Sending Nucs - BEHIND THE SCENES

So it's the final nuke day of 2024, and Richard is on his way here today with 148 nukes. Today I'm sending out the final batch of nukes of 2024. Richard is on his way here now with 148 nukes. Got some Langstroth in there, but mostly national for the final batch of the year. This is the 13th batch of nukes that we've sent out this year, and it's been absolutely crazy. But in this video, I'm going to show you the full process of how it works. So Richard's been out, he's been collecting nucs over the past few days, bringing them back to his base location, gets them all ready there, set up, ready to go. And then he gets up at 3 o'clock in the morning. Richard is a very early riser and he closes the entrances just before the bees are going to go out and start flying. This is deliberate to reduce the amount of stress on the colony. We don't like keeping them closed up for long. We try and minimize the amount of time that they are closed up. So Richard's on his way up here now. What you will see behind me there is my gym. That is my garage, but it also doubles up, deliberately doubles up as a very suitable storage place for the nucs. And the reason that we've designed it like that, the reason I've designed it like that is that the heat is the number one stressor to the bees. So if they get too hot, they can potentially collapse and they can die. So what you want to do is keep them as cool as you can possibly keep them whilst they're stored up inside the nuc. So I don't know if you can see it there at the bottom of the garage down there, and I'll show you all of this later on. I've got a big massive air conditioning unit. unit in there, and that's been running since last night. I went and put that on last night, getting it as cold as it can possibly be in there. So Richard will turn up with the nucs. I've got all of my address labels here. This is the, the biggest one. I'll just flash that in front so you can't see the addresses on it. But that is the— that takes ages. So we have to print out all of the addresses, get them all down, do the exports, print them out, put them onto the paper. But then what I do is I laminate them, and my laminator is not an expensive laminator. It is very, very slow. So So I spent 4 or 5 hours yesterday laminating all of the sheets ready to go out. And I could just stick the stickers on, but I've had it before where you stick, you know, 100 stickers on and a couple of them come off and people say, never got my nuke, and the tracking just goes dead and it's the stickers falling off. So I like to, you know, go the extra mile and laminate them and then we staple them on. So the first step where Richard gets here is we immediately go on, put all of the address labels on, staple them all on. And then I've got my trusted water sprayer here. This water sprayer here was given to me by, I can't remember the company, but it's a Birchmeier water sprayer. And it's well, it's like completely different from the rest of them. It says Smart UND Swiss, and it's got like this little, I don't know, little dangly thing at the bottom of it. And it means that it sprays every single little bit of water out right until the end. Fancy water sprayer. But they're not that expensive, they're about 15 quid, but they are really, really good. But every single nuc that comes, I put the address on, and then I give them a really, Ahem. Really good spray of the water, and then they go into the air-conditioned garage and the door gets closed. Now luckily for me, I've got two entrances to that garage. I've got one at the front and one at the back, and it's the one at the back that I go in regularly throughout the day. Quickly get myself in there, keep the room nice and cool, and I'll go through and I'll regularly spray the nucs to keep them nice and cool. What I'm listening out for when I go in there is a nice gentle. I just want a gentle hum. I don't want to hear silence. Silence is not good, but equally, a really loud, aggressive roar is not good as well. So you get used to the temperature and the sound that that room is supposed to be kept at. Me and Richard, then, once they're all in there, we generally have a chat. So we'll do that today. We'll have a little chat about things, see how things are going, talk about plans for the season, talk about what we need to do. There's, believe it or not, quite a lot of administrative work and planning that goes into our nuc operation. And it's quite good that we have very defined roles, me and Richard, in terms of like what I do, in terms of what Richard does. I enjoy the bit that I do, he enjoys the bit that he does, and then there's bits that we get to do together, which is really nice. But we generally like, we have like these weekly catch-ups during the nuc season and have a coffee and maybe go and look at some of the stuff and some of the sites as well. We need to go and drop off a couple of nucs up there. My phone's going again. I started this video about 3 minutes in and I had to stop it because I got a call. But I will mute that one and I will call them back. It's unbelievable how many calls I get during the week, but the day after nuc day, that is the busiest day of the year in terms of getting calls nonstop. But it's all good fun and I absolutely love it. Definitely not complaining there, but it is a full-time job doing it. So once I get all the nucs in there, once again, have a chat with Richard, Richard goes, I might have some lunch, I'll do some emails. I'll kind of get everything ready. I go and do all of the scanning out, so that means I have to give everyone their notifications to say that the orders have been dispatched, mark them as fulfilled on my system as well, otherwise people end up getting 2 nukes. And then by the time I've got all of that done, the Royal Mail collection driver is here. So we've got an excellent, excellent relationship with Royal Mail. We've got our own dedicated delivery driver and we've got our own dedicated delivery slot. So previously what I had to do was kind of go and take my nucs to the post office, which was not ideal. And then we managed to get an agreement with Royal Mail to go and drop the nucs off directly to the local delivery office, which is down in Mold, and then they would get the collection into Chester. And then Royal Mail kind of contacted us and said, you're sending quite a lot of nucs to us, do you want a dedicated delivery? And we said, yes, definitely dedicated delivery, dedicated collection. So now we have the ability to have The Chester delivery drivers come and collect the nukes from us, and they come and collect them from us at the time that we want. So it's not a case of— there you go, phone going again. Different person, we'll get back to both of those people in a sec. And here is Royal Mail as we speak, a different Royal Mail. So I've completely thrown me off there. So now anyway, the Royal Mail come and collect it at about 4 o'clock, and we have a dedicated delivery driver that comes who I've got a good relationship with, who I actually play golf with as well, who will be quite happy for me to video him. So, cut that short there. I will wait now until Richard gets here and then we'll continue the filming in a bit. Right, so Richard's arrived and the first thing he's just said is it's cold up here and it is, it's absolutely freezing, which is perfect for nuc day. I'm going to flip the camera around though and show you the nucs that Richard's brought up. So you can see, very nicely packaged up, perfect fit. This horse box that Richard's got is just absolutely ideal for this. You can see they go all the way back. There's quite a lot of nucs, not much extra room. Richard, this time?

