Live Apiary Inspection - Episode 4

So hello everyone and welcome to another live apiary stream, but this time with a massive, massive difference. You can see me proper resolution, no buffering whatsoever, and you would definitely be able to hear every single word I say because bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, I've got my audio on and I've got it set up correctly. So in today's video, I'm going through all of the colonies behind me. I've also got a second camera with me. I can toggle between the two cameras, so I'll be able to give you really good detailed close-ups of exactly what's going on. This is filmed live. There's going to be no cuts. There's going to be loads of ums. There's going to be loads of errs. I'm going to show you exactly what I'm seeing inside every single one of these colonies here. I've got about 16 or 17, mostly nucs, but I've got a couple of flow hives here. I've got some colonies that are set up as a walkaway split. I've got my keeper's hive. I've got some really nice Buckfast breeder queens that I've introduced. And just to recap from the last time that the channel members would have seen this apiary, And if you're not a channel member already, definitely hit the subscribe button and join the channel. Get some really cool, awesome content, exclusive content. But what I did in the apiary last time is I messed up badly and I sent a customer, or didn't send a customer, a number of queens that I meant to send him. He was going on holiday and he said, I need these queens urgently, like you need to get me these queens. So I went and harvested them out of my nucs that I was building up to make sure that my customer got his queens on time. That left every single colony in this apiary without a queen. Fast forward about 3 or 4 weeks ago, that was, I came back around, I put new queens in. So a lot of the queens here are F1 Buckfast from Black Mountain Honey, but a lot of the queens here are also German Buckfast from island mated and artificially inseminated that I've imported in, and they are brilliant, brilliant queens. And now they are introduced, they've started laying, and today hopefully we're going to see some nice capped brood and check up on all of those colonies. So I'm gonna get my veil up, we're gonna start at this end, we're gonna work all the way through right to the very, very end. Hope the audio is good, I hope the visuals and the resolution is good as well, which for me is really important. But most importantly, I hope that you find something useful with these live apiary inspections. So we're all good to go. I'm gonna sort the camera out, I'm gonna tweak that a little bit, gonna get that into the exact right place that I need it. Always going to be like a little bit of jostling with these cameras here, but I think, I think that's about right. Let's move that a bit like this and we should be good to go. It's miserable, absolutely miserable here today, but I do need to do my weekly inspections on these colonies. And I've just realized that the camera is a million miles away there, so that's no good. We'll get you set up a bit closer, point you down a little bit as well. But yeah, it's like 15 degrees Celsius. There is There would be a mega flow on. The bramble and the clover are in full flow here, like really, really good flow, but the weather's just shocking and it doesn't look like it's going to really improve anytime soon. So good to see that they're out still foraging, but not foraging very, very well because it's just too cold. Right, there we go. So I'm going to get my second camera up, get that one going as well. And I've got this cool second little camera on a tripod, but it's got a gimbal set into it as well, so If I hit record on there and then face that downwards, you should be able to see what's going on. So I can cut between the two. I'm going to do a clap to sync the audio as well for me. Audio is now synced. And let's get into this one here. So the background with this one here, this was an artificially inseminated queen that went over winter. She's tried to supersede herself, or they did supersede her, and the superseder failed. And then I introduced a new queen in. And then I took that queen out and gave it to someone else, and then I put another queen in here again now. So that is a feeder, obviously that's just the feeder there. Forget that I've gone around and put all the feeders back on, I have been feeding some of the nucs in this apiary. You can see the bees coming up through the feeder there. I always like to tap the boxes like that, just something that I do. Get told off by a number of people for doing it, but I like to just make sure that there's no queen on On the bottom of the feeder when I'm putting it down. You can see it's not annoyed the bees too much. For anyone who saw it there, there's the queen. Look, she's just come up to meet me. So see if I can get her out on the frame that she's on. Brilliant. Love it when queens do that. So should be able to see it on that camera there, and you can see what I mean about the remnants of drone brood. But really, really good because there was no worker brood in here at all. And she started to lay up workably. So we will see on the other frames that that queen is good. She's a good laying queen. And I'll just give you a close-up to that camera there as well. Hopefully the resolution's a bit better for you now. Really happy with that. So that's a good start. We found the queen. The problem with finding the queen on the first frame though is you— what do you do? Where do you put the frame? I hate putting the frame down with the queen. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to try and get the The second frame out with one hand and put the frame with the queen back in to get it right in the middle. So there we go, put that frame back in there. So you can still see the remnants of all that drone brood on there. Drone layers take a while to get fixed, but I'm really, really happy because on the last inspection I didn't have this. I basically had all of this drone brood in the middle there. But I didn't have this really nice ring of capped worker brood around the edges. Tiny little bit of sac brood there. I'll just, I'll kind of try and zoom in. You'll see a little bit of sac brood in the middle, and that is the thing that will creep in when your colony is not set up right in terms of the amount of bees and the amount of worker bees that you've got in relation to the amount of drone bees. It's effectively neglected brood, and because there's not enough bees in the colony to feed it all out and to clean it all out, you're getting little kind of viral diseases like that showing up. So in the colonies along here, I had tiny bits of chalk brood showing up a couple of weeks ago, a little bit of sac brood, but it was because the bees had been neglected and they hadn't had enough brood emerging to ensure that there were enough nurse bees in there to take care of the brood. This is really positive though. I'm so happy to see all of this capped worker brood around the edges, and once all of that drone brood in the middle is out, We'll be good to go. So I'll just grab one more frame out of this one, but I've seen, I've seen everything I need to see here. I've seen eggs, I've seen capped worker brood, I've seen the queen. Just being really careful not to squish any of the bees, always like to do that at the beginning. Oh, and there we go, loads and loads of eggs. I'll just give you a close-up of that camera there. So hopefully you can see the eggs in the centre of that frame, really nice pattern of eggs, and I'll do you a close-up on that one there as well. So first nuc done. They're running out of space, and I've not given these space in the last few inspections for a couple of reasons. Just because, you know, they're overcoming that drone-laying queen and the remnants of all of the drone brood that was previously there, So they've not really needed it, but you can see now the colony is probably at the point, definitely at the point, where they need an additional box. As soon as that next round of capped worker brood emerges, which you can see it's already been capped over, that colony there will be good to go, good for an extension box, good to go into a hive. So I'll just give you a quick flash on this camera here so you can see what I mean in terms of that colony. Full colony, 14 by 12, filling up all of those boxes there, all of those frames. They've got feed in there, they're not really touching the feed in there because there's a good flow on. Definitely needs an extension box, so I will fix that later on. I've got some boxes in the back of the car, but I'll try and kind of keep moving for the sake of the video here. So I'm going to get my feeder back on, nothing underneath it. So really good start, found the first one. Got the queen, found eggs, lots of brood. I'll come back and I'll do these videos again like in the next few weeks, and you'll be able to see that transition away from a drone-laying queen like that. But good to see that we've made a positive start. Right, the next bank of 3, these are all on nationals now. So a lot of them here are on nationals. I've got a few on Langstroth as well. Just turn that camera around so you can see what's going on. Majority of them though, they are on nationals here. There we go. Not quite right, this camera. I need a cameraman, that's what I need, isn't it? Definitely need a cameraman. There we go, we're all good. Just checking. Yeah, there we go. Just checking the ActiveTrack was on. I've done this before, I've done like a whole thing And it's just on manual, manual focus and everything's out of focus and, you know, can't be dealing with manual focus. So this colony, this batch of 3 colonies here was split out from an artificially inseminated breeder queen early on in the year, and they are a little bit too close to that way and it really annoys me and I always drop that one off. So I need to be super careful that I don't drop that one off today. Now I'm going to jump to the first one up here. Really happy to see that. What I was going to say there, I want to make sure that all of these have taken down their feed. I fed all of these and you can see just the remnants of some feed in here where I'm on a little bit of a tilt so the bees can't get to it, but I really wanted to make sure that they were taking down all of their feed. So good to see that they are actually taking that feed down. Let's get this one set up like this so you can actually see inside it. And a reminder for all of these, for the people who have not seen these before, these started off as like 2-frame splits maybe, maybe like 6 or 7 weeks ago, but they've had a go at raising their own queen. A lot of them failed, then I've introduced a new queen in, they started laying well, a mated queen that I've kind of introduced in myself, and then I had to take that queen out to give it to a customer, and then I've put new queens back in. So I've really messed around with these colonies, so they're slow, the growth is slow. And I've, because it's been warm, I've been putting extension boxes on to make sure that I'm not going to lose any through swarming. So some of them don't really need the extension boxes on, but it's just the way of me being able to manage my colonies a little bit more reasonable at this time of the year and ensuring that I'm not losing any bees through swarming due to lack of space at least. But look at this, you can see in this colony here that they are, they are doing really, really good. I will note again, shouldn't really have the best behaviour today. It's 15, 16 degrees and not the best flow on, but the bees are pretty good. They're not looking too bad. If you're wondering what's over there, I've got all of my empty bottles of syrup that I've used over the last couple of years. But there we go, looking pretty good down there. So let's get a couple of these frames out, see what the pattern's like on this here. So you can see there's been a little bit of checker brooding going on. A little bit of bees drawing crazy comb, which is annoying. Supposed to be self-spacing frames, and sometimes the bees don't really kind of take notice of that. Just looking at that there. There we go, that's looking good. I'm just going to turn that camera around so I can actually see what I'm doing at the same time. So really good flow going on here. Like, I'll show that to both cameras there. But you can't really ask for a huge amount more than that. That is perfect flow from a really small split. So a few weeks ago we were worrying about bees starving in these apiaries and coming around doing emergency feeding, and one feed has pretty much sorted all of these out, and then the natural flow has taken over. These are crying out for a hive, this one here, so I'm gonna have to come back this week and rehive a lot of these because they're on 6 frames now. That is the last frame that they've not drawn out, but you can see they have already started to try and draw that out. So when you're seeing this, as that is your last frame in the box, like, that's your trigger. Don't leave that any longer, because as