Let's Talk Bees #84 - Your Beekeeping Questions Answered

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I'm sorry I'm 7 minutes late, but I have been having technical difficulty yet again. I am not even joking, there are 4 different sets of microphones over there and every single one doesn't work. So then we have to use this one here, which means that we get a little lag with the audio, which is infuriating, absolutely infuriating, because the mics are over there, they just do not work. or have an operator who has the technical ability to make them work. Probably should put that one in there, right? Let's answer some questions. Morning, Laurence. Weather is horrible now in Scotland. For open stores that don't make the cut, do we leave above or place below the brood box for them to clean out and use for winter prep? So I think you'll be surprised the amount of frames that you can actually get away with extracting. The rule really is if the honey is ripe, you can extract it. So don't worry too much about the capping. But really the capping tells you a lot. So if the frame is 100% capped over, you know it's good to go. And then the rule that we use in 14-Day Beekeeper is to say roughly 80%. If the frame is 80% capped, it's also good to go. So anything in between 80% and 100% is fine. But then what you have to realize is that every 100% frame you put in is going to be down at like optimum moisture level. So if you add in some frames that are kind of just like slightly above optimum moisture level and then mix it all together in the extractor and in the settling process, you're going to going to balance out the, the low moisture content with the high moisture content, and you're going to come somewhere around average. So that means a lot of those frames where you're, you're kind of pulling them out and saying, oh, it's like 10% capped or 20% capped, it's not up to 80% yet, they're probably fine to go in. You wouldn't want all of your frames to be like that because the moisture content would be too high, and you're aiming for something like kind of between maybe 16 to 18% moisture content when you test it. But you can definitely balance things out. So in terms of where you're going to put things to make the most use of them, if you're going to double brood, it's really, really easy. Just leave them at the top and the bees will do whatever they need to do with them. Or if you're on a single brood box, you want to cycle them out to the edges of the brood box like that. So if you're talking specifically though about open stores that are in the brood box, it is just cycling it out to the edges like that. But don't, um, exclude a lot of the super frames just because they're not capped. Give them a good shake, test the moisture content, and hopefully you can kind of get them in the mix as well. Uh, Simon is doing a rain dance and saying good morning. Morning to you too, Simon. Uh, Dave and Ella say good morning. Hello. I just realized that I've got the text there in green. I think it's channel members. Yeah, channel members are green and I can't read it. I am getting, getting a bit old. Alan Hunter says, morning, Lawrence. Have you tried the modified Snellgrove 2 method for swarm control? Thinking of trying but don't want to lose my great Black Mountain honey queen. Do they really tear down the swarm cells themselves? So a lot of these methods where you're manipulating flying bees or foraging bees or swarming bees are all nice and they all work in their own way and they all kind of go back to, I'd say, the specific beekeeper working out a system that worked for them. Now the modified Snell Grove 2, I'm not an expert on. I couldn't say to you, oh, this is exactly how this technique works, but it is just an artificial swarm. It's a way of saying, or a way of manipulating the bees once you realize that they have swarmed to try and get them tear down the cells or to try and get them to stop swarming. I have never found any manipulation through all the ones that I've tried that is very effective at that, that is foolproof and does it 100% of the time. Most of the time I find if the bees are trying to swarm or you trigger swarming, pretty much no matter what you do, whether you put boards on and bleed flyers one way or reduce the kind of compression in the brood box by whatever method you want, the bees still often go and swarm. So it's not like a foolproof method. And I look at that and I step back and say, well, can we, can we not just like not wait for the bees to swarm? Can we just do it like a couple of weeks earlier? And then that's the Demarais method. The Demarais method, okay, it's a different manipulation, but it's, it's also a different mindset. It's saying, well, instead of waiting for the bees to tell me when they're going to swarm and then reacting, it's me trying to understand when the bees are going to swarm, cycling it back a couple of weeks, and doing something to them before they know they're ready to swarm. And I find it's so much more effective, so much more efficient, and it means that it's a lot more predictable as well because you're not waiting for a colony to react. You're going out to an apiary and saying, right, there's 12 colonies here, most of them are ready for it, I'm just going to demerit all of them, and then I get my control back in that way. So I know that's a cop-out. I've not, I've not done that. I can probably look at it and do a video on it if you want a detailed explanation, but I would say with I'm not a fan of artificial swarms because it means splitting into 2, it means waiting for the bees to tell you when they're going to swarm, and it, it often doesn't yield the results that you want. Nearly forgot the 3rd one there. Right, John and Morgie and Simon and lots of people saying good morning, so hello to everyone there. Says, morning Lawrence, I hope you're well. If overwintering in a polynuc, what do you do about ventilation? Is condensation likely to be an issue? I love this question, and it's so relevant. I'm literally going up to the forest after this to film a video on condensation. So I have a number of these. I have loads of polyhives. I love polyhives. Insulation is important. Ventilation is equally important. What's more important than ventilation, though, is the quality, the density, and the location, and the insulative value. Your insulation and where you put it within the hive. I've got my messages coming through, I forgot to turn those off. But this is, this is what I'm going up there to do. So I've got these wooden Langstroth boxes, just standard, like standard 5-frame medium Langstroth wooden boxes, and I had them stacked up just ready for processing, ready for doing some nucs in, and a swarm's gone in. Huge swarm has gone inside. Now it's attached itself to the top, there's this mesh at the top, and I looked in, I was like, oh, it's really annoying, a big swarm that's going to land in those boxes. I was going to use them Hey ho, we'll leave them there, we'll deal with it. So I was going back up there yesterday to deal with it and I took the roof off. What I'd done is there's a big mesh on the top and then there's a metal roof that was on top of that. Terrible insulation. So I just put that on because it's under another cover, so it's really, really well protected. And I thought I'd deal with that later, just pop this metal roof on. So I went out there yesterday to deal with it, took the metal roof off, and it was dripping, like dripping with condensation. Never seen anything like it. Like just taking it off and puddles of water everywhere. And that is what happens in a beehive. Like, a beehive creates huge amounts of moisture, creates huge amounts of heat, which means that the air can hold the moisture. So the humidity in a beehive is very, very high. There's lots of moisture there that if you set it up incorrectly, if you set up your insulation in the wrong place like I did with that nuc there, which is I've not done that deliberately, but I've basically set up very insulated walls in wood in comparison to a very non-insulated roof in metal. And okay, wood's not technically