Let's Talk Bees #82- Your Beekeeping Questions Answered

Here we go. Good morning everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I'm going to jump straight into it with the questions because I have to leave at 7:55 today, so I've got a little, little day out planned. First question from Chris says, good morning Lawrence, a nice Black Mountain Honey Obsidian Queen introduced yesterday, so fingers crossed she's accepted. Really interested to see how she goes next spring. I'll answer that bit first. So I'm excited to see how she goes next spring as well. I've got a number of Obsidian colonies and as you know, I've had tons of feedback from people saying how much they are enjoying the Obsidian line, the the darkest line of queens that we produce here at Black Mountain Honey, or are produced for us, but they are really, really nice. The one thing that always just stands out— and if Andy Street is watching, I tried to turn Discord off there so I didn't get notifications through, but if you could stop messaging, that'd be fantastic because I do not know how to turn off the notifications— but with the Obsidian, the one thing that stands out every single time that I go into the colonies with the Obsidian Like you can't get the feeder off, you're like, whoa, pulling it off like that. And as soon as you get it off and unstick that propolis, the smell hits you. And I know for a lot of beekeepers, they look at that like, oh, propolis, they get it all over your fingers, it gets everywhere. But for some people, like, some people really do like propolis. Some people trap propolis and make tinctures and do loads of different things with it. So for people like that, the Obsidian Bee is, is very, very good. But it is, it always strikes me just every time I open them that smell, the power of the smell. You mentioned there, Chris, on another note as well, beekeepers— you've been talking to beekeepers in the shop shows who've lost their bees over winter, and the common factor is they all treated late September into October. Is this taught somewhere? Virus load too high by then, in my opinion. So this is one of the fundamental things that we teach in 14-Day Beekeeper and is discussed at great length within HiveQ all the time, which is, yeah, people treat too late. The, the common The textbooks say this: this is the honey season. Get your honey off, do all the extraction, get it into the jars, and then once you get to that point, the bees probably need to be treated for mites. And I've always said that's completely wrong here. Let's focus on the bees' health first. When do the bees need to be treated for mites? And I found for me around here, kind of middle of August is that sweet spot, potentially a little bit earlier for the bees, but you want some honey still at the end of the season, end of all of the hard work. But yeah, treating in September, treating into October is is kind of pointless because the whole point of the overwintering, um, or the whole point of getting your bees through the winter is you want them to kind of be as healthy as they possibly can be all the way through. It's the winter bees that bring the bees through the winter, and what people think they're doing by treating bees in September and October is they're treating the winter bees, but they're not. They're kind of way, way too late. They need to be going in— I'm recommending to people kind of last week of July, first week of August this year. Getting the viral load on the colony down as low as possible to prepare for the production of winter bees. And then it's that September-October period where the winter bees are produced and they're sitting there in brood form. The people who take the advice and treat early have got such advantage over people who are treating later. So I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever, Chris, even when everyone said last year it was the cold and the damp that got them. I knew it was the varroa that got them. Like, it, it was a cold, it was a damp year, but varroa gets bees, kills them, and then you just end up with really damp, miserable conditions in the hive. And it looks like— it does look like the, the cold and the damp got them, but I suspect it is the varroa. So yes, get in there early, treat all of your bees, and you will, you will have nice healthy colonies in the spring. I'm gonna sip a coffee. Good morning, Laurence. Are you seeing more wasps' nests in the ground this year? You found 4 in the ground just on the field. I have my bees on— oh, you found 4 wasp nests on the ground that you have your bees on. Luckily they're not bothering the bees too much. Okay, I think that is going to change. It's the time of the year where the colonies, the wasp colonies, are expanding at a rapid rate and they've got everything that they possibly need, and then it's when those nests start to switch into sweet feeding mode that they're going to go after the honey. So you might have big massive colonies of wasps there at the moment, they're just like, yeah, we're not that fussed. About the honey at the moment. We'll have a little bit, you know, we'll kind of send a few scouts around and we'll get what we can get, but we're not that fussed. And then someone flicks a switch and all of a sudden they are fussed. Like a wasp survival guide to say to people, these are all the things you need to be doing. But check your entrances, reduce entrances down, make sure there's no holes in any supers, combine weak colonies, go in, make sure they're queen right, don't leave any dead space. There's there's a lot of things that people need to be doing, and a lot of things that we're giving heads up for both in Fortin Day Beekeeper and Hive Q at the moment. A few people saying good morning. Good morning to Morgie. Good morning to Nick. Nick says, "Would love to hear about people's honey room setups as I want to get something sorted in my garden. Have a great day." It's funny that I've had two emails this week of people saying, "What should I do with like my honey extraction room? What extractor should I buy?" Kind of transitioning from commercial or transitioning into commercial. So we're kind of like large-scale hobby at the moment, maybe going commercial. What should we buy? And I've got a podcast set up next week with, with a chap called Jacob, uh, which should be very, very fun. And we're going to talk about that transition and the different extractors and things that people should buy, and maybe like how to avoid some of the mistakes that, that people are going to have as well. Now I know not everyone's going to like this. Yeah, these are exclusive videos for people, HiveQ members. So if you want to, if you're interested in that kind of detailed breakdown of progression through hobbyist into amateur beekeeper into commercial entry point. That stuff is going to be over on HiveQ. You can check it out at hiveq.com. But for you here, you want to hear about people's honey room setups as you want to get something sorted in the garden. You don't need that much space for a honey room. I've got mine still in a, in a perfectly usable log cabin, 2.5 meters by 4 meters, and I've got a 30-frame extractor in there, I've got an uncapping machine in there, I've got a Meliflow in there, 200-liter creaming tank, I've got a 200-liter premium sieve, like a settling tank as well. 2 bottling machines, and I think that's about it. It is tight, but there was a lot more stuff in there. There are a lot of things that I bought that I didn't need. So I bought like a wax capping spinner, I bought a pump, I bought a sump, and this is where it's about fixing it for you. Not everyone needs all of that commercial equipment, and I'll go and go and look at Richard. When Richard does his honey extraction, he has 2 extractors, 2 20-frame extractors, and a bread knife, and like, that is it. And I say, you could— uncapping machine would save you loads of time. He's like, no, no, no, I know what I'm doing. It's like, right, not going to argue with Richard because he does know his stuff. But it's— he says having the 2 extractors and a bread knife, he said, is quicker for him than having an uncapping machine and a honey extractor because he can kind of fill one of them up with a bread knife, press the button, and then just go and work on the other one. He said by the time he fills the other one up, that one's ready to be Like decanted and taken all back out, and he's just got a nice little