soon as the bees and the queen build the brood up to there, just going to shake this off, they're gone. They're going to swarm. So all of the queens up here have been clipped. I think actually most of them have been clipped. I might have missed one or two. But we'll take a look at any today that aren't clipped and we will crack on clipping those as well. So lots of brood on that one there, really nice patch of brood. Not going to take any of the lower frames out just because it would take too long kind of putting stuff back together again, but another frame of foundation there drawing it out really nicely. You can see it's done a little bit of checkerboarding with this. And then this will be the other frame of brood that I put in there. So as you can see, they put a lot of drone brood on that side, but that side over there, loads of nice capped worker brood. Really, really good state this colony is in. So all I'm going to do is that final little bit of checkerboard in there. I've got that one frame at the edge, and on that side they're kind of not fully drawn that out, so I'm going to shake that off. I'm going to pop that one to the side and I'm just going to get my least used frames into the middle to support a stronger growth. And I know I'm ending up putting this frame here, this unused frame, at the end, but I don't like putting 2 of the underused frames next to each other. I just, just the way I do it, I like to kind of alternate them as best as I can to get them drawn out as evenly as possible. So there we go, nuc number 1. Didn't see the queen in that one, but I saw eggs, I saw nice patterns of capped brood, so everything's fine. Don't need to see anything else apart from that. Now this one in the middle, this is probably one of the smallest ones in the entire apiary, but I have been boosting it. So I do, within an apiary now, I will pinch frames of brood and move them around because I've just realized that it's not, it's not a sustainable, manageable way for me to make splits without moving stuff and balancing around. But you can see this one here, I've not even got the extension box on at the moment, so I've kind of And put the brood box, sorry, the feeder in the middle. So if I just show you that on this camera, you can see down there, got the feed opened up with a bit of fondant in there. And this one has really been— I've been boosting this one to try and get it going. This was barely on, like a fistful of bees at one point, because when you split 3 colonies like that— this was one colony I split into 3 separate nucs all next to each other. And the bees just migrate to the one. You always get like the strongest, the weakest, and then one like in the middle. And the one in the middle coincidentally here was by far and away the weakest. They went to either side. So this one had like, you know, football-sized amount of bees and that was pretty much it. And then they've gone through the hassle of me putting queens in and taking queens out and messing around. But I have boosted them, so I'm hoping to see a few more bees in here than I saw last time. So let's just pop this one open. This one here, you can see they're nowhere near as big as the other one. So give you a close-up here. What I should also add, and I've said to channel members as well, this apiary here is the one apiary where I'm a little bit behind on comb rotation. So these colonies here will have like aggressive comb rotation. I've got brand new frames up here that are going on, and once all the bees move up, I'm just going to remove a lot of the lower frames, and I'm just going to, I'm just going to burn them and just kind of move them up. So it's not It's not a shook swarm, it's not a Bailey comb exchange, it's just kind of a drastic removal of anything that's a bit dark. But let's get in this one and take a look, see if that queen is in there laying. This one here isn't a German queen. I didn't want to risk a German queen kind of like on my weakest nuc going. Where are we here? Let's put that camera up a bit to see what's going on. So frame of stores on the outer edge, pollen, On that side there. Just pop that frame off to one side. What I'm wanting to see here though, I'm wanting to see the green marked queen running round. I want to see eggs, I want to see at least eggs, but I'd like to see a little bit of capped worker brood. But this queen was introduced way later than the rest of them because she was like— the colony was so small. And I did actually have a failed introduction on this one as well because when they're so small like that, they do very strange things. But how about that? So we're good, we're back to normal on this colony here now, and we have got a really nice frame of capped brood there, and in the middle we've got tons and tons of eggs. See if I can get a close-up. Whoa, definitely need to strim this apiary. You can see that there, loads of brood, loads of eggs. See how close we can get with that camera. So all is good, don't need to worry about this one anymore. Probably borderline, I'm still gonna not put that extension box on. I think it's a bit too cold at the moment to risk putting that extension box on, and you can see like a lot of the frames, they're not even really like full of bees, maybe like half full of bees. And the queen's doing what I want her to do, she's laying all of those eggs up, turning it into capped brood. So I don't want to get— I don't want to make it super, super difficult for the bees. So I'm not going to put that extension box back on, I'm just going to put this back together again. I'll put this frame here, actually I will set it up exactly how they had it. Rest that one on the side. I want to make sure that I'm keeping all of that brood in the middle, and you can see there they've not even touched, not even touched the outer frame there. So not going to checkerboard, not going to give them additional space. I'm reading what that colony is telling me there, and what that colony is telling me is they're not advanced enough to take on that additional brood box. So I'll just put the feeder back on, and then I can store the additional brood box on top of the feeder for when they're ready. And I do like with the BS Honeybees nucs there, you know, that they do kind of have access to that. So if, if I came back and I'd missed something and there were tons of bees in here, like, they do have access to that. It's a bit awkward for them, but they can get up there, unlike some of the other feeders where you wouldn't be able to actually get up there. But that's pretty good, I'm quite happy with that. So 3 and 3, we've got 3 queens, 3 sets of eggs, and all looking good. And even better, they're all taking down their feed. I know that one there got fed fondant, and I wanted to feed that one fondant because it was a bit smaller than the rest, but all of the rest of them taking down their feed. Which is a really, really good sign. So this one here, checkerboarded again. Let's take a look inside this one. Lifted up that frame of brood there, and they're starting to work on all of those extension boxes, which is good. Not quite as advanced as the other one, but pretty good. Not, not a million miles away. Maybe a couple of frames off. Just looking at those outside frames, already started to work the outside frames, which is good. Even, even on the back there, so they're pretty much working all of that. Just checking to see if the queen is anywhere there, and she isn't. So top box, and they are flying with all of those eggs and larvae, so that is like fully laid up there. Hope you can see that one. So like, I'm guessing the one next to it is going to be relatively similar, and it is. So that is fully laid up with eggs as well. Eggs on both sides. Let's see if we can find one of these German queens to show you, because they are pretty impressive, these German queens. I'm a massive fan of my German Buckfast. You can see their lovely brood pattern. Lots of stores on that frame as well. Looking really, really good. These are in desperate need of hives, so my job for the rest of this week is to sort out the hives, make sure that I've got nice clean sterilized hives for all of these nucs to go into, because you can see there, that's already like 4 frames of brood in the top box, and I know the bottom boxes are going to be equally more packed out with brood. And then at the end there, we've just got, got a little bit of brood over in the corner. That might be some drone brood. But then lots and lots of stores. So these nucs are looking really good. Now what I could do with these nucs is I could split these nucs off. They're on double extension boxes. I do have roofs and I have floors, brand new ones and clean and sterile ones, so I could just split them out. I might do that. I might put another extension box on and then split them out into 3 nucs, but I think at this time of the year, probably easier for me just to get them into hives. They can still build up and get me a honey crop in this location here. The honey goes on for ages. And I use my cutoff as like 15th of September as my final cutoff for all of my honey crop. And you know, it's only 30th of June today. England are playing as we speak. I've stopped not watching England and doing this instead, which I know kind of gives the game away a little bit in terms of the live stream. And this isn't a live stream, I'm filming it as live, but it's the only way for me to do it. And I don't think it makes a massive difference because the other day when I did that live stream I couldn't come and talk to the camera because I was all the way over here. I couldn't see the comments, so there was no way for me to interact with you. And then I thought, well, hang on, if I film and cut it together in a way and then do it as a live stream, I can just sit there and watch and I can be behind the keyboard. So if you're watching this, I'm going to be there behind the keyboard and I can kind of like communicate and interact with people whilst I'm doing it. So I thought, that's actually better, get better audio, better Better visuals, more information, and I can answer questions at the same time. So hopefully that is a better live stream for you of an, uh, an inspection, as opposed to me trying to do it genuinely live with the, the material and the resolution and the audio buffering all the time. Right, let's carry on over here. I'm always worried with these though that I'm not like filming it properly. I get to the end and it's like 2 hours in and I've just missed everything. Bit of a disaster down there, a bit of a shocker. I've left a box of fondant that I was feeding, which I thought was nice and secure, and it clearly wasn't secure. Something's come and taken it all down. You can see it on the floor there. It's not like a major issue, just a bit of tidying up that I've got to do at the apiary. Probably should have done that before I started, eh? But let's get into this next batch of 3 nucs that I've got here. I will tweak the camera slightly over a little bit more. There we go. Just want to make sure you can see everything that's going on. There we go. Right, so should be more of the same with these 3 nucs here. These 3 are probably more like the more advanced ones over there, I think. Now that is one of the most annoying things that happens with the BS Honeybees poly nucs, and I remember when I was cleaning my BS Honeybees poly nuc feeders I tried to stick those in, and you can see, you can even see the remnants, uh, like here along this bit here where I tried to stick them in previously. Because every single time I take the roof off, they come off, and I get really annoyed with them coming off. So I think I'm gonna have to like work out a way. What I might do is I might put like a spacer in there and then a screw and just screw it down, because it drives me insane. And every time I'm trying to like put the lid back on, I can't get it on because that's like slightly out of the way. Really annoying, but they're good, they're good feeders, but that, that part of it does annoy me a little bit. Right, no queen underneath there. You can see though, look at them, nice big strong double nucs. So like for you, if you can't see it on there, these are on doubles. So they've got the floor and then 6 frames, and then that is the top 6 frames. And when I came in Like 3 weeks ago, these were all empty, all of these boxes, all of these top boxes, and I've just started lifting up just this one frame here, and then all of those other frames there, they're new frames that have gone in, and they've only gone in a couple of weeks ago, but the bees have been very, very busy drawing them out. We had that one week of a brilliant flow, and then it slowed down, but the bees are flowing, flying today, and there is a mild flow on. You can just sense it in the air from the movement that's going on. Oh, there we go. So I found the queen. So she is number 3, last year's queen, German island mated. We've got some artificially inseminated ones as well. Beautiful, beautiful queen. You can see her there right at the top of the frame. I'll get you a close-up with the other camera, but I've been so impressed with these queens. Been