Live Apiary Inspections - Episode 1

Is it working? I have no idea. I'm guessing no one's here yet because I've just clicked live out of nowhere in the middle of the apiary, and I just did this to see if it worked because I get told off by my wife all the time for doing live streams and going late into the evening talking, and she's like, I'm next door, this is really loud, can you go out and do it somewhere else? And I say, well, there's no connection anywhere else, can't really do it anywhere else. And then it dawned on me the other day that it's the summer solstice and days are pretty long at the moment, and it's like, what's the time now, 6 o'clock, something like that? I could come out and I could do a live stream at the apiary. How cool would that be? And I've never wanted to do that before because my camera is not the best, you know, on the camera phone when you're looking at it. Because I've got my new Sony one, I can link it up to my normal camera. So what I don't know though is that I don't know if the audio is working. So can someone give me the thumbs up and just tell me if the audio is working? Drop a comment on there. It would be really, really good if you could, because if it does work, then I can just come and do live streams in the apiary and nobody else has to listen to me rambling on in the background when they're trying to get to sleep. Now, how do I find out if this is actually working? I can't see any comments coming in. Oh, I've got thumbs up, so it looks like we're working. Audio is good, excellent. Okay, cool. So live streams at the apiary. It is Really, really nice to be out in the apiary. Brand new apiary, very, very close to the bees, so you know, we'll see how long before I get stung. But isn't it nice? Isn't it nice weather? And isn't it a change from the rubbish weather that we've had? So I can probably do like a little mini Q&A, you know, if you've got questions coming, I can see them coming up, I can see comments, I can see thumbs up and stuff like that, but I'm not gonna— this is Griff's weekend, so I'm not gonna go wild and do a long Q&A. I think Griff's doing a stream tomorrow night, at least I think he is. So I just— this was like a test. I wanted to see whether it worked or not, but I might as well talk a little bit about what's been going on this weekend. I have just popped up here to do— this is brilliant— I popped up here to put 2 queens in, and I was so excited about bringing up my camera to test for the streams that I forgot on the queens, and I just realized that. That's annoying. So my wife's gonna be really annoyed when I get back home and I say Yeah, did you do the queens? And I say, no, I just did a stream instead and forgot about the queens. He's gonna think it's a cunning plan, and it wasn't a cunning plan. I genuinely forgot them. That's really annoying, but I just, I can't get over how nice the weather is. And I, I know everybody, I'm pretty sure everyone in the UK must be in a similar boat here, that it's like beautiful sunshine, really good weather, piles of nectar coming in, and okay, maybe the bees aren't like perfectly set up to take advantage of it, but I'm seeing huge amounts of nectar coming in, and it would mean that you'd get a pretty, pretty good crop, I think. Someone's saying beautiful weather, it rained last night as well, and it did, we got a splash of rain, and I remember going on holiday once to Italy, and every single day it was like 25, 26 degrees, and every single night it was just drenched with thunderstorms, and I thought that's pretty good bee weather, I would take that. But what is amazing, one of the best things that I've seen this weekend, I've been having a few issues with some like little splits that I've made. So you've got like little splits, maybe like 1 or 2 frames of bees, and you've got a queen cell that goes in there, and then the queen cell's failed because of the poor weather, so then the bees are getting old and some of them have turned drone layers. And whenever you get like a weak colony like that, all of the little niggly diseases and viruses start creeping back in. You'll see a bit of sac brood, you might see a bit of chalk brood, you might see a bit of neglect. neglected brood where the bees— not enough bees to look after the brood. And I remember going in about a week ago, 10 days ago, and thinking, oh, this is really not good. I've made up some splits here to take some expensive queens. I bought a lot of expensive queens from Germany to flood the areas with the good genes and the good genetics, and to use as breeder queens as well. And I had to put them in these piddly little splits that were looking so ill. And I went back around 3 or 4 days ago to clip the queens because I didn't want them flying off, but also just to kind of check and see how the colonies are getting on, and every single one of them just looked brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Like, no chalkbrood, no sacbrood, no neglected brood, everything was cleared out, eggs were perfectly being laid in the middle, all of the nectar coming back in, and I just think that nectar is such a good thing for the beehive. Gives like the ability to clear everything out. It gives the queen a reason to lay eggs, but it gives the colony a reason to clean up. And the fact that they can go out, the fact that they can bring that in, it just gives them that warmth. The warmth is the main thing, and it just turbocharges them. So where you might have had like some neglected