system. So all I would say is keep it keep it flexible. A lot of people talk about this on Hive Q. These are the things that we we see on there all the time. But don't don't just think I need to get the biggest extractor possible. I need to get an uncapping machine. I need to do all of these things. There's probably a nice system for for you in there. All I would say is though, don't undersize your extractor. That's probably the biggest mistake that I see people make, which is. they know they want to ramp up, so they think, oh well, I've got a 2-frame extractor at the moment, I'll get a 6-frame because that's 3 times as big. Where really, if you know, you know, if you've got 10 colonies or 12 colonies, I'd be going for a 12-frame, but probably saying you should get 20-frame. Get a 20-frame because then that will see you all the way through up until like Richard's level with hundreds of colonies. And if you want to increase above that, you just get another 20-frame. So there's a few little tricks like that to make sure that you're not like building in some redundancy into your extraction setups. The other thing that I would say as well is, is just have a look at the flow. And this is probably what we're going to talk about a bit more on the podcast in terms of where are you putting those boxes. You need to actually map everything out. What most people do is they map out their honey extraction room and they say, I'm going to put the extractor here, I'm going to put the uncapping machine here, and they just kind of put all the equipment in there. There's no room to move. And then the 50 supers rock up and they say, no, we've not accounted for any supers in here, there is not enough space. So you need to almost just dedicate like 50% of the space of the room as dead space. We've got some metal stainless steel trays that go in there that are purpose-made for For supers, they're great. They just go on the ground and then you can put the supers in and there's not that much clearance around them, catches any drips, but more importantly protects the honey from kind of like any dirt or anything on the floor. So there's a lot of things like that, a lot of tips and advice that I can give to make sure that you're extracting in a hygienic way, but more just kind of getting the most efficiency out of smaller spaces as well. So we will cover a lot like that. If you've got a specific question about any extraction equipment, give me a shout. Good morning, Laurence. I've done a Demaray 6 weeks ago, uh, 14-day beekeeper nailed it for me. Bottom box now rammed with stores and pollen. Should I checkerboard with the top brood box now the weather's good here? So great question, Martin, and one that not, not catches people out, but the Demaray, if you've had previously treated frames that have had any sort of amatraz-based varroa treatment in them, you, you can't just treat them as normal frames. You need to manage them in a certain way, which is kind of what you're referring to there. But what it gives you What the demeray gives you is a lovely end to the season. It really does. It makes life easy for everyone, and it gives you options. So imagine you didn't do a demeray, and you've just got a brood box and six supers. If you manage to keep your bees in the boxes, which is a challenge this year. But let's say you've got that. What do you do? What's your what's your plan for getting the bees down to winter? You kind of really only got one plan, which is take off the supers and then look at the boxes and say, "Right, there's no way the bees will get into that box." I'll have to add on. another, another box at this point. So you go double brood. Whereas with the Demeray, if you do that same manipulation there and you say, well, okay, the top box now is a 40-pound honey box full of pollen, full of stores, full of good stuff, but I can't, I can't do anything with it because it's, it's tainted with Amitraz, so it's for the bees only. It gives you a much nicer option now, which is, okay, just take the 6 supers away in the middle. So if you've got brood box, 6 supers, and then another brood box, all I say now is just take the 6 supers away and harvest it. and take the top brood box down to the bottom brood box like that, and you've just fed your bees for winter. Like, you could leave them in that configuration and they probably wouldn't be that far off. The only problem with doing that is that you've got, like, you might add a bit of swarm pressure in because you're not giving them, you're not giving the kind of queen enough space downstairs in that brood nest. The other way of doing it, adding in a box of foundation at the end, helps with swarm suppression. So as always with beekeeping, it's get a benefit somewhere and then you've got to manage the risk somewhere else. But I like that as a flexible option. If you're worried about that, like middle of the season, you're thinking, well, hang on, I want that honey, how do I get that honey out? The best way of doing it is taking that top box that's full of honey and stores, putting it at the bottom, bruising all of the combs, like really bruising the combs, like smudging it around like that, and then putting a queen excluder in between that and the brood nest. So you have smudged up honey brood frames Queen excluder, original brood nest, and then all the supers above. And what I find is if you add in another, like, frames of foundation, super directly above the brood nest there, the idea is that the bees don't like honey underneath them, so they're just going to move it all up to this space up here. And it does work well, can take a little bit of time, works well in a flow as well. But yeah, I love the Demeray. This time of the year with the Demeray as well, people need to send me some pictures of their Demerays because this year is just Most beehives kind of are taller than the beekeeper. Ntab says, morning all, question about overwintering. We started this season with 2 hives, we now have 6. What factors contribute to how many we take into winter? So I would say take them all into winter if you've got good, strong, healthy colonies that can defend themselves and are strong enough and have not got a high varroa load and have got a good quality mated queen with a good quality brood pattern, then there's nothing stopping you building those colonies up. still got loads of time left for building colonies up. Not so much time left, I don't think, for honey production this year, but if you're feeding them, then you can just keep on going, keep on building them up. If any of those colonies at the moment have got drone-laying queens, if any of those colonies are on like 2 frames in a 12-frame box, if any of those colonies are struggling a little bit to defend themselves against wasp pressure and robbing pressure at the moment, just know that in 2 or 3 weeks it's going to be 10 times worse than this, so they're not going to stand a chance. So you need to go around and fix those ones now. So The number— I'd say the numbers are irrelevant unless you've got a very specific number in mind and you want to work to that. I would say you go in there— this is the best bit of advice, works across all splits here— forget about the number of hives, forget about the number of boxes. You say, right, how many bees have I got? Yeah, make up a number. If you've got 6 hives there, let's say there's 20,000 in each, you've got 120,000 bees. What is the best configuration of boxes over winter to get as many bees through? as possible? And that kind of gives you your answer, I think. And you'll see, you'll start to know that as you become more experienced as a beekeeper. You'll begin to know how many bees you need for different times of the year. So in spring, like April the 15th, if it's nice and sunny outside in the UK, you can say, well, 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, don't even need the shake of bees. But yeah, a little shake of bees going in there, that's going to build up to a 12-frame colony by the end of the year. Whereas at this time of the year, it's right, 3 frames of brood minimum, or 2 frames of brood, frame of stores, good shake of bees, probably 2 shakes of bees, and a separate apiary and delayed feeding to make sure that you don't get the wasps, you don't get the robbing bees. That's going to be the minimum at this time of the year. And then if you ask that question again in like August, middle of August, I'll