Let's Talk Bees #83 - Your Beekeeping Questions Answered

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 83 of Let's Talk Bees. Now I got told off this morning by my wife because she said, why have you booked a live stream on your daughter's birthday? Fair point. I did not think anyone was going to be up, and apparently she said, yeah, children get up really early on their birthday. So my daughter is up there, I've been up there, I've said happy birthday, I've given her a big cuddle, and I've said Daddy's just going to come on and do a quickfire, like 30 minutes max, live stream and go through some of the questions. So it's gonna be one, one question each, and I'm gonna do it as quick as I possibly can whilst drinking my coffee. So Oh, I'm gonna choke first. We'll jump straight in. We've got Gene from sunny California says, I hope you and your family are well. What is your opinion on VSH queens? So we sell a lot of VSH queens. VSH stands for Varroa Sensitive Hygiene. It's queens that have been proven to have a hygienic trait, I guess, to remove productive mites from cells within the hive. Doesn't mean that the hive doesn't have varroa, doesn't mean that you don't need to treat doesn't mean that it's a super bee that's going to do everything for you, it's just something that gives you a helping hand when it comes to tackling varroa and potentially gives you options that weren't available if your bees didn't have that trait inside them. That's my view on it really. I think lots of funding should go into this, lots of trials, lots of tests. What I definitely don't advocate is people thinking or saying, oh, I caught a swarm and luckily it was just this brilliant swarm that doesn't need treating, so I'm not going to treat them. Because I know the story, like 3 years down the line they die, and they die because of kind of like another reason, damp or cold. But it's, it's understanding that the chances of finding something like that are incredibly low, um, and there's ways of testing and there's ways of analyzing the genetics without the colonies just failing, without actually going through that, right, let's not treat them and let's just have survivor stock. So big, big fan of VSH queens, big fan of the work that goes behind it. I think there's bit of misunderstanding in terms of what they are, what they can do, but also how to, how to achieve them. I'm not a fan of letting bees die so that we can identify the good stock. I think there's much, much nicer and more ethical ways. Good morning, Lawrence. I raised a queen from a split in spring. I couldn't get her to move up into the double brood config in the nuc, gave up and put them on a hive on a good flow. I couldn't get them to expand the hive no matter how I checkerboarded or moved the frames around, and then she swarmed my bait hive. She's back in a nuc now. Should I kill her or will she eventually work it out? So Sam, a lot of people find this problem out themselves. Takes 2 or 3 years to work it out, and I went through this process, really frustrating process, which is beekeeping is expensive. Like, if you go out and you buy nucs and you buy queens and you control all the genetics, then it's a lot of money going in. So what, what most people do is they might, they might buy a nuc or they might get a swarm and they might make some splits, and then their mate Dave's got some bees and they've swarmed, so they're going to grab this swarm and they put it on there, and before they know it, they're up to 10 colonies of bees, but they're all like splits from another colony or swarms that have been brought in. And then they think, this is, this is good, we started off with one, we're now up to 10, right? Bees, do your work, fill the boxes, let's get some honey. And then they find that the feral swarms that they've caught have one thing in common, which is they are excellent survivors. And, and the people who like feral swarms, they use this as kind of like a bit of a selling point. They say they're survivor stock. They're not going to need kind of moddy model coddling, whatever it is. I get the words out right. They're not going to need the care and management that, like a buckfast colony have might have, for example. So the problem that you get with survivor stock, though, is that they're built for survival. They're not built for what you're asking them to do, which is build up a nice big strong brood nest and then go up and store honey. And they're not fussed about that. All they want to do is just move and split and divide and. like survive against varroa because they're survivor stock. So they don't care, they're doing what they think they're doing. Like, they, they think they're doing the right thing, which is they're surviving, they're not dying. And the reason that that's so kind of linked in with varroa is that the varroa load is probably too high. So they're building up, building up, building up to a point where they say the varroa load is just too high, like, we need to, we need to swarm. So we're going to swarm and create a natural brood break. then that swarm goes out carrying an incredibly high varroa load, goes into one of these boxes, um, that someone catches, and then the same thing happens again. Like, they build up and it looks like it's going okay, but what's actually happening is the varroa load is going through the roof, and the colony just gets to a point where it's like, we've got