using them for about 4 or 5 years now, and I've got a number of different lines that come in. I've got a number of different breeders that give me queens and stuff now, and I just I love Buckfast. I love Buckfast queens, and I love really nice calm queens, and I've just found that these are some of the very best that are going. And look at the size of her, really nice, really dark. You know, Buckfast isn't all about just ginger, ginger bees. These bees here, these are the daughters of this bee, and some of them are orange, some of them are a bit dark. That queen there is a little bit camera shy, but look at her there, she's a beautiful queen. Really nice, beautiful Buckfast queen. Right, so let me put that down. As always with inspections, you only need to do as much as you need to do. I found a queen, I've assessed them for stores, I've assessed them for space, I'm doing a little bit of a disease inspection, but I'm not doing like a regimental shake the frames off doing a proper disease inspection that you should do 3 times a year. I'm looking at all of these and thinking, yeah, Yep, they need hiving up, but the queen's there. There's no swarm cells, and I could go and take take them all apart and look further down, but I don't I don't really need to do that today. I'm going to go back in and I'm going to give them hives tomorrow, and I can take a look and see if there's any swarm cells in there. But it's very rare for small colonies like this to swarm unless they get incredibly congested, or if you just have really bad genetics of bees and they just want to swarm on you. Buckfast bees not so much like that. You can compress them in quite a bit before they feel the urge to go and swarm on you. Right, let's take a look in the next one. Interesting, how have all the bees got in that feeder? That's a bit odd. Ah, I can see there's a hole under the feeder there. So look, I'll flick that round. You can see that this one, this is totally my fault, see the bees going in underneath? And that's because that is not seated correctly. So I will, I will fix that tomorrow. I could just like push that down, but I don't want to squish any bees, so I'm not going to do that now. But the way, the way to just temporarily fix that will be I'm not going to feed them any syrup today, so I'll just remove the syrup plug and then we fix that entirely. So this one here looks quite a bit smaller. I've not got bees working upstairs, not any bees working upstairs. So let's take a look what we've actually got in here. So I'll get that top extension box off, and there we go. We can, we can do something here today because that bottom box looks jam-packed full of bees, absolutely rammed. Top box has got nothing in it. So whenever I see that, I'm thinking, well, I don't want the bees to not realize they've got space above them. So I'm going to split that bottom 6 into 2 3s, and I'm going to put them kind of over each other like that. You can do 4 and 2, or you can do 2 and 4, whatever's kind of easiest for you. But I do like to move them around when I'm seeing a colony that big in size there. So I'll give you a look now. So you can see, like, that is 6 solid frames of bees, bees on all of the frames there, and I'm pretty sure they'll go all down. So I'm going to split that. I'm going to take 2 frames there, 2 nice frames of brood, and I'm going to lift them Up. We'll do that now. What I, I really don't like, this is a bad setup for me. Normally I don't set these up in 3s, I set them up as a maximum of 2s, and from 2s you can go in kind of either side, but in 3s you have this awkward one in the middle, especially if it's on a single, where it's really difficult to get in and get the actual frames of bees out. Always remember as well, first thing you do whenever you're doing this is you take the 2 Frames that you don't want out, put them somewhere else, and then you can just put them straight in. So then you're not trying to do things with one hand like I had to do on the first hive. So I'm just going to get that frame out there. Let's have a look what we got. So as I said, some frames ready to be cycled out. That one there, look, I got a, a, an old super frame that would have been used like in an emergency. They've drawn it out. You can see how old that is though. That's lasted for ages like that, but obviously gonna, gonna cycle that out at some point this year, without a doubt. So I'll put that one up there, and I'll just get in and see what else I can see down here. It's, it's strong, this one. It's not a million miles away. I'm not blaming them for not going upstairs. Just want to see that queen. There we go, I've got the queen, so we're all good. So queen's on that frame there, you can see her running round. What number we got there? I keep on doing this. Oh, there we go. But my eyesight's gone really, really bad. I keep on bringing her up and thinking I've dropped her. Right, she's number 6. So let me take that. I don't like taking the queen and putting the queen upstairs. I always like leaving the queen on the existing box because I know that she's safe and sound down there. So she's back in there. Let me get one more frame. And there we go, that's a nice frame of brood, nicely laid up frame of eggs as well. That will get the bees going up there, and there's enough bees to, to manage me doing this manipulation in this colony. Maybe pushing them a little bit harder than I should, but I'm not going to go wild. I'm not going to do any checkerboarding. All I'm doing here is I'm changing the shape of their brood nest that they've created. So you'll see back down there now, I'm not going to go— oh, that's me. I'm not going to go in and I'm not going to put like 2 frames of foundation in the middle. I'll shift all of that over to one side and I'll just stick the foundation kind of like on one side or the other. Let's just get that right for you. Go. Right, so 2 frames of foundation that need to go in there. I'm just— I know the queen's on that side, so I'm just going to move everything over to that side. Always, always worried about damaging good quality expensive queens. Always worried about damaging any queens for that matter, but especially when they are as expensive as these ones here are. So just put these 2 frames back in now. So I'm hoping that this is Enjoyable. I'm hoping there is a good substitute for a genuine live stream, and I'm hoping that you can see what's going on. Like, you can see eggs, you can see larvae, you'll be able to see swarm cells, you can see the queens, you can read the number on the queen's back. Gives you a little bit more information than the shocking resolution on some of the previous streams. So I'll definitely do this going forward. And as I said, the beauty of it is that I can be there in the chat answering questions as we go. Right, that one's all sorted. Let's get that feeder back on. I think you'll agree though, pretty chilled out bees. They're really chilled out, these bees. Really nice. Just got a queen cage there that I need to leave back on that one. Right, let's go on to the last one of this batch. Just going to turn this camera around. You can see what's going on. And let's get inside. And again, really annoying, really, really. I'm definitely going to fix that because when you're using these feeders a lot, it's, it's annoying and it's time-consuming. And apart from— need I say more? Need I say any more? It falls off every single time. And then when I glued them in It was annoying because I had to take them off to clean them, and then the bits where I'd glued it was a bit— so there was no perfect solution, and what I'd done previously wasn't really good enough. So this one, a little bit further behind, got an empty frame of foundation there, but apart from that I've got 10 frames. So this one is definitely due a checkerboard. Obviously done a bit of checkerboarding on this one previously as well, but I will— I'll do a bit more aggressive checkerboarding now because you can see the ones that I brought straight in there. They are drawing those out. So that's just frame of stores, that one. I'm going to put that one to the outer edge. And then this one here, nice big chunky frame of brood, and we've got lovely eggs and larvae in there. Let me show you a close-up on that one. That's a nice frame, and it gives you a good indication that there is, you know, a good flow on. You can see all of that stores up in that corner there, building that up nicely. Eggs and larvae, lots of brood. Not seen the queen, but don't need to see the queen. Obviously treat every frame like the queen is on it though. That's a checkerboarded frame. Not sure if you can see it on that one there. Eggs in there, and then in that corner up there we've got the queen, so she's busy laying on that frame. So I'm just going to put that one all back together. I'm going to checkerboard. I've got this frame here that's slightly drawn out already, so I'll put that one in. And then I'll take this big frame of stores. A little bit of brood on that one as well, that's good. And I'll bring that one inwards, and then I'll finish it off with the final frame of foundation over there. So you can see a lot of these nucs are really, really firing now. And the channel members who saw this a couple of weeks ago, like, they— Considering where they were when I took those queens out, and you think I had to go through the process of making them hopelessly queenless 8 days, knocking down the cells, putting the new queens in, waiting for them to lay, Waiting 3 weeks for that new brood to emerge, to get them to this point that quickly, it's pretty good, pretty impressive. And it shows that the bees that I left behind were good bees, but it shows that the queens that I've put in there are really good queens as well. So very, very happy with that. Half an hour in, enjoying it. We've done 7 out of probably like 16 or 17, I think, something like that. Right now I'm gonna come back to the fake flow hive. The reason I'm going to come back to the fake flow hive is because it is the king of propolis. Like, my fingers will be covered in propolis. But that's an interesting one because that's one where I've not actually seen the queen yet, but I think it was successfully introduced. For— again, for channel members, that's the one where I thought I'd introduced a queen and I hadn't. I subsequently come back and introduced a queen, and I'm not sure if that queen has been accepted yet. I came back, the cage was empty, but I didn't see the queen, didn't see any eggs. So that one's a mystery. Same with the keeper's hive. And then the Paradise Smart Beehive— no, sorry, then the normal Flow Hive is in the same situation as well. I think that one has a failed introduction in there, so we need to fix that. I do have 2 queens in my pocket today to fix a couple of failed introductions. And then the Paradise Smart Beehive has one where I've done a walkaway split, and we should have emergency queen cells in there today to come in and be able to Remove all of the emergency queen cells and then requeen the colony and get it back going again. So definitely, definitely need to strim this apiary. That is long overdue. But we will miss out the fake Flow Hive for the time being, and we will take a look at these 2 over here. So you can't see me, right? Let me move that around a bit. I wish I had a cameraman or a camerawoman. Be great. And I could just Do the beekeeping and not worry about whether things were in focus or the audio was good and all that stuff. Right, so we're on to my absolute favourite frames and feeders frames again. Sorry, Rob, that the more I deal with these frames, the more problems I'm having with them. They're just not drawing them out properly and it's making my beekeeping very, very difficult. And then when I'm interspersing them now with wax The bees have a clear preference for the wax, which is making things slightly more challenging for me. But strong colonies here, and you will see I've got my frames and feeders frames in there. Queen's not on the bottom, which is good. I do like 14x12 frames. I like— I do like them. I moved away from them because it was challenging to run them alongside nationals and challenging to run them kind of like just 14x12s, but As a frame, I do quite like a 14 by 12, like a big frame for the bees to get involved with and do what they want. Let's just lift that one up so you can see. So the spacing on this box is wrong. I think I've got— I think I modified some of my extension boxes to run on bottom bee space or top bee space, and then they're not compatible with the other ones. So the, the Maysmore extension boxes come in a certain bee space, but then when you're using them with BS honeybees, they're not compatible. So you need to chop the runners out to make them compatible, and then when you start doing what I've done here, you either lose the bee space or you end up with a double bee space. So a little bit difficult to work with, and it's not— it's just not ideal. It goes against kind of all of that standardization talk that I like to say. And I do, like, it is the best advice, but you do end up playing around with different things. So, found the queen, she