brood, you might have had sac brood, you might have had chalk brood, the bees are thinking, no, we need to clear that out because we've got incoming nectar. So So going through these colonies, it was just the complete opposite, absolutely beautiful. And just all of my worries were kind of gone. I'm aware that the exposure is a little bit rubbish here. I'll have to pick a better spot next time and get the exposure right on my face. But I'm not going to stay long. What Leon Morgans is saying, you just described what's happened to me. Queen cells must have failed and now I have drone layers. There's a queen cell there now, so I'm sitting tight. We're in winter and experience even -1 at the best of times. So the hives I've got behind me, they are— so I've got a mixture here. So this is going to be my license apiary. I've just brought my nucs up here, so I've got Payne's poly nucs with the extension boxes on. Very friendly bees, loads of nice friendly bees in there. What I forgot to do on my phone is turn off everything else, and then we've gone off somewhere else now, so hopefully, hopefully they don't bother me too much. But I'm not going to stay long, so So I'm just gonna crack on. I'm really annoyed, I'm really annoyed because what I'd planned to do was I had planned to put these queens in and kind of do it as a little bit of a live stream, but I can't do that now because I've not got the queens. Maybe we could open up a colony, what do you think? I do have my bee suit here. This is kind of the plan, maybe I think I'll do some live inspections, but I don't want to break the stream because I— To get my B set out of the car, and I do need to go back home, and I need to go and get the. And what a shocker! My mind has gone any. I know I talk about channel membership streams a lot, but I do a few channel membership videos, and my mind has just gone. Like it's it's really gone since I've since we've had our our daughter. My mind I've got proper baby brain, and I'm struggling a bit with it. I'm forgetting everything, and I'll kind of like drive somewhere and then just completely forget it. Um, and I've done that tonight and I've forgotten to get the queens. And the, the only reason that I'm here— I'm here for 2 reasons: to put the queens in. One, also, I went to go and film some videos today about how to clip queens and how to mark queens, amongst other videos, and get back home and check the footage and it's just completely out of focus. So I've come back, I can do that at least and get that bit done. I'm not going to do that on the live stream because, uh, it might annoy some queens and might annoy some bees. But I'm really, I'm really happy with this. But what I wanted to test is I wanted to test that the camera worked. I wanted to kind of like see what it looked like. But I also wanted to test the signal because obviously not everywhere gets good signal. It keeps on cutting out the screen though. That's a bit weird. I don't know why it's doing that. But it seems, it seems to have worked really, really well. So I'm definitely, definitely going to do next week's livestream up here. The farmer here is a bit of a legend. Well, The farmer here is a bit of a legend. The farm shop here yesterday— no, I shouldn't say that actually because it will give you a clue as to where this is, so I can't say that. It was exciting though. Right, let me think what I'm going to do next time, next live stream. So a week today I'm going to come up here and I'm going to do my live stream and I might make like— I might bring my solo stove up here and have a little bit of a fire and make like a cup of tea and stuff and I will I do a little bit of both, so I'll bring my camera up and then I'll do the inspection of all of these colonies here. So all of the colonies there are one, two, three, I think there's ten or eleven colonies up here, and I've just requeened them all with all of my different lines of queens. So we've got all of the Promorsky, everything Promorsky, Carpathian, Caucasian, Carniolan, Buckfast, Elgon, everything. So one of each, and the plan is just to run this apiary showing the different genetics. So they went in. maybe like a week or so ago, and I released them all and went through on a channel member video going through saying they've all been released. Had a couple of failures that I'm coming back up to fix today that I forgot. And what I'll do though is I won't do the inspection next week, and I'll come up here and I'll do like— we'll do an earlier stream. So I'll start the stream at like 6, maybe 6 o'clock BST, and then I'll do the apiary inspection. And then we'll follow it with a Q&A after that. I thought that'd be quite cool. Thomas Lindsay says, would definitely be interested in live inspections. Yeah, we'll do live inspections. What I've realised though, I thought at the beginning, mate, should I do live inspections? And then I changed it to these channel member ones because if anything like horrific happens or anything goes horribly wrong or I make mistakes or drop syrup everywhere or squish queens or do all of the things that I've done in the past few weeks in member videos or trip over, then I don't have to be embarrassed because the whole YouTube community is not going to see them. And it's worked a little bit because I have been making a complete fool of myself on these videos, but you know, I don't really care. I've never said that I'm an expert, a master beekeeper, an expert beekeeper. I'm just a random guy who loves bees and keeps bees and makes just as many mistakes as everybody else. So I'll join— I'll let you join in on my mistakes. It'll be really good fun. But I think, I think I'm going to call it a day there. I'm sorry, this is just a very short little brief live stream. I will release a video tonight as well. I'm not doing this just to not have to release a video, so I will do a video tonight. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get back to it, uh, make the most of the long summer nights getting on with stuff. I'm gonna have to nip back home, get those queens. That's really annoying. And then I'm gonna finish off the videos trying to do, uh, the queen slipping and the queen marking video. Surprisingly difficult to do. a video that I tried to do it and I was holding the queen and I thought, this is gonna look perfect, it looks so good, and got back and the focus had just shifted like 10 mil and it's just completely unusable. So really annoying. And that's what happens on these little videos that you don't really— you don't, you don't get to see most of that stuff because you just, uh, you just see the finished bit. But this has worked really well. I'm really happy with this. If anyone's got any questions, I'll give you 5 minutes if you've got urgent burning questions about your beekeeping. If not, I will, I will just call it a day and know that this has worked really, really well. And probably I need to do a little bit more practice with it to see if— I'm just like, I'm playing with settings and stuff, it keeps on going off. I'm going to have to turn up the screen timeout. I'll have to sort that out, but the battery looks pretty good and I'm quite happy with how it looks. And you get like nice stuff with these cameras in that you get like the focus pulls and things. Didn't really work, but a lot better than just the standard forward-facing cameras. Hello from Tarquinia. Lagustica or Buckfast, which ones? So Buckfast, if that's that quickfire answer, I can only pick one, I would go Buckfast. I do, I do like Lagustica, and I do think Lagustica have got a place for like aggressive expansion and brood rearing. But I just think the Buckfast is a better all-round hybrid. And I know, I know Lagustica is not a hybrid, but the Lagustica, they can just starve themselves out a little bit and they just— all they care about is brood. And I think in the right hands, that's perfect if you know what you're dealing with and you know that you can never let them get anywhere near close to starving. But if you're looking for honey crops as well, and you're looking for like particularly calm bees, depending on where you get your Buckfasts from, I think Buckfasts are going to be better at getting a honey crop. And the Ligustica, again, it depends where you're getting them from, who the breeders are. I find the Buckfasts are probably like a little bit calmer as well, and they're not— the Buckfasts are not quite as prolific. The Ligustica, just take it, they're just ridiculous in terms of how prolific they are. Oh, just— I'm just reading the questions here, so it's a little bit difficult for me to read them. Mark Faraday says, any update on your long hive? So my Nucci hive, so that's coming up here, the Nucci hive that is living in my living room at the moment. I had some issues with water ingress and the guy was fixing it, so he's giving me the advice on how to fix it and he just wants the feedback really. So I've kept it inside whilst all the silicone and stuff's gone on— gone off, and then I've waiting for someone to help me move it because it's, it's quite heavy and I can't do it on my own, and my wife is basically recovering from C-section, so she can't help. So that's going to come up here. I'll stick that up here somewhere and we'll play— basically probably going to go like right where I'm sitting at the moment, but it's cool. And I've got loads of Langstroth nucs up here so I can make the different splits. And the idea with that, I've got 6 different compartments in there and I'm gonna have 6 different genetics of bees. I want to be able to see them like all next to each other. I thought that'd be quite cool and maybe do like some really orange ones next to some really dark ones. One of the queens up here, I think it's like the 3rd or 4th one along, is the darkest Carniolan I've ever seen. Like, it is like the picture, jet black, absolutely jet black, and I'm really excited to see what the bees are quite like when they come out, if they're going to be as dark as that. Should be pretty cool. Hi from London. Hello, I'm from London. What kind of truck are you using to transport your bees? So I use L200s. That's my truck, it's pretty good, never let me down. I got stuck in a field a couple of times, but that was like more my fault. But the thing that I don't like about pickup trucks for transporting bees though is the size of the cabin in the back. If you get a double cab, the size of the cabin in the back with the wheel arches is never perfect for getting a good stack of bees on, and I wouldn't have the double cab again. I'd have— So I'd have the double cab again, I wouldn't have the hard top again, but I'd have the roller shutter. I think the roller shutter's way, way better. And then I'd probably get designed some like lifter. And I think they do them now. So they're basically like lifter boards that give you about 12 inches of clearance. So you come, you have a flat board in line with the wheel arches. So it's like you're losing 12 inches of space, but