I'm sure, I'm sure you've got lots of honey in the bank. Maybe clipping queens next year will be a way to stop the actual queens leaving. Darren's cancelled the demerit. Okay, cool, good man. Graham Thomas says, hey Laurence, remember the queen giveaway battleships competition? The VSH queen I won is going great, very strong colony and already 5 supers. Excellent, that's good to hear. I do remember the queen battleship competition, that was really good fun. We need to do more competitions. I need, I need more time to be able to plan more competitions, without a doubt. Hi Laurence, I made up 3 nucs on the 28th of May and they have nearly filled out 11 brood frames. Do I keep them on a single brood box or add a super or add another Good question, and one is at this time of the year where people can get really confused about single brood or double brood or what's best for the bees. So it always helps with working out what do you want, what does the beekeeper want, what's important for you. Is it building up some colonies that are strong going into winter? Is it turning these colonies into more colonies so you've got more nucs going into winter? Is it trying to get some honey from these colonies before the season's over? So you, you could sit in one of 3 very, very different camps there, and the advice will be different depending on what you want to do. Double brood at this time of the year, I would say there's only 2 reasons that I do double brood at this time of the year. One, if I'm going for like aggressive splits, so I want to turn all of the frames in that box into lots of different splits, or 2, I'm thinking I just want the easy way out here. I want to do like as little as possible and just get them ready for winter. They're on 11 brood frames now. I'm just going to chuck another brood box on the top, leave them to it. That can be their feed. I'll leave them in double brood over winter. It's maybe a touch early to do that, just in terms of space, but they're the 2 ways that I would use double brood at this time of the year. If that was my colony, what I would be doing is I'd be keeping them on single brood. They're on 11 frames of brood. I get a queen excluder on, I get 2 supers on. That is what I would do, and I just leave them to it. And so Chances of them swarming due to compression in the brood box is lowish, definitely still there but not as high, anywhere near as high as it was previously. Adding the queen excluder and the supers on is going to really give that sense of space there because a lot of bees will move up, they'll be drawing out wax, which is a great swarm suppression activity. So it's always nice to give bees kind of frames of foundation for them getting on with, and then the chances are you're going to end up with a really nice colony going into winter. potentially some honey as well. So that's what I'm going for. You mentioned honey being tainted if it's been in Apivar frames, but we don't encourage bees to move honey up from those frames to supers at other times. Yeah, so it's not— I know it is confusing. So it's not the honey that is tainted, sorry if I said that before, it is the wax that is tainted. So they say you cannot extract from this wax. What they— if you think of the kind of dynamics of a beehive, the way that the bees bring in nectar, and then deposit it almost always in the brood box, and then the bees kind of move it up. The bees don't often kind of just come in and then put it upstairs like in super number 6, so it transitions all the way through the brood box anyway. So when the Apivar frames are tainted and you can't extract honey out of them for human consumption, you can definitely just mimic that natural bee dynamic, which is, right, I've got honey in An Apivar-tainted frame temporarily, and it is really like not in there for that long when you're doing a demarei, and all you're doing is just ensuring that the bees move it from the tainted frame into an untainted frame. And then all it's done is it's just been through the exact same process that the medication is licensed for, which is you can have that kind of moving through the brood nest in that way. I know it's not clear, but that's definitely the way that it works with Apivar. So as long as you're not extracting it from the tainted wax, then it's fully compliant. You can get the bees to move it around in that way. For anyone who's wondering what that means, is that the alternative option for the top brood box that you can't extract directly out of is take it, bruise all of the cappings, put it underneath the existing brood box, and add space above. The idea being that the bees move it all up. They hate having honey underneath the brood nest like that. They want honey and then the brood underneath. So they get it upstairs into the supers and it does work quite well. I've got Simon. Good morning, Simon, how are you? Laurence, how has your weather been for this year? How's the weather been this year? It's been nice, it's been challenging. I would say it's probably the most challenging weather we've had. Yeah, I would say the most challenging weather we've had, definitely, because we had a very slow cold start, very slow cold start, which was not good, and then it got going again and all the bees were like Yeah, this is brilliant. We had that lovely little kind of period in May, and then we had a huge June gap, a super cold June gap actually. And it's not— you, you often— you don't often get a long June gap, but sometimes get a long June gap. But it's very rare to get a long cold June gap. It was like 9 or 10 degrees for a lot of early June, which is not good. Set a lot of the plants back, set a lot of the flowering back as well. And then all of a sudden someone came in and said, was that 9 degrees? You're not like 9 degrees, right? 