Let's Talk Bees - Episode 67

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I've got paint on my face and obviously my hair has just gone boof in the heat, but we're going to do another live stream, we're going to talk about bees, but we are back in the kind of last bit of my house because I've not prepared anything, so this is kind of what beekeeping is like in the summer, it is carnage. But I just want to turn on my live stream so then I can see all of the comments and stuff. I'm not being rude and ignoring everyone, I'm just going to go in here, turn the sound off, and then I can read the comments Down here. But also the problem is I still don't— I don't know if I've gone live properly. I could just be talking absolutely to no one here. So my screen is not working. I am going to quickly just go around the back and have a look and see whether that was working. Let's just kind of go like that. And yeah, it's working. Okay, cool. So all I need to do now is work out how to get onto my livestream on here. Anyone can send me a link, that'd be helpful. Oh, right. Just bear with me 2 minutes. Look, I'm on the page, I'm clicking on it, and it's not working. So it's kind of not a user error, like I know what I'm doing, but it's just not clicking on my livestream. It's very, very strange. So how are we going to do this? I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what's been going on whilst also trying to navigate into the livestream. I'm not very good at doing 2 things at once. And I just hope that I can get like further enough in, far enough into it— The livestream. To get it to work. There we go, got it to work. So I have the questions now, apologies for that. It is a very, very busy time of year and I'm just looking at the amazing set that I've put up here today. It's pretty rubbish. And then my sister-in-law and nephew behind me there. So we'll do better, we'll do better. Well, I'm gonna go through the questions there. So hello to Aaron. Hi Aaron, how's it going? Thanks for your work and your pizzas, they're amazing. Aaron has already given me my first instructions drink my tea. So thank you for that, Aaron. I'll do it. Hello, happy Friday. Happy Friday to you too. I gotta remember to stop talking into the thing. I need to, because no one can see me otherwise, can they? So I will put this down as soon as I start answering questions. I'll tell you what I did. I did it this way before, didn't I? This was, this was a better way of doing it. I very nearly dropped it, and I will try to not drop it again. I have to try and remember this. So we can hear you, we can hear you. Hello to everyone. Jay says flow was well on here today and loads of pollen coming in as well. So this is the nice thing about this time of the year, I love it, if you've actually gone ahead and taken your honey off at this point, is that the bees, the bees just get it all and it's good for the bees, it does definitely pay you back in the winter just leaving the bees to settle themselves down and take whatever comes in. The next week or so does look nice but in my experience even when you get like this nice late season weather once, all of those plants have expired because of the short season and the lack of the rain. The sun doesn't really do a huge amount. So although it looks nice on the weather forecast, and it is very, very nice, I don't think the yield will be huge unless you're in a heather area where you should be getting a decent amount coming in now. But even the heather, like around here, I've not taken my bees to the heather again because I've still got lots and lots of heather in buckets. But also, it doesn't look good. like it just didn't look good, the fields, they looked very, very brown, and all of the moorland as you drove through it earlier on in the year, it just looks so parched, so brown, so early, so I just didn't go. And normally at this time of the year, if you go up there, it's all nice and purple, and it's not, it's just brown. Not good. Right, let's have a look at some of these other questions then. So Pete says good evening, good evening to you Pete. Hi, hello, I'm new to the bee community, I delivered one of your queen bees to my customers a matter of weeks ago, they invited me to tend to their bees and I'm hooked. I love that. It's so funny, everyone who does it likes it. So I've got a new videographer at the moment and he got stung by a wasp today, but he's becoming inquisitive and he's thinking, oh yeah, maybe like, you know, get a beehive. And it's just you get introduced to it without even thinking about it and you think, well, that's strange that a lot of people have this beekeeping hobby and it gets a lot of people. And Once beekeeping's got you in its grips, it's got you for good, because it is, it's just fascinating. They are wonderful to sit there and watch. I'm just kind of thinking in my mind about what I've been doing today, so I'll talk about that quickly. So the storage units that I kind of got up at the forest just look terrible. Oh, shocking. And then I tried to paint them myself just to make them look not like dirty white plastic, and I didn't do a very good job of cleaning it or priming it or anything like that. I just spray painted over the dirt, and within a few days it's all just started to like fall off again. So I thought, well, I'm going to do— I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it properly. You might have seen a post I put on Facebook saying, do I have any connections with anyone who does good like murals or street art? And I got connected with someone very, very quickly, and they, they have been up there today painting the storage containers and painting some beehives and painting some other bits as well, and doing just a phenomenal job. Oh wow, it's my new favourite place to be. Right, so Mem says, hi Lawrence, bought 2 queens from you a few weeks ago, both queens were not marked, is this normal? So we fixed the markings. So the heat this year has just played havoc with the pens that we used, and they had to change formula on the pens. So there was a good, I would say, a good 5 or 6 week period in the middle of the summer where a lot of the markings were wearing off, not got the problem anymore. So rest assured, any more that come will be marked. But yeah, I don't know, I've never experienced it before where it's been like so widespread like that. You get the occasional one where it's particularly hot, they rub it off and buff it off, but this one, it was a good 6-week period. Hi, I saw a queen on my last inspection that was new and she looked mated. How long should it take for her to lay, and if not, how long to be bald? So there'll be no definition in terms of how long to be bald, but in terms of how long from her going out and getting mated should come into lay within kind of like 4 to 5 days after being mated, maybe slightly earlier than that. But it's more the duration from when she emerges as a virgin queen and then takes her time to become sexually mature. It's that period there where you've got a real stopwatch on her. There's like a 2 or 3 week stopwatch there. And if she doesn't go out and mate, and it's probably closer to the 2 weeks, some people will tell you it's longer than that, but for me, if the queen doesn't go out and get mated in the first 2 weeks, from when she's sexually mature, that we wouldn't use a queen if she did that. So that's the more tight— I say more timely time, it's not that— that's the more relevant piece of information at that 2-week date, because it will give you an understanding of when to kind of kill any virgins that haven't been out properly and mated. So yeah, that's what I understand. We're all the way down here now. Sorry, right, Lynette says hello. Danny says, I got my 2 queens from you last week, but the splits have been getting battered by the wasps, going in