was up there. Always nice to find the queen nice and early. All of that frame is drawn out, loving that. Really, really nice frame, tons of eggs. I don't know how close up I can get with that camera there, but like, she's laid up a full, full 14 by 12. Really, really good. So she's doing exactly what I wanted to do. I'll give you a close-up of her with that camera as well because she is a lovely queen. What number is she? 44. And get a lot closer with this one as well. So there she is. I think that's in focus now. There we go. So number 44, and then I'll kind of like show you some of the eggs in there as well, all laid up. Just left a ring of stores. Which is one of the other real big benefits of 14x12. They do leave them a nice ring of stores in there, which is always good to see. Helps when you have issues with starvation. But then coincidentally, all of my colonies that have starved or tried to starve this year have been on 14x12 and have been on frames and feeders frames. So read into that what you will. Personally, I think it's completely to do with the genetics of the colony. Queen that was in those colonies. So there we go, nice frame of capped brood, and I've seen everything I need to see in this one here. Let's just have a quick look at the the frames and feeders frame to see if she's laid that one up as well. Be nice if she has. So got the remnants of the drone brood left over from that one. So this one was a drone layer as well, and. And you can see, you can see from that other frame, like the worker brood, the capped worker brood, that's not going to be anywhere near as mature as this, is perfect. And then I've just got the remnants of the old drone brood in there. So the bees will sort that out over time as the colony grows and gets stronger. If the larvae in there or the pupae in there are dead, then they'll just clear them out. So you won't see that forever. And then you can see they're just starting to work on that frame there now. So no more checkerboarding allowed on this colony. They're not quite ready for it. And with 14x12s, I'd always be like a little bit more reluctant to do the checkerboarding. You're creating like a real barrier on the bees, and the bees don't like it if you create too much of a barrier. Whereas on like a standard national brood, it's nowhere near as bad, and the bees are, bees are pretty happy with it. Right, so this one here, my mistake. I can't, I can't blame BS Honeybees for this one. I'm only joking, I'm not blaming them, I'm just pointing out The real case, real life use case for these little bits of plastic there, and I'm going to fix it. But this one is my mistake. I've got burr comb on the top of the frame there, so the roof doesn't sit on it properly. A little bit annoying, but totally my fault in that instance. And then doesn't look like the bees have touched that syrup, which is always not a concern, but it makes me think like they're a little bit, little bit far behind, right? So these ones definitely are. So this is a 14 by 12 box. That's got a national extension box on the top. So I'm not going to look in this one because I know from last time the queen was introduced— no, actually, I am going to look in this one. There we go, I take it back, because this one I introduced a queen into it literally a week ago, and I've not seen eggs in this one yet. So I do want to see eggs. I saw the queen last time, but she wasn't laying, and she'd only been in for about 3 or 4 days. And this is hilarious. I lost that last time and I couldn't find it anywhere, and I was thinking, where has this gone? It's fallen out and it's stuck to something. And there we go, it's fallen out and it's stuck down there. So the bees must be thinking, what are you doing leaving that there? Very annoying. Let's get inside here though. So this one here isn't a German queen, this one here is a Buckfast queen, F1 Buckfast queen from Black Mountain Honey. Let's just set up this camera for you here so you can see inside. There we go. And this one here is a right old mix, so there's some 14x12 frames and feeders frames in there, and then there is some national deep frames in here as well. So the bees are going to be playing silly buggers with this, thinking, what are you doing giving us all these weird-shaped frames? We're going to extend them down, but I don't think there's quite enough bees in here yet to do that. Oh, there we go, we've got Eggs and larvae fully laid up both sides, so really, really happy with that. I'm just poking my head in there now, right, so that's all I need to see at the moment. I can't establish anything else until all of that is nicely capped over, so no need to go inside, but that's progress from last week because we've got bees actually, well, they've got the queen, sorry, laying eggs in there turning into lava. And I can actually see now that they are working the extension boxes as well. So really, really good to see. Again, issues with bee spacing in there. And as I said on all my channel member streams where I've been doing this, it's easy for me to hide when I'm editing videos on YouTube. It's impossible for me to hide when I'm doing live streams. And I know this is a slightly edited live stream, but I won't, I won't hide all of the bee space issues out here. Incompatibility between boxes. Results in the wrong bee space between the frames, which either results in bees tightening things down together with propolis if the space is less than 8mm, or building burr comb in between if the space is more than 8mm. Bees want an 8mm space, which is a perfect bee space. But I'm really, really— I am, I'm very, very happy with how this apiary is going. Like, it's getting to the point where it's It's getting big. I'm able to actually do something with this apiary now in terms of getting some production colonies back in here, or turning these nucs here into production colonies, making some further splits. And okay, it's the 30th of June, but in Wales the season goes on a lot longer than it does elsewhere. You might wonder why I've got these things in the middle there. They're just to try and keep these hives a little bit further away from each other. Does work quite well. But I'm gonna have a good tidy up in this apiary, get rid of all those bottles, get rid of that fondant. That's kind of my job for this week, and then to hive up a lot of these into nice brand new hives. Right, keeper's hive is on the back loop because that is the most angry hive in the whole apiary, so I'll do that one last. Really good tip, if you've got a colony that is the angriest one, or if you've got a colony that maybe you suspect of disease, like, do it last because you don't want to be transferring disease around, or you don't want to be transferring angriness around. This colony here has never ever had any disease in it, been inspected numerous times by the NBU when they're coming and doing like dash audits and things like that, but it's never— we never had any issues with disease around here or in the surrounding areas. And all of the bees in this apiary are super, super friendly apart from this one. This one here went a little bit rogue, not sure what happened with that, so it's in the process of requeening, so we'll get it back on track pretty quick, but it did, it went a little bit crazy, that one. And not like, not like mega crazy, not like chasing me, but it would sting me. It would definitely sting my fingers as I'm going through and trying to inspect it. Right, let's get into the next one here. I've run out of straps on this one, so this one is being held with a bucket of water. Let me go and get the other camera, get that one set up. So this one here was— happened again. This one here was borderline whether I added the extension box, and I chose to in the end. So it's probably going to be empty, that, but they have taken down their syrup, which is good, which means that we might see some bees up there. Aha, this is the one that was— I didn't have enough space. So really easy fix for that one. I'm going to get the frames that I got in the car just to fill that one up. I often do that. You'll run out of like the exact right number of frames So then you just leave it with, on a smaller colony, just leave a gap. Not the end of the world, but you just make sure you fill the gap up the next inspection, otherwise the bees will just fill it all with wild comb. So, batch of frames from Murray McGregor, but through Gwynny Gryff. I was in, you know, young newborn babies, so I didn't have time to be making up frames, but these are good frames. I know some people aren't 100% sold on them and I understand the reasons why and what they say the reasons why. See, see like the gaps around the edges here, saying the bee space isn't correct on the side. So then if you have this gap down the side there, then the bees will tunnel through and it just means it's quite difficult to find queens. But I'm— I like the convenience of these frames. I'm not like 100% sold on the wood Wax is really good, really like the wax. Just opening it up though. And I got my Leatherman there. I was gonna— this is what I was gonna show you here, my Leatherman. I love my Leatherman there. It's got a striking iron on it as well, so you can like make fires and stuff. I do love a boy's toy. It's pretty cool. Well, I try not to stand on those frames there, and I'll just leave them there to give me a little bit of space, but I'll close my Leatherman up. Get that back in my pocket. So these ones here, these were really, really small. This is probably the second smallest one that I had in the apiary here, and they're doing well. Like, these are built up quite well as well. Super calm, these bees, really nice. Oh, beautiful frame of brood there. Can't really moan, can you, when you're getting frames of brood like that? Looking good on that side as well. There's more, there's more. I can see at the bottom here I've done a bit of checkerboarding. It's borderline too aggressive, the checkerboarding there, but it looks good. There's lots of bees ready to emerge on this one. Just want to have a look, see if I can see any eggs. There she is. I thought we might have a queen on that frame there. There we go. So you can see the queen at the top running around, or can you? There, there we go. You can see her now. Number 63, obviously well mated. Super nice calm bees. And then We've just got stores and pollen on that last frame, so I'm not gonna checkerboard this. In fact, I'm gonna kind of like reduce the amount of checkerboarding that's going on in this colony. I've got 3 frames that I'm putting close next to each other, just trying to get the DM4 spacing to touch, and I'm just going to give them the additional space over to one side here and let them keep all of the brood nice and warm in one area there. That should keep them happy. So that one there's got a couple more weeks, 2 or 3 more weeks before it needs moving over, but I wouldn't wait. Like, at this time of the year you can move boxes over really early. Like, it's warm at the moment, it's warm at night, and you might set the colony back a little bit, but you're not going to get chilled brood. The brood isn't going to die. So that's another one done. I'll clear up those boxes at the end. Again, the, the real Flow Hive We will come back to that at the end. We'll do a little clean sweep of all of the bigger colonies at the end. We get the small ones out the way first. Let's have a look, has that worked? Just turn the screen around a little bit. There we go. Right, so a couple of ones here. Got a 14 by 12 and 2 Langstroth boxes over here. Let's go into this 14 by 12 first. Now this is the one, I'm pretty sure this is the one where the bees are just not drawing out the frames properly and playing real silly buggers with big fat frames, and it is annoying. So you can see in there I've had to kind of try and rejig this round again, but they weren't drawing out the central frames, they weren't drawing out some of the frames. So this big one over here, this big fat one that's way too fat, needs trimming down, and then I've tried to reduce Or make them work some of the ones where they weren't drawing it before. So if we pull out these 2 frames and they've not drawn them out, I'm going to be really, really annoyed. And I'm just, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them. I might have to take them out, re-wax them. But you look at that box there and you think, well, that box needs an extension box, doesn't it? That is a box full of bees. Why has that not got an extension box on it? And it's because last time I went in, there were like 2 or 3 frames that they hadn't really drawn out, and they definitely hadn't drawn them out fully. They just kind of started drawing one, and they were shunning a couple of them. Which was annoying. So let me just turn this frame round, turn the camera around even. There we go. So let's get inside this one. It's difficult now because they've started like extending the frames, making them super fat next to ones that are really thin. It makes pulling out frames difficult and dangerous, and you can see already this is going to be a real, real challenge to get that out. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get a hive tool, and you might notice that I'm not really using hive tools when I don't need them. I always keep them on hand in a bucket of like clean soda over here, but if you don't need it, like, don't use it. But in this instance here, like, I can't get any of these out, so I think the safest one for me is going to be to try and get one of these ones from the side out. And there we go, that one's just popped out. So that That's going to be the best one. Really properly lies down, you can see. Few bees flying up here, temperament not 100%. It's like, it's fine, 15 degrees, and they're not, you know, they're not battering me, they're not stinging me, but a little bit more buzzy, I would say, these ones. And I can just see there, I think I did squish a bee with that hive tool, so maybe that explains that. Sorry, Mr. Bee or Mrs. Bee. Sorry, Mr. Bee or Mrs. Bee. Now frame spacing should be like pretty easy. If you get the frame spaces next to each other, the bees should do the work. But look what's happening there. It's jammed because I've got one— you can see I've already killed some bees there. I've got one frame that's been drawn out too thick and then one frame that the frame's on, and there we go, the queen's on the bottom of that frame. So let me really pray now That I've not squished that queen. The queen was on the bottom of that frame. I've done it a couple of times this year with frames and feeders frames where I've rolled my queens as a result of them not drawing them out properly. But look, empty. Why are they not drawing out the frames? They've been coated in wax. And they're just not doing it. So I have to say, getting a bit frustrated with it now because they should be drawing that out and it's causing me issues. And that might have killed that queen there because the one next to it is drawn out, and then they're just completely ignoring that side. So I'm going to go through this colony, I'm going to find that queen because that's really annoyed me, that has. An expensive queen that I'm probably just gonna have to take out and remove from these frames. You can see she's doing the business, that queen. And there we go, look, we found her there. So I just managed to get her off. I saw her just in time, but she's doing a really good job. I'm not making her life particularly easy, I would say. So she's safe, and I'm going to put her off to the side there like that. But let's get in and take a look and see. what the rest of these frames are looking like, if they've made any progress on them. So I think you'll agree that's pretty good, pretty good frame. Liking that as well, really happy with that. And it does look like they've made like a little bit of progress on these. That's good to see, they finally made a bit of progress on those frames. Not Not perfectly drawn out, but I'm happy with that. Like, I'll take that. And you can see on there as well, got eggs, loads of eggs being drawn. And then the next one along does look like it has been drawn out as well. So luckily my change up there has, has got them finally working on it. But you can see like the space issue I'm talking about, they've not drawn out a lot of these frames yet. So I'm not going to give them more space because all I've got at the moment to give them is big wax 14 by 12s, and I don't want to— I don't want them to neglect these. I want them just to get them finally drawn out once and for all. And you know, if they can't draw them out when they're this congested and when there's a really good flow on, when are they ever going to be able to draw them out? That one there, for reference, so that's going to be the middle frame going in. Let's see if we can get that drawn out next. I'm going to squish bees doing that. How am I going to get all these frames in? Like, I get super, super worried about squishing queens, and I could, I could just cut back some of those frames, but it's a lot of work. I shouldn't have to cut back frames. I'm almost tempted with this one here just to— Oh, I finally managed to get it in. I was going to say just leave it out and just sacrifice a frame, But this, this is going to squish bees. They're not going to draw this out properly. I can't even really get that in. I'm just going to have to jam it in and accept that some bees are going to die in there. And then when I'm trying to take that frame back out again, I'm going to roll another queen. So I'm going to take my queens out of the frames and feeders frames. I can't risk rolling the queens in there. Not a good look. Right, let's take a look at a couple of Langstroth nucs. Couple of really nice Langstroth nucs. Bit of sun coming out, that's nice to see finally, warm up a little bit. All right, let's do this one first, and I've got the camera in the right place. So very nice. These extension boxes here were only added like a week ago. And the bees have drawn them all out completely in a week. That is pretty impressive, bees. Good going. Let's see if the queen's come up here. I reckon we're just going to see stores up here. Lots and lots of stores. Really nice though. That's good. Let's just tweak that camera there. So lots of stores. Very happy with that, and checkerboarding stores is, is so safe. There's no issue, you're not going to risk chilling any brood. Just looking in that one there as well, I expected to see some eggs there, but there's none in there, so I'm just going to checkerboard all of this. Really, really safe to do that because there's nothing up here, but they're drawing it out. Loads of bees up there, and again, no eggs. So really simple, I'm just going to move some of those frames of foundation to the middle. And take the ones from the outer edge and put those in the middle as well, move everything along. I'm not even going to bother going downstairs because I went in here last week, I saw that there was the queen, I saw that she was laying well, so my view is they're not going to swarm due to space. I know my bees, very, very rare that they would swarm with sufficient space in there. I'm just going to do that checkerboard in there and call that Okay, that's a nuc done. That will grow very, very quickly. And then let's have a quick look in the other one. I suspect it's going to be pretty similar, this one. Have a look. Slightly stronger, so maybe a little bit of brood living upstairs in this one as well. Let's have a look. Nope, nothing in the middle of that one. Oh yeah, we've got some brood, got some brood on that side there. So open brood, eggs and larvae. So not going to checkerboard that one because we've got brood upstairs. I'm not a fan of checkerboarding with open brood. Do it with capped brood. That's empty, so I'll take that one out and I'll move it to the side, but that's about as much as I'm going to do on that one. These need, these need a new home. Definitely need a new home, those 2. A week and they would be without a doubt full. A lot of bees in there, a lot of brood in the bottom, but that's good to see. Right, we've got 2 Paradise Smart beehives over here, jam-packed, absolutely jam-packed full of bees. And I've got 2 Nationals over there that are an interesting story as well. We'll do, we'll do the Nationals first. Actually, so let's have a look in these. Is that on them okay? Yeah, I think it is. Right, so these nationals over here, I had some extras from Richard come up, so I ordered some extras. Like I said, I always order a few extra, and you might have seen— channel members definitely would have seen it in the, the nuc production video that I showed with Richard about how we get them. I had those extra ones that I brought up, and I brought them up here, and I've not got any National extension boxes. So when I came up here last time, there were so many bees in these boxes and they were definitely going to swarm, and I've not got around to cleaning the boxes. Obviously won't put them in dirty used boxes I need to clean and sterilize and scorch. So what I did— these were in fact over there, over somewhere else over there— and what I've done is I've just moved them within the apiary to use the 3-mile or 3-foot rule to my advantage. So normally I'd say to people, well, don't move them in the apiary because you're going to lose all the flying bees. So what I've done is I've moved them within the apiary to lose all the flying bees, and hopefully they've not absconded. But I'm looking inside and I'm thinking they're going to still be pretty full. But last time I did a, I did a short on Sunday, so if you go back through, say, I think it's called something like The Bees Took Advantage, that was one of these nucs, and you'll see it was full, full to the brim with bees. That was about 3 or 4 days ago, so it should be more packed because more brood has emerged, but also all of the flying bees will have gone back to where the fake Flow Hive was. So let's have a look inside. Oh, that's so good! That has worked a treat. That's really, really reduced the amount of bees that are in here because it was a swarm risk. It was a massive swarm risk, this one. And if I show you kind of down inside here now like this, That now is a perfect nuc ready to go into a hive. I've lost all of the flying bees, but there is— they are still a swarm risk, these ones, due to congestion, because it might have triggered before I did that manipulation. So this one here fully warrants a full, full inspection, every single frame. Let's take a look inside. But this is, this is one of Richard's nucs. This is one of the nucs that Richard's reared. If you've got an overwintered nuc like this, this is exactly what you would have got. And you can see, well chilled out, super, super chilled out bees, really, really nice. Interesting, so when I checked this last time, eggs and larvae, loads of brood everywhere, and I've just pulled the first frame out and there's no eggs on it, so I'm thinking, oh, don't tell me that's a sign that they have swarmed. I can fix a swarm, we can deal with the swarm, it's not the end of the world. Oh, I can, I can see a few eggs in there just dotted around, so maybe that's not the end of the world. We'll get a couple more out though. Oh, I hate it when I do that. I've killed a bee there, and just by my own stupid fat fingers, not realizing what it was. There we go, really nice frame, super calm. Look at all that additional comb at the bottom where they'd run out of space. So that is a sign, if you're seeing kind of comb like that being built at the bottom, sure sign that your bees are thinking about swarming. So you never really want to see that. It's good that the bees take advantage of it, the extra space, but as soon as you start doubling up the boxes, that will cause you an issue. So good, good to fix it whenever you get the opportunity to fix that. Let's go from this side. Oh, I'm so, so happy with how this has worked. It's worked really, really well. Just turned it into a much more manageable nuc. And there's my queen. Let me show you that queen. Beautiful green queen. So that's good, no swarm cells, queen's still on there. Just going to put these frames back in exactly the same way that they were because there's some that are a little bit chunky. I always like to shake the last frame off before I put it back in when I'm working kind of like in a tight nuc like that, just to make sure I'm not squishing anything. And then these boards were to go back on, that's why they were on top. Oh no, they're the Langstroth ones, they're the wrong ones. Right, so they're going to come home with me. Get my brick back on, and let's see if we've had just quite as much luck in the one down here. Hopefully we have. Use the rules that bees give you, like, to your advantage. If you've got a colony that's super massive and you've not got anything to do with it in a few days, like, you can bleed bees off just by moving it away, as long as you know the bees are going to go back into somewhere else. Wouldn't do it if you've just got one colony in your apiary and you move the bees away and they just all fly back and cluster next to a hive stand, that's not going to work. But if you know you've got a colony that will receive them, then by all means just do it. It works really, really well. And I would say that this one here is even, even more so, like they've taken even more bees and gone back, so that flow is going to be jam-packed full of bees. That's going to be a really fun one to inspect. Not that they're angry, just going to be a lot of bees in it. So hopefully I've left enough brood, or there was enough brood in here to retain enough bees. That's the— that's what you're banking on really here, is that the brood is going to retain the bees for you. They won't abandon brood like that, especially open brood. But again, no eggs on that first frame, so I'm just going to shake these off. I want to see the queen, I want to see eggs, I want to see nice brood pattern. Yeah, well, we got that lovely brood pattern. Really nice bees. Richard does a fine job of creating the, the calmest nucs that I've ever dealt with. It's like his F1s are the same as the pure Buckfast breeder queens that we use. Exceptionally calm, incredibly prolific, like