like an insulative material, but it's still way more insulative than metal. So I'd set it up in this wrong configuration, almost like the opposite configuration. Now, if you think about that from the moisture's point of view within the beehive, you've got this big swarm that's landed in this vertical box, this wooden box, and it's creating all of this moisture. The moisture is there, it needs to get out somewhere or it's going to go and condense on the least insulated area, and for me that was on the roof directly above the cluster. So when I pulled off the roof, all of this moisture just flies down onto the bees. Now in the middle of the summer, it's not, it's not a big deal at all, they're probably thankful for the moisture with the lack of rain, which is I think the next question coming up, but in the winter, do that and it is the worst possible setup that you can have for your bees. Your bees will really struggle in the cold, they'll struggle in the damp. And there's no need for them to struggle because it's a super easy fix. So if you're going in a poly nuc, I would say everything's fine. Leave, leave the insulation to do its work. You don't need to do any sort of modification. There'll be an open mesh on the bottom. All I would keep open is the open mesh. That is our standard overwintering kind of setup for our nucs. So insulation on top, fully covered over, crown board on, insulated roof on, and then just leave the mesh open. That configuration there is much, much better than the configuration I had, which is the roof is the most insulated, the walls are the next insulated part of the box, and then you've got a mesh on the bottom. So when the moisture's in the hive thinking, where shall I go and condense— I know moisture does not have its own thoughts, but it thinks that, doesn't it? It thinks, where am I going to condense? And what it's going to do now is that it's not going to go on the roof because that's the most insulated part. That's the part where the moisture will go last. It's going to go on the sidewalls. And if it condenses on the sidewalls, it can only go one place, which is down, because gravity just pulls it out. So your ventilation isn't so much a way of bringing air in. This is what people think— I need some air, I need to remove and replace the stale air with some ventilation, or let the bees do it. And bees do do that a little bit in the season as well, but in the winter plays a much more important role, which is like an exit for all of that condensation which you've made condense on the vertical walls. Same thing applies in a beehive as well, and this is why I give people the advice of a polyasphalte feeder. Polyasphalte feeder is great because it means that you can feed your bees syrup, means you can flip it over, feed them fondant, but it means that on any single beehive that you put it on, you've made that top super insulated. You've made it way more insulated than any other area on the beehive, even if you're putting it on top of a poly hive. It's big thick insulation, which means that the condensation can only track down the sidewalls, and as long as you've got mesh underneath, it means it can go somewhere else, and then it just makes the bees' job super easy to keep the temperature and the moisture levels in the hive absolutely spot on. That was a long, that was a long question. There we go, let's have some coffee. Oh, Morgie says, if you're starting beekeeping again, what would you do differently? I'm really bad for giving this kind of advice, you know, because a lot of the things that I did, a lot of the mistakes that I made, and a lot of the mistakes that I continue to make are kind of good for the channel a little bit. So the, the example that I would use, if, if I didn't have a YouTube channel and I didn't have— I didn't do any videos or anything like that, and I went into the apiary and my best colony had swarmed and they were up a tree, and I was having to go out and do like— I've got loads of jobs to do that day. I'm thinking, oh, it's really, really annoying. Like, my best colony swarmed and they're up a tree. Frustrating, because it means that I can't do my proper work. Whereas you flip it on its head and you think, well, Like, I go into the apiary now and I think, oh, best swarm is up in the tree, right, get the camera. And it's not like, it's not like I chased that, I didn't set the colonies up to do that, but I look at it in a slightly different way. So my mistakes and my errors were good for me and were good for my channel. Another perfect example of that is, is like buying all of the different beehives. Like, I've got every single beehive. I've got Maysmore, I've got Paynes, I've got Lyson, I've got Bello, I've got Thorns, I've got National Bee Supplies, I've got a BS Honeybees hive. Like I actually have a BS honeybees hive, so I've got the experience of all of those things. And for me, that was good because it gave people kind of access to the videos and you've got good back catalog. And then for you, for the beginner, I would say that's the worst thing that you could possibly do. Like just pick a good one, stick to it, standardize. Because I curse myself on a daily basis when the boxes don't fit and I've got top bee space like going against bottom bee space and the ridges don't fit. And then okay, I've got a roof, but oh, the roof doesn't actually go on that box. So let's just. Strap it on. That lack of compatibility and standardization is very, very frustrating. So if I was giving advice to anybody else starting beekeeping again, that would be a top tip, which is just pick a format. And that doesn't mean pick an expensive format, that means pick like a standard format. Pick a format where like multiple different suppliers supply that same thing. So I would always kind of base it on like a wooden National you're in the UK, and you can buy like seconds-grade cedar and build a lot of the stuff you want from seconds-grade cedar, as in like buy it seconds-grade and then assemble it yourself, and then you can add like your own floors in, and then all of the Abello 11-frame kit is compatible with it as well, and there's various other polyhives I think now that's still compatible with the national kit. That would be good advice, I think, just to not get caught out on all the little gizmos and gadgets and different styles of hive, but just go straight in. But then the number one, and I'll talk confidently about this now, I used to really shy away from this and just think, I don't want to, I don't want to rile people up or cause arguments, but it's the type of bee. And that's not to say that the type of bee that I've chosen is the type of bee for everyone, most certainly not. But for me, like, looking back through the videos, I mean, doing loads of this recently, like looking back like 6, 5, 4 years ago, and then kind of like last year, and then this year's videos. And like the thing that I notice is, wow, look how calm the bees are. And I'm not— it's not a plug for our nucs, like the nucs, the nucs sell very, very well without the marketing, but it is, it's my observation of it, which is they're very calm bees now. Like I was doing a short video the other day and I got to a nuc and it— oh no, it was a full-size colony, this was in like 10 frames of bees, but a big strong colony, pulling frames out and doing stuff, um, like no veil on, which of course everyone should, should wear their veil, that's a good bit of advice as well. But they were so calm. And then I look back to the video 6 years ago and I think, I was getting, I was getting hundreds of stings through the bee suit. Like, not even just not having a bee suit on and getting hundreds of stings, I was getting stung through the bee suit. Just imagine trying to do those inspections with my old bees. And it was as simple as this: I was given bad advice. I was given the advice which is you have to have the local bees, that's the only option, everything else is not good, don't even consider those options. And like it nearly killed me twice, um, and I had to move to something that was a little bit more gentle. And now that