39 degrees, and it's like, right, it's quite clearly too hot now, and all the plants are struggling to yield. So it is— there's a lot going on with the weather. It kind of seems like you've got everything that you want and then nothing, and it's damaging kind of going from one extreme to the other. So fingers crossed it just settles down a little bit, we get some rain. The whole of the UK needs some rain, very, very dry, and that's going to cause problems later on in the season. So fingers crossed. Hi Black Mountain Honey, I installed a nuc into an Abello polyhive on the 24th of May. It was a 5-frame nuc. They filled out the brood box very quickly and last week I put honey super on, drawn out comb already. I'm just seeing if there's any more to that. Excellent, that sounds good. It's at this time of the year, the expansion on colonies is, is unprecedented, like it's unlimited the amount of nectar that's coming in. So if they've got space and they've got enough bees to do the work, You'll see some rapid, rapid expansion. Sip of coffee. Uh, Alia Fraser Honeybee says, morning Lawrence and morning all. Have a check today, nuc, not one of yours, arrived 17th of June, transferred to a full hive. June 24th, found a capped queen cell, split the hive. Anything I should be worried about? Um, yes, if it was a single capped swarm cell in a brand new nuc, that is almost certainly supersedure. In any colony, if you're just finding one, one cell, um, almost certainly supersedure. But what I would say is just take a picture, take a picture of it, and maybe put it into the HiveQ community group. This is where— this is where HiveQ is a brilliant place to kind of get that check, because you can put stuff into AI, you can, you can Google it, but sometimes when you're looking at a cell— Darren will know this one— you're looking at a cell and you're thinking, is it a queen cell or is it an emergency cell, or is it like brood? Is it drone brood? Sometimes they look very, very similar, and having that community to be able to ask questions like that is very valuable— hiveq.com. But if I found a single cell and I'd identified it and kind of had it confirmed, it's like, right, that is a, that is a cell, that is a queen cell, it's not drone cells, not drone brood, anything like that. I'd be then thinking, right, okay, what kind of, what flavor of cell is it? What type of cell is it? It could be swarm cell, it could be a supersedure cell, or it could be an emergency cell. Now emergency cells, it is like, unless you've got a 1 or 2 frame split, to take away a queen and get 1 emergency cell, it doesn't really happen. So it— you're often going to find 10, 15, 20 emergency cells spread across like a big colony like that. In a 5 frame nuc, the emergency response might yield like 5 or 6 cells. If I found 1 single cell on any colony, regardless of where it was, doesn't have to be on the face of the frame, doesn't— could be anywhere. I'm treating that as supersedure, and supersedure means there's a problem with your queen and that they're trying to requeen her naturally. So if that was a Black Mountain honey nuc and you said the nuc arrived on the 17th of June and I found a capped queen cell, I'd say, oh dear, I'm really sorry to hear that, please send me some pictures, we'll get it sorted. If you sent me a picture and I said that's a supersedure cell, I would be immediately apologizing, sound really, really sorry. How can we fix this for you? Lots of different ways that that can be fixed. One could be just replacing the nuc and obviously getting the other one back. One could be taking down that cell, killing the queen, adding a new queen in. That's potentially going to be the easiest way of fixing that one there, but I would recommend getting a second opinion on what the cell is first because it might be something perfectly innocent and the queen might be there and she might be fine and there might not be an issue. So just, yeah, identify what that type of cell is And then take further action after that, I would say. Mitch says, watching from Las Vegas, Nevada. Nice, thanks for the great content. Weather is 110 degrees or 43 degrees Celsius. Wow. Need to treat for mites but not sure what— oh, I missed that, sorry. There we go. Uh, need to treat for mites but not sure what, uh, with it's so hot and only 2. Okay, it's missing a little bit at the bottom there. So you're saying you want to treat for mites but it is very, very hot. So first thing I'm going to do is give you some advice on what not to