Sunday to see if they've made it. A lot of people have been struggling with the wasps. It's funny, I went up to a colony, I took 2 colonies right next to each other, and one was like probably on about 3 frames, 3 or 4 frames of bees, and I just looked at it yesterday and the wasps had taken it out and completely killed it. And then the one next to it was also one of the similar size, I must have made them up at the same time, but probably 3 or 4 frames of bees, but lots of empty space in the hive, and they'd managed to fight off the wasps. So whether that's just that they're working their way along, once they clear out the one next door, they will finish off that one as well. But it's— people say, what do you do for wasps? How do you fix the wasp problem? I've got a real big wasp problem, what do I do? And I always say it's not something that you can fix. It's not an easy fix to go in and kind of fix somebody else's wasp problem. The best thing you need to do, if you're managing wasps, you need to start managing them April and May. And that sounds a bit weird, but what it means is that you need to make sure that come July or August, but like definitely August, but come July you've got big strong colonies and you've not got colonies that have got failed virgins in them or drone-laying queens or laying workers, because they just get taken over every year by the wasps. Like, it's not a surprise the wasp activity that we're seeing. It's worse than it normally is, but it's always there. It's persistent. This time of the year you have to protect your colonies, and you do that by making sure, like in June, you're going around checking, making sure all the queens are— making sure the colonies are queen right, putting in new queens where you need to, compressing colonies back down again. So if you've done an artificial swarm and maybe one half you've left a normal queen in and they're doing well, and then the other half you've just left them with one queen cell, and then that version's not gone out and mated and come back and failed, like, at that point you could just merge those 2 colonies back together. If they've been left there for 6 or 8 weeks with no queen, they just dwindled away to nothing, and everything that is there is big old bees. So what a lot of people do in that scenario there is they say, okay, well, I might be able to fix that by putting in a new queen at that point, but what will happen is you'll get 3 weeks of no new bees emerging, but you'll get 3 weeks of lots of old bees dying. So you get this perfect storm of kind of the collapse of the colony just as the wasps are getting strong. So we see a lot of that, but it's knowing kind of when you're thinking about that split in May or beginning of June, you're thinking ahead. thinking, are both halves of this split going to be able to survive in August? Because a lot of the time, if you think like that, you think definitely not, like, I'm just going to merge them back on. And then when you merge them back on, you have the challenge of swarming again. But you've just got to stay one step ahead. And I say that from, like, I've got to stay one step ahead as well. Beekeeping is very, very difficult and very challenging, and no one ever masters it. You just try and be a little bit more like a fisherman every single day. Well, where do we go to now? Let me drink some tea while I look. Hi Lawrence, I'm preparing for my spring here in New Zealand. Hello to anyone in New Zealand. Trouble is I've just bought a pallet of Sudzucker food, hope it stays well. Basically, if you've bought invert sugar syrup, it never goes off, and if you bought proper good fondant, you'll get, I'd say, 2 years out of it, so you should be fine. Um, Nathaniel Price says, good evening, just ordered 7 queens, many thanks for the discount. My pleasure, I've seen that one come through, so thanks very much. A lot of people ordering queens, wow. Queens are really coming to a very prompt finish, so we've got a batch coming in next week and then 2 more weeks and then that's it, we're done. We might do the first week of September as an absolute last, last week of the year, but we're not doing any further than that. I need a rest. And also, I just don't think— I don't think you should be messing around with your bees in September. September is just leave them alone. And like, you shouldn't need a queen bee in September because you should have fixed all of the problems in May or June, definitely July, and like as an absolute last-ditch attempt in August. Shouldn't be fixing any of these problems in September or making splits, I don't think, really. I might do myself out of a few sales, but that's, that's how I wouldn't want to sell queens if I didn't think it was the right time of the year. September will be the cutoff. Sam Brister! Sam Brister! Should I go and get the mat? That was it, Sam Brister made me an amazing Black Mountain Honey mat. Hello, Sam, how's it going? Sam says, I have a mega aggressive hive and was wondering if it's better to requeen now or should I wait till spring? So of course I'm going to say this, I sell queens. That is not what I'm saying here, Sam. This is genuine, without a shadow of a doubt. do it now, it's so much better doing it now because what you— if you didn't do it now, this is what would happen. You do it in the spring, so you'd go in in April, and every single bee in that colony is going to be the daughter of the angry queen that you don't want. So even if you went in first week of April, killed that queen, you're not going to see the signs of the new queen that you add in until the 1st of May, and then all of the bees that are hatching out throughout April are probably going to live through to July, or maybe— probably not July, but June or July, something like that. Once they've emerged at the end of that 3-week period and live for 6 weeks. So it means that April, May, and a bit of June next year, you're just gonna have really angry bees again, whereas if you do it now, it's like, get in there, do it, and then pack the bees up for winter, make sure they've got enough food, and then you open up the colony in April and every single bee that you see is the daughter of your new queen. And it's so nice doing that. I love doing that when you have a really angry hive. and you just go in and put like a queen in or put a— so sometimes with those angry hives, if they won't accept a mated queen, you can do like a forced supersedure. It's quite a good one to do. I've done it a couple of times where I've had extra cells and just thought, you know, I'm just gonna put one in that colony, and it does work, and it seems to work quite well late on in the year as well. It's like a bit of a gamble, so you could just go along to the colony, just put in a queen cell in a cell protector and put it into the colony, and a lot of the time they'll let the queen emerge and they'll give it a go at superseding. So it's an interesting one to do, but I would definitely fix any queen issues at this point in the year as opposed to next year. I also had an unexpected supersedure queen in the hive. When inspected, she flew off. Hopefully she comes back. I find most of the time if I ever see them fly off, they do end up coming back. But what some people like to do in that scenario there is kind of like stand there with their arms out in the air like a big X and just stand there for a bit, and I just drink some tea. And the reason they do that is just so the queen's got something quite easy to navigate from, so they navigate against something else like that. Oh right, where are we going? I'm off in France this week, person looking after my bees advised me a swarm I caught a few weeks ago are being robbed, don't know what to do, any advice? So I would say if you're in France, there's not a huge amount that you can probably do. But if you were back