a swarm again. So then they go. Fixing it with good genetics, obviously the money goes into that and the investment that goes into that, but it does give you like a bit of relief from that kind of swarming. And when we say to people the Buckfast genetics are a low swarm tendency, and people say, well, I bought them and they still swarmed, it's not no swarm tendency, but it's, it's a case of feral stock could swarm 3 times in a season. You could, you could catch a swarm, it builds up in a brood box, goes and swarms again, you catch it, builds up in a brood box, never gets up to the supers. Whereas a Buckfast colony is likely to build up in a brood nest, get to 2 or 3 supers, okay, it might swarm. But you've got two or three supers of honey, and then the video is so funny. The video I did yesterday, that exact scenario happened. So that went out on the channel yesterday. Go and check it out. The colony swarmed left behind. I think left behind like four supers of honey, and then they they bounced back. I left a single queen cell in for them. She went out. She got mated, and then they produced a crazy amount of honey throughout the season. So Buckfast isn't no swarming; it's low swarming, but they leave behind like. Something very, very valuable generally, which is a lot of honey. Fingers crossed you get it sorted though, Sam. What I would say is just, you can make the decision and try and requeen, or you can combine them back down again. Getting towards the point where swarming is going to ease up now, so hopefully they'll get ready for winter. Uh, Jean— oh, I'm really sorry, Jean, I'm gonna have to run through because there's not many people in here. I'm gonna have to do one question each. I'm gonna flick through, um, to make sure that everyone gets a question answered right. Martin Miller says, morning, Lawrence, posted this last night. 7 of the 11 frames in the brood box are honeybound and partially capped. Nothing treated and an empty super above foundation. Any advice please? 2 F1s today. So bees are lazy, yeah, they will come back with their forage, they might transfer it over to another bee, and then the other bee's like, ah, I'm just gonna stick it here, just gonna— like, why would they go to level 4 of the hotel or whatever level it is up in the supers when there's tons of space in the reception? And that's the good analogy to use there, which is they will always put it as close to the entrance as they possibly can. With the exception of if there is brood there. So bees set themselves up like this: brood and then honey above. Like, it's always that way to get the honey as far away from the entrance as possible. But as I said, bees are lazy, so they put it as close to the entrance as possible. So you find yourself in this situation where if you're honey-bound in the brood nest and there's no brood in there, the bees have got no— there's no point putting the honey just further up because it's more work. So there's no brood to go underneath it. Long story there, but what it means is that when you get your F1 queens in and when you start to get a brood nest developing, you can kind of artificially build that. So make sure when you put the queen in, there's a couple of nice empty frames in the middle, either drawn comb or foundation. And then as soon as those 2 are drawn, just do the same thing again. Take out the outer frames that are going to be stores, take them off somewhere else, move everything out like that, and add new frames of foundation in the middle. And quickly, you know, after the space of like 2 or 3 weeks, you're going to build out this full brood nest and by the time you reach the full brood nest, all the honey will be upstairs in the supers. It works very, very well, that one, but you do need to manage it. Hi Lawrence, what do you think of beekeeping all in medium boxes? So I'll answer that generically for everyone here because it's the same whether it's a National or a Langstroth. The deep, shallow, medium divide— which one is best? So I've had experience of a lot of these different things. So I used to use like National deeps which are confusingly like a Langstroth medium in terms of size. But let's use the deep and shallow terminology to make it a little bit simpler. So I used to use deep boxes and shallow supers. That's what I used to use, and it worked quite well. And that is the industry norm, I would say, across the world and probably in the UK. Then I got thinking, well, and like other people, it's not revolutionary at all, but there's economies of scale here. Like, I can Surely I want the bigger boxes. It's going to be easier. I just need one type of frame, one type of box. I'll get economies of scale in purchase. I'll get economies of kind of scale and stacking in the back of the pickup truck. I think I think this can work quite well. So I went down that route, did all of that, and then as you get into the process, you realize that as you're treating with chemicals anyway, you're you've got two different types of box. They're the same size box. They're exactly the same, but there's two different types. There's brood boxes and there's Honey supers, and this is where like I thought, well, this is a waste of time because I kind of wanted the interoperability of it. I wanted to have a brood box one season and then a super the other season, and kind of be able to denote where I put the queen excluder to determine how much honey