do. Yeah, don't use formic acid. Don't use Formic Pro. It will bake your bees and bake your queens. It is not good when it is that hot. Apivar is good. Any any amitraz-based one there is going to be good. It works well. Similarly, thymol. Thymol is very temperature dependent, and it needs like an optimum temperature of around 25 degrees. Too cold is not good for thymol. Too hot is not good for thymol as well. I kind of question the efficacy of a lot of the thymol-based products. I would, if I were you, if you need to treat for mites now, I would either go with caging the queen, forcing a brood break, oxalic acid-based treatment sublimation, or I would go with kind of Amitraz, Apivar, something like that. Don't use Formic Pro. Uh, JS— I can't even read the green on here at the moment. JSCFB says, are there going to be any premium Obsidian Star Queens available again this season? Possibly not. So we're trying our best to secure the lines that we can. Oh, how am I best to put it? Probably not this season. Definitely next season. Yeah, definitely next season. The numbers. You see it with the emails that go out. I've had a number of people message saying, "You keep on sending us emails like 30% off queens," and then we click on them and they're just always out of stock. And I say, "I am really sorry." Like we. will sit there and there'll be like 100 queens spare, and I know that I can put them out on the email list and they'll go pretty quick. And then we put them out and it's like minutes and people are just snapping them up really, really quick. And it's a similar issue affecting the Obsidian and the Premium Obsidian, which is I put my order in very, very late and they're saying, look, it's not like— it's hard for us to weave that into an already, um, like compressed season. It's very warm, everything's being compressed. So Possibly not for this year, definitely for next year though. Mike Spinks says, is it okay to inspect early due to extreme heat later? How early is too early? Um, I obviously— everyone take care in any heat that we're getting across the UK at the moment. I love the heat, I, I absolutely love it. Uh, 30, like high 20s, low 30s for me is just shorts and t-shirt weather. I love it. I'll go out and do a full full load inspections doing that. I do not recommend that other people do that though. If you are susceptible to the heat, then yeah, early on. I said to people last week, look, it's 37 degrees in the shade. If you don't need to inspect your bees, like, just don't do it. Miss it for a couple of days and go back in and fix it afterwards. It's not worth doing it when it's that hot. I think when it's 30 degrees versus 38 degrees, it's a different conversation, which is, yeah, definitely go in and inspect them and just get in there. early as possible. I went up to the apiary though at about 5 o'clock. I was actually out there about half 4 doing some inspections and it was very nice. It was super, super cool and the bees were like, what are you doing? Way too early to be inspecting us. They were kind of all still there but it was, it was nice. So yeah, early in the morning. How early is too early? If it's light, you're good to go, I'd say. Any ideas for entrance wasp control in a poly nuc? Oh, that's a good one. I think the wasp Shield entrance would actually work really, really well for a poly nuc. I did a PDF guide. Someone sent it into me. It's called the Hive Shield Entrance. Basically, a bit of like trunking, bit of plastic trunking that's got some holes cut in it, and then you can stick it onto different size entrances. And the one that I just or the one that got sent to me that I put out the design for was the Abello one. But I reckon you could. I reckon that could be modded quite easily for a poly nuc. Might have to like screw it on. Take it back off again. I will have a think. That's a that's a good idea. Right, got 13 minutes left, so I'm going to try and get through as many questions as I possibly can. I say that every time do quickfire and then I don't get to them. But I'm on comment seven like seventeen minutes past seven, so I'm a little bit behind. Sorry about that, everyone. Mark says, "Morning. I made a split in the same apiary, left them locked in for 24 hours, put grass in the entrance, but the bees have buzzed off. Can I add another shake of bees back?" Unfortunately not, you can't add another shake of bees back in. This is the problem with making splits in the same apiary, a lot of the time they buzz off and then if you've added a frame of brood in and then they've gone, but you've sacrificed that frame of brood, that frame of brood now won't emerge because it would have chilled, almost certainly would have chilled. So this is why we recommend doing it in a different apiary, but also making sure that there's sufficient brood in there. A lot of the time the bees don't— the bees go somewhere else because there's not enough brood left in there. So the forager bees are going to go back out and just go back to the original site, but if you put loads of nurse bees in there and lots of capped brood that emerges into nurse bees, then you get quite quick expansion even from a