there, I would say reduce the entrance down to a single bee space, and if you were feeding them, to take off any feed, and then if it continued, to move them away from that apiary over 3 miles away. That's what I always do, that's my only— that's the only thing that I'll ever do if any bees are getting robbed, and I don't want them being robbed, obviously don't want them being robbed, but you know, if I want to take immediate action, I'll pick up the colony, just take it to a new apiary at any point in the day, you know, lock the wasps in, lock the robbing bees in, you take it to the new site and within 10-15 minutes, stopped. Oh well, this is good, I've got nearly down to the bottom of the questions, so as you know the rule at Black Manta Honey, Let's Talk Bees, if I get down to the bottom of the comments we are done, because I was up at 4 this morning doing emails and stuff and then I've been out painting all day, so I could appreciate this. Thank you, thank you everyone, this is good. Right, so Regarding wasps, you must check your supers and brood boxes however you do it, seal it up, small holes and gaps, even if it looks ugly. That's a very good point. Everyone makes that mistake, don't they? They think, oh yeah, 4 supers of honey, yep, that's it, I'm a proper beekeeper now, I know what I'm doing, and then you go back the next week to harvest it, or the day after, and the wasps have found their way in and just cleared out every single gram of honey, and you walk away sheepishly with your uncapping knife between your legs or whatever it is, make sure you seal all around if you're leaving supers on a hive, definitely this time of year. Doing weekly inspections this time of year, what do you do? I'm concerned checking each frame so long, maybe I should just leave them. What is the minimum I should be looking for? So from normally around like mid to back end of July, I stop inspecting, so I've not inspected for a good few weeks now. Apart from going around and just making sure they've got enough space in the supers. So you still need to go around and do the inspections, but you don't have to open the colonies and pull out the frames and invite the robbers. It's just, it is crazy seeing people inspect at this time of year. You definitely don't need to do it. So probably why there's a lack of videos coming out from me, especially short ones, because I'm just, I'm not going into the bees. There's no need to go into the bees at this time of the year, and they can just enjoy the tranquility of not having a beekeeper around. Gareth Rose says hello. Hello to you too, Gareth. From my OG question, original question, I have a queen scheduled for delivery next week. Without knowing how old the queen is, should I base this, this inspection on the mated queen's performance? What to do with new queen? I'm really— I'm well confused with that question. So the queen that you've got is probably going to be maybe like 8 weeks old, something like that, that she will be marked blue for 2025. And it's just the blue, it's just the 2025 that you really need in terms of the Queen's age. I don't think anyone tracks the Queen's age any more than kind of like just annually. Should I base this net inspection on the mated Queen's performance? Sorry, sorry, Zach, I'm not 100% sure what that means, so I'm going to leave it there. But we've got to the bottom of it, that is it, there's no more comments anywhere unless— no. I had it on top chat. not live chat. I think I've missed loads of questions. I think I've built myself up to the expectation that I was just about to go and have my dinner, but I don't think I— I was on the wrong one. So there are loads of questions, right? We'll flick back through. I've missed out so many people. If I've missed out your question there, I do apologize. Oh, right. I'm going to put that tea down because I'm slurping it all over the place. Right, let's have a look. So Michael Menino, good afternoon from the USA. Hello. Hello. Denbigh Honey from Cape Verde. Denbigh Honey is always on holiday. Jasper wants a shout out downstairs. Right, so I'm going to carry on from where I left off. So Ben Deacon, so Ben says, if I were to buy and construct a National Pine Hive before next year, would it be advised to treat it after construction or leave it as is? So I would advise to not go for the pine variant. The cedar second variant is so much better, and it doesn't really cost that much more. If anything, maybe Maybe 20% more, and then you don't have to do any treatment on it if you don't want. So you save on the treatment, and it's like half the weight. So when you're lifting it up with supers and the super frames are full, you'll be very, very happy that you took cedar instead. But if you do go down the pine route, yes, you do need to treat it. And if you do go down the pine route, I would suggest going for the Denrosa pine, and then that is wax dipped and much more competitively priced. Oh, here we go. So Gareth Rose says, what's best to overwinter, brood and a feeder? So my configuration, the configuration that I use, is a floor, brood box for the bees, polyashworth feeder, and then a roof. Really good configuration with an open mesh floor. Mark Buchanan says, hi Lawrence, I recently purchased a Thorns DSM polynuc. I was wanting to make 2 3-frame splits over winter, kind of walkaway split. Will it work? So I I've had loads of experience using like the 2 3-frame splits, and I don't like using them like that anymore. So any nucs that I've got where they've got 2 3-frame splits, I overwinter as a single 6-frame, because there's not a huge amount of benefit really to most beekeepers by having 2 separate queens there, unless you're looking to kind of split and sell them. But then I'd say, well, you can just split and sell them, just overwinter in the right size box and then sell them in the box. But I don't, I don't like them. What you generally find is that one half does well and one half dies, so then I think, well, I would have preferred just to give the one half that does well the space for the whole, the whole 6 frames as opposed to 3 frames. But the reason that I say that there with your question, will it work in terms of a walkaway split? So what you, what you can do theoretically with those hives is if you've got a 6-frame, got it in a 6-frame configuration, take the divider and you just pop the divider in. On one half you've got the queen, and then on the other half you've obviously just got brood and all stages but no queen, and then the bees will create queen cells using the emergency response, and those queen cells will emerge, and then they can potentially requeen themselves. So in the right time of the year you can do that, it's called a walkaway split, and if you've got good weather it's relatively reliable. In the UK, we often, especially in Wales, don't have good weather, so it's probably a 50/50 hit whether you're going to get a decent or a mated queen out of it doing it that way around. But at this time of year, you're just condemning half of the colony to die. It'll either be like the cold, the winter, or more likely the robbing bees and the wasps will get them. That's what I would say. You can't leave colonies kind of almost for any time at this point in the year without— Jeez, here we go— without a laying queen. So it needs to be like a fully laying queen because it just The way that the colony regulates the pheromones is that it keeps itself organized if the queen is there, a very cohesive unit, and they'll defend a cohesive unit, as opposed to when the queen's not there. If you ever looked inside a hive, you look, you're just like, it's like anarchy. Open it up, there's no— there's nothing going on, there's no rhythm, and it's because the queen's not there and the queen's pheromone's not there and it's not controlling the hive in the way that it should be