the bees are going to collect. And it just became really quickly apparent that you couldn't do that because you were treating them with chemicals. And then the other one, so sorry, Apivar is the chemical that I was treating them with so that the the wax is then tainted with the amateur, so you can't extract the honey out of it, which is fine. But then the other thing is that when you let the queen lay up all of the brood in all of your frames, instead of having like just a maintenance regime on the brood frames, you've now got a maintenance regime on all your frames, and the majority of them are going to be the super frames as well. So I ditched the— I ditched the system really, really quickly. Took me 2 years, and now I just converted all of those deep boxes back into brood boxes, and I went out and bought loads more shallow boxes. And now I keep those shallow boxes exclusively as honey supers. Means that they're never tainted with any chemicals, means that your, your honey management system is much, much easier. But it means the maintenance of those frames is like infinitely easier. Instead of having to do regular replacing them because they've gone dark and gone black and they're carrying all the kind of horrible things that we don't want to be contained within our wax in the brood nest, I've just got nice clean honey frames that go back on, never tainted my wax, they're never tainted by brood, never need to be replaced, like unless they're damaged. You can just keep on going again and again and again. So I used that system and it didn't work for me. It's not to say that it wouldn't work for, for somebody else, but they're the two, they're the two big issues that I had with it. What, um, what treatments are you using and is that going to contaminate your honey boxes? If so, I wouldn't go down that route. And then the other one is, do you have the time and the effort to actually manage those frames? Because it seems nice at the beginning, but it does introduce quite a significant maintenance requirement. It will work, uh, it will work out. Let— I can't even read. It will work out. Let hair build up for winter. Sorry, I think I'm, I'm struggling to read. I need my glasses. And she will do good next year. There we go. I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump onto the next one because I'm not sure that I can read anymore. Wow, there's a lot of questions on here today. I'm really sorry that we are shortening this one down. Uh, right, where do we go to? Uh, drink my coffee while I work it out. Got a few people saying good luck for supers this weekend. Right, Ferg says, morning Lawrence, I hope you and the family and the Black Mountain Honey team are all doing well. Should I be doing something to adapt my underfloor entrances to protect against wasps? That's a good question. So I would say no, you don't need to do anything to adapt your underfloor entrances for wasps. They should be able to manage it with the design as it is, with a huge caveat in that you need a big strong colony. Imagine an underfloor entrance, it's quite long like that, it's the full, full width of a beehive, but it's a very easily defendable entrance, but only if you've got enough bees to kind of line all the way up. And that's what they do, they just line up on that entrance and anything that comes in that isn't a bee, they just, they take it out. So if you put like a 2-frame split— I'm not suggesting you've done this, but if anyone puts a 2-frame split into a big full-size beehive with an underfloor entrance there and you've not got the bees to line it all up, then the wasps will overrun it really, really quickly. So the thing that I love most about my underfloor entrances is the ability to move the bees super quick. And the way that you do that is you have like an in— it's an inbuilt landing board. So instead of having a landing board on the outside, it's recessed, so it's inside. And what that means is you have a really tight, confined space that you can just Chuck something in, and when it expands, it just goes. It just expands and seals the whole entrance. So it's great. You get some old like sofa foam. You'll get this. Find find someone chucking away some sofas and just take the foam out. Cut it into big square strips. Quite quite big. Probably like four inches by four inch cross section like that, and then the width of the entrance a little bit longer. And then what you can do. So this isn't to reduce it down from wasps. This is what I do when I want to move it. I take that foam strip. dunk it in water, I just squish it in the underfloor entrance like that, and it's completely sealed. Not a single bee can get out. And then when you're transporting bees like that, because this— because the foam is wet, they've got like a nice inbuilt air conditioning system as well, and a way to cool themselves down by getting the water, which is very, very handy. But the reason that I say that is, if you think about that, think about the way that that works. You chuck this big foam bung in and it reduces this really long entrance down to nothing. It effectively seals it all the way along. But you can use a similar design to that to just restrict the size of that entrance. So the easiest way of doing it, the way that I've found to do it, if I've ever come across a colony that was struggling with wasps on an underfloor entrance, it's so simple. Get a bit of wood and imagine, imagine