very, very small split. But yeah, hopefully you get that one back on track. Laurence, what's your opinion on reducers? Do you use them? So on our underfloor entrances and with a nice big strong colony, I don't use them, don't have any issues with that, but for other people who are not using that type of entrance or don't have big strong colonies in there, I recommend, and we cover this in the Wasp PDF survival kit that we sent out. For all of these things, I'll stick them in the link, the description for this video, so I'll stick the link for HiveQ, I'll stick the link for if you want the free HiveShield entrance, I'll stick the link in for the Stop the Swarm guide, and I'll stick the link in for the swarm survival kit. They are all free, you just got to go through onto the landing page, add your email in, and then you can download them. Jenny says, are we still likely to be seeing swarming? I have a colony that is making lots of play cups and another colony that I've just moved from a nuc to a new hive with a mated queen that has been accepted 4 weeks ago and laying well. I found capped queen cells in my weekly inspection yesterday. Confused.com. Absolutely, yeah, we are still in like not prime swarm season but not that far off prime swarm season. The solstice was, where was it, 2 weeks ago, the solstice, and you've got to think from the bees' point of view, from the queen's point of view, the solstice works like this, which is, oh, just felt like that day was slightly shorter than the day before, maybe we should start like, maybe we should stop laying so many eggs, suggests— like, you suggest that to the queen, and she's like, nah, it's fine for a day. And then the next day they're like, no, no, seriously, definitely, it's like 23rd of June now, that, that the days are getting shorter, like, queen, stop. And she's like, okay, fair enough, I'll stop. So she stops, and then let's just say she doesn't come back into lay for another 6 weeks or whatever, something like that. She will do, but let's say she doesn't, and, and then that's naturally going to start shrinking down the brood nest like that. But at that point, 23rd of June, line in the sand, you've got brood nests, got 10 frames of brood in, let's say capped brood ready to go. So although the queen has stopped and is reacting to the solstice and saying, right, we're going to start shrinking the brood nest down, we're going to start reducing the swarming impulse, all of the things that come with shorter days, you don't actually see any sign of that until a minimum of 3 weeks later because all the brood has to emerge. So the queen stopped laying, she's triggered the slow reduction of the brood nest, but although she's pushed the button, the brood nest is still expanding because all of that brood is emerging. So it's in a— you're in this kind of like nether region of, right, they're trying to reduce the brood nest down, but it's actually still expanding, and that can result in swarming. And yeah, very, very much still in the swarming period. We go through maybe until kind of like the middle to back end of July doing weekly inspections to check for swarming, and then we stop doing it and say any of them that are going to swarm now, we just kind of, we put up with it. We say it's going to be less than 5% that are going to swarm kind of post-July, kind of like 1st of August onwards, so we stop doing all the inspections. But yeah, if you're going in, you're finding queen cells now, you have to make a split, take action, otherwise the bees will go. Uh, drink some coffee. I have my basic assessment at the end of the month, any advice? Do you know what I can expect? Um, so no, because I've not done basic assessment, but I, I, I quite like an exam. Like, I'm, I'm not too bad in an exam. Like, I'll look at something and just remember it and go in and do it, but I don't enjoy exams. Like, I'm really not one for learning things. I'm very much one for, you know, like, if I'm, if I'm going through and kind of thinking, um, I get the timings for the Queens' and stuff like that, I don't just recall the information. I just gotta spreadsheet and just put the date in and say, right, that's graft date, and it just goes. So when people say, oh, what's the gestation period for so-and-so? And I say, well, it's on my spreadsheet. I don't need to store it up there, I just, I know where it is. So the basic assessment is, it is a good like test of your knowledge, but I don't think it is, it defines a good beekeeper, because if you don't know the answer to those questions, you can just go on like Google or AI and work out what the answer is. So I'm guessing it's just gonna be some sort of multiple choice. Don't take it too seriously, have fun, I'm sure you'll be fine. Hit the thumbs up button. Thank you, Jean, very kind. Can always add a brood extension to nucs if they get too strong too early for overwintering and will work better than adding a brood box for expanding. So definitely, and that's all I'm saying is have a plan. So double brood overwintering is a lovely configuration, it's a really nice configuration, and if you've got the extension boxes there to do that on