controlling it. So I would not recommend it. No, definitely don't do that. Where have we got to now? Couldn't take my supers off, so I put them above the crown board. That way the bees don't get it and the wasps. So yeah, I've done that before and just double-check that they can't get in. It's a sensible place to put it. The only thing that I don't like about putting it there is it's much more difficult to extract it once you've left it there for a night because the temperature just goes right down, especially where we are. Like, it will go down to single figures probably even tonight. Whereas when you take the honey off the hive and you look at each frame and it's like over 30°C. So when you— what I like to do is I'm going to clear an entire apiary in the morning, take it all back, and then do it that— just do it straight away. 50 supers, put it through the machine, and the uncapping is so much easier. But then the spinning, like, you just, you put it on one function, like auto function on the spinner, just press it once and then it comes out and they're not bone dry, but they're like— they definitely wouldn't need to be spun again. But then you do that if you've put it in the— or left it on a hive overnight or let it go cool overnight, and it takes so much longer to get the extractor balanced at the beginning just because of the kind of viscosity of the honey, but also just to get the honey out into the buckets. Very, very long. Aaron says, look forward to trying out your VSH queens. Oh, very good. Yeah, that's on its way, or next week is it? I'm not sure, I can't remember the dates. I'm terrible for dates. I'm not terrible, I shouldn't leave it on I'm terrible with dates, I'm not. We're very, very reliable when it comes to people ordering on the dates on our website. The error trap comes in when either me or other people edit the orders. It is actually always me that edits the orders, I shouldn't really blame anyone else, but the error trap is me going in manually and editing something and getting it wrong. But when people order on the website, if you go on the website and order, I want a queen to be dispatched on this day, we always dispatch on that day. Brendan says, exactly, I lost a hive to wasps after finding a gap in one of my supers while I was out there. Did you manage to get some footage of your production hives this year? So there's a lot of things that I didn't manage to get done this year, and like going out and getting footage of the production hives is definitely one of them. I've managed to get some, like a halfway house, so I've left some colonies for production in some of the closer apiaries, and then that way I've managed to get some footage of that. So we'll do some— we'll do— you'll be able to see some of the supers and see some of the honey and see some of the uncapping and extraction rooms. I've definitely got enough for all of that, but not got out to the proper production ones because they're just too far away. And I've really changed everything up this year. Like, I, I, I will enjoy doing the, the 2025 recaps because the weather this year has just enabled so much to be done, and I'm always hugely overambitious with what I can actually get done in a year. And I always know that I always give it my best shot, but I always know kind of deep down I won't get everything done because of the weather, really, if you're doing stuff outside, or just how busy things are anyway. And this year I've been hugely overambitious, but we've got so much done, so I'm pretty confident that we are going to launch 14-Day Beekeeper in November. And it started off as 140 videos, so that was going to be 140 videos, 10 videos per module, 14 modules. And now we're closer to 250 videos, so I think there's going to be about 250 videos on that course by the time it goes out to be launched in November. And then there's loads of other things we've done, like we've gone to Malta and flown out there, and going to Apimondia in September, amongst other places. Got lots of travel coming up, lots of beekeeping travel. And then just the general selling queens and selling nucs is quite an achievement in itself, just staying sane through all of that. So we didn't get footage of the production hives, but we got lots and lots of videos. I think at the last count, I've got over 50 videos for YouTube filmed. So we do one a week, so I pretty much got the entire next year. 2026 is filmed already on YouTube, but no, they've not edited it yet because they're editing all of the 14-Day Beekeeper videos. So So there is a real bottleneck, but it's fine. You don't see the bottleneck at your end, 'cause for YouTube, for people watching on YouTube or anywhere, it's just one video a week. But I've not worked out what tomorrow's video is gonna be yet, 'cause it's not filmed and it's definitely not edited. And this is the first time in ages that I'm not gonna have a video. But it's frustrating, 'cause there's so many that actually has or have been filmed. Just can't push them through quick enough. Right, so where we go next? I missed a lot of these. Sorry about that. Delroy says, hi, I'm from the Caribbean. I'm planning on starting to keep bees. Is it too late to start? So I'm not sure what it'd be like in the Caribbean and like when the season is. In the UK, it's probably the worst time to start keeping bees now. I've had a lot of people say, I know, but I just want to get a nuc at this time of the year. Like I want to start, and I say it's the worst time to start because the only thing you can do. is kill the bees. Like, if you were perfect and you got them through to the point where they were like fine for mites and like survived the winter and got them through and they didn't die, then the only thing that you achieve is kind of getting them to a point where I would have just sold them to you like that in the spring anyway. But you take on this huge risk of them dying, and then like that's kind of got by another nuc. So a lot of people do want to start at this time of year. I can see why it's tempting, you're like, it's summer, So people think, oh yeah, you can do stuff now, but really the season is over, well and truly over, I would say. So no, I would not be starting now. Um, oh, what's going on here? Right, next question. Let me go down. Uh, it's from Hamish Loves It. He says, appreciate this, great stuff. I'm running 2 apiaries, 14 by 12s. Nice. I, I like, like when I go and inspect, I've still got some 14 by 12s. I'm going to go and inspect them. As long as the bees haven't produced swarm cells, I always really enjoy the inspections. Like, I like a big frame like that, and I quite like looking at the frame, and I like the fact that you'll get the ring of pollen, you'll get the ring of brood, like, you can get some beautiful frames. But the only problem that I had with 14x12, and the reason that I moved away from them, was when they come to swarm, you're just very limited on options without adding another box in. So I like, I like a preemptive demerit, and a preemptive demerit with a 14x12 just doesn't work. the box is too big, so it's too heavy to lift, but then also it just accumulates too much honey at the wrong time of the year, so that was the reason I didn't use it. I do worry that taking off all the supers so all the bees are in the brood box that they might swarm due to lack of space. So that very much is the risk, and I'm not saying that's not a risk, so if you're worried about that, what I say to people is, well, if you're worried about that, double brood, and then double brood pretty much negates or mitigates that risk quite substantially because if they can fit just about in a single brood box, double brood box is loads of space for them, and the chances of them swarming in a double brood box is very, very slim. But compressing them down at this point in the year and then