prolific beyond belief. I continue to just get such good feedback from people day in, day out, like new people messaging me saying, you know what, bought a nuc off you the other week. It's got a drone frame there, lovely drone frame, doing a huge benefit for me in this apiary. But bought a nuc off you 3 or 4 weeks ago thinking not going to get any honey and put it into a colony and we've got 3 supers of honey within the first 6 weeks or something like that, and they're just over the moon and happy. You know, the first honey that you get and that you give to your friends and that you give to your family. It's just the best feeling in the world. So there we go, that's worked hardly— I reckon 50% of the bees have been bled off here. No swarm cells, got it in time. Queen's still in there. I'm gonna put the queen on that side and then pop this frame back in. Very, very happy with that. That's worked well. Not sure if I've said it yet, but this apiary needs a tidy up, needs a I've got a few like bits lying around, but it's plastic, it's clean, it's brand new, so it's not the end of the world. But I just need— it's been on my list for a while, but my excuse is I've got a 6-week-old daughter who takes up quite a lot of my time. So priorities and all that. As long as the apiary is super hygienic, we're all good. Right, this one here I did a walkaway split on Let's get that camera sorted out. Very small. Did a walkaway split on the Paradise Smart Beehive. So I had one Paradise Smart Beehive, but I had 2 of them. So all I did, this was the original spot and I just moved. So it was on double brood, so I just split the brood 50/50. No idea where the queen was, but I knew the queen was in there. And then I'll just put the new Smart Beehives on top. And I'm just stacking a bit of equipment on here as well at the same time. So that's just equipment. Um, you can have a look, you can have a look in the window. So the window does come out if it's not painted in fully. Oh, interesting, I think I've just broken it there. I have, right? I'm gonna have to fix that. He did say there were a couple of defects in the ones that I was getting, so that's not the, the boxes breaking, that is me being sent broken boxes, which I did say was no problem whatsoever. Right, let me take this super off then. Get the super off. Yeah, we're happy with that. I love the smell. Some of the bigger colonies here, real, real good at going out and collecting propolis. And these are a little bit more tetchy than they were last week. So if I had to have a guess, I'm going to say the queen's not in this half. I'm, I'm always wrong. By the way, so after saying that, the queen will be in this half. But if we see eggs, then we know the queen is here. Let's have a look, see what we see. Let's get that camera sorted. Here we go. Right, so nothing yet, just honey, lots of honey. So this one here is going to be one that I do need to add a queen into, obviously. Don't know just yet, but we'll find out which one. Just going to work out which one it is first, and then we'll start shaking off all the frames. But the fact that there's so much honey in there— Good, good point to raise here though. I've had this question a huge amount over the last couple of weeks, which is, in my colonies, the brood box is full of honey, and you know, you can see You can see there the brood box is full of honey. How do I get the bees to move it upstairs and I've not got a queen laying in there at the moment? And it's really simple. Basically the answer is give them space upstairs above the queen excluder and get a queen laying. As soon as you've got a laying queen in there and you've got open stores at the bottom and space above, the bees will move it up. If the stores are capped, you want to bruise them. Get a hive tool, just run it across the face of the combs to gently bruise the wax cappings, and then the bees will sort that out for you. So yeah, another frame of stores. So I'm, like I said, I'm guessing that this one in here is the one that's not got the queen in. Another frame of stores. Doing quite well, got a few polished cells in the middle there. Just trying to get these frames out without squishing any bees. And now we've got— so there we go, like I was wrong, I was definitely wrong. There is the queen. So there she is, and I've got eggs and I've got brood. So I have that predicament there. What I'm confident about is that the bees will sort that out. If you're in this situation here and they're still not doing it, what I will do is I will wait for the bees to lay up some brood. I'll then take 2 frames of brood on either side and put it 2 frames over this side, 2 frames over that side, and I'll put all of the stores in the middle. And if they're uncapped, great, they could just use it. And if they're not uncapped, I'll uncap them or bruise the stores. And then by splitting the brood like that, they will lift it up. They will definitely lift it up. So I'm not concerned that this colony here is going to swarm due to lack of space. You can see there now, lovely frame of very chilled out bees. Hey, these are super chilled out bees. These are F1 Buckfasts from Black Mountain Honey, but I just pinched the queen out to give to someone. But like, they're not moving at all off the frame. Check out how chilled out those bees are. Super, super chilled. Even if I blow, see, not many flying off at all. That's what you want— chilled bees. I had a guy message me today saying, we, uh, we bought, we bought nucs from you because you said they were going to be super chilled, and they were super chilled, and he was really happy. I, I have had a couple of guys message as well say, we bought bees off you because you said they were going to be super chilled and they're a little bit angry. And you will occasionally get that with F1 Buckfast queens, and like in those instances I say to people, well, send me a video, and you know, if they are angry, we'll just replace the queens for you. Obviously it has to be the same queens, can't be that they're superseded or gone down a generation. We don't guarantee temperament at the next generation because not my drones, someone else's drones. So this colony is all good, that one's got the queen, so we know— Oh, I did this last time. And then nearly lost the queen. Gotta take the queen excluder with it. So that side of it is good, that's got the queen. I can feel that there is honey upstairs. If you want to have a quick sneak peek in the top of here, there'll definitely be some bees in there. Not as many as I thought, you know, like a couple of seams, but they're quite dark, they're quite deep down, so you can't really see them anyway. So I won't bother showing you that, but let's get into the one next to it. And you'll be able to see some emergency cells. There will definitely be emergency cells in here. Let's get that camera sorted again. Here we go. So I can be a little bit kind of not worry too much about this one now because I know that there's no queen, so I can put like boxes on the floor and stuff. Always worried if you're picking up like a box and putting it down on the floor if you've got a good queen in there. And that one is now an expensive Buckfast German breeder queen. I'm always worried that, you know, I put that super down there, if she was on the underside of the queen excluder, then I'd lose her. But I know there's no queen in here, and you can see not as many bees, and that is what you would expect because that was the original position and that's where the queen was. Really, I should have— I was doing the video to try and prove a point, but really what I should have done is put the original position without the queen and then the new position with the queen and with a little bit more brood to try and tempt more bees to go where they're not used to going. But there was loads of brood in here, so I didn't have to really worry about it too much. Let's get that camera down. So stores, not quite as many bees. Just going to shake that one off. We'll start doing our queen inspection for cells. Just like to take that first one out, makes it loads easier. And then I just shake the bees off immediately because I know there's no queen in here. So there we go, you can see emergency cell. I'm just going to take that off. Loads of emergency cells in there again. Not going to miss any today, Aidan, but you can see, got another extended one, super extended, so that would be a duff where it's fallen. But that's the one, you know, that's the one to not miss. Always chucking them back downstairs, making sure they're squished, making sure they're dead. So I'm going to double-check every single frame today, Aidan, make sure I'm doing the best for my bees and I've not got to come back. Because I know you'll spot the errors if there are any. So again, another fallen one there. Interesting, isn't it, how you get a few that have fallen? That's all good. Nothing on that frame. Frame of stores. So that there, that is just a play cup, but nothing in it. But I would just always take it down. Don't even bother checking, just take it down because it takes you 2 seconds to take them down. Kind of takes you longer to check to see if they're anything to worry about than it does to take them down. Right, there we go. That is prime example of a frame where you're going to miss them. Wow, doubly so because it's Drones on the back. So see if you can see all of the cells on there that I need to take down, and then see if you can see all the ones on that side as well. Lots and lots of cells. It is easy to miss cells, so just always err on the side of absolute caution. So we even see this tiny one there. That's— that doesn't look like a cell, does it? No. But it probably is a little rubbishy cell. But there is a really good one hiding in here. See if you can spot them all. Like, how many do you think are there? I've taken one down. That one there looks a bit like an emerged one, but it's not. The timings are wrong. So what I can see here is 1, 2, 3— I'd take that down, might be drone brood— 4, 5. But then that is a queen cell. You can see by the way it's dimpled. Really easy one to miss there, so I'll be taking that one out. That's the the most difficult one. Taking that one out and that one, squishing that plate cup in. Taking that one out, taking that one out and that one, and then reassessing again. And I probably just. Tap that one down. Drone brood, but I tap it down. And then even worse on this side, look at that, the mess. So got one there, two there. I'm gonna go like a little bit more extreme here because a lot of this is just drone brood. I'm not too fussed about taking it down. I know it's harsh, isn't it, taking it down? But you've got to do it. You've got to make sure that the introduction goes Well, I'm pretty sure that's all of them. Yeah, right, confident that's all of them. If I've missed one, Aiden will tell me. And there we go, nothing on that one. What channel members will have been noticing recently is they, they've been able to see I've been doing like kind of basically live streams but not live, similar to this but just as videos. But they'll be able to see like the introduction success that I've been getting with my F1 Buckfast queens. And the reason I get good success with them is because I know how to manage the colonies. And I don't, I don't want people to take that in, in the wrong way, in that it's like an arrogant way, but I've been doing it for quite a long time and I've had all of the mistakes, you know, I've made all of the mistakes. So I know what to do, I know not what to do, and I don't get 100% success. I don't think anyone gets 100% success with introducing mated queens. I've just popped the tabs off the cage there. But leaving them the correct amount of time, making sure that you take down all of the cells, making sure that there's no open brood and that they are 100% hopelessly queenless before you pop the tabs. And I know my method should be waiting 24 hours before I pop the tabs in. I should be putting the queens in, waiting 24 hours. But I'm adapting that because I know that will work, and I've not got the time to come back here tomorrow to kind of come in, put the queen in, and pop the tabs tomorrow. I'm on Sunday today. I'm on babysitting duty, like looking after my daughter duties tomorrow, so I can't do that. But I know this will work, and I'll come back. You can see that's marked L, so it's Lagustica, and this will work. So I'll come back, that'll all be good. That's completely fixed, that one there. Let's go and have a look at some of the other colonies, the slightly more difficult ones I've got in this apiary. But good to see that they're both working well, and I think now that these have both got queens in, you can see both of those boxes, they're pretty much full of bees. This one more so than this one, and you could— I could swap them round once I've got the queens successfully introduced, but I'm not going to mess around with them to try and balance them too much. But once that brood gets— once the queen gets laying and once the brood starts emerging, these 2 boxes are going to get filled up with honey really, really Right, let's go and do the fake Flow