be saying, well, they need to be full. Like, you should be seeing them compressing. You should be thinking, oh, I'm a bit worried about them swarming, there's that many bees in the box. And if you don't have them that compressed, then the wasps get them anyway. So Again, it's always it's always about balancing it. I would say just take all of that into account, compress the ones that need to be compressed and combine them, and then for the rest of them, just get them get the defenses ready for winter. Jay says morning, all bit cooler today. It is. It's not it's not that much cooler here today. No, it's it's still very much nice and warm here, but hopefully it's coming. I saw next week there is um there's a bit of rain coming, which would be fantastic. I hope we all get a good sprinkling of rain apart from the people in Scotland who said that it's been raining all summer. and they want some of the sunshine, so we're going to do a swap apparently. That's what's going to happen. Morning Laurence, thank you for getting back to me about sending queens to Northern Ireland. I'm doing my split today into a nuc but can only move the nuc about 30 to 40 feet away. Any advice? Thanks. So if you're— you need to treat that as splitting bees within the same apiary then. If you're splitting bees within the same apiary, you can do it, but you just need to be aware that all of the forager bees are going to go back to the original nuc. So you need to account for that in terms of the amount of bees that you're putting in. You need to account for that, the amount of brood that you're putting in there. The more brood and nurse bees that you put in there, the more they're going to stay put. But most importantly for you, don't feed them. You need to not feed them for a good 3 or 4 days because if you make a split to another part of the apiary and feed them, all the bees are like, yep, it's fantastic, and then the foragers go out and they come back and they say there's like all-you-can-eat sugar syrup buffet over there, you need to get in there fast. You come back and it is just ravaged by robbing bees and wasps and all of the brood has chilled and it is no good and it just needs to be burnt. So don't do that. But if you don't feed them, then you'll— what you'll see is you'll take a big 6-frame nuc over there, say, and you'll be like, yep, 6-frame nuc, that's brilliant. And you'll go back the next day, you're like, it's now a 3-frame nuc, the bees are just about like there. That is what happens when you make splits in the same apiary. And you just need to be aware of that and then put the defenses in place to be able to build them back up again. Dave and Ella say, Boradar, hope you and the family are well. Really enjoying Circle. Thank you. That's HiveQ for anyone that's wondering, hiveq.com. With temps in Mid Wales reaching 30+, we are inspecting as early as 10 AM. Should we keep it brief, enjoy some coffee? Well, I'll have a sip of coffee first. Yeah, when it's warm like this, you need to go in and do the inspections at a time to suit you. I went up there last night with Ivy at about half 7, and it's so— it's nice up in the forest then because the sun has been out. Like, where my hives are, they're in the sun for the majority of the day, and everything warms up, and there's like gravel and stuff around them. And then when the sun goes away, everything gets a chance to like cool down a little bit in the shade. And then I go back a couple of hours after, and it's just— it's really nice. So I went up there to do some watering, but I've been thinking— I've been thinking like early mornings are probably going to be my time now. Because I get— people know I get up early, and I just want to get up and go and see the sunrise for a little bit, but I can get more done in the morning. The temperatures are much, much easier as well. So yeah, get up. Sunrise beekeeping inspections are very, very fun. There are more bees in the beehive at that time, it's the only slight challenge. Middle of the day is great because all the foragers are out, there's hardly any bees there. Doing it early in the morning or late at night, there's definitely more Definitely more bees to deal with. Electrical Courses has got like brilliant advertising. It's such a great way of doing it. I should be doing more of this. But all is well in the motherland, and I put that up as well. Not— I like just got triggered by it, so I shouldn't have done that. I don't know why I clicked it. Right, Mark Lofthouse says, morning, Lawrence. My Black Mountain Honey Queen was introduced on the first. Can't be found in the hive. I've not seen her since release. I've added a frame from another hive that is a third full of eggs. Is that enough? So yes, it's enough to kind of confirm whether you've got a queen in there or not. So anybody who's introducing a queen in, can't find the queen, or the queen's dead, or they killed the queen, the next best step— not the next best step, but the next logical step— is to kind of determine the actual status of the hive. If you put a frame of eggs in and they do nothing, so you come back after 8 days and it's just capped brood, then that proves that there is a queen in there, or the bees think there is a queen in there. 2 different things but kind of the same response. An example of the latter there is laying workers, so there isn't a queen in the hive but you pull the frame out and there's no emergency cells because the bees think there is a queen because of the pheromone that's being released by the laying workers. Most of the time though, it indicates that there is a queen in there, there's a virgin queen, there's a drone-laying queen, there's a queen that you need to find and you need to kill. So yes, it's enough to confirm that, come back after 8 days and it will give you information that you need. Even a small patch of eggs, the bees will always find it. Good morning, adding genetics to my apiary this year. Black Mountain Honey Buckfast queen laying well, but 5 weeks on and they're still trying to supersede. Also added a Jolanta queen and want an Obsidian soon. So just double-check with the superseder that it's not swarming. I know you probably can tell the difference, but people say, get emails coming in saying the bees are trying to supersede, and you look at the cells, it's like they're definitely trying to swarm. But if, if it is like a dark queen and you're adding genetics and you've got really dark genetics there and they're still trying to supersede, you just got to keep on top of it. The fact that they're 5 weeks on, they're still doing it, shows that you've been doing your job for 5 weeks, which is going back in every 3 or 4 days, any cells that you see, take them down. As soon as that Buckfast genetics kind of starts to get into the colony, they should stop doing it. I'm surprised that they're still doing it 5 weeks on. It's normally like 3 or 4 weeks, so keep at it, but they will stop doing it. And I'm sure, I'm sure you'll be happy with the Obsidian as well. A few people saying hello, so we've got Julius Hicks. Mark also says, secondly, they're back through the brood nest with honey, what should I do? So once, once you've got a queen back laying there again, you can start managing that out. You can take frames out and you can make splits and put frames of foundation back in, and then you need to make sure there's space above and bruise any capped frames of stores in the brood box so that when that queen is there, the bees have got a chance to move all all of the honey up and actually give her some space to lay. Can take a while, takes a little bit of work to do that as well, but you need to, you need to get on with it. Right, a few— oh, I'm gonna have a coffee while I flick through here, why not. Brian says, good morning, as thoughts turn to autumn treatment, what would you suggest we use? I used Apivar last year. So I'm going to be using Apivar again this year as my summer treatment, and I'm just changing the terminology there because Autumn treatment really does catch a lot of people out. They think, oh, what, what's, what am I treating for? I'm sorry to pick on you here, Brian, but what, what are we going to treat for this year for our autumn treatment? And I don't know about you, but autumn treatment for me is like brown gold leaves on the trees. It's like October, November time. It's way too late to be treating. I'm going to be treating this year on