having nice weather and then working all of that in a single brood box is very, very risky. I'd agree with that. So most of the time, if the bees don't fit in properly, I say to people, another brood box straight on top and just give the bees that space. What you'll find a lot of times though is you have a single brood box and like the bees don't fit in it properly, so you put another brood box on, all frames of foundation, and then you come back after like 4 weeks and look again and it's just frames of foundation. The bees just kind of like cluster up there, but they don't— they do not want to expand. It's not the kind of— it's not the time of year that bees will expand their brood nest. But you still get— you'll still get growth and you'll still get days where it looks very packed and days where it looks like it's way too compressed. But that's the risk, and when you start looking at numbers of beehives over kind of like tens or twenties or hundreds, the risk is quite small, and it's definitely not worth the effort to try and fix the risk. But I appreciate for some people, if you've got one hive in your garden, it's binary, isn't it? They either swarm or they don't swarm. So if you follow my advice and they swarm, you think, oh, that's bad advice. But on the— like, I know over the majority of people, or the average of people over the UK, It is one of the good ones. PK says, hi Lawrence. Hello to you too, PK. Danny says, what's your thoughts on making a split from 3 separate colonies? So the textbooks say, you know, make a split from 2 colonies and they fight, but 3 they don't. I've never found them to fight. I'll do whatever, but making them from 3 separate colonies is a good idea, but I just like taking them to a new apiary. You take them to a new apiary, you can do whatever you want. it could be bees from the same colony, bees from 2, 3, 4 different colonies, as soon as they go out at the new apiary they just say, right, that's not where we live, and reorientate, and then it's a new unit is formed pretty much instantly. I get paid in organic eggs at one of the stops, seed is better. Definitely seed is better. Hi, what's the chance of swarming at this time of year? I'm taking my last super off next week, which is full, and can see them backfilling the brood box. Worried about space on 14 by 12. So as I said before, the swarming risk is there. I would say, if I had to hazard a guess in terms of a percentage or an average, I would say maybe like 5% of colonies will swarm, possibly 10%. Oh, that's Jasper killing a pillow downstairs. And then it's up to you whether you accept or tolerate that risk by doing nothing. And for me, in most cases, yes, I would. On 14 by 12, I would suggest that they will pack in there nicely. And you got to think, at this time of the year, what they do is they don't want to have a huge brood nest, so then they keep a lot of that room for stores in there. And then depending on the weather, you know, it goes up a little bit and then it comes back down and goes up, and you just need to make sure that it doesn't go too high and it doesn't go too low. Too high for like too much stores in the brood nest and they'll swarm, and obviously too no, not enough stores in the brood nest and they're going to die. You just need to keep it kind of somewhere in the middle over the next 6 to 8 weeks and then the bees will get through the winter on their own. Right, what's going on here? Thanks, because at the moment I've got the brood box with 2 supers and one brood box that's got the honey in. I need to fix that one then. Well, it was Tony there. Oh dear, there's a lot more. There we go. Tony says, after watching your videos, I started the season with 2 nucs from you in Polysmart hives, ending the season with 8 hives and over 60 kilograms of honey. Thanks so much, that is why I do it. People say, why'd you do all that? And that is the reason there. So I'm very happy, Tony, that you've— it's gone well, and it's nice, isn't it? A lot of people just stumble into beekeeping and it just becomes so contagious, and it's just a nice hobby, lovely hobby for everyone to get involved in. Everyone likes honey, you can sit there, you can watch bees. But my favourite thing, if I had to like refine it to a single beekeeping moment, is this this one here, which is going into the bees the very first visit of the spring, so the point where you can actually go in and like take the feeder off, take the crown board off, and it's when you get the queen excluder— so my configuration is a roof and then a polyashtral feeder— so take the roof off and then you take the feeder off and you get that immediate first whiff of propolis, like the smell of a hive, and I just find it so invigorating, but so evocative of beekeeping as a whole. And it feels like it's good for you, definitely feels good for you, very like antibacterial and microbial, antimicrobial. But it is, I love that. And it's those little tiny things that us beekeepers maybe take for granted, but they get people. And you start a hobby and you get something like that, you get that first taste or the first smell or the first— Jazz! doing, mate? Jaz wants to add his own comments in there, but it's that little small tiny things that I really think get people hooked on beekeeping. Donna says, just asked questions on the Facebook Live, should I ask them again? Thanks so much for your time. They should come up on here, this is like a Facebook/YouTube/Twitch stream, so I should see them all on there, Donna, but if they're not coming up, I'll take a look for you. Good evening, 2 Caucasians in their hives, thanks, taps still on till Sunday, good luck with the introduction. Should I wait with treatment, Apivar or Formic Pro, while requeening the hive? If so, how long after popping the taps open? So I just eliminate Formic Pro. Formic Pro, it just kills your— it's going to kill your queen, even if the queen's out of the cage, it'll probably kill the queen, so I'll make a really easy decision for you, bin the Formic Pro and use the Apivar. because Apivar is no problem at all to use whilst you're breeding. Donna agrees that I'm reliable on the dates. Thank you very much, Donna, appreciate that. I like that we're reliable on the dates, and I say to people on the phone a lot, and they say, yeah, but if I order it for Thursday the 10th of August, like, what day will it arrive? And I say, it'll arrive the following day. So it's always 24 hours. We can't guarantee it, but it will be there. But we can definitely dispatch it on that day. And they say, okay, can you dispatch it on any other day? And we go round and round and round in circles. And a lot of the time— oh, I don't want to say a lot of the time people end up frustrated with it, but I just say, if you order it on that day on the website, I will send it guaranteed. And they generally are happy with that. But yeah, we send it out on the day we said we're going to send it out. Right, where are we going next? There are a lot of questions on here that I appear to be missing. So I do apologize for that. The questions are coming in way quicker than I can answer them, so sorry. But Hamish says, I want to get into AMMBs. Darker bees seem to be better at overwintering. What do you think about those dark teddy bear bees? So no, I don't see any correlation at all in terms of overwintering. Like, I could— it's difficult to put it down, like overwintering success, on like a type of bee, or is it a Class B or a hybrid or a specific native species when there's so many other factors involved in there as well. You couldn't— you'd have to eliminate or hold all of those other factors as control variables to work that one out. And I'd say it's like, who cares? Who cares? It's going to be marginal anyway. So what varroa treatment are they using? Are they being fed? How big did the colony start off? And