you cut a piece of wood to fit in the underfloor entrance slot completely, so it just seals everything, it just fits in, couldn't fit in more perfectly, and then just cut 10mm off one side and then put it back in. And what you'll do is you will have reduced the underfloor entrance down exactly the same design, but instead of having like 460mm of entrance that the bees can— or the bees have to defend, you've just shrunk it right down to 10mm. And there'll be tons of different variations that you can do on that, just for putting bits of wood in to give you a configuration to protect against wasps. It works, and it works really, really nicely. As long as the colonies are strong, you shouldn't have to do it. But there we go, there's a backup for you. Is it too late to add a nuc to a hive, and do you think it's too late to make a split from an overwintered hive? So no, definitely not too late to add a split to a hive. I would go ahead and do that. I would follow the advice that I gave previously there though, which is just reduce the entrances down to suit. And then no, it's still, it's still good to make splits. I'm speaking to someone at the moment about the PDF that we sent out, and I'd say So we were saying 2-frame splits for the 1st of July, 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, really good shake of bees, off to a new site, mated queen in will work. I would say as we progress towards the back end of July now, I'd probably advise that for 3 frames of brood. So if you're making splits from this point onwards, I would go 3 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, really good shake of bees, 2 shakes if you can get away with it, take them to a new site, leave it 8 days, take down the emergency cells, add in your mated queen, and then feed them. keep feeding them, and they should be very, very nice strong colonies for the next year. Good morning, thanks for the time you give to the community, and happy birthday to your daughter. Thank you very much. I've got a WBC that swarmed and requeened from Black Mountain Honey Queen about 2 months ago. They managed to fill out 2 supers being harvested this week. What configuration, uh, should this go into for varroa treatment? Apiguard with a queen excluder, or empty super, or an English feeder? Okay, well, good, good that they, uh, you, you've recovered them from the swarm and you've still got some honey on there. Apiguard is not my favorite treatment. Um, it's very, very temperature dependent, and I would say this year is probably the best year for Apiguard. Normally people use it too late in a cold year. You're gonna put Apiguard in, which is like a thymol-based gel designed to reduce the amount of varroa that's in there. It's proven it does work, but it's just quite temperature dependent and timing dependent. So normally, as I say, people put it in too late and it's too cold in the UK, so it's not very effective and they have issues with it. It could potentially be very good this year, similar similarly with Thymivar, which is just a different way of getting it around the hive, different product. But warmer temperatures and doing it earlier, and and it could have a much better efficacy. I don't want to say it will because I've I've not tested it. I had issues using Apiguard, and that's why I moved over to Apivar. And we give the advice to a lot of people say use Apivar, and they buy Apiguard because they sound very very similar. There's a lot of apies in there, apistan as well. Apivar is the one that we use, which is the, the, like, the chemical name is amitraz, and then that is a hard-hitting miticide. And then we use apibioxal or varroxal later on for, for the broodless break. But if you're going down the route of using Apiguard, then I think this year should be good for it. And then the configuration that you want is you just need to make sure that your honey is nowhere near it. This was the problem. This is one of the things that I didn't like about Apiguard is that everything smells a bit of thymol. Thymol is very, very strong, and and it's very, very long-lasting. Even when you kind of go back to the hive the following year, you can still smell it in the colony. It's quite a nice— I think it's quite a nice smell. It's not nice if you taste it or you get it anywhere near honey. It's disgusting and it does contaminate it. So take all of your honey supers off and then the configuration that I would use for that is you need some sort of eke, you need some sort of way of transferring the gel-like substance around. So easiest configuration I would say is take your honey supers off, shake all of the bees out, take them off, they go somewhere else. You'll be left with a single brood box If you're on double brood, I'd consider— I'm just reading your question there now, you're not on double brood. I was going to say I'd consider compressing it down, but no, you should be fine. So single brood box, and then I would get an eke. If you've not got an eke, just use a super, empty super, put it on the top, put your gel just in the middle, and then put the roof on. And that kind of 4-inch gap above will give the vapours a little bit of the ability to permeate better throughout the colony. You do need an eke. you're using Apiguard like that, but best of luck with it. Uh, let's see who else we've got. Morning Lawrence, hope you and your family are well. I have a colony I caught from one