I can see that, now I can see the benefit of that for other people, and people coming to me and saying, I had, I had horrible bees for years and I didn't think like there was any way out and I just wanted to give up, and then I put your queens in and they're just like super, super chilled out and nice and I enjoy beekeeping again. So not necessarily a mistake, but some feedback which is just Don't settle for your first set of bees. If the bees that you've got aren't kind of up to scratch, then maybe look to try and improve them a bit. I think a lot of people here talking about the rain. We are due some rain tonight/tomorrow, and it said that last weekend and it didn't come, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna wait until I'm out there just like, oh, standing in the rain. We really do need it. I've had to go and put another IBC of water up there. Because a lot of the plants are dying at the forest. Um, right, jumping through. Sorry if I've missed anyone there. There was a few random comments. Right, so Melanie says, morning, going to use Apivar strips this year as a change from Apiguard. Is it worth giving them a blast of oxalic acid first and knock off the phoretic mites before Apivar, or isn't it worth it? So I don't think it's worth it. The system that we use is kind of a 2-pronged approach. Always recommend that with varroa, whatever. management system you're using, try and have 2 like opposing different treatments or methods for reducing or killing the mites. So what we use is Apivar. Really good time of the year to use it is kind of like now, next few weeks, 2 or 3 weeks. Don't wait until back end of August, early September. We're going in this year 1st of August. So taking off all the honey, putting the feeders on, putting a little bit of feed in just in case the bees need it, and then putting the Apivar strips in. Leave it for 8 weeks and don't worry about doing any oxalic acid sublimation at the moment. Just let the Apivar work. And then we will time, and we'll give people advice on this, time a natural brood break. So we're going to try and use our 3-week cold trigger. It's going to be around the winter solstice, keep getting the name wrong, around the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. But we're going to try and like fine-tune that a little bit so we can go and do a single blast of any oxalic acid-based treatment to knock off like up to 95% of those phoretic mites. But we have to be broodless in order to do that. Doing it now, you'd knock off a few phoretic mites, but I— if I'm going to have my one blast of oxalic, I want it to take down up to 95% of the mites in the colony, not just to take down the phoretic mites, which could be like as little as 20%. So no, it's not worth it now. It's definitely worth it later. Uh, Jean and Simon, hello to you both. Uh, Jean says, Lawrence, what is the best way to tell if a queen is mated or a virgin? A lot of people get this wrong. A lot of people think visually You can tell. You definitely can tell visually, but I think a lot of people misdiagnose mated queens for virgins, especially if you're getting it in a cage. A lot of people look at a queen in the cage, and I'll do it the same, say it doesn't look very big, that queen in the cage, and they shrink, they shrink themselves right down. So people say that's a virgin, when really you take that queen, introduce it into a colony, and tons of people here will have experience with this. You come back 2 or 3 weeks later and she's like doubled in size. So whilst she was mated before, she didn't look mated because she's like confined to a cage. But then really the only true way to tell— and for me it's not even a case of is it a virgin or is it a mated queen— I see it as have we had a successful mating. So I could have a mated queen that had failed. So I could have like a drone-laying queen is a mated queen a lot of the time, she's just not been mated correctly. So I'm always assessing kind of, is she successfully mated? Is she good enough to send out to a customer? And the only real way to tell that is by the brood pattern. She's got a nice capped brood pattern, like really consistent, no gaps, then she is absolutely fine. You do need to wait a little bit of time though to test that out fully. Hi Lawrence, made 2 splits yesterday, could not find the queen at all. Do I need to wait until Sunday to figure out which hive or split she is in? A lot of people do that, so that is effectively a walkaway split, which is you just kind of go in and just split a hive into 2. like that. A lot of the time, if you've got 2 brood boxes, you just go like that, put one brood box there, one brood box there, don't worry about where the queen is, and then just leave them. You didn't do anything. You just come back and the queen will be somewhere, um, and then the other one's got emergency cells, and hopefully they raise themselves a new queen. But if you, if you want to do that as a method of requeening, you can use the same kind of impulse, the, the emergency impulse, but just do the walkaway split. So just split them, wait 8 days, come back, queen's going to be in one, and the other one's going to have emergency cells that you take down, and then you can just go ahead queen. Uh, RJ Kellerman says, good morning from Heidelberg, South Africa. Sorry if I pronounced that wrong. How would I use the Demaray for apiary increase instead of huge honey yield? Good question, that. I wouldn't use the Demaray for that method, um, and the reason I wouldn't use the Demaray for that method is that there's much simpler methods and much easier methods. So the Demaray gives you bumper populations of bees, like huge honey colonies, but also huge populations, the number of bees. So they are good for splits in that sense, but they kind of— they take a lot of resource, and there's a— there's still that risk that they're going to swarm. Whereas if you're just looking to build up big strong colonies, you're much better off building the colonies up as aggressively as you can early on in the season, but once they reach that pivotal point where the brood nest stops expanding even though you're pumping it full of feed— pumping it full of feed, you're feeding the bees to get them going— that's the point that you need to split. And then maximum increase comes from maximizing the bees at that point into as many colonies as possible. So you could— let me use the example, take a colony for the beginning of the year. So you've got a colony that comes out of winter, 10-frame colony, and you say, right, I'm going to split that one up, going to get that one split, so what do I do? What I would recommend is double brooding it, getting some 1:1 sugar syrup into it and building it up, obviously once the weather allows and the forage allows and the bees that are there allows you to do this expansion, but build it up to the point where you're on double brood. You'll find that the bees will turn most of that into a brood nest early on in the year, they're not going to pack it full of honey, so you'll come back down and maybe you'll have 16 frames of brood, something like that, if you've got a nice prolific Buckfast queen in there. Now what you could do at that point is you could say, right, I'm going to do a demerit at this point, I'm going to, I'm going to do something at this point and try and expand it and put the honey supers in. And all I would say is, well, just no, stop doing that, because all they're going to do there is just keep the same size brood nest and then just start storing honey. So you're not, you're not doing what you want, which is increasing the number of colonies. Whereas at that point, if you've got 16 frames of brood, and you've got additional frames of stores elsewhere, and you're doing this like back end of April, early May, depending on like the fine-tuning for South Africa as well. But if you did that in the UK, you could take one-frame splits. You could split that 16 frames of brood up into 16 colonies, add in an additional frame of stores for each one. So you've got one frame of stores, one frame of brood, wait 8 