the temperature, the location— there's so many different things that will affect whether a colony is gonna come through the winter okay. And I don't think whether it's Buckfast or whether it's AMM is really one of those things. I'd say they're both in good condition if managed well. I'd say they'd have very, very similar overwinter performance. Cub Rider says, what keeps you awake at night? Oh, that's a good question. I like questions like this. What keeps me awake at night? I'll tell you what, here's the answer. Nothing at the moment. Nothing keeps me awake at night because I get up quite early and I work quite hard, and then I go to bed when I like can no longer keep my eyes open. So as you get into bed, it's bang. Nothing keeps me awake. Um, but I just worry all day about stuff. I want to tell you what though, Aaron says, haha, it was me that got the date wrong, the time, the time. So you're off the hook as long as they arrive tomorrow. I, I really hope they do. Like, I'm, I'm thinking back to, to the orders And have I sent that out for tomorrow? I'm going a bit crazy here, Aaron, thinking maybe I've not sent that out now. And I suspect if I've not sent it out, I'm probably gonna have to drive somewhere and meet you on the M56. If you, if you got an email from Royal Mail, then it's been dispatched. There we go. Sorry for joining late. My Black Mountain Hardy F1 Buckfast Prize Queen has been accepted. I've named her Lioness in honour of the England women's win. Very nice. I love to hear the backstory or the follow-on story of a prize queen. Jasper, hey, stop it! Thomas, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, got 6 colonies, 2 of them with 3 brood boxes, 2 deeps and 1 shallow, and a few supers. They seem to be storing honey in the shallow brood box and not the deeps. Should I leave them on? So at this time of year you will, you'll just see this huge contraction down, and people have been messaging me saying, Got a brood box, then queen excluder, and 2 supers full of honey, and so I put the 3rd super on, and it's just been on for 2 weeks and the bees aren't touching it, like what am I doing wrong? And I say, you're not doing anything wrong, it's just the time of year. Like, to get bees to move up into a new box, or get them to draw anything out, or even just get them to store honey in it, requires a significant surplus at this time of the year, and what you've got at this time of the year is absolute maximum honey requirement, or like calorific requirement from the colony. So in order to achieve a surplus at this time of the year, you need so much like daily nectar coming in, and unless you've got perfect weather and perfect forage and perfect conditions, you're just not getting that. So all that's going to happen is you, you're more likely to just see the 2 supers that you've got start to deplete as well, which is why get in there early, get the honey. And start feeding the bees, because then ultimately the bees are kind of happier on that. The bees are at their happiest when they're like feeding, when they're bringing stuff in. They don't necessarily like that. You look at the bee's temperament come the end of the year when the flow stops and they've just got their honey and they're being attacked by everyone, like they go angry and vicious. And then if you take the honey off and start feeding them, they're just like, yep, we're all good, absolutely no problem here. So I like to, I like to get that. as soon as I possibly can. Steve Jameson says, 14-day beekeeper sounds amazing. I think it will be. Do you have any tips for overwintering a nuc? Started with 2 frames of brood, a Black Mountain Honey queen, and a frame of food. I've been given 2 litres of syrup also. So you should be fine, just feeding little and often, making sure the entrance is as small as it can be, like it can literally be a single bee space, one in, one out. And then just making sure that you never spill any syrup and making sure that they don't get robbed, and that's it really. Get the treatments in, varroa treatments in nice and early, and you should be good. Harry Reynolds, good evening Harry, hope it's going well. He's going to catch up later, so hello to Harry later as well. Jay says, so long as the new 10 over 10 queen rearing video is out before next season's queen rearing season, I'll be a happy bunny. So I can guarantee that one, that one is fully filmed, the 10 over 10 remake. Um, and it's a good video, that one. It's so much better. The audio will be better. I look back at the first video and it is shocking. So that one's completely filmed and redone. The Demeray Split one, I did the demo. I should have done the Demeray Split one earlier on in the year, which is a bit annoying. I've done it like— I've not finished that Demeray Split video yet, so I need to finish that next week. I don't know where the weeks are going. I need to finish that, uh, the Demeray Split one next week, and then they're the 2 main videos that I was going to do. But there's loads I think I've done— so I've done my queen rearing 10 over 10 video, and then I've been down to Richard's and done a full, like, from the very beginning, day zero, setting up his breeder queen colonies and the start finishes and the grafting and everything all the way through with Richard to the nucs. So that's a lovely video, there's a couple like that with Richard. So we've gone to town, there's some good videos coming up, and what I quite like with the videos is that If, if I publish them throughout the season, I never get to watch them. I don't really, I don't really watch my own videos after I've edited them anyway. But now I've got like, as a videographer, so I don't really see the footage ever because I'm not dealing with it. So the videographer films it and then it goes off for editing somewhere else. And then I do, I do watch it prior to it going on YouTube, of course. But that's the first time that I get to watch it, which is quite exciting. Quite exciting to watch the videos. you've not had any dealings with them. Good evening, Laurence. I had to start feeding my bees in North London. I'm seeing brood emerging dead with their tongues hanging out. Right, that's clearly what's going to happen to quite a lot of people at this time of the year. 2025 has lulled so many people into this false sense of security in that you just— that's it, bees take care of themselves, and it's been very, very nice up until now, and From a few weeks back even, all the way through until the end of the year, bees are really going to need a bit of support from the beekeepers in the form of sugar. Like 1:1, I would be feeding at this time of the year, and then as you move towards the end of the year, 2:1 and invert. I wouldn't— no need to feed fondant at this time of the year. You probably shouldn't need to feed any pollen or pollen sub at this time of the year. They should be bringing that back in if they need it. Like when I go through my hives, there's no way I'd be feeding any of that because I've just got frames and frames of really good varied amounts of pollen, but you do, you need to keep on top of it at this time of the year because starvation can get your colonies quickly. We have 15 minutes left. I will answer as many questions as I possibly can, but I've still got quite a lot to do before I go to bed tonight, and I'm very tired. So where are we going next? Right, Steve Jameson says, can you tell us more about the 14-day beekeeper course plans? Is the info on the site Oh, it's like, it's like Steve, it's like I've given Steve a little crisp blue £5 note to ask that question. Thanks, Steve, that's a brilliant question. I will answer it for you in great detail. So 14-Day Beekeeper is for people to go out and learn about beekeeping. It's designed to transform a beginner to a competent beekeeper in 14 days. And when people— I've