all of your boxes Then I would say that's preferable, and then you— that dictates when you start. So you might be thinking, okay, well, we've got double brood boxes, so we're going for a 12-frame, 6-over-6 overwintering configuration. So when am I going to add my frames in? I'm probably going to do a 2-frame split, 1st of May, something like that. One frame, one frame of brood, one frame of stores, good shake of bees, new site, take down the cells, add a mated queen, and then let them build up naturally into the 6 frames, and then another box on top and then build up naturally into that one and hope that that's just about right. The nice, the nice thing with that is that you don't need to stop at 2, so you'll find you'll get to the end of the year and you're like, say you did 10 nucs and 8 of them are just about fitting in and 2 of them are like, seriously, we need more space, come on, can we just have another box? You just say, yep, there you go, overwinter it on a treble. And, and a treble is an equally nice overwintering format. All I would say with anything stacked like that, like a slim kind of column-like beehive setup, definitely strap it down. It is liable to getting knocked over by the wind. Member, channel member for 11 months, it says here, so well done for that, Mark. Says, morning, I did a split in the same apiary, 2 brood, 1 store, shake of bees, close them for 24 hours, put glass in the entrance. Okay, we did that one, but they've mostly buzzed off, so can I add the bees back in? No, but give it, give it another go. They would have all gone back to that original hive, so you can just go and do the split again from scratch. but just beware that frame of brood, it's going to be, it's going to be potentially rendered useless. Hi Lawrence, 70% of my supers are full and capped over. Is it best to leave them on or take them off and store them somewhere? Oh, that's okay. So again, depends what you want. Do you want to absolutely maximize the amount of honey that you get and protect it from bees and robbing wasps and all of those things? If that's the case, then potentially yes, take it off. Bear in mind, taking it off makes honey extraction, like the uncapping and spinning out of it, much, much more difficult. It is probably one of the best bits of advice that I can give to people is don't be too ambitious when it comes to your honey extraction and your harvesting. Don't go in like I did and say, right, today is going to be my honey harvesting day, I'm going to go around and get 100 supers, so that's today's job. taken off all the honey supers, you're going to put them in the honey extraction room, and then going to kind of close the door and come back tomorrow, we're going to get on with it and process all that honey. And then you come back the next day, this is a true story, come back the next day and you realize that you didn't— not that you didn't close the door, yeah, you did close the door, the door was closed, but you come back the next day and you realize that maybe your honey extraction room wasn't as wasp-tight as you thought it was, and you come back in to tens of thousands of wasps. Like, I'd never seen anything like it, and they were just stripping the honey. Like, as I spoke, it was all over the floor, and I was like, what am I doing here? So ever since then, all I do now is, um, is I just take whatever I know that I can extract in the afternoon. Morning harvest, afternoon extraction. And then the following day, you do it again, like morning harvest, afternoon extraction. You just keep on going. And it makes life so much easier. It eliminates any of the major robbing issues. It gives you the ability to take honey supers off in the day and put them back on later at night if you need to, if you're short on equipment. But the biggest benefit, like by far and away the biggest benefit, is that you're going and taking a super of honey off a hive that's keeping that honey at the right temperature. It's a warm hive. The brood box is emanating heat all the way up through it. All of the honey is just like perfectly liquid. But better than that, it's warm. It's a warm liquid. So when you uncap it and you put it into the extractor and push the button, it just goes boom, comes out, get like a nice dry frame that comes out. Whereas if you, if you do it the other way and you get through kind of like the wasp drama and you start uncapping it and it's just like, oh, it's cold, like it's gone down to whatever the temperature is overnight and it's just really, really difficult. So unless you've got a way of keeping the honey at the correct temperature, and a lot of bee farmers do this, they'll have a warm room So they'll take the 100 supers in and they'll get the temperature exactly right and have a little bit of air flowing through and kind of keep the temperature stable so the honey can remain stable, and then obviously any drips are being collected. If you're doing that, then you've got no constraints whatsoever. I've just got a honey extraction room, I don't have a special fancy heated big massive place to put all of my honey. So you make these mistakes once and then you share them with other