days, knock down your emergency cells, add your mated queen in, and feed them the whole time. You'd be amazed. Yeah, like those one-frame splits will be ready for splitting probably 2 or 3 times again throughout the season, but you're starting with 16 of them. So if you go from 16 to 32 to 64, like, you could turn a colony easily. And I started doing this— I gave up at 20 because it was just too much work, too much going on at that time of the year. Um, you could easily go from one double-sized colony like that to 64 colonies in a single season with unlimited mated queens obviously going in and unlimited food and unlimited frames. But it is doable. And yeah, I wouldn't recommend the demo ray for doing it. I would just do standard standard splits, get them to kind of that maximum quantity of brood, and then just go ahead and split. Morning Lawrence, it's honey harvest day for me down here in Kent. It's been a bit light due to us not having any rain since the beginning of June. Yeah, it's not great, and I think what you'll find is that the bees will be going backwards where you are, and this is where the advice that I'm giving people at the moment, which is funny because some people are taking it completely the wrong way on social media, but the advice that I'm giving people at the moment is Go and take your honey off. Like, the season is pretty much over for most people. If you're in Scotland, probably got a few weeks left. If you're down south like John, probably a few weeks behind, and the bees have like actually absorbed and consumed some of that excess honey. But people are pointing the finger a bit and saying, ah, it's terrible advice just focusing on taking all the honey, and I say, whoa, whoa, that's not the advice here. The advice here isn't just let— oh, come on, let's get all the honey and leave the bees to it. let's cycle it back again. Why are we going in and taking the honey off now? We're taking the honey off now because we're trying to get ahead of varroa, like that's why we go in and treat early. Our focus is bees' health, we want the healthiest bees, we want our bees to come through winter well, we want our bees to be able to tackle and cope with the viral load from the varroa mite, and we take the honey off in order to enable and facilitate that treatment. So our focus is on health, and we remove the honey to focus on health. And people say, ah, focusing on the honey, and it's like, no, we're not, are we? We're focusing on the health, which, um, for the people pointing the finger, I'd probably remind them maybe that's something that you should do with your bees as well. But there we go. Wow, triggered me big time there. No one even said anything. John Denham says, morning, Lawrence, the Obsidian Queen I bought a few weeks ago is doing great. Can't wait to see how she goes next year. That's really, really good to hear, John. I've got a few, I've got a few Obsidian up there and I'm looking after for someone, and I've also got a few in my colonies as well. And there is no nicer feeling than going into the apiary, cracking open the obsidian, realizing you've probably got to get in there a little bit more to break all of the propolis seals, but the smell, the smell that comes from the obsidian is just different from the rest of the beehives. It is, might be the longer tongue accessing the different nectar, definitely going to be the excessive propolis that they put in there, but they're nice, they're chilled-out bees, they're super fluffy and grey looking as well, so yeah, I'm a big, big fan of obsidians, and we'll be doing lots, lots more of them next year. Uh, well, here we go. Yeah, it's green. Thomas says, hi Lawrence, we're making late season nucs. When would you treat them? I'm taking my supers off today and we'll treat them in the first week of August. So again, this is, it's good advice for people, and it's making sure that your nucs that you're making are well treated to reduce the viral load going into winter. Now normally with main colonies, your supers are the thing that's stopping you treating any earlier. There's no point kind of saying, okay, well, look, let's just not take any honey off ever, let's just keep on treating the bees to make sure that they're healthy. There needs to be like a two-way relationship there. So that bringing the honey harvesting early to facilitate early treatment to keep the bees on— like, to keep the bees healthy on big colonies is, I think, the right strategy. But when you're doing nucs, there's no honey on the nucs, like you're not going to harvest the honey, it's just brood frames, so you can, you can treat very, very early. You can treat when you make the nucs up, so a lot of people do, so they'll go in. My advice to anyone making nucs from this point forward, I said it last week as well, 3 frames of brood, 2 frames of stores, good shake of bees, an extra shake if you can do with it, and then take them to another apiary if you possibly can. Keep the entrances really, really small and do not feed in the same apiary. But what you can do is when you're making up those nucs, just pop in the Apivar strip at that point. Wouldn't fret too much about the fact you've only got 3 frames of brood in there, the colony will expand over that period, so I just go with a single frame of brood, right in the middle of the brood nest. So if you've got 3 frames of brood, or you probably have it 2 frames of stores, 3 frames of brood, and then a frame of foundation towards the edge, just put the Apivar strip slap bang in the middle of the brood, and then you're going ahead and treating early. So you can just, you can treat now. If people are doing that kind of June next year, you can just treat straight away, as long as you're not putting those, upgrading those colonies back into beehives and then trying to put supers on. You get a free hit, and it means that the nucs are very, very good coming out of winter. Well, I'm gonna have a sip of coffee. Uh, right, John says, move my bees to the heather on Thursday. If people are thinking of taking the bees up, I would be doing it now, it's in bloom. I'm in County Durham. Great shout! I've been saying this to people for ages, like, get them up there now. 12th of August is not when you want to be getting your bees up to the heather. It is far, far too late. The Glorious 12th is kind of almost when you're going to be taking them back down now. I say that, it's probably going to be longer than that, but it's— yeah, get them up there now. Anybody who I know that's going to the heather has either gone or is kind of going this weekend. And if you go this weekend, you might get a reasonable flow depending on how much rain you've had in that location. I'm not taking mine up to North Wales. It's like burnt to a crisp. It's just dark and brown and no flowers and nothing. So it's not in bloom. There might be a little bit there, but I'm not I'm not going through the the effort of doing it because it is quite a lot of work. Jean says, Lawrence, who taught you about beekeeping? You're an amazing teacher. Thank you for all your knowledge. Oh well, I'm definitely self-taught through lots and lots of mistakes. I've got Richard now, so Richard Richard puts me right all the time. Richard is very very experienced when it comes to beekeeping, but I learned a lot through failure, and I guess that the scars are still there through that failure, thinking. Do you know what, I wish someone else had told me this before I made all of these mistakes, because beekeeping is relatively simple. It really isn't that complicated. There's a number of things that can go wrong that all have relatively easy fixes. There's a number of things that you can do to kind of mitigate the worst of the beekeeping season, whether that's starvation or swarming. And if you focus in on the right things, then, and have enough colonies, then you've always got the ability to kind of get things back on track. Now I'm going to do a video about this when Zane comes back. I should say where Zane's been really. So I was supposed to go to Jersey. I had a message from a company— well, I met this guy called