like probably the last week of July, first week of August. Probably going to be 33, 34 degrees outside if the current temps or anything to go by, and then I'll be coming back and chilling out in the paddling pool for a bit. So it's very much not an autumn treatment, very much a summer treatment. And yes, I'm going to go for Apivar because Apivar, which is like the brand name for Amitraz, which is a hard— like a, a hard miticide chemical— it's not nice. It's not something that I particularly want to put in my beehives, and I wish I had another more kind of sustainable-friendly option, but varroa will kill your bees. And I've always been on the side of, I want to keep my bees as healthy as they possibly can be. I'm aware of like the restrictions around Amitraz and the impact that it can have, but without nice healthy bees, like, there's not much point doing anything else. And all of the other treatments that I've used, I've not found them anywhere near as efficient or as effective as Apivar. But more than that, I've not found the ease of use anywhere near— I've not found anything anywhere near as easy to use. Or anything that just doesn't impact on other things that I'm doing at that time of the year. Formic acid, for example, you can't treat with formic acid and feed at the same time. Now, formic acid is a much shorter treatment, so it doesn't create too many logistical issues. But Thymovar, for example, or Apiguard, which are 2 thymol-based treatments, they're much longer treatments. They're treatments that are very much temperature dependent as well. They might do well actually in, in this temperature here. They want like a specific— I think Apiguard's around 25 degrees, so anything Lower than that is not good. Anything higher than that is not good. But those thymol-based treatments I've just found to be very, very inefficient. But because they're such a long treatment, you lose the benefit of being able to feed with them as well. So the Apivar system that I use, like the treatment system that I use, is you go in, you take all of your honey off, you configure the brood nest as you want. If you want to double brood it at that point, you do. You put your feeder on, you put your Apivar strips in, you feed them 1:1 sugar syrup. So I'm, I've harvested the honey, I'm treating the bees for varroa, and I'm trickle feeding them to keep them nice and strong, to stop the robbing bees out, to stop the wasps coming in, and then I'm building them up for winter kind of all at once, as opposed to saying, right, this is the treatment period and then this is the feeding period. You get benefit from doing it all at once for the beekeeper but also for the bees. That early feeding boosts the amount of winter bees that are going to be born but also helps the colony defend against wasps, which is very, very important. Good morning from Shropshire. I'm really hoping for some rain soon. I get the feeling the season is going to be over very quickly. Yes, I think it is. The only way I can see it extending for us in North Wales is that when this rain comes in, we need like 2 weeks, I would say 2 weeks of just not torrential downpours, but rain every day, like quite a lot of rain, drizzle interspersed with like heavy downpours. If we get that for a couple of weeks, you might get a resurgence, you might get another couple of weeks of flow. But then I start to think about, okay, well, like, if that's the only scenario that's going to work and that doesn't come in until kind of mid to back end of July and they get 2 weeks out, am I gonna risk messing around with all of my honey? Am I gonna risk having an inefficient honey harvest season? Am I gonna risk my bees' health by delaying my Apivar treatment to try and eke out a little bit more honey? Now I remember, I remember going back kind of like to, to my very early days of beekeeping and embarrassing some of the things I used to do. But I remember thinking this in September, kind of at the heather, mid, mid to back end of September, thinking we've got another couple of weeks here, we can, we can probably eke out another 3 jars of honey here. And, and then looking back, I definitely wouldn't have eked out anything. But making that decision, and then, and then, and I'm pretty sure even at that point in the year I thought we can make some more splits now, let's, let's just do some more splits as well. to give these bees an even tougher ride into winter. And obviously we didn't get any more honey. All of the splits failed over winter. We had a really tough time, and you learn from these mistakes. I learned I was months late putting my treatment on. I learned I was thinking about the wrong thing, like I was focusing on the honey, what can I get out of it, as opposed to thinking, how can I keep healthy bees? And then if you've got healthy bees, good management practices, the honey takes care of itself. So I would be going for— I'm reading the wrong one there. Yeah, we need some rain. That's what we need. We need a lot of rain and we need it fast. But my advice to people is going to be this, and I've already been giving this advice on HiveQ a lot, and I see people planning for it already, which is we've had all of this dry weather, beautiful sunshine, lots of honey coming in, lots of honey on the colonies. It looks like we're getting a couple of weeks of rain. What's going to happen during that couple of weeks of rain is you are going to have the biggest colonies you've got, like monster jumbo colonies, 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 bees in these huge towers. You've seen how fast the honey can go on, and now you're ready for their party trick, which is how fast the honey can disappear. And it goes just as quick, if not quicker, if you've got robbing bees sniffing around and wasps sniffing around as well. So the benefit to the bees of harvesting early, treating early, feeding early, getting the colonies ready for winter, giving them a space, is, is this: they've got more space in the brood nest, so they're less likely to swarm. You're feeding them, so they're much less likely to be robbing bees, but also to suffer from robbing bees as as well. You're strengthening them with that feed, you're giving them the ability to build more bees, more brood, which is going to help them defend. I thought I was going to get them all in one nice coherent list there, but I didn't. But anyway, loads and loads of benefits from doing all of that. The big one though, the big one that I missed there, is that treating them early, just a couple of weeks earlier— so this, this year normally it's 15th of August, this year it's gonna be say 1st of August— the impact that that is going to have on the viral load of your winter bees, which is the first thing we started talking about today, is significant. You've got these massive curves going at the moment, which is the amount of brood that's being produced. Now that is coming to the point where it's tapering off, it's stopping. The solstice is gone and the bees are going to be shrinking down the amount of brood that's there. What you have at the moment is an out-of-control varroa curve, and when you have this curve where one's going down like that and the other one's going up, the amount of varroa per bee in your beehive, that ratio gets to a dangerous point, and it's around this time of the year where it starts getting dangerous. Every week that you go forward now, that is exponentially going upwards, giving you more viral load on your bees going into winter. So then when you get an opportunity like this and you see the rain coming and you think, well, the rain's coming, they're gonna, they're gonna take— I'm gonna say they steal the honey— gonna take all of the honey, and I'm gonna be sat there watching the honey going down It's a no-brainer for me, and I think everyone should be doing this, which is work out when that rain is coming in, go there the day before, take all of your honey off, double brood them, get another brood box on there, get your Apivar strips in, trickle feed them 1:1. The bees are good for the next 8 weeks. You've maxed out the honey, you've got it at the absolute peak, and you have just turbocharged your varroa treatment for this season because you've gone in before that exponential curve gets out of control. Do you know what, if people follow that advice, yeah, and maybe you didn't follow that advice last year and you went in and did a treatment middle