of my hives that swarmed, now 4 weeks old and struggling a bit, really needs bees, have capped brood but really need to emerge soon. Is there still time for this colony to be strong enough going into winter, or best to emerge now? Thanks. It is strong enough. When you get to that point where you just need the bees to emerge, I always think, oh, I really hope that the brood didn't get chilled That's the only one, because there shouldn't— you shouldn't really see a reduction in the bees on the brood like that. They kind of just hunker down and get through until the new ones emerge. You need to do— you need to reduce the entrance down to an absolute trickle. You need to make sure that they're fed without attracting robbing bees. It becomes a little bit difficult, so just maybe some fondant could be good. Fondant would be good for them, I would say, a much less attractive way for robbing bees or wasps to get some fondant on, peel it off completely, place it on like the top of the frames where the bees are. They'll cluster up close to it and it will keep them warm, which is what, what you need for a colony like that that's not got that many bees to tend to the brood and keep all of the brood warm. If the brood starts to emerge, if you've got like 2 or 3 frames of brood in there, like good capped frames of brood, and it, and it emerges, then they will be fine without a shadow of a doubt. It's getting to that point. You're either, you're either going to end up with a colony that's fine or a colony that's got 3 frames of unemerged brood and a few dead bees. I really— that's hard-hitting, James. I think we'll go with the former. I think we'll get you, get you the winner on that one. Morgy says, morning, I noticed you never seem to check the queen excluder on Zane's first nuc. Is there a reason? I've had the queen on the queen excluder twice at the association hive, but the instructor said he's never had one on one in 10 years. So, so I do, I do check it. I don't know if like we cut it or something like that. I always have a little glance underneath, and I found— it's so funny you say that. Yeah, because I found One of the queens on that hive on the queen excluder. Did I not put it in the video? We do do a little check. Good advice for anyone out there: if you're taking your queen excluder off, have a little look underneath because you do find that the queen is occasionally underneath it, and then just put it off somewhere, put it off somewhere nicely so the queen can't wander off if she is on it and you don't you don't actually spot her. But no, good advice, Morgie. Matopka says, "If I want to go," and I missed that one. That's a half question. Darren Brown says, good morning, Lawrence, just a question about winter feeding. Is it best putting fondant straight onto the frames or through an Abello crown board? Oh, okay, so winter feeding, this is where the books, it drives me a little bit crazy. So I never feed fondant if I can get away with it, ever. The only time that I'm interested in feeding fondant is if I'm supplementing like a queen-rearing colony with protein. I'm putting like really heavy protein fondant on. I will do everything I possibly can to not feed fondant, just ever, because there's no real need to feed it. It's an emergency feed that you, you should only be feeding to your colonies really in an emergency. And the emergency is— pardon me— the emergency is they're starving and you've not fed them enough syrup to get them through the winter. Like 99% of the time, that's the only emergency that's going to be there for feeding fondant. So I just like cycle back a bit and say, well, just feed them the right amount. There we go. Feed them the right amount and you should get them through. So I appreciate, uh, that's kind of not what your question was about, but I just wanted to get that across to people. I'm really not a fan of feeding fondant if you can get away with it. But you've got an Abello crown board there. Okay, so you want to feed the bees through the crown board. So if you were going ahead and feeding fondant and there was an emergency, my favorite way of feeding fondant is directly onto the frames. Find it much easier. You avoid any isolation starvation risk, but also it's just easier for the bees to find, it's kind of easier to clean up, and then I like to flip my polyisoprene feeder over, and then that gives you a really nice warm insulated space. If you've got the Abello crown board though, I would say like if I had the Abello crown board on a colony and I was thinking of feeding fondant, I would just get some fondant in an upturned like takeaway plastic tub, fill it up, and I would put it over one of the holes once I'd taken out the mesh. Probably the central one if you've got the 5, the one that's in a square. You can put it over multiple ones if you want as well. I'm very much one for like using the equipment that you've got, so not— it's not a case of, oh, you need a polyashtral feeder to do this properly. No, there's tons of ways of feeding fondant. You can feed it with the Abello crown board, you can feed it just in a wooden super, you can just make up a really simple eek, you can make your own like multi-purpose crown board, insulated multi-purpose crown board, tons of different ways of doing it. But my advice to you is try to do everything you possibly can to not have to feed fondant. Feed the bees the right concentration, like, of