Nigel down at one of the shows from a company called Apitoura. So they're the ones that make these little wasp and Asian hornet pods. Quite a cool design. I did a video about it and he messaged and said, look, we're going down to Jersey for a couple of days just to do some stuff. Do you fancy coming? Like, it'd be quite cool, we'll pay for you to come down. Um, and I thought, wow, yeah, well up for that. So can Zane come as well and we'll video it? And he said, yeah, definitely, let's, let's book it all in. So it was all booked in and then my situation changed somewhat, so I, I couldn't go. And I said to Nigel, I said, I, I'm so sorry, Nigel, I've got to cancel. I cancelled tons of really cool trips this year, but have to, have to stay home. I said, I, I can't come, my wife's not well. Can, can I send Zane? Because I think Zane will do like a kind of good, if not better, job than me going down there. We can send Zane, we'll do some stuff, and then we'll do a podcast and talk about it and produce some videos. And is that okay? And he said, yeah, yeah, sure. So that's where Zane's been, um, the past few days. He just got back, and I've not seen any of the footage yet, but I'm really, really excited about kind of going and seeing what, what all of, all of the fuss is down there. But this is where My— I have like an appetite for knowledge, and the Asian hornet one has always frustrated me a little bit because people say, what should I do about Asian hornets? And I say, well, it's not really impacting us yet, so we're not, we're not going to be the experts. We don't really know 100% what should we be— what we should be doing. Same as like small hive beetle. If you said to me, what, what should I be doing for small hive beetle? I'd say, well, I can go and read what it says on the internet, but we've never had it here, so we don't have to, we don't have to worry about it. And I realized for me, as like a beekeeping educator now, that I need to, I need to get ahead of things like that, especially ones that are on the frontier, ones that are here and coming in. So we sent Zane down to do the Asian hornet. Zane's going to come back and try and transfer across as much of that information as possible to illustrate what they're doing on Jersey, because they're managing it reasonably well. There's some people there who are years ahead of anyone in the UK, and we're going to try and tease that information out and get it out to the channel. I don't even know where I kind of got onto talking about that, Gene, but there we go. That— there's the next bit of teaching that's coming your way. Uh, Electrical Courses, I love it, says, morning Lawrence, I'm going to rear some queens next year using the Avellote Mini Plus. I'll be using the awesome Black Mountain Honey BF Buckfast 2025. I want to replace some current queens, can you advise? Oh, I, I wasn't going to go into too much detail on that one though. I would say just follow one of the videos. The videos are going to be able to explain that much, much better than I can. I'll also be doing some videos next year on some smaller queen rearing methods. So I'll try and do them before people kind of actually have the chance to go and do them. I don't want to— I don't want everyone to fall into that trap that I fell in, which is you need all of these resources to make up hundreds of queen cells, because you quite clearly don't. And there's going to be better ways of doing it on a smaller scale. Uh, so that's all I would say is that, yeah, don't buy too much kit. You can do it with a very little amount of kit. The Abello Mini Plus are quite nice though. I do like raising my queens in those ones. Uh, Rashid says, does anyone here know about an online beekeepers community? I love it, brilliant, that's not even plugged. 14-Day Beekeeper is a great online course, and hiveq.com is where you need to go for your online community. Uh, Gillian McKay says, just built clearer boards, what's the best method timing to use them? I'm in Scotland too, I'm worried about uncapped supers as our season has only really took off 2 to 3 weeks ago. HiveQ has been amazing. I'm glad, I'm glad you are enjoying it, Gillian. So What clearer boards are you using? I would recommend like a rhombus style. Rhombus style, I think, are the easiest ones to use. That's like a big hole, and then the escapes kind of funnel down to these 2 small little rhombus entrances, just like normal entrances, and they work very, very well. They're very, very, very, very quickly. They do need a reasonable good flow, so when you're thinking like if it's in Scotland and you put them on and the bees are just a bit like, not going out today, you want to put them on in a flow really, or when the bees are flying. and they only want to be on for about 24 hours, make sure you put them the right way up. The way that is the right way up is to have the additional space in the— you kind of have like a multi-purpose crown board, but the space should be facing down. If the space is facing up, got it wrong. Feel free to send some pictures or put some pictures onto HiveQ on that one as well, because there is a couple of different ways you need to set them up. But all I would say, the best advice for using clearer boards— I don't use clearer boards, but the best advice for using clearer boards is to make sure that there is sufficient space in the bottom part of the beehive where you're trying to compress the bees down into. You can compress the bees to a certain extent, but you can't work miracles with clearer boards, and you'll go back in and you'll get most of them down, and then you'll be like, right, what am I going to do now with all the bees that are left there? Because 80% of them are down, but there's quite a lot left. I'm going to shake them, am I going to try and brush them, or am I going to get the blower out and blow them? And I came to the conclusion in the end, well, if I'm going to get the blower out and blow them, I might as well just blow them out in the first place. Now that's not to say that that's the, the way it works for everyone. In good weather, clearing boards are very, very good. Good timing, go in, put them in late on the— late on in the day, or kind of like around midday onwards when the bees are flying, and then go back early the next day, and you should have most of the bees compressed down if you gave them enough space. Just wanted to say, as a new beekeeper starting next season, following Zane's first nuc has been so interesting to learn from Oh well, do you know what, I wish it had been a little bit more successful. And it's funny, I know where I was going, uh, on the gene question previously now, which is the learning. You can apply the learning to kind of any beehive. If you've got an unlimited amount of time, you can go there and kind of make sure that you eliminate the majority of the mistakes. And your, your handling and your husbandry is going to play a part in that as well. You obviously can't go and kill queens randomly and, and expect the colony to do well. But I've got a— at the apiary up at the forest, one of the little segments of it just shows what is possible throughout the beekeeping season, and it shows what good looks like, and it also shows what bad looks like. It's got pretty much everything there. So I'll give you like a bit of an example of some of the different colonies that we've got in that apiary. So we've got Zane's first nuc on his 3rd queen or whatever. There's a super of honey full. I don't think they're going to fill the second one. I don't even think they're going to touch the second one. I'm going to go back up there today and have a look and see how they're getting on. I've got another colony up there that is on a treble demaré with a blue 2025 overwintered queen, so it's got 3 brood boxes on. One of the brood boxes is like half brood, half stores. One of the brood boxes is full, and when you see it, you'll agree it is full. It is incredibly heavy to lift down, and then there's like 3 or 4 supers on it as well. And then there's the brood box at the bottom and the queen is still there. So a colony, a 