of September, back end of September, compare the two because it is chalk and cheese, and you'll be treating every year early and focusing on the bee health because it really does make a massive difference. Hello from New Zealand. Hello to you too, my grandfather was from New Zealand. Good morning, Laurence, what are the chances of bees raising their own queen now? They've killed 2 introduced mated queens and been queenless for approximately 4 weeks. I had a frame from another colony and they've made queen cells. Okay, so if they've made queen cells, you can, you can definitely still get them to go out and get mated at the moment. The amount of drones that are around is going to be reducing now, but the weather's good. So if they're not accepting any introduced queens and you've got queen cells there, you could just knock down all of them bar one and let them requeen naturally. The only problem with it though is that if they've killed 2 introduced mated queens, you probably made the split, introduced the queen, and then something's happened and it's kind of you've gone through this process, the bees are getting quite old. So if you're going to try and resurrect that colony now, now that we're into wasp season, I would recommend the only way of doing it is to introduce a mated queen. Appreciate you might not want to do that, and the reason is that even introducing a mated queen, you're not going to see any brood for 3 weeks emerging, whereas if you introduce a cell, you could be talking like 7 weeks before the first young bee from that virgin queen, like the daughter Actually emerges, which is way too late. The colony will be long gone by then. So my recommendation for you is either take down all the cells and add in, uh, take down all the cells and add in a mated queen, or probably more likely here, which is saying I don't think that colony's got what it takes now, I'm going to shake them out, I'm going to let them join in with all the other bees, and I'm just going to go off and make a healthy split from another colony. I know it's like tail between your legs time, and I, I never like kind of getting to that point, but sometimes that is the best option kind of for everyone. Let's have a sip of coffee. Harry says— Harry got cool delivery the other day, didn't you, Harry? That was very, very fun to see. Hive Q again. Morning, Laurence. I have a swarm that I boxed around 4 weeks ago. They have filled all but one frame. What is my best option here? Should I add a super, or is there an option to do a late split? So definitely can do a late split. Like, a brood box at the moment, if you've got a brood box, it's pretty much full. You can split that into 2, no problem. Just make sure that You take all the precautions of splitting them, doing it in the right apiary and stuff, and making sure that you're not feeding if you're doing it in the same apiary. Or there's still like, maybe, what's the date now, the 11th, probably 3 weeks, 3 weeks left of honey gathering. They could fill a super in that time, so it's up to you. I would, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't rule out them going out and getting a super full. There's still a good few weeks left for all of the later summer crops as well. But good luck, hope it goes well. Will there be any Obsidian nucs available for 2027, and is it better not to introduce an Obsidian queen to a Buckfast colony due to colour difference? Enjoy some coffee. I'm topped up with coffee. So Buckfast— so the colour difference isn't necessarily what makes them reject it, it's the genetics difference. And Buckfast, like a hybrid bee, they will accept anything. Like, they honestly will accept anything. Any single queen you try to requeen a Buckfast colony with, they're just like, yeah, Whatever, happy with that. They are pretty chilled, our bees. Obsidian nucs, very interesting. So not for this year because all of our overwintered nucs are just raised in Wales, so they're Welsh Buckfast. It's kind of on the border. We have 2 mating ones, but we are moving them actually all over to the Welsh one because you'll see this on the new website that's coming out. We found like the pocket that we've got in Wales is just like tip-top. The UK one we were happy with, but we think like If we're comparing the two, our sites, which one's better? It's the Welsh one. So we're just saying, right, we're gonna do it all at the Welsh one now. Um, and but they're raised in the UK. So like all of the queens for 2027, UK-raised queens are raised already. Richard's been— I don't think Richard ever sleeps. I don't know how he does queen mating in the middle of the night. But all of those are done. All of the nucs are ready to go, and they're going through into winter. So we won't have any Obsidian for 2027. Um, but I'm, I'm going to speak to— I'm going to speak to Amano and Melita Bees and see if we can get some Obsidian breeder queens, and then that will allow us to do something similar here. So we hopefully will be able to have— for probably for 2028, ridiculous, it's so far ahead— but some UK-raised Obsidian nucs available. So you heard it here first. I'll make sure that the first one is for Dave and Ella, how about that? Alan says, morning Lawrence, have you seen my pics of the Drone Land queen? Just need to confirm that I should kill her, thanks. Oh, I have not seen that. If that is on an email, I'm about 2 days behind emails. I think I'm on the 9th of July, just looking at it there. Um, so if Sorry if I have missed an email. Yes, let's go ahead and say that we will do that. I'm sorry, Helen, if I missed that one. I will clear out my emails today and I'll get a response back to you. Um, but don't worry, we will sort it out one way or another. Sam says, morning, Lawrence. I put one of your Buckfast into a nuc 10 days ago, flipped the tabs, and went back in 3 days later just to check, but couldn't find it anywhere. Going to check later, hoping I was blind. I hope so too. Uh, you find it a lot of the time, especially in a big colony. you go in and it's just, it's hard to find them, especially with loads of bees at this time of the year. It's eggs more that I'd be looking for, so fingers crossed you go in, you see eggs. Always nice to get a successful introduction. I found brood in my supers above the queen excluder in one of my colonies yesterday. Is there anything additional to that? No, there's not. Really annoying when they do that. It's either faulty queen excluder and something's getting through, or laying workers if there's multiple eggs. But if it's just standard brood, I would say faulty queen excluder or like you've got a crack somewhere and a queen's come in. There's loads of options for it. It generally can get to the bottom of it though. Right, where did I get to here? Right, Luke says, morning Lawrence, when going into winter on double brood, do you have to use 4 strips of Apivar or can you get away with using less? So the Apivar like treatment regime, can't remember what the word is, like the instructions, there you go. The instructions for it say you need to have 1 strip of Apivar per 5 frames of brood. Yeah, so it doesn't say you need 1 strip of Apivar per 5 frames. So if you're just adding in frames of like foundation or anything, or you've got frames of stores, you don't necessarily need to count those frames of stores. So take, take it with a pinch of salt, I would say, that one there. The recommendation is count the brood frames, but a lot of the time you're not going to go in and actually count the brood frames. You're just going to look down and do it and kind of see what it is. There's no point pulling out the frames to count them and killing your queen at that point in the year. It's just not worth it. You're much better off guessing, and you can kind of roughly guess. I would say most colonies are going to need 2 strips of Apivar unless they are genuinely on double brood and they've been on double brood for a while and you know that top box is going to have like 8 frames of brood, bottom box is going to have 8 frames of brood, and then I would be going in and saying, yeah, you need 4 strips of Apivar, 2 in the top, 2 in the bottom, like evenly dispersed throughout the box. But most of the time, like if you're going in, you've got double brood and it's a brood nest, the bottom box is a brood nest, the top box is just honey, you just treat that as like a single brood nest. So you're just looking for