syrup now when you're, when you're taking the honey off. The bees need like 1:1 to keep them going, and then move over to 2:1 or move over to invert, and the final one should be really, really heavy, like heavy syrup. And you should be going in, weighing them, getting them up to weight, making sure that there is sufficient weight in that colony to get them through winter. And then, and then, and kind of only then, like in February, March, if you're going back and hefting, you're like, it's like, should be started off at 40 kilograms and it's now like 23, 24, and I'm, I'm hefting it and I'm worried. I think they're light. Okay, I'm going to open them up and oh wow, yeah, they're struggling. Okay, I'm going to put some fondant on. That's really the only scenario where I would add it on, and I definitely wouldn't plan to put it on. Next one from Spreading Ideas says, 2 months after the queen excluder is placed, the bees transfer the eggs from the brood chamber to the honey super even though the queen is below. So It's kind of one where there's a few different things that could happen there. One is they've swarmed or superseded and a new queen has emerged and she's small and she's managed to kind of get up through the queen excluder and then maybe get out of the super, go and mate and come back in. That's— that could happen. Um, the other one is you've got laying workers, so the queen died, um, no pheromone was there for such a long time that the laying workers took it, or the workers took it upon themselves to start laying. and then you're seeing brood kind of scattered everywhere. You'll see that if it's multiple eggs, multiple eggs in cells and eggs that are not on the bottom of the cells. That is how you identify laying workers. Could be as simple as this: you've taken off a queen excluder and put it somewhere and it's kind of just changed the shape of it and it's allowed a little hole so a queen, like a mated queen from the brood box, can get up and go through. You could also have a defective queen excluder. So there's, there's tons of reasons why that might happen. We had someone in, uh, in our HiveQ community this week having exactly the same issues. And I think they might be on this livestream as well, so hello to you. I won't name anyone there, but it was great. It was a really good, useful piece of advice for everyone, which was there was brood upstairs in the supers. Like, what has happened? And I think for a lot of people it's like, well, this surely can't happen. There must be something wrong. But there's always a way with bees. There's always like a backstory. There's always a way of understanding what's happened and then knowing how to fix it going forward. So I think we've got a plan. I'm so excited about what's going on in HiveQ. Let me just do a little side tour for HiveQ. One of the things that we're doing, one of the things that I'm doing at the moment, is not just focusing on doing as many videos as possible because the videos go out there, they don't perform that well. So I thought, well, what can I spend my time doing? I've not got a day job, I need to do something. So let's, let's double down on the community. Let's just make the community awesome and do as much as we can to, to give members of HiveQ— visit it now, hiveq.com— a nice space to, to kind of Be a part of something special. So my idea, this is one of the ideas I had, was to have a honey exchange. So every member, and there's like 1,500 people who have joined the course now, but every member will have the opportunity to like send some honey down, maybe 6 or 10 jars of their own honey. I've not got my honey here today. I know it's up there. It's my little prop honey. So maybe 6 or 10 jars of honey like this, and then we could put them all together, package them up with a little story. You know, you've got different, different honey. You've got Welsh honey and Scottish honey or London rooftop honey, and it can come with a little story, and then we can put it all together for people. People and send back 10 different jars. And I thought, I'd really, I'd really like to do that. So, so we are doing that on HiveQ. We've not worked out the logistics 100% yet, and it got me thinking about the logistics. I was thinking, well, maybe we just do it at the Bee Expo. Maybe I'll just get a stand at the Bee Expo and everyone can come. I know not everyone can come. We'll still do it. We'll do it virtually for everyone else who can't do it. But at the Bee Expo, it might make sense to do that, and we can just do it there and then on the day. I've got tons of ideas like that, and you know I'll be I'll be taking loads of cuttings from my plants and my seeds and sending them out and doing seed pals. And and Chrissy is now officially our community manager over there as well. So we have a real life person kind of organizing and managing things, and it is really cool. Like I I am genuinely excited about HiveQ.com. There are lots and lots of things happening over there. I'm really sorry. Yeah, my I heard as I was doing the advert there, I heard my daughter coming down the stairs, which means I do have to. to go. It's 3 minutes before the time. Uh, thank you so much for everyone coming in though. If you want to get into HiveQ, do go and check it out at hiveq.com. It is £8.99 per month and it is probably the best beekeeping community out there. Easy for me to say, but I'll see you all next week.