2025 colony that didn't swarm, probably going to yield like 150 pounds of honey. There is a swarm, like another colony, there's a swarm that I caught, really like good-sized swarm, probably like 8-frame swarm. Put the queen excluder on, put the first super on. What do you think happened with that one? Random feral swarm. They didn't go up into the super and they just swarmed again. Always the way with feral swarms. Brilliant. Spent years doing that, you know, putting the work and putting the effort in, and then like this swarm, it's just like, oh, really frustrating. Um, I had a colony that I went to go and do a demeray on, 6-frame nuc that I put in there. It had grown up, it was on a brood box, 2 supers full, and I went in and they'd swarmed, but they'd left behind some capped swarm cells. So I'd knocked all of those down, left a single swarm cell, and I've gone back in and the 2 supers are still full, and the queen's kind of gone out and got mated, so they got back on track. So there's all of these different examples, and it doesn't really matter that some failed and some did well, and some have got loads of honey on and some have got no honey on, because like, for me, what matters is the collective. As long as you're doing enough things right, you're getting enough honey, it doesn't matter that the odd one fails, doesn't matter that you lose the odd swarm. And whilst I would have loved the 150-pound hive to be the Zane's first nuc one, because it's a dead gentle hive as well, like really, really nice, big, prolific, strong hive. I might just switch them over, switch them over and say, oh yeah, it's done it in a week, 150 pounds of honey. But I do, I, I wish that had been the hive because it would have, it would have been really, really nice to show everyone. But I understand it from the beginner's point of view now that the, the Zane's First Nuc series probably fixes a lot more of the problems that could happen to people with their first colony. So when you get your bees next year, you might go through some of those problems and you might be able to fix them, and you might be able to get to that point where you've got like 2 supers of honey or 3 supers of honey at the end of the year. So I'm not like— from an ego point of view, it's like, ah, could have been, could have been a really good one, that one. But I think over the longer term, the fact that it all went wrong and we've like got it back on track is going to be more beneficial for people. And I would say that's— I think, fingers crossed, like touch wood— going to be the greatest success, is that if we get that colony through the winter, I think that's the important bit. Start again the following season, because the next season it can be the 150 Pound Hive. There we go, doing like my YouTube outro there, um, holding like my cricket stroke. I get so confused, am I filming or am I streaming? Right, here we go. Hi Lawrence, do you think the heather will yield this year, noting the weather we've had for the last few weeks? So I, I definitely learned not to give sweeping advice for the whole of the United Kingdom and Ireland because that's not going to be the best way of doing things. I am working on that though. I am working on how we can reduce the advice down to your location, and the little clue is it will live within hiveq.com. But for us, I can talk about us in North Wales. So for us in North Wales, I do not think we're going to get any decent amount of heather this year. I'd be amazed if I see even a purple bloom. Um, for people in Scotland, sounds like it's pretty run-of-the-mill in terms of the rainfall that they've had so far. So if you get the nice weather now, could be on for like the best heather year ever. Down south, again, I think it's probably going to be too dry in the UK, and I know over in Ireland it's been relatively dry as well, but I still think like Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, you might have had enough rain, and if you get the nice weather now, you could get a decent amount of heather honey. Hi Lawrence, I'm in my first year. I'm getting confused with what to do with my bees when I take the supers off. How do I give them space so they don't swarm? I had my email today is going out on this very, very topic. So previously the advice that I would have given is this: you need to take your honey supers off so you can treat your bees. Yeah, so right, honey supers off. Okay, let the bees compress into that box, they will get inside it. Now that advice is normally built around kind of middle of August, back end of August. Doing it at this time of the year is gonna not work In the same way. So my recommendation for people, and I'll be finessing and finalizing and formalizing, I should say, this into a little bit of a system, but my recommendation to everyone is as a minimum have 2 brood boxes for each colony. It gives you the ability to fix the problem that you've got now, it gives you the ability to do a Demarest split, it gives you the ability to overwinter on a double brood, but it gives you the ability to start the spring again on single brood, which is really, really important. So you're getting confused with it now because you've got the supers and you've got a single brood box, so you're thinking, I take the supers off, there's going to be too many bees in that box and they're going to swarm, and I would agree with you. At this time of the year, that's probably going to be the case, and also if you've got the bees bearding out the entrance, it's not going to be the easiest to defend as well. It's going to open it up to attack, so my advice to everyone this year is Take off the honey supers and add an additional brood box on top. Put your feeder on, feed the bees if they need it, but you're just trickle feeding to get, to get them through. You're not looking to pump them full of syrup, and then let them overwinter on double brood. Like, you're— the bees have still got plenty of foraging left. You're not going to harvest any of the honey, but they'll still build up, and adding that additional double brood on means that you're highly unlikely to swarm kind of back end of the year due to space. Now here's the nice thing with this though, yeah, you don't need to stick on double brood forever. So you're gonna, you're gonna have single brood at the moment, you're gonna put another brood box on top like that, and then you're gonna go into winter like that, and all the bees will just migrate up to the top, and you'll just have all the bees at the top and an empty box come spring. At that point, you just take the box away, you start again on single brood. What that gives you the ability to do is do a demaray. So you start the season on single brood, you add your first super on, you add your second super on, you're on a brood box and 2 supers, you think, right, I'm gonna do a demaray. You take the bottom box, lift up to the top, put a new box on, on the bottom. The reason that I've given you that configuration there is because that's the configuration that a lot of people will find themselves in now, which is a brood box, X amount of supers, let's say 6 supers, and then another brood box on the top, which is like a post-demaray configuration. Now a lot of people thinking, what am I doing here? What am I doing with the honey that's in the demaray, in that top brood box? Because if it's been tainted with Apivar, you can't extract it. So you can either take that top box, put it to the bottom, and then try and force the bees to work it through, or the much easier solution, if you're configuring down or compressing down to double brood, is do this. You've got top brood box, you've got a bottom brood box, you've got all the supers in the middle. Harvest all the supers, go off and take them away, and just do this: brood box at the bottom, honey stores on the top. It's in a brood box configuration. That little system there is very repeatable throughout the year, gives you double brood when you want to double brood, it gives your bees space to stop them swarming, it gives you the ability to do the Demaray, which also stops swarming and