the brood frames as opposed to the stores frames, and you can work it out from there. Good morning, I like your metal Abello mouse guard, very cool. Um, Simon says 2 Black Mountain Buckfast queens introduced last Friday, one 100% laying, the other looking good. Okay, that's good, good to hear, keep me posted. We've had some success with a new queen and Apidea. Is it too late to grow a nuc to overwinter? So to grow an Apidea to a nuc size, yes, very, very difficult, very time-consuming. I did that once and it took like almost a full year. Like, even I started it in May, just got one in there because we'd overwintered it and built it up. It's very, very, very slow. And you can imagine it because imagine you've got like a big frame of brood on a national, imagine how many cells are there, how many bees are coming out, and then on an Apidea you've just got these little piddly frames, and that's the reason that it is so slow. So no, I wouldn't recommend doing it. I would take the queen and I would make up a split with the queen, and I would— you can fashion a device to put those little frames into colonies and then let them emerge like into supers. That's probably what I would recommend. Evening all, Laurence, what's your thought on using poison for wasp control? Not a fan of using poison for wasp control. I've seen someone commented on a video saying about using Vespex, which I think is like a— yeah, it's a poison where you go around and you you treat the wasps to kind of go back and poison the nests. I'm not saying that's wrong, and I'm not saying that doesn't need to be used elsewhere, but in the UK I don't think you need to do that. In the UK, I think you can manage the wasp threat more than adequately by preparing big strong colonies, and the wasps will just come in and wipe out everything that you've not prepared. So no, it's not for me. I don't like just pumping chemicals out for the sake of it. If there's an option where we can do it without chemicals that works, Which which I think we found in the UK, then yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't be doing it. BBBB says, "Hey all, good to see you, Lawrence. Been grafting for the first time yesterday. Boy, it ain't easy yet. Had a hard time getting a lava on the tip of the pen. Them cheap Chinese ones." Yeah, it's it can be frustrating. What I find with grafting here is like I'll start grafting at beginning of every year, and I'm like, "Ah, it's difficult. It's annoying." Go like that, and then you get into the rhythm of it. You get into the rhythm of it, and you kind of. You go through the pain barrier and the annoying slow bit at the beginning, and then you just, you hit your rhythm. You work out which one works. You find a nice grafting tool with a nice kind of like filament at the end, and sometimes you can get a bit of sandpaper on it, like sand it down with 4,000-grit sandpaper and get it super fine. And then some people like to kind of wet the tip. You know the way that I do it, I don't look at the larva, so for me it's like, it's quite, it's quite a nice process. I put a bit of music on and I'm just kind of there just going down, and you, it's just, it's the angle. It's the angle of the filament going down and making sure that it curls up underneath. That's where you want to get the little, the little bit of sandpaper, wet and dry sandpaper on it to make sure that that tip can just like smoothly go in and out. But what I love with the grafting tool, the Chinese grafting tool, I love the ability to be able to get the larva off into the cup like bang in the middle every time. Really gentle on the larva. So I find with it, I can like— the acceptance rate of the larva is very, very high. I think if you do it right with the Chinese grafting tool, it works. You know, experts will do it with any grafting tool that they want, and I, I think I'm in the minority. I don't see many, many queen rearers using the Chinese grafting tool, but you just gotta work, gotta use what works for you. Uh, right, Man says hit the like button for Lawrence. Peace. Thank you very much. I'm gonna have a sip of coffee. Oh, itchy nose. All right, there we go. What time are we on? We've got about 20 minutes left. Ryan says good morning, Lawrence. Both nucs I got from you are absolutely smashing it now. The one that I caused to dwindle down to four frames has now got two full supers, and the one that stayed at six frames for ages has two full brood boxes and three supers. Thank you for your help, Ryan. I am over the moon with this one. Really, really am. So to fill in the gaps for anyone, we sold Ryan a couple of nucs. He had a bit of a problem with one of them, and it looked like it had come very, very close to starvation. A bit of checkerboarding that had happened, and we were trying to fix the problem. I said, "I think maybe they got caught out in a bit of a bad June gap, and maybe a bit of checkerboarding has." split the brood and they're struggling. So what you need to do is remove the checkerboard, feed the colony 1:1, pump it in, and just wait. Because that kind of stability by giving them the feed should get it back on track. I don't think there's anything wrong with the queens because like the brood pattern is really, really good and I'm not seeing any pollen, I'm not seeing any stores. I think it's a nutrition issue. That was like 6 weeks ago. So Ryan, thank you so much for coming back and kind of filling it in. I know it looked like it was trending in the right direction. But to get the, get the full picture now with that frame— yeah, that colony that had 4 frames has now got 2 full supers. And just to put that into context to people, 2 full supers is like £20 a super, that's £40, it's like 80 jars of honey. How perfect was that? 80 jars of honey like that, and we sell them like wholesale for like a fiver, so that's £400 of honey. So that advice, Brian, that we got— okay, wasn't directly through hiveq.com, but it's kind of advice you'd get at HiveQ— has produced an additional 400 pounds of honey from one hive in one season. There we go. BBBB says, you did it without even looking. Did you just learn it by practice? I'm currently happy if we get one queen off it. So no, the not looking one is just through a combination of sheer laziness and frustration. That's generally how most of my systems come about. It's me when I get like a grafting tool. I was finding it— I could see that, I'd be like, right, I want that larva there, I'm going to get that larva there, and then be like, well, Grafting tools kind of in the way. I can't really see, so I'm doing it at an angle, and I'm like, I can't really see what's going on. Like, I can see them, I can focus on them, my eyes aren't that bad yet, but the grafting tool is just like blocking my ability. So I said, well, maybe if I just put the frame down like flat and then come in like I'm holding a pen. And I was like, oh, that's, that's comfortable, you know. So I just, I just, I thought I'd try and do it without looking and went down and got the first one up. I was just like, that was really easy, and it didn't hurt my hand, and Okay, I couldn't see what was going on, but I didn't, I didn't need to see what was going on because I got it out first time. So I put that one in, I was like, right, let's go and have a look at another one. Right, I'll go for that one, put it in. And I think I did like 3 in a row, and it didn't, it didn't carry on with that success rate, but I did 3 in a row. I thought, this is, this is loads easier because music on in the background, like, I can just sit here not looking. As long as I time all of the eggs to, to hatch at the right time, I know I'm going to be going in and getting the correct larva out. So that's, that's the, that's the technique that I use. It's on one of the videos I show the technique where I kind of like don't look. I'm not saying it as in like, oh, I can graft without looking. I'm just saying, well, that's the technique that I use. It's a bit of a bodge technique if you ask me, but it does work. Uh, where are we going next? Resin says, would you vape nuc at this time of the year? So I wouldn't use like oxalic acid sublimation as a sole treatment at this time of the year because it's not going to penetrate the wax, and it means that all of the mites that are in, like the reproductive mites that are capped under the brood, are just not going to going to have any impact on them. So you'll get the phoretic mites and then all the other mites will just come out and replace them. So unless you're going to do like multiple treatments at 5-day intervals, I wouldn't be doing vaping. I would go with a more hard-hitting miticide like Apivar, getting them down to a really nice point, and then going in using the kind of 3-week freeze test— teach that one in Hive Q too— to identify that natural brood break for you. And then you can go in and do oxalic acid acid sublimation at the point when it's going to have the highest impact, timing it with that natural brood break. Hi Lawrence, greetings from Romania. 