In this solo beekeeping vlog, Laurence Edwards revisits his apiary three weeks after a previous inspection of the Ross Round sections. He explains that he missed the optimal window to remove capped frames just before the severe "June gap"āa period of nectar dearth. As a result, the bees uncapped and consumed about half of the stored honey in the Ross Round sections. Laurence walks through the current state of the frames, showing fully uncapped, partially uncapped, and still capped sections, and notes that the bees are now storing nectar again as a new flow begins. He reflects on the mistakes that led to the loss: inspecting at the wrong time of day/night, not using a smoker effectively, and being lazy with technique. Rather than intervene aggressively, he decides to let the bees recover naturally during the upcoming nectar flow, while emphasizing the importance of proper inspection timing, equipment use, and monitoring bee behavior. The video serves as a practical lesson on managing Ross Round sections, handling nectar dearth periods, and avoiding common beekeeping pitfalls.
Chapters
It's been about 3 weeks since I last checked up on the colony with the Ross Rounds in, and the last time I checked them, they had gone massively backwards. Oh, I completely missed my opportunity to take those off. They were fully capped, they were beautiful, and I will include this video as the next episode in this series to show you what happens if you don't get it off at the right time. It was kind of like 1st or 2nd of June, just before we were getting into the June gap, and then we got hit with a really, really bad June gap. And they obliterated it. They probably took 50% of the stores out of those Ross Round. They uncapped everything. I'm going back in there today and I'm hoping that it's filled up again. If it's not, I'll show you just how much they've taken, what they've done to them, and then how we can get them back on track. So get my bee suit on, let's go and check up on the Ross Round sections. Right, so the bees are a lot calmer today, doing the inspections when I should be doing my inspections. And unfortunately, the bees really have gone backward with the Ross Round sections. Now, this isn't a disaster and it's something that we can easily remedy. In fact, I'm not actually going to do anything. I'm going to let the bees remedy this problem. But I just wanted to give you that update to show that if the bees get to the point with either the section racks or the Ross Round sections, don't be stupid like me and don't be naive and think the bees aren't going to take that down first. That is exactly what they've done. Some of the Ross Round sections in here are empty. Some of them, they've uncapped it and they haven't filled it back up again. And I do find I've had experience with both section racks and Ross Round sections before where if this happens, they do get a little bit reluctant to go back and fill it, but I'm confident in this apiary here, which is an incredible apiary. The bees will sort this out when the flows come back in, when they run out of space, and they will fill all of these back in. So a few little examples for you there. You can see we've really gone backwards. These are the same frames you saw last time. So some of them they've completely uncapped, some of them they've partially uncapped, most of it they've completely removed, and at the moment they're storing the nectar elsewhere. So I've not got any new fresh nectar in my Ross Rounds. If I turn that around the other side, you should get Really good looking, that empty one there. What am I gonna do? There's a couple of things that I could do here. One is I could go and bruise the cappings and try and just kind of reinvigorate the bees to go and work on the Ross Rounds, but I don't think I'm going to do that. I think I'm maybe going to add more risk in. All I'm going to do, I'm just going to leave the bees to it and hope we get a really superb flow and the bees finish these frames off. I'll grab a couple of other frames now and show you just how consistent this is across all of the frames. And then we'll close these bees back up and hope for the best. So another frame here, and you can see very similar. They've uncapped a lot of it. They've eaten a lot of it. Some of it's still capped over, but the real positive on this frame here is they are storing nectar in it again, and we're definitely back into the flow here. You can tell by the bees' behavior. You can tell by the activity at the entrance. We are well and truly back into the flow, which is really good news. I'm confident we'll get this filled, and you know me. If something goes wrong, Black Mountain Honey, I will show you. I will tell you my mistakes, so then you can hopefully. learn from them. The mistake I made here was I didn't get it off quick enough and the bees ate it. So I'm really getting back into the habit of using my smoker, and I think that it's showing on the bees, isn't it? Because they're so much calmer than normal. Again, a mistake that I've made trying to do these videosā wrong time of the night. Definitely don't inspect your bees at night. Not using the correct equipment. Trying to kind of like polish my technique because it's very, very easy to become lazy as a beekeeper. The smoker's doing the job, correct time of the day is doing the job. Now it's just over to the bees to finish off what they started and get these Ross Round sections fully capped over.