people, but yeah, I would go ahead and leave it on, I think, is the right answer for the majority of people. Leave it on, there's not that long left of the season, you're going to be extracting in a few weeks, I would say. Lawrence, after a swarm, what is the best option to care for the hive? I would say don't worry too much about food. The food should almost take care of itself with like the remaining part of a swarm because there should be an excess of food. If anything, like, there's too much food, so I wouldn't worry about that. The main risk is that you've not got a queen, you've not got a proper brood nest. So if you're, if you're at a point of the year where you're thinking, right, this colony is exposed, I would be taking down all of the swarm cells and adding in a mated queen. If you're earlier on in the year and you're thinking, no, this is— we're in like prime honey production period, got loads of bees still left over, I would just be taking down all of the cells, leaving one, closing them back up, and not going in for 4 weeks. You'll either— you'll come back to either lots of honey and a colony that needs fixing, probably just to shake out and emerge, or you'll come back to loads of honey if the weather's been good and like the queen's all set up in the brood box and back to normal. Don't go tinkering. A lot of people do that with swarms, they'll be going in and tinkering, and there's potentially virgins in there and you could be disrupting mating flights. There's no benefit that you can add to the bees for like those 4 weeks after that. They need to get the queen back mating. again, and you have no power to influence that. You only have the power to kind of mess it up. Good morning, Laurence. I hope you and your family are well. I introduced a Black Mountain Honey F1 Buckfast queen to a nuc. She is laying extremely well and brood on full, uh, 3 full frames a week 2 after introduction. My question is, would it be better to keep the nuc in a poly nuc and add an additional brood, or to transfer to a hive? So it depends what you want, Dean. Again, it always comes down to beekeeper preference here. What's the plan? Like, is it, is it just got a colony and just want to take another colony into winter. I would say if it's on— if it's in a nuc at the moment and it's laying 3 full frames of brood 2 weeks after introduction, that sounds like a nice big healthy strong nuc. Sounds like you've got a good queen in there as well, so that will grow and expand very, very quickly. It's going to grow way bigger than that nuc for this additional— sorry, for this year. So yeah, either an additional brood box or transfer it to a hive. I have to say my I don't, I don't have a preference there. I'd go with either of them, depends what you have. So I would say if you've got an additional brood box already to hand, use it. If not, don't buy one especially for it, just transfer it to a hive. Right, coffee. Julia says, thank you for your help and advice, much appreciated. My pleasure, Julia. Danny says, morning all, so I bought an F1 Buckfast queen from yourself a good 5 weeks ago now and introduced her to the hive and all was Good. After about three weeks, there were swarm cells and plenty of them, so I had no choice other than to do a split. Now the trouble is, since I've done that, the queen has stopped laying or laying very very little, and this is still the same after a good two weeks. What do you think I should do now pushing forward? Good question, Danny, and it shows the importance of giving the queen what the queen needs in order to lay. We get this a lot. We see a lot on emails. People will say, "I bought queen a few three weeks ago. She's not laying," and we say, "Oh, really sorry to hear that. Like she should be laying by now." now, send me a few pics, send me a few pics of what's going on. And we often get like one-frame splits with half a frame of bees on and like a queen wandering around saying, seriously, what's going on? Where have you sent me here? So, and we say, the queen can't lay there, she's not got enough bees, there's not enough food coming in, there's not enough forager bees bringing that food in, there's not enough nurse bees to look after the queen, there's not enough brood, like to maintain the temperature, you know, this isn't how you introduce a queen. And a similar thing will happen there where you've got a big strong colony that's got all of these parts, it's got foragers, it's got nurse bees, it's got brood, it's got a queen, and then when they swarm you go like this, you take them into 2. Your job as a beekeeper is to balance that as best as you possibly can. Now a lot of the time, this is probably what's happened here, Danny, so the colony swarmed, yeah, preparing to swarm, I suspect you've done something like this, which is, which is the right thing to do. You've gone, right, the colony is going to swarm, so I'm going to protect my asset. I'm going to take the queen on a frame of brood, a couple of frames of brood, frame of stores in a nuc, and I'm going to go and put them somewhere else, somewhere else in the apiary. That's the right thing to do. You knock down all the