Hive, which I also think has not got a queen. Pretty sure it's not got a queen, not got anything in there, so all of the brood has emerged. These ones are a little bit touchy as well. Not, not quite as bad as some of the other ones in here, but let's have a look. That camera sorted. Sun's come out, loving it that the sun's come out. It did say that later on tonight the sun was going to come out. There we go. Best thing in the world, swapping out my fake Flow Hive roofs. Oh man, they were shocking. When I say fake, I mean— sorry, I mean pitched, but it was on the fake one as well. Really, really didn't like those roofs. But my Flow Hives are quite far behind this year. These are the ones where I took some early splits out of them, and then I've had a couple of successive failed introductions, or where I've put queens in then taken queens out. So I've been messing these bees around something crazy, and there's not many bees in here, and I'm pretty sure they've not got a queen. So let me move this camera over here. You can put it there actually, that'll work. So you can see, not that many bees in the top box. They're on double brood, but they're not really doing a huge amount. They're only up here because you've got an old drawn-out frame up here. Really, I could condense these down to single brood, but I'm not, I'm not too precious and I'm not too fussed about doing that at this time of the year because there's a good amount of bees in the bottom box. You can see that frame there, getting on a little bit, that frame, but decent amount of pollen in there. So what I'm on the lookout for in this colony here is a virgin. Now I don't think there's a virgin in here, and I'm just going to add a queen in. But if there— it would explain why there's been a couple of failed introductions, and it would explain what happened last time. I was so confused when I did that last members video because I thought I'd put Queens in here, and then I subsequently put queens in there, and then the queens— I couldn't find the queen. So what we might find today is eggs. We might find eggs, we might find brood, and if we do, I'll be really, really happy because that will solve that problem and solve the mystery of the Flow Hive. But also what I hate about the Flow Hive, the genuine Flow Hive, is the spacing. Spacing is just not right on the Flow Hive. And it results in a similar thing to the Frames and Feeders frames where you get super chunky frames and then you get frames that are not drawn out right and then you just get this big gap down the middle. What's that all about? It's an 8-frame box, but you've got a 3/4 of a frame gap on the one side. So you're always ending up with chunkier frames than you, you should get. So should get a dummy frame really built to go in there, but maybe Flow Hive should just build their boxes the right size. And you can see exactly what I mean there, it's stuck together and it started to pull that foundation out because it's stuck to the frame next to it. And same with that one there, really annoying. So this, this colony is dwindling, this one desperately needs a queen in there. And I'm just going to take my time looking over it because like I said, I do think if there's any colony in here that's still got a failed virgin running around, Is this one. And I remember, I remember what I did now. After that failed introduction, I think I boosted it with a frame of brood, and I'm pretty sure that they've raised some cells on that frame. Just spotted that down there now, which is really good if they have. First sting on the finger didn't go through, but I did just get stung then. So that's quite a long time to go without getting stung. You can see Cells being built there. But do you know when some colonies just throw up complete mysteries? Because that's not an emergency cell, that is a supersedure cell. There's 2 of them, center of the frames. Interesting to see if there's anything in them. I reckon they might just be duff. Nope, there's a larva in them. So that is well confusing. Let's give you a close-up of that, which leads me to believe that there is a virgin in here. There is a failed queen in this colony that I really do need to find. There we go. So you can see there, larva in there. Larva doesn't look particularly good, probably a duff larva, but there is a larva in there. I'll show you that on, on the other camera as well because the other camera's a little bit Better resolution. But I do think there's a— I do think there's a failed virgin in here, and I wonder where she is. So there's a cell on that side that I need to go in and I need to remove. Looks like a supersedure cell. There's a couple of them on here. So I think I missed a cell. I think I missed a cell a few weeks back. And that's what's resulted in the failed introductions. And I was giving it the big one back there saying that I never make— I never get them wrong, I never miss them. But you do, you make mistakes. But on the whole, you know, it's up in the high 90s percentage-wise. So you do occasionally get colonies like this though where it's a challenge and it can take hours to find virgin queens. Like, it's not a quick thing to do. Coming in now, it's about 6 o'clock at night at the moment. It's a really, really good time to be finding virgins. And like my tips for finding virgins, like I've said before, you don't want them— you don't want to be looking close up here. You want to go as far away as you possibly can, and you're looking for that behavior on the frame. And you need to get yourself in like a zen-like phase in order just to look for virgins. You're not looking for anything else. Luckily on these frames, there's literally nothing else here anyway, but I can't see any. And because I'm doing this live stream, I'm not gonna I'm not just gonna zone out and zonk out on you and just look for virgins and just be silent. So what I probably will do is probably just take down the cells and just try and like force an introduction with a new queen. But if it happens again, this colony here is so small that I'll just shake them out, and that's, that's how I'll deal with this colony. I'll shake them out and I'll just take a split from one of the other boxes and put some new bees in here, and then that's the safest way of doing it really, because there's not many bees here. There's like 3 frames of bees in here. That's not enough bees to create a big thriving colony at this point in the year. Like, I'll get them back on track for winter, but that's, that's it. That's basically all you would get. I thought I'd seen one there. I thought I'd seen the virgin there, but it wasn't. It was, it was just one of these orange bees that looked a little bit kind of slimmer than the rest of them. I'll do it on this camera here so you can kind of look along as well as I'm looking through. But really frustrating. It's probably the most frustrating thing, and the thing that I enjoy least about beekeeping is trying to fix broken colonies and like looking for virgins. Like, I enjoy the intellectual challenge of it in terms of what have I done wrong? And reviewing it, but only once you've solved the problem and you're like, ah, right, okay. I'm not one for, you know, the mental stimulation of it. I don't enjoy the mental stimulation. I enjoy the solving and thinking, ah, yes, I've solved the problem, and I can sit back and have a cup of tea and enjoy and revel in the fact that I've solved something, not, not the actual frustrating part of it. But I did, I did a video like a few, probably a few weeks back now, channel members video, where it was just hunting for virgins. And I went through, so all of the colonies up here all had virgins in, and I was, I was pretty good. I found most of them, and I think it took me like 2 visits to get them all. And then this is the only colony, the legacy colony from there, where I've still not got a queen to successfully lay in here. I donated some brood into it as well to kind of keep them going, but it's not, it's not looking great. So let's have a look one more time on that cell, or on the frame that's got the supersedure cells on. And as I've said before, if I do find a virgin, I will kill her and I'll show you her after I've killed her. I won't try and hold the frame up to the screen. That's a surefire way to lose your virgin. But definitely no eggs. But then if there's no eggs, how is there cells with larvae in? And then obviously the cells aren't going to be any good because they're going to be from a daft little virgin who's just fired out a couple of cells or a couple of eggs just to keep people happy, but they're almost certainly going to be infertile. I really want to find her. She is in here. But you know, this is the kind of one where I like at the end of this in three or four minutes' time probably, I am just going to give up and I'm going to put this all back together again and I'm going to put the introduced queen or the mated queen that I'm going to introduce and we'll probably come back next time and she'll be out laying and we'll think well what was going on there? That is just an absolute mystery. Like where have they got those eggs from and why have they killed the other queen? Very, very strange. Right, we're going to shake them off. I'm going to take down those cells. 2 supercedure cells, and then one looked like they were having a go at doing it, but there was not really anything in it. Just have a quick check on the other frames just to make sure Basically final last gasp check for the virgin, but no, I'm just checking to see that there's no cells on any of the other frames, which there isn't. What do you think? Have a guess in the comments. What's gone on with this colony? What have I done wrong? Because I've definitely done something wrong, but it's very, very rare. Like, normally what happens is you just don't see any eggs, there's no no eggs, there's no larvae, you can't find the virgin, you keep on putting queens in, the virgin keeps on killing the queens, you don't often get supersedure cells because supersedure cells don't make sense. Confused. Right, let's put it back together again. Oh, I do, I do have that one frame up here that I've not properly looked at yet. Let's have a quick look at this frame. If she's anywhere, she'll be on the underneath. I suspect In the dark. Nope, can't see anything on there. And if you've seen the queen— wow, if you've got Aidan with your eagle eyes and you've seen it, let me know what was the timestamp, what was the minute, because my eyes are giving up a little bit. But let's get the other queen in. So I've got another F1 Buckfast Queen, Black Mountain Honey. I've just— that SD card is full, so that car— that camera is game over for the rest of this. I got my queen there, so let's get that queen in there now. Should have remembered to clear the SD before doing, uh, an hour and a half video. Bit silly, right? Let's get her in. If you've not got frames of brood, just go in between the 2 most active frames that you've got, and that should be good. Do you know what we could have a quick look at? We could have a look to see if I've somehow trapped the queen upstairs. There's not many bees up there, but that could be what happened. Are there even any bees up there? I don't think so. So that makes sense. Be really annoying, but it would make sense. And then it would explain why— how they've got access to eggs and larvae, because they're just pinching them from up in the supers. Oh, that'll be a mammoth cleaning job, that will. My, uh, my Flow Hive is falling apart at the moment as well, you might have noticed. So I need to kind of like pinch everything back together, try and get it working. But luckily the new roof holds everything in place, which is good. So there we go. Right, 2 more hives to go. We've got the keeper's hive, which is the most angry hive, but I will do that one next. And then we've got the fake flow hive, which has got all of the additional bees. There'll be tons of bees in there. I'm not sure whether there's a queen in there, and I know that there's lots of propolis in there, so that'd be really fun to inspect. Let's move this camera though. I will bring any frames up to this camera now. Where are we at? We're up to an hour and a half. It will be ever so slightly trimmed down from what you're seeing on YouTube, maybe like an hour and 20 or something at the moment, but it is filmed as live. But I am— I'll just trim out any, any unnecessary delays, like when I went and got the frames out of the car. Keepers hive, so cool. Oh my goodness, like, I'm into the brood box already. It's as quick as that. Like, these are just stacks full of— there's quite a lot of bees in there, there's a lot of honey in there. But I never need to worry about that because all I do is I come down to this area here, I take off those 2 little guards that they don't— they propolise the guards in, it's weird, but then they don't propolise under the guards. Basically these are guards for propolis, so you'll see there, see how they're propolised down, but then the frames don't get too propolised down. It's weird, it's good design, I don't know. How they've come up with that. Angriest bees in the colony, in