2-year beekeeper here. What is your opinion on oxalic acid strips? Can these replace chemical treatments? Thanks. Yes, they definitely can. Oxalic acid strips are one of the most proven ways of treating varroa. Unfortunately, they're not licensed anywhere because it's probably not going to make anyone that much money to license just kind of generic oxalic acid. But you see people doing tests on this. Like, we don't do tests on it, we don't, we don't use them because we, we have to comply, obviously. But you see other people in other areas of the world where the licensing is slightly different, and they do— they just get an oxalic acid sugar syrup solution, they'll get the Jiffy towels, and they'll kind of drench them in the Jiffy towels and just fold them over the frames. When I went to Italy, it's a treatment that they use a lot out there. They use it like 4 or 5 times a year. Dead simple treatment though, you just go out with a big massive tank of oxalic acid sugar syrup and you dip your Jiffy towels in it, drench them, put 4 over the brood frames on each hive and then move on and leave them there and the bees like tearing them up and move them around and they spread the oxalic around and it knocks down the phoretic mites but then also because it's there for quite a long time as the new mites come out you get a prolonged knockdown so it's very, very effective and completely organic as well, it's a good treatment to use, a lot of people do use that. Anita says, and then, oh, I've missed, I've missed the first Anita question there. When we're going back to— oh no, Anita, all I've got is, and then do we reduce back to single brood at any point? Okay, um, so if you're going back for the Demeray one and reducing down to double brood like that, you'd always— nice to get back to single brood at the beginning of the season, but that doesn't mean doing anything at the back end of the season. So if you, if you go into winter like this with like double brood and maybe you've got brood at the bottom, stores above. In the winter, all that's going to happen is they're going to eat this food and the bees are just going to drift up to the top. So in the winter, like in the spring, you have all the bees at the top and like an empty box, and then you just take the box away, back to single brood, start again. In Scotland, we ate definitely, or we are definitely, 2 to 3 weeks behind the south. Do you think we should be okay to go for middle of August to treat, or as you said, beginning of July, August? So I think, Martin, this is a perfect example of where you need to use kind of like the North Wales line as a bit barometer. If you're— if you've had rain, if your season is not going to be as compressed, if your season is closer to average than normal, if your season has been very, very wet up until now and the bees have not produced that much honey and then it's followed by a nice sunny period, I'd be looking at that and saying, well, like, middle of August is probably going to be the earliest that I'm going to take the honey off. I'm going to push that to the 20th of August, 25th of August. Maybe there's going to be like a real nice sweet spot there. I say to everyone, 30th of August Is it 30th or 31st? I forget. First of September. There we go. Makes it easy. First of September is your cutoff. You have to have got it done before that. I would say everywhere in the UK just to be on the safe side. But up in Scotland, yeah, middle middle of August should be fine. Kind of even back end of August should be fine as well, depending on what your crop is. J Bob says three panic bought abellos coming today. My two hives swarmed. Caught them now learning on the hoof. Oh, that sounds like fun. That's pretty much pretty much what I did. Yeah, just like. Chaos and carnage all around you, and then you learn, learn as you go. Um, Mark's saying that Harry's got lots of new toys. He certainly has. Richard says, good morning. Will I— uh, so start again, Richard. Good morning. Will have my first cut comb this year. Should I freeze the pieces for storage? Thank you. So yes, I would freeze the cut comb. It's much, much better if you freeze it. Um, you'll find though that you'll probably sell it quite quickly, but if you're keeping it for yourself, it does granulate in the comb and then it's just not very nice at all. So freeze it as soon as possible, and then once you defrost it, it should remain liquid for much longer. Hello, I got an Apis mellifera colony 2 weeks ago and did an inspection 3 days ago and got surprised to see 4 queens. 2 days ago, one died. Now, now 3. What should I do with them? So if there's multiple queens in a hive, they will be trying to kill each other. So you can kind of— I just leave them to it. Easiest way of doing it is leaving them to it, unless you're worried about them casting off. So if there's— if, if they've swarmed and like you saw a swarm exit and there's multiple queens in there, you should really knock them all back down to one, and then that stops cast swarming. You probably struggle to find them again now unless they're, they're big. It's very unusual to see that many. They do, they do kill themselves relatively quickly. Very kind, sir. Thank you very much. Uh, I'll put them back up again. I forgot what I'm doing, right? Hi from New Zealand. I've been enjoying your videos as they've helped me with my 3 hives here. Our season is about to start and my 3 hives are still thriving. I love the kind of transition back end of the season in the UK, just like the beginning of the season in New Zealand. Oh, we could just do beekeeping all the way through the year. David says, following on from what you said about double brooding, when we take the supers off and treat with Apivar strips, is the overbrood with adding the new box above the existing brood box? I've confused myself there. Is the overbrood with adding the new brood box, the new box. I don't understand, Dave Nella, I'm really sorry. I'm going to read it one more time and try and get it clear in my head. Following on from what you said about double brooding, when we take the supers off and treat with Amplify strips— got that bit— is the overbrood with adding the new box above existing brood box? Okay, I think I know what you mean. I think what you're saying is you've got the brood nest here and you've got your, your kind of top box up there for the demo ray, and you've got all the supers in the middle. knock out all of the supers, and yeah, you're not overbrooding, but you're just kind of compressing it. So you have brood, stores. That's like standard winter configuration. That's where I would go at this point. I'm sorry if I've not understood that properly. You can email me if I got it wrong. I love your wooden theme in the background. I'm building a beekeeping workshop in my garden at the end of August with similar wooden theme. I've outgrown my kitchen. Okay, cool, nice. I'm very happy with my, my new workstation. Much better than trying to do it in the living room. Which is what I was doing for nine years. My poor wife. Cash is King says, "Hi Lawrence, beginner beekeeper. The queen I got from you last week has been accepted. Thank you." Excellent. I love I love hearing the stories about them doing well. Julian Martin says, "Morning Lawrence. How is an F zero queen created? As I understand it, her offspring will be F one and what you sell as mated queens." So F zero is a weird term. It's not like a it's not an actual correct technical term. So It's useful, yeah, because the offspring of an F0 queen is the F1, but it does start at F1. F0 doesn't exist. So they're called pure queens and sometimes called like P1 or P queens, but they are created by exactly that. You have a pure queen, pure maternal side, and a pure paternal side, so a mother and a father. And you need to make sure that the