increases your honey yield. It gives you so much flexibility, and it means that you never have to worry about artificial swarms, you never have to worry about splitting, because it's always managed on a single floor. I love the Demaray split. I'm going to be developing it into this kind of double brood Demaray full season cycle article showing you how to do multiple demarais in the season but only with the 2 boxes. That is the plan. I've not finalized it yet. I've got about 85% of it, um, but there we go. How do I give them space so they don't swarm? Add another brood box on, go into winter on double brood. Uh, Pointy Men— sorry if I said it wrong— says, hi Lawrence, I have 3 of your Lutz Egger queens and I'm delighted with them. I want to expand numbers, so who makes best nucs and hives on the Langstroth platform? Thanks. Um, first up, I'm glad that you're happy with the queens. They are very, very Very, very good. I'm really pleased with all of the queens we're being sent. Uh, and then, uh, expanding on the numbers, so the best nucs for Langstroth— we don't do a huge amount of Langstroth. I'm still running the Payne's Langstroth ones, but there is a slight, um, there's just a slight sizing issue on them that we're working on that one. But no, I don't— I've not got a favorite. I have to say, all of the Langstroth ones that I've got have been made-up wooden ones. The, the beauty of Langstroth is that it's super simple. Like if you can, if you can cut yourself a finger joint or get someone else to do it for you, you can build a lot of these boxes even with like butt joints. You could do it. Don't take my recommendation and use butt joints. Get someone proper to do it. But Langstroth is so simple that you can build a lot of the stuff yourself even with very, very limited skills. And the fact that it's top B space makes it so much easier. So you're not going to worry about any like rebates or adding space onto anything. It's just sheet, sheet goes on top like that, right? That's the crown board. It's, uh, it's a much, much nicer and easier system the national. So yeah, I wouldn't give a recommendation for the best Langstroth nuc in the UK because I don't think I found that one yet. Um, but yeah, make some of your own. Can you remove the internal feeder from the Pains of Poly nuc? Really enjoy listening to this chat. I'm glad you're enjoying it. Um, yes you can, and it's, it's such a nice design feature. I just— oh, all of them should have removable feeders like that because it means you can add additional frames in if you want, if you want to kind of butcher it. But for me, it acts as like, um, a dummy board So you kind of go in, instead of trying to pull the frame out, you just push the frames over a bit, pull the feeder, go, comes out, take it off to one side, and I've got like a 2-frame gap in order to do manipulations and stuff, which is, which is very, very helpful. Lawrence, are Buckfast queens available in the US? So yeah, there's plenty of Buckfast breeders in the US. Yeah, there we go, that's all I'm going to say. Our new queen had a honey-bound brood box, so we swapped 3 capped frames of honey with foundation, harvest 1 and froze 2. When do we thaw and put it back, put back the thawed frames of honey? What's the trigger? Right, um, so you're not— there's no trigger, there's no like, right, you should put it back in now, and kind of at that end of the year it's almost more, more hassle than it's worth. My recommendation for you is keeping them in the freezer. Sorry if they're in like causing a nuisance, keep them in the freezer, and then when you go to make a split next year, that's the best use of them, because what you can do is you can just make a split next year. You can take out a good frame of brood, put it in your thawed frame of honey, put that in, good shake of bees, go ahead, um, like wait 8 days, take down the cells, add your mated queen in, and that's a really, really good use because it means that you can turn, like, you can turn an 8-frame colony into 8 splits as opposed to turning an 8-frame colony into 4 splits. So I wouldn't be adding it back in for winter feed. It's not— its use as winter feed is nowhere near as valuable to you as the ability to make those splits. Uh, Michael says 80 watching and only 12 likes. Come on folks, hit the like button. Thank you very much, Michael. It's worth noting at this point I am changing the way these streams are going on. I am, I'm afraid. So there is a change coming, and the change is probably coming next week. So I do the streams every single week in the season, and then outside of the season I go down to once per month. That's not happening yet, so that'll probably be like 1st of September is the once per month. So we've got Got five weeks left. I'm looking at my calendar down here. Five weeks left of kind of like the weekly streams, and then we go down to once per month. But what I am doing is I'm moving where these are hosted. Now I know that's not going to be ideal for everyone, and it's it's a nuance of the Circle community. But I do need to do the live streams over in Circle going forward. So it will they will end up behind the Hive Cube paywall. It's only eight pound ninety nine per month. However, what I will be doing. is I will be filming the live streams over within HiveQ and I'll release them on YouTube. So anybody who's watching this and they're like, that's annoying because I want to listen in, you can still listen in, it just won't be live. Um, and then anybody on Circle or HiveQ, like, that's where the questions will be. And the reason, the reason I'm doing that is I'm really struggling to keep up with the comments. Like, I came in the other week and I got an hour, I can only do an hour, and I can never get to the end of the comments. And I just the way to filter and prioritize them, the most sensible way of doing it is just putting it over on that platform over there. So going forward, the live streams will be released kind of— it'll be Sunday morning. So I'll be doing the live stream and releasing it on a Sunday morning for people to watch. It'll just be like a video one. It won't be edited. It will still be like exactly the same. There just won't be the live chat functionality on it. And then for anybody else over on Circle, on hiveq.com, you will get it live over there. I appreciate that is not ideal for everyone. It's the only way that I could make it work to kind of continue doing it on such a, on such a regular basis, but also ensuring that everybody gets their questions answered. Right, Twinkle Roo says, morning, Laurence, I have one hive on double brood, the other on single brood. Do I leave the double brood on whole winter to spring or remove the second box at some point? So I think this year is a really good year for everyone to go and use double brood. and overwinter in that configuration and then fix it in the spring. The reason I say that is that I think we're going to be doing more feeding this year than normal, so you kind of want a space for the bees to cluster. We're taking the honey off earlier this year than normal, which means that the colony kind of— there's not going to be enough space for the bees. So if there's not enough space for the bees, you need to put the brood box on. If you're putting the brood box on now, there's definitely no point in taking it off. off before winter, because which box do you take off? You're going to come in, in this, if you come in like back end of the year, the bees will be brood at the bottom, stores at the top. You think, well, can't take either because you can't take the brood, that's where all the bees are, you can't take the stores because that's what they need to eat, so they'll migrate up. The bees will just kind of go up like that and then consume all the stores, bottom box is empty and you can swipe it away in the spring. Right, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna try and get through as many, as many ones as I can in the last 5 minutes. I've got to take my daughter out at 8 o'clock. Super sticker, thank you, sir. You, you do not need to do that every time, but