done this with courses before, particularly 14-Day Filmmaker, And, hmm, oh, I wonder where I got the name 14-Day Beekeeper from. But 14-Day Filmmaker did this for me, which was learn how to make films in 14 days. And I got to about day 1 before stopping watching. And the reason, the reason that I stopped watching was it's a real commitment of time. When they say 14-Day Filmmaker, they mean like you're starting at 6 o'clock in the morning and you're finishing at midnight for 14 solid days. So, so they're technically right, it is 14 Day Filmmaker, but I didn't realize that it was like you really have to focus down for that amount of time. So I've done exactly the same with 14 Day Beekeeper, and there will be other variants of it as well. So 14 Day Beekeeper is going to be around 250, possibly 350 videos. It's not going to be something that I finish properly this year. It's going to be something that I add to year after year after year. I'm going to add different little bits of videos, change things up. Layer up the information, put diagrams in there, put little things like little crazy things in there like my HACCP control processes that the food hygiene people said were exemplary. I'm gonna put them in as like an add-on into the 14-Day Beekeeper Course where you can just download the processes as they are, just put your names in and got yourself some processes which I checked with food hygiene and they said yeah, absolutely fine because that's what people just like upload them to the internet anyway. So it's going to be incredibly comprehensive, but I appreciate that might not be for everyone. So 14-Day Beekeeper is going to be all of those videos, and then I'm going to do 1-Day Beekeeper and 7-Day Beekeeper as well. So we'll do like 1-Day Beekeeper, we'll just give you maybe like one video from each of the modules, and then 7-Day Beekeeper will give you kind of like a little bit of a mix. It just reminds me, I'm never going to get this out of my mind now because I had my little brother around the other day And he was saying to me, what are you doing? So, uh, 1-day and 7-day beekeeper. And then I said, yeah, 1-day and 7-day beekeeper. And he said, okay, I like that. And then he just, he just designed me this cool logo for 5-day and 10-day beekeeper. And I was like, that's fantastic, like, I like what you've done there, but you just— there's a slight error. Thanks, thank you anyway for the lovely thing. Uh, JK says hello. Hello to you too, JK. Donna Morrison says, my beautiful Black Mountain Honey Queen sadly died. She had a very rough start. Oh no, we now have a beautiful daughter. I'm glad, I'm glad you got her daughter. That's a nice thing with queens, that you can kind of follow them down the generations like that. Uh, Simon Ashdown says hello. Hello to you too, Simon. Uh, Simon G says, hi Lawrence, just emailed you a sneak peek picture of my design of castellations for Robello Supers. No glue, nails, or screws required, but they can be screwed in if desired. Oh, I wish you told me that before I did a full video on how to fix castellations into the Abello Supers. And I'm not going to give away the way that I've done it because you've probably done it way better than I have, but I have found a solution that is pretty much bombproof. I'm very, I'm very interested to see what solutions work. I like, I like comparing solutions and I like sharing solutions because a lot of the time you can pick like different bits from other solutions and merge them together and be like, right, that is It's kind of like the best of both worlds, yeah. Right, where are we going next? I'm meeting so many nice local people because they're coming to buy honey. This is the hobby that just keeps giving. Yes, certainly is. Vanilla and mahogany is what I get from a top-performing hive. Okay, like the smells, very nice. Hi Lawrence, I would like to overwinter the bees with a honey super instead of taking it away and feeding them. Do I just leave it on without the queen? Is there any tips? So I'm really against leaving supers of honey on for the bees, and not because— so what a lot of people say is you need to leave them their own honey, don't you know anything, you fool? And I say, well, I kind of am leaving them their own honey because I take the honey off like 2 months before they stop going out and collecting their own honey, and like I supplement it with sugar water or sugar syrup, but the bees are going out and getting their own. And I just— that's all confined to the brood box, and I have my mite treatments going on all in the brood box. And then I religiously clean out those frames every 3 years. So every year I'll merc down 3 or 4 of the frames, and then it keeps the chemicals away, and it just keeps everything nice and neat and tidy. As soon as you start adding a super into that equation of overwintering and mite treatments and feeding and storage of the frames afterwards, once they've had brood in them, everything becomes so much more complicated. And I say, well, is that like worth the, the, like, the aggravation? Is it— sorry, is it worth the benefit from leaving the bees with their super of honey? And I like it. In my, in my head, I think it's nice, isn't it, to leave the bees with the honey that they've gathered in that super? But then I think, well, that's kind of what I do. I take, I take all of the honey off and then I give the bees— if I took all of the honey off in like the back end of September, then I you could say, okay, well, that's different because then you're just overwintering the bees on sugar syrup, whereas I take it off so early and it gives the bees so much time to backfill it. You know, all the ivy— you could get a super's worth of ivy honey. So a lot of bees just overwinter on the honey that they get from the ivy and the pollen. So you don't need to leave that super on. And that super— this is the thing— if you left a super on now, what would likely happen is before the end of the year, the bees are probably be back up there breaking it down, consuming it, and turning it into winter bees. So they don't even really overwinter on that honey. And then the thing that you're like, 100% will happen as well, is that you would— the queen excluder, you would have to take the queen excluder off because the bees will start off at the bottom. So you start off with brood at the bottom, queen excluder, honey on top, and then the bees will just move upwards to consume through the winter. And if that queen excluder is still in place, the queen gets trapped down below. So if you take the queen excluder out, what ends up happening is all of the bees are upstairs in the super at the end of the year— or sorry, at the beginning of the year— which is a right pain because then you have to like find the queen, put her back downstairs, and then put the queen excluder back in and wait for the colony to build up again. And then when you take that super off, it becomes a wax moth magnet. It couldn't be more— that's the one, that's the box that they're going to go for over every other box. For some reason they do that when you get a nice old super box and then the bees allowed to, or the queen is allowed to lay eggs in it for however many cycles and then it's left or stored, that's the one that they always go for. So no, I don't recommend it. If you're going to do it, definitely take the queen. Okay, I've got 8 minutes, 8 minutes until I'm gonna go cook my dinner. Hi Lawrence, first season double brooding, should I leave them double brood for winter or squeeze them into a single? So if you are on double brood at the moment and you're not interested in taking any of that honey out, which I think is the right shout, definitely just leave them on double brood. Yeah, yeah, the compression is just to get all of the supers away, and then whatever brood nest is there, just leave it there. And