queen that you've got, the pure queen that you've got, is mating exclusively with the pure paternal side with the pure drones that you've got. You can do that through artificial insemination, or you can do that through island mating. Now, island mating is like some rock middle of the sea, tiny little rock, and they just bring like the specific bees out there. So they'll bring the colonies, they'll bring the, the virgin queens, and then they'll have the drones up in the air. So you can have a natural mating, or you can have like an artificial mating, but it is essentially exactly the same thing, which is controlling the pure maternal side, controlling the pure paternal side Putting them together, and then the offspring will be F1. Sorry, the offspring of that is not F1. Let me clear that one up there. That's how you create the pure queen, and then we take the pure queen, we graft from the pure queen, and then we do an open mating and try and control the drones as best as we possibly can. They're the F1s there. Yeah. Jotten says, why not an oxalic acid sublimation instead? If you're talking about instead of Apivar. It's because the brood is capped, so you'd have to do multiple oxalic acid sublimations to get the same effect, which isn't actually licensed in the UK, so it needs to be above, well, compliant. I've got 5 minutes left. Good morning, I have too many colonies. I want to merge some of them together before winter. Some are very large, 14 by 12 with 3 supers. I feel I want to wait for a few weeks until all the supers are off and the queens are slowing down a bit before merging, but would that be too late? No, I would say that's a really easy way of doing it, and if you want like This is how some people do it. Yeah, they'll go in end of the year, so you've got 14 by 12 with 3 supers on, just take the 3 supers off one colony, take the 3 supers off the other colony, go and harvest them, and just put the 2 14 by 12s on top of each other. Yes, there will be 2 queens there and they'll probably have a little bit of a fight, but you can, you can do it another way as well. You can go in and find the queen that you don't want because you get like, if you're combining colonies down, you do have to queens. It's not very nice, but find the queen that you don't want, kill her, and then take the 14 by 12 with the queen— sorry, take the 14 by 12 with the box that's not got the queen, and then set up another one that's got the queen in, and then a newspaper sheet on top of it. So you're going to be set up like this: you're going to have a floor, your 14 by 12 box with the queen in, a sheet of newspaper with a couple of little holes in it, and then another 14 by 12 box where you've removed the queen and then left it for an hour or so, and then place that on top. So you're gonna have floor, brood box with queen, newspaper sheet, brood box with no queen, put the roof on, leave them to it. They shouldn't swarm in that configuration even though you're kind of like double brooding them. There's a lot of space there, they should be fine. And then Apivar strips in, come back in the spring, should be one colony. There seems to be a big variation in honey prices. What would you recommend for 8-ounce and 12-ounce for wholesale and direct to customers, please? So there is a lot of variation, and I think some people do struggle to Not to market their honey, but they'll be in a place where there's lots of other beekeepers. So if you're in that situation, you need to need to come up with like what's your USP? Why is your honey? Why can you? How do you justify the cost that you're charging? The price you're charging for an eight ounce like that. First up, I'm glad that you're doing eight ounce and twelve ounce. That's really good. Pound jars, although quite nostalgic, just undersell the honey. It's a big jar. It's a lot of honey that goes in it. You need to ask a lot of money that people don't necessarily want to pay. Whereas a jar like that, an eight ounce. which is a half-pound jar, we sell that wholesale for a fiver, and that's a good price for it. But like retail, you could probably be getting that closer to £10, and that's what some people sell like a 5— uh, sorry, a pound jar for. So jar sizes are good. I would say minimum £5 and £7, or £6 and £8 for the 8-ounce and 12-ounce wholesale there, and then going up to kind of like closer to £10 retail for the 8-ounce, and then maybe like £12 or £13 for the 12-ounce. You'll find anything over a tenner is difficult, so the smaller sell a lot better. That's why we only do— we only use the 8-ounce ones. Uh, right, BBB says, heart loving it, not looking, it's on. I've, I've missed— I've missed the thread. I've forgotten what we're talking about. 2 minutes and I have to go. Right, uh, says, after a terrible wet and cold spring in Northern Ireland, the weather has finally picked up with balsam out now, and we have our first strong flow of the year. Can I delay treatment similar fashion to Scotland? Yes, don't use the advice of us in North Wales where it's been terrible drought, but don't go any further than the 1st of September, and that still gives you a good— that gives you a good 6 weeks to get a honey crop in. This is what it is all about. I know I've mentioned it a lot today, hiveq.com, but this is where you get this advice. This is where you can connect with beekeepers that are close to you. This is where you can kind of discuss what's happening with my bees and say, well, I'm a little bit higher, I'm a little bit lower, like, what should I do here? The ambition is we're going to have localized groups. We'll have one for Northern Ireland, one for Scotland, one for Wales, and then drill down even further than that, down into the counties, to try and give you really localized information within HiveQ. More people we get in there, the easier it is to do that. But there are— there's over 40— I think it's nearly hit 1,500 people signed up for 14-Day Beekeeper now, and HiveQ is filling up very, very fast. So head over there, it is a very cool place to be. One final thing I will add on there, I needed to put this in here: I'm going back to every other week on YouTube live streams, and then we will be doing the other live streams. So I'll still be doing it, we'll be doing it on Circle. That is where HiveQ lives, and there's tons of additional functionality over there. So I'll probably still release it on YouTube, but it won't be live. So every other week there'll be an exclusively live live stream over at hiveq.com. Morning Lawrence, inspecting yesterday, we are noticing huge amounts of pollen being stored in the brood box. Should we be concerned? It seems to be taking up a lot of room. So yes, I would be concerned. You don't need to do that much to get it fixed. So if you're going in and there's like 1 or 2 frames, I wouldn't do anything. If you're going in and there's 5 or 6 frames of pollen, it's too much. I'd be taking 3 or 4 of them out, putting them in the freezer, because they are an excellent resource for making up splits and for queen rearing as well. Are you concerned about Apivar resistance? So I'm always concerned about any sort of resistance to chemicals when treating for varroa. This is why we advocate like a dual treatment. So we, we say Apivar in summer as a summer treatment, and then as my autumn treatment, you see what I've done there, we use oxalic acid as a sublimation. 2 very different treatments, 2 very opposing treatments. to say, well, if the Apivar treatment didn't work or there's any resistance building, we're going to catch them elsewhere. But like, wider Apivar resistance could happen, um, and yeah, we need to keep our options open. And the more treatments that we have available to us, I think that's the best for everyone. Right, we have reached the end. I'm sorry if I did not get to your questions there. I have got another call. People are starting to put calls in for Saturday mornings now, which is fantastic and my favorite thing in the world. It is actually quite a cool call that I'm going on next. But I will see you all next week. Um, it will be a live stream on Black Mountain Honey, a live stream on 14 Day Beekeeper, and then that will be the last one, and then we'll switch over to Circle. So do head over to hiveq.com, check it out. It is very, very cool. It is a brilliant worldwide beekeeping community, and it is the start of something I think is very special. So I will see you all there.