it's much appreciated. You just said not to feed a split if it's in the same apiary. Is that for a set period? Thanks. Um, yes, so for a set period, and it's to bleed the foragers off. This is why I always recommend to people go and take the splits to a new apiary. If you're making splits in the same apiary, you'll have like a few challenges that are on. The first one though is that you'll take the split, move it somewhere else, and all the forager bees will just kind of go back to the original hive. If you start feeding the new nuc, the forager bees go back with a message which is, buffet over there, free-for-all buffet over there, and all the bees just go over and strip it, and you come back and there's just like 2 frames of brood and nothing. It's just like empty, no bees, no stores, no nothing. Whereas if you don't feed, then all of the bees still go back, the forager bees go back here, but they leave you with the young nurse bees. They leave you kind of like in a position that can cope. Now if you feed at that point, so if you wait like a few days and feed at that point, then the forager bees can't send the message back and that's what stops the robbing. I would just be really, really careful though doing splits in the same apiary at this time of the year because the forager bees are your defenders, they're the ones that are going to stop like the wasps coming in. If you go ahead and do like a 2 or 3 frame split at this time of the year, do it in the same apiary, all the foragers go back to the original hive and you're just left with the nurse bees, the wasp comes to the entrance and it's just like Just like wanders in, just like, can I, can I come up here? Yeah, all right, sweet, nice bees, yep, fine. And before you know it, you're overrun with wasps. Whereas if you take it to a new apiary, you can feed straight away because you don't trigger any sort of robbing. The feeding is good for the colony, strengthens the colony as well, boosts the defenses for when the wasps come, and then you don't, you don't have any of those other issues associated with that. So yeah, I wouldn't feed in the same apiary. Everyone's done it, you You make the split, set it up, feed, and then all hell breaks loose. Oh, Jean says all the best to your family. Thank you, Jean, you're here every single week. Morning, Laurence, just to be clear on Apivar strips, 1 strip per 5 frames, so roughly 2 per brood box. If I have double brood, is it 2 strips per box? I assume not 4 in the top box. So Apivar is a strip per 5 frames of brood, that's that, like, and you can adjust it according to that, so it's got nothing to do with boxes. It's got nothing to do with, um, yeah, nothing to do with boxes, nothing to do with kind of like empty frames that you're putting in there. So don't worry about single brood, don't worry about double brood, just count up roughly the frames of brood that are in there, and then you want 1 frame per 5 frames of brood-ish. Round it up if you need to round it up. So if you went into a, let's say, a 10-frame box that had 7 or 8 frames of brood, I'd give them 2 strips. If you went into a double brood configuration, that had like 8 frames of brood on the bottom box and then all honey up here, I'd still give them 2 frames of strips. You put the strips where the brood is, you count up the frames of brood, and you want 1 strip per 5 frames of brood, as I say, ish, always round it up. Don't go putting 3 frames in there though. If you're, you know, if you're 7 or 8 frames of brood, you can go for 2, if you're 12 frames of brood, you can probably go for 3, and then you just want to put it in the most sensible location, evenly spread throughout the hive. Hi Lawrence, what do you know about soil mites? I found 50+ mites walking around my varroa boards, but AI said they were soil mites, not varroa. Teardrop shape, not crab shape, but very small. I don't know much about soil mites. There's tons of different mites you get, like you get like pollen mites as well, and should get the microscope in and see if we can identify all of the different mites. But I would say, yeah, there's nothing to worry about in terms of stuff that you're finding on the Varroa tray like that, unless, unless AI tells you it's something to worry about. I think, I think it should be okay. Uh, right, a couple minutes left. Um, right, here we go. Simon says, I've been thinking about castellations for Langstroth. Worth it, or is there too much variation across different brands? Definitely too much variation across different brands. That's one of the problems with Langstroth. And I really, really do like it, but it's not standardized. It's a global standardized system, and then each country has a slightly different take on it. So the Langstroth frames that you might get in the UK are different from the ones that you get in America. I actually think the Langstroth frames that you get in the UK are superior to the American ones. I know I'm going to get abused, aren't I, on social media for saying that one, but I do think they are, and I'll tell you the reason why. I had a really lovely Canadian lady over this week and she— I said I had a Canadian lady at the Honey Honesty Box, yeah, and we came in from filming and Zane said there's a couple of Canadian ladies out there, maybe you should go and say hello. And I was like, okay, I can say hello. I was like, hello, and then I got chatting to them and one of them was a beekeeper. She said, oh, I keep bees in Canada, and I was like, no way, I keep bees just up the road. would you like to come and have a look? And she said, yeah. I wasn't expecting that, but she said yeah. So anyway, I took her up there and I showed her some of the stuff, and she was like, whoa, these boxes are cool! She loved all the different, like, colorful Abello boxes that I had, but she said, oh, they're my— they're the ones that I've got. She pointed to some 5-frame Langstroth boxes. I said, oh yeah, let's pull them out, and said, oh, these are the kind of frames. And she said, oh, you're so lucky over here. And I said, why is that? She said, you Our frames are not like that. She said they're the same, like they're the same size. How random is this? But she said you've got, you've got the wired foundation like that, and your bottom bar is 2 bottom bars as opposed to like a single one. And then what that means is that you can put like wired foundation, you know, a foundation with the zigzag wires on. So in, in the US, that's not really how they do it. What they do in the US is they have a solid bottom bar and then they wire the frame And then they just kind of like embed a piece of foundation on, and I'm not a fan of that. Like, it does work, and it's not, it's not my preferred method. I would say it's quicker, and on a commercial setup, that's probably what you want to be doing. But just from a, like, a personal pulling out frames, I much prefer the ones where I've got the wired foundation but also the 2 bottom bars that kind of brace that foundation, because it means that when you pull the frame up like that, the The foundation doesn't sag, and it does do that on the other Langstroth one. Like you can get a little bit of sag in it if not done correctly, probably the way that I'm putting it on. But I just find my frames are so much more solid and robust, kind of with the wide foundation in, but also with that mounting point at the bottom. So I go off on like massive tangent there. What was the question? Should you make them? No. The top bars are different as well, and that's probably the biggest one. I think it's the thickness of the top bar. Isn't consistent, which for constellations needs to be absolutely spot-on. Right, I'm really sorry everyone, that is, that is the end of the stream. I need to go and take my daughter out. So the next one will be released at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. And for anybody who wants to watch it over at HiveQ, if you go to hiveq.com and sign up, I will see you all there. We'll stick to the same time, 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning. Yeah, see you all then. I hope you all