then if you want to go back from double brood to single brood, the same thing applies. Like, they'll start off at the bottom, they work all the way up to the top. You'll go in in February, March, April, whenever it is, and they'll just all be in the top box. Just take the bottom box away. Right, Gareth Rose says, when should I take off all the honey boxes ready for winter? So my recommendation for people was like a couple of weeks ago, but I've not taken all of mine off. I've still got whole sites where they're still on. Middle of August is the absolute drop dead, that's my one, but some people still keep them on. Hello Lawrence, thank you for the queen bee I purchased 2 weeks ago. She has been accepted to the hive and started laying. Excellent. Do you know I said before what one of my favourite things was about beekeeping was like seeing people? I guess this is the same thing, it is the same, The same process. I love when people leave reviews for things, and it's they leave up really nice thoughtful reviews, and some of the reviews we get are fantastic with pictures and videos and really nice and long and detailed. I love reading them, and then some of them are really short and really to the point, and it will say something like had had an issue with the queen Lawrence fixed the problem with no quibble or something like that. It's just like a really short punchy one. I thought. Oh, I like that. It's just fixed a problem. So if you, if you've not left a review and you would like to leave us a review, it's always very much appreciated. Uh, right, where we go next? Someone just said coffee, so I'm gonna drink this. Thomas says, thanks for the chat this weekend, Lawrence. Obsidian Queens have totally overcome the badly stored frames. Okay, nice. Lots of people buying the Obsidians. Wow. Uh, Hamish Love says, tongues hanging out usually means pesticides or herbicides, or so I thought. So if the bees, it depends what way they're in, so if they're kind of going into the cell trying to get to the bottom with their tongues hanging out, then they're trying to get the remnants of the honey. If they're in the cell with their tongues hanging out, kind of like freshly emerged pupae but young bees, that's either pesticides or like heavy varroa. Right, where are we going next? Where are we going next? I'm not going to get through everyone's questions, I am very, very sorry. But I'm not a million miles away, let's see if we can get through them. So Ian UK says, is it too early to feed 1:1 in rapid round hive top feeder with so many wasps around? So nope, it's fine to feed it if your bees need it, you need to feed it, you just have to reduce the entrances right down, do not spill any, make sure the bees can't get in the feeder. Hey Miss Loves It says, only happened once anyway, thank you for all your explanations, you certainly know your stuff. Thank you very much. I've been doing it as a hobby really for 14 years, Diane Steele was the first beekeeper Wow! Well, I do know what I'm not the most experienced beekeeper, very far from it. And I just like to talk about bees, and I'm the one who just puts the camera on. But I love going to shows and conferences and talking to people who you know really, really know about bees, and it's fun just sitting down chatting about it. And they've always got like little examples of the way that they learned over the years or things that they did wrong, and I love it when people are. honest with the information that they give. You don't always get this in beekeeping. It's probably the biggest frustration. I told you about the things I like about beekeeping. I hate that some people could be so close-minded when it comes to certain things, and they just completely formed their opinion on something without ever trying it or experiencing it themselves. And it's just somebody else saying, yeah, that's a load of rubbish, and they say, I've made an opinion on this, that's a load of rubbish, and they've got no evidence or Anything to back it up, and they they often give this information and say this information in a really not nice, quite mean way, very condescending, very much. How dare you try to change something that we've been doing for years? You're just like, oh yeah, this is not going to go well. But not everyone is like that. But you you know you'll know the kind of person that I'm talking about there. Right, I've gone off on a tangent again. Right, Donna Morrison, channel member, says, "I have the opportunity of putting some hides on long." On long honey in an exposed location, will your Buckfast queen bees be okay? So yeah, the Buckfast queens are fine. I had some we sent up to some people up in the Highlands of Scotland, they've done very well up there. We've had some other really remote places, kind of on the middle of hills and stuff, and it's as long as you get enough days where the wind subsides down a little bit and the bees can go out and fly, that you can get some really good crops in those locations, because obviously you've got the conditions playing against you, you've got the wind, maybe the rain, lack of sunshine. But if you get the good conditions, there's nobody else keeping beehives there, so you have like a free hit at all of this forage. And a lot of those places you get bumper clover and bumper bramble and all these untapped resources. So if you get the right conditions, you can hit the jackpot. So good luck, hope it goes well. Uh, Andrew Rogers, I'm jumping down now, next question. Andrew Rogers says, how do you actually knock back a nuc for sale in the spring, as I've had many people mention that keeping on top, um, so keeping on top of them in the spring was a difficult thing. So I'd never look to knock them back, but a 6-frame nuc in the spring just needs hiving up, needs hiving up like pretty early in the spring, as soon as you start to see— it's difficult to know, you know, If you look into a 6-frame nuc in February, it does look very similar to what it looks like in April. So it's more about like holding your nerve and knowing like roughly when the time is to go in and just to have that look, have that first look and check. And I remember, so this year I was pretty good and got most colonies out. I don't think it— no, it wasn't 2024 because 2024 was soaking wet. It was 2023 when I thought I'd got around to a lot of the nucs in time for hiving them up. and I had just missed this emergence of brood, and I'd gone into, oh, like a whole row of about 30 or 40 of them, like a whole apiary, and I would say 50% of them had either swarmed, but most of them, they hadn't swarmed just yet, but they'd created swarm cells, so they were ready to go. And it was brilliant because the timing was just so good, the weather was lovely, and I had all of these jumbo queen cells, some really nicely made using the swarm impulse just with the perfect weather. So we just, we split them up and they went well, but you can get caught out. You do need to keep on top of them. Right, I've got to 8:29. I'm gonna call it a day there 'cause I am very, very tired. Thank you for everyone dialing in. We will go down to only one talk, one livestream per month as of next month. So we've got one more. So in 2 weeks' time, I'll be back towards the end of August to do kind of like the final 2-weekly one of the year. And then we will go down to monthly for September, October, November, December, January. And February and March, so kind of like 7 months of the year, we'll just go back down to one, and hopefully that there will be enough to talk about. But we've got loads of other projects that are going on throughout the winter to keep you kind of all informed and updated. So I'm talking nonsense, um, I've got to that point where I just need to go and get to bed, get some food. I wish you all very happy beekeeping, very good weekend, see you sometime soon. Bye.