you can use that for pull-out storage. And then with the rollers top, and then just strap the nucs down as I go, 'cause I'm only ever really transporting around either full beehives or nucs in there. And doing that, it means they can stack really nicely. BS Honeybees have got a mega new truck designed basically, not like that, completely different, way better than what I've said, but it's a lot more, a lot more commercial, their one. Mine would be like a retrofit for what I've already got, but they had it designed like fully from scratch and it is properly awesome. Can I use red diesel in my truck if I became a bee farmer? Absolutely not, no, they are on it with red diesel, nope. No chance. I think the rule is if you ever drive it on the roads, you can't use red diesel. I know farmers drive tractors on the roads, don't they? But no, there's no way you could use red diesel if you became a bee farmer. How many full hives do you have on each of the abeille stands? So it does depend on the size of the wood that you get. On some of the ones over there, a lot, a lot of them are not set up correctly. You can either use a 2.4-meter length wood or a 3.6, And a lot of these are on 2.4, but with the stands at the end, basically though, on the 2.4 you can get 4 comfortably, and on the 3.6 you can get 6 comfortably. But I'm always a bit scared of using the 3.6, but I've seen people do it. I've seen people squeeze 8 onto a 3.6 as well, but they are the best stands in the world. I know I do the social media for Abello, so I'm going to say that anyway, but they genuinely are. Like, you can't really see the ground here, but it is Oh, I'm not trying to pull a bit of it up, it's like rock-solid clay and just got these rut marks and tyre marks, it's all over the place, and if I didn't have like adjustable stands, I just wouldn't be able to have stands here. Right, let's see if there are any other questions I've missed on there. Lynette Blackman says, I asked at my local club apiary, how do you know whether to go to double brood or just add a super? And you'd think I'd kill something. Why do people double brood, and is it really a bad thing? Interesting question, a very timely question as well, I would say. So I double brood early on in the spring because I don't want my bees to swarm, and I keep very, very prolific bees, so if I didn't double brood, my bees would swarm. If you keep like local feral natives, probably get away with single brood, and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'll reserve judgment, but you probably don't need it, so that's why it might have rubbed people up the wrong way. What I would say though now is if you're kind of thinking about going to double brood at this point in the year, complete waste of time, absolute waste of time, because we're past the solstice now, so all the brood nest is doing is just contracting down. You want to— you can push your luck at this point in the year, really, really push your luck and try and condense the brood box as much as possible, and even if you're on double brood, you could take the queen excluder out, put it in between the 2 brood boxes, and then use the top brood box as a super. and get away with it and not compress or condense the brood box down too much that they would even have like an issue with that. So I wouldn't double brood at this point in the year. I do like double brood though as a configuration, just to make sure that the bees don't swarm. So I'm just reading at the bottom, you said there as well, Lynette, you're on Langstroth, so with Langstroth, unless you've got super, super prolific bees, you probably get away with a single Single Langstroth brood box because it's a pretty big brood box, especially the 10-frame version. 10-frame Langstroth version is already equivalent to like 1.5 times national brood box anyway. Peter Thompson says you should get trucks like Murray McGregor. I've seen Murray's, what are they called? I want to say like utes, they're not utes, so I want to say Uzis as well. Unimogs, there we go, Unimogs. I had an Unimog drive past me the other day, I always wanted to get an Unimog. And they are well expensive, and they use way too much fuel, and they break down a lot. And I can understand why people like Murray need them, but I don't need an Unimog. I'd love to have one, I would absolutely love to have one. I'd love to have a drive on one as well, but I am— I don't need one, but they're cool. Hi Laurence, I introduced my Buckfast Queen yesterday using the masking tape method over candy. First time using the method, fingers crossed. On the next check on Friday. Well, good luck. Hope it goes well. Few people using that method now. I see Griff did a video on that. I did. I kind of sent a Manos or did a Manos video. Melita bees, Manos. He used that method. I think Bob Binney used it as well. It's a good method and a time-served method that many people use. Right, call it a day. 20-minute stream, really quick one. I'm gonna go now. I'm gonna get these queens. I'm gonna get these videos finished. Glad that this worked. Really, really glad that this worked. I'm gonna go home and check the street and see how it is, but we will be back here this time next week. I'm going to bring something to keep me warm because it is a bit cold in the shade. I'm going to set the lighting up a little bit better as well. I'll get everything fully charged up, we'll do a full 2-hour Q&A stream in the apiary with a live apiary inspection next week. I'll see you all later.