the apiary, this one. They're not, they're not terrible, but you— I saw them just immediately coming up for me there. It's funny, but I do, I do enjoy inspecting this one. These ones have got a bit more propolis with them as well, but you can see frames coming straight out there now. So last time I went in here, the queen had been introduced. And I can see now I've got eggs and larvae. I'd like to see some capped worker brood on this one. It would be nice just to confirm that what I'm seeing isn't drones still, because I don't think I saw the queen. I'm not 100% sure. I think last time I saw eggs. A design improvement that I'd like to see, and I'm going to fashion it myself, is like somewhere to hang the frames there. So I can look at where do I put this frame. Basically need to open the top, but if you had like these frame rests, I could put the frame there and just hang like 3 or 4 frames there. It'd be great. So what I have to do, and this is why they always get angry, is I have to shake them off, and then I just got to like pop that down somewhere. And I generally pop it down just here, but then the bees can't fly and get back in. So it's— that's kind of my mistake a little bit, but it would be nice if they just sold some rests. I'm going to get myself some, make some myself, I think will work really well. Not 100% sold on that brood, I have to say. Looks a little bit droney to me still. Interesting, we see on that one there, see if you can spot something funny about one of those bees on there. Same on that side. I can't see anything. Not so much funny, but just an indicator. What it is is that there's like a couple of ghost bees on there with a white stripe on their back, just around up here somewhere, and that's a Himalayan balsam bee. So the Himalayan balsam is out, which is nice. Starting now, the only thing I'm concerned about there is I've got, I've got a couple of frames in the middle that's definitely capped worker brood. I've just got a few few cells of what looks like the beginnings of drone brood there. There's definitely some drone brood going into that frame there, and it is still the time of the year where the bees will create drone brood, but I've not really taken this apart so much to be able to work out what's going on. But we'll find out, we'll find out next week. So I've got my queen there hanging over in that side, hanging out with the drones. Bit ominous, isn't it? I reckon we've got another drone layer in here, which is frustrating. Nice amount of pollen there though. Look at that pollen there, beautiful pollen in that corner. But we will see. So no action to be taken on that colony there other than to wait and see. Might have to replace that queen Queen. She was an F1 Buckfast Black Mountain Honey, but you do occasionally get drone layers. If you get a drone layer from us and you— if you're in that, if that was me there and I was the customer, all I would do is just send a picture of the drone brood with the queen on the frame and said, queen's a drone layer. And then I'd kind of give the customer authorization and say, right, kill the queen, either send it back to us or just send me a video of you squishing it, and then we'd send the replacement queen. So we do underwrite The queens, and we underwrite the fact that you will get drone layers in the first, first season. If they go drone layer, we'll send you new queens. Obviously, we ask for the original ones back, or we want to see videos of them being killed. And we are aware of the timings as well of when queens get introduced and how long it takes for drone brood to be emerging, or at least being shown like that. Some people try it. How cool is that though? Look, so that's all put back together again now. Isn't that a cool design? Like, I know people say, oh yeah, we've had that design for years, blah blah blah, and it's like, well yeah, but I've not been able to buy that design. And I think it's different from the AZ beehive. It's like a standard beehive without pulling out frames, using standard national frames. So this one's Langstroth, but you could, you could easily make that into a national design as well and never have to worry about all of these top boxes. That's just my honey boxes. And then the beauty of it is that it's perfectly lined up for a Demeray split. If you want to do a Demeray, you just put your— take your frames up, fill them up into these 2 boxes here, put the queen back downstairs with new foundation, cycle it round. It is built for the Demeray split. Brilliant. Bit of propolis coming onto my hands there, you can see. Wait till you see my hands after this next hive, going to be fantastic. So I hope we can finish This live stream kind of like in a positive manner and we can find, find the queen, find some eggs, see some honey, maybe in the flow frames at the top. But like, I know for a fact that box there is full to the brim with honey. It's genuinely stacked full of honey and there's going to be a lot of bees in here now, loads of bees. So floor down there, I've got my feeder on, but that's, that's not been used for ages because we're in honey season now. It's gonna— oh, it's so funny, isn't it, that I've not got to use a hive tool in any of these boxes. This one though, mega, mega propolis. There we go. So I just want to get that off without the queen excluder. That's what I want. And then I'll take the queen excluder off. Look at all those bees in there! Oh my goodness. I'm a frame short in here. How have I done that? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I'm a frame short. I don't know how I've done that. You can see the bees building their wild comb in the space. Have I left out a frame short? I think I might have a frame in the car. I think I do have a Langstroth frame in the car, so I will wander back to the car. I am getting pretty good at bringing what I need to the apiary and keeping a few stores. Oh no. And I can't believe I said that out loud because I've taken it out and in the back of my car is just loads of golf kit. So I'll leave that in. That's embarrassing, wouldn't it? Blowing my trumpet again and then making myself look like a fool. So I do have a couple of spares over here though from this colony. I'm just going to pinch one of these frames. So I'm off camera at the moment, but what you won't have seen is I've just got to pinch A frame, a foundation out of one of those nucs because those nucs are getting hived up tomorrow and there's, there's excess frames in there. So I do have a spare frame. I'm going to have to sort out the wild comb up here as well, so I'll leave that back end until the end. Look at the propolis! I'll have to get the frames out to show you the propolis in here. It's wild. Oh, we'll get that, we'll get that last frame out first actually. So lots of bees, super, super chilled as well, and considering that these have had loads of, like, other bees, like rogue bees chucked in here as well, they're not fighting or anything, so that's pretty good. We'll do a little shake just to give myself some space. Oh, but that's not too bad, so I've just got one piece of wild comb there. We'll fix that and we'll leave that there. Right, so I went through this top box, not like— I went through the top box last week and there was literally nothing in it apart from frame after frame packed to the brim full of honey, like properly packed. So I'll show you, I'll show you just what's— that's indicative of basically all the frames in there. Heavy! That's a Langstroth frame, full of honey. And you kind of might ask, well, you know, it's supposed to be in the Flow Super, no? And it should be, but this colony is— I've run it on double brood where really I've taken so many, I've taken splits out of it, I've taken queens out of it, I've not got queens going, but the bees have just lasted and lasted in here. It's been brilliant, and I have been topping them up with brood. So normally I'd expect there to be loads of brood down here and a little bit of honey to act my buffer for the colony not swarming, because you've not got much room to play with in a fake Flow Hive with the super like that. But what I'm more interested in in this one here is the bottom box, so I'm just going to get my hive tool again. Got a different hive tool this time around. Going in, and I'm just going to take— this is what I was going to do, I was going to get my queen excluder. Put that wax in there for safe disposal. Put my queen excluder on there, and then lever that top. That is so heavy, that top box. Whoa! That barely liftable. So you could extract that. If I find if I find the queen down here, I'm definitely definitely going to put the queen excluder downstairs because it's late on in the year. I'm not worried too much about swarming now. You might, might lose the swarm, but it's not, not the end of the world if I do lose the swarm and just turn that into a honey super. I've got loads of Langstroth honey supers on the go at the moment, and I can extract that. So we will extract that if we can, but I want to obviously need to make sure that there's eggs in here. I need to see the queen before I go putting queen excluders in anywhere. So this is another one that went drone laying a while ago, and I'm seeing some cells on here as well now, which is a little bit strange. We've got eggs, we do have eggs on here as well. Okay, so that's, that's positive. So I've got one colony there, drone that had gone in a while ago, they're still recovering from that. So let me shake that one off. Hopefully we find some nice frames of worker brood in here as well. Now we've not got another drone layer that needs fixing. So that's just a frame of eggs, bit of drone brood on that one as well. Could have another drone layer in here, and that would be why I've had failed introductions in this one as well. But it is amazing that they've kept so many bees. And we're not like— I know you can't see it, or you look at all the bees in here, they're young worker bees. There's not that many drones in here. Throw curveballs at you, don't they, bees? Yeah. All right, let's take a look. Couple more frames. If I see any more frames with drone brood like that, I'm I'm going to assume it's a drone layer. So yeah, I found the queen and it's a drone layer again. So that is another one of my queens. Unfortunately, it's good advert for them, but like I say, if you get drone layers, we do replace them. And you can see a couple of attempts at supersedure cells in there. And that's, that's not good, not a good look. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put that off to one side and just double-check to make sure that there's no nice frames of worker brood knocking around in there and it is a perfectly healthy queen before, before I squish her. And no, she's a drone layer. So for me, that's a really easy fix. Keep an eye on that queen over there. Just trying to think back to when I put her in. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm getting my dates mixed up. She's only been in here about a week and a half, so there's no way that she can be responsible for all of that drone brood because she wasn't, she wasn't released until about 7 days ago. So I don't think any of it would have been capped over yet. So she gets a reprieve, but I might be wrong, so I'll be back in here next week. She's a, she's a big queen, she should be easy to track down in here again. So I'm not going to kill her this week, she looks good. There is a little bit of capped worker brood in here as well. So she lives to fight one more day, but she's not going to get a huge amount more time. Definitely next inspection, if we don't see lots and lots of nice capped worker brood, she will get the chop. Shake that one off. But what I definitely Oh, sting on the finger there. Few, few bees in here. Strong colony, this one. So just going to get that frame back on, and then I am going to do what I said, put that queen excluder back on there now, because I know that the queen, even if she is a drone layer— oh, that's heavy. I'm going to— Oh, taking a bit of wax with me. Even if she is a drone layer, she is now confined to the bottom, so it makes it easier for me next week coming back and finding it. And then that box above is now the queen excluder. And then obviously— sorry, now the box above is above the queen excluder, turns it into the honey super. And then we've got the fake flow super directly above that, which I don't need another queen excluder underneath. So we strap this one all back up. But I think we're good to go. I really enjoyed doing that. Hopefully this first attempt, a kind of semi-live stream, has gone well and you've enjoyed it. Hopefully I've been useful kind of in answering some of your questions. I thought I'd add a bit of wax at the end. Both here, kind of in the time being I'm doing power stance because the camera's set at the wrong height, but also on the keyboard as well. I will be on the keyboard for a bit answering questions. If you want to see me do kind of anything different on the live streams like this, give me a shout. I can have a go at doing anything you like. Hopefully it's been useful though. Hopefully you come back next week. Hopefully you tune