swarm cells, you leave one, and then you leave the swarm on to mate. Now what you've done there is you've made a split, but you've made a very, very unfair and an uneven split. And I know that you might not have done that, so I just got to kind of try and fill in the gaps, and we can— you can drop me an email if you something different. And always, you know, we'll fix any issues with queens, but this is likely what I think's happened here. And if it isn't, it still kind of indicates what could potentially happen if you don't give the queens what they need. So you take that split off to somewhere else, you've made a very, very uneven split. All of the bees that are in that small split have gone up foragers into the air and they come back to the main one. So the way of potentially not having the issue as much is to reverse the split round. You keep the queen in the big strong colony, and you take the split off with the cells to somewhere else. Now, I don't like it that way around because the problem is the bees are thinking, look, we're going to swarm, and you don't want your asset, your queen, in with the side of the split that's still liable to swarm. So the way to fix it properly is to balance the splits a lot more effectively. Now, one way of doing that is when you take the queen over to another one, you give her like 4 or 5 frames of brood. you just say, right, 4 or 5 frames of brood, frame of stores with the queen off somewhere else, and you're not going to lose anywhere near as many bees there. You're going to have tons of brood emerging, tons of nurse bees. Your queen will be fine, she will be laying. And then over on the other side, like, she didn't— they didn't need a queen over there for the time being. They don't even need the conditions to support a queen just yet. All they need is the virgin to come out of the cell and to go out and mate. So the beekeeper has this preference in terms of how they split things up, and then knowing kind of what you know and what needs to go where and what the queen needs in order to continue to lay, you can start to dictate what you should be doing. So drop me an email if that's not what you've done. I suspect that's what, what's happened there is you've taken the queen off to a little nuc, all the foragers have gone back, and now you, you're left with a queen, not that much brood, not that much bees, and she's not laying anymore. And then maybe you're like trying to feed her syrup saying, come on, do it, do a thing, lay, do some things. But what she needs is she needs more bees around her, she needs a bigger community like we've got in Hive Key, but more bees, more foragers, but especially more young nurse bees, and she should get back into laying again. Right, it is 8:03 and there is a lot of questions on there, so I will, I'll do, I'll do a couple more and I gotta go because I can hear girls calling my name. Right, Christopher says, summer flow hit, accidentally killed my queen, and while they were requeening, the brood box is filling with nectar. Will they move it up when the queen comes back, or should I add comb? So they will move it up as long as it's not capped, but if it's capped, you'll need to bruise it and give them the space above in order for them to move it. It's a bit of a challenge, but once you get her back into lay, you'll quite quickly get that brood nest back on track. Jean says, Lawrence, what happens when you leave the honey supers on too long? Does the honey on longer go bad, or is there a time limit? Okay, so does the honey ever go bad on the hive? It shouldn't, as long as you've got a decent colony in there keeping it at the right temperature, keeping it at the right moisture content, keeping it free from any pests, then it should stay on there. I don't want to say like indefinitely, but for the sake of beekeeping season, kind of, it will last to the end of the season. So yeah, definitely. I get a lot of ivy next to where I am. If I treat Apivar and pull supers, I seem to get a lot of late swarms. I assume from lack of space. Any ideas? Double brood. Double brood would be a good one if you're, if, if you're taking And this is where it's always good to like know where you are. You've identified like ivy nectar and a potential kind of like blocking out of a brood nest if you're getting lots and lots of ivy going in. So double brood, I think, should fix a lot of that. So instead of compressing them down, taking all the supers off, getting them onto one brood, just go straight into a double brood configuration. Gives them somewhere to put all of that ivy nectar, ivy honey, and it's good, perfectly good for overwintering. I'm a first-year beekeeper, so much responsibility. Brood box is filling nicely and I put a super on. 5 days ago with foundation to give the bees space. Only 5 days ago but no wax draw. So that will happen, and you'll see some of the earlier videos. The recommendation that I give is, when is it— when are the bees ready to have a super? And I say, look from the top down, and when they're covering 80% of the frames, you go ahead and put the super on. That doesn't mean that they're kind of going to work it immediately, it just means that that is the point that I would recommend putting it on. Realistically, when are you going to see them kind of going up and working it? any point from that point onwards up until about 3 weeks, I would say, depending on how big your colony was, depending on what the temperature is like, depending on what the flow is like. They will go up there when they're ready to go up there. It's, uh, you just got to sit there and wait, unfortunately, but they will, they will get up there. Uh, Jay is excited for his premium Obsidian arrival today. Hello, Jay! Sorry I could not be on Hive Q a little bit more this week, but got, uh, Lowe's kicking off, busiest week ever this one. I'm gonna try and get, get on there more next week. Mark says, oh, also I have several colonies insisting on propolising closed the queen excluder and refusing to go up. 3 colonies have not gone up at all. I've resorted to removing the queen excluder to get them to go. That is interesting. They should not be propolising the queen excluder like that. I would get your calipers or whatever they are out and measure the gap and make sure that the gaps are correct on your queen excluder. I suspect you've got a faulty queen excluder there, or some super-propolising bees, and you could just have that, you could just have super-propolising bees that like don't need the space up in the super, but I would question the genetics if that's the case. Hopefully they're not mine. Good morning, Laurence. If the season is again going to be short due to drought, Somerset is dry again, if the harvest is early, when in your opinion is swarming over? So that's— this is a good point. Normally the swarming pressure subsides kind of as you move Yeah, I'm just trying to kind of clear it in my head as you go through the season like that, but with it being compressed, it will and kind of should fall off a cliff edge more readily, but I'm just not sure that it's gonna, it's gonna work like that. So I think swarming pressure is still going to be there, kind of like as it would on a normal year. I think the wasp and the robbing pressure is going to come in earlier, but you never know with years like this. Like, if we— you, you don't know what is around the corner. The forecast looks dry for a couple of weeks, so I think it's kind of get get through to that point. But then if you had a couple of weeks of rain, two or three weeks of like thunderstorms and rain, and then you had like an Indian summer where you've got a really nice like late very warm period, and the Himalayan balsam did well, and you start to see like the dandelions coming up again and different things coming out. You just don't know kind of what is around the corner. We have to adapt and change to that as it comes. At the moment, it looks very like very much like a. Compressed, short season and one where the bees will need a little bit of help from the beekeeper to get them through that battle period. It's in 14-Day Beekeeper, so we have a dedicated module to this, it's called Post-Harvest. So a lot of like beekeeping courses or training, it's very much you start here with a nuc and then you build them up and then they start to swarm and then you get some honey and then you take the honey off and you kind of put it in a jar and that's the beekeeping season done. and they, they often miss out this really important, very lengthy period from taking the honey off through to like October, and the books don't make much sense at this point. They say, yeah, feed the bees up to 40 kilograms, but the timing of that is very, very specific. So we go into, I think there's 22 or 23 videos specifically on post-harvest and exactly what you should be doing in that period in 14 Day Beekeeper. So go and check it out, 14daybeekeeper.com. Morning, I'm finding your footage very useful and informative, Keep up the good work. Thank you, Chris. Much appreciated. Bert says, morning, Lawrence from Spain. First time I've managed to catch the live stream this year. I always listen later, but finally managed to get my act together. Hope you are well today. Well, I'm glad. I'm going to end it on that point there, Bert, because I've got—I think there's about—I don't know. There's loads more comments. I'm on seven seven thirty six. I'm like half an hour behind on the comments, and I'm ten minutes past the live stream. I'm glad you managed to catch it live. Hopefully you got that comment as well. Go out, do some beekeeping this weekend. It is, I would say, the last weekend that I would recommend doing a demeray. I'm not going to recommend it any other time going forward now because it's as good as done. So if you've not done one already, go out there and do a demeray. Check in for wasps. Make sure there's no wasps around your apiary. Start combining colonies down if they're struggling. Focus on getting everything queen right. Don't spill any syrup. Really start taking precautions because that battle zone is coming very, very quick. I hope you enjoyed the live stream. I will catch you all next week, every single week, 7 AM. In the season, and we've got about 8 weeks left. I'm very, very excited, and I'll see you all soon.