One more layer.

One more layer. But there we go, you can see nice gentle buzz. Try and get back down here from without any falling. Right, so the process now is I need to get them out, get the spray on, get the labels on, get them up into the garage. Not going to do a huge amount of talking during that period, but I'll, I'll run it on replay and you You can see it all happen. So 2 hours later, takes a long time stacking up nucs and getting them ready. They are all stacked up in the garage. I've got a few down here for collection. I've got a couple of extras, always grab myself a couple of extras I'm going to put in my apiary later on today. I'm going to make a couple of splits from them as well because I've got a couple of weak nucs that do need a little bit of boosting. So I'll pinch out some of Richard's brood that's on national frames. Not got many bees on national frames anymore, but we are done. I'll just flip the camera around and show you kind of like the setup with the air conditioning unit And then later on today when I go in kind of midday to do a little bit of hosing down, I call it hosing down, but just give them a good spray through the gaps with the water again. Used 2 of those containers, so kind of like 3 litres of water has gone into them there. We've adjusted them slightly. So the winter nucs are generally like pretty much jam-packed, but we try and reduce the amount of bees that are in the nucs now and increase the amount of brood that's in them just to get them through the post a little bit better and ensure that we don't have any failures in the post. So looking at these ones here, confident that they're going to be able to get through. And it's weird, like, feeling the different weights throughout the different times of the year. These ones are bordering on the light side, which I think for going through the postal service is actually like a positive thing because it means you've not got open stores or open honey, or even capped honey for that matter, in the cells that can drain out. You're limiting the amount of food that they've got, and then the instructions that we give to customers is they should feed them upon receipt, which is good, gets the colony going, gets the queen going again anyway. So we do our very best to get the bees in perfect condition kind of for now and then going through the postal service ready for our customers. So garage door is closed again, got the air conditioning running through there, obviously closing up all the gaps, really nice and cold in there. We keep it about 17°C, which I find is basically the optimum temperature. You don't want it like super cold, you don't want them starting to like cluster up thinking that it's winter, but you just want to reduce or eliminate any risk of the bees overheating whilst they're in the storage there. Now I could keep them outside. I could keep them outside under cover, but it's very difficult to regulate the temperature. Like, we're very lucky today, it's 14°C and overcast, which is just perfect. So I'll flick down here. I've got a few, got a few of the spares that are down here. You can see once the bees settle, like, there's tons and tons of bees in these ones here. I'll always pick out the strongest ones. I know it seems like I'm picking out the best ones for myself, but I'm just— I'm not. I'm picking out the ones that I don't want to send through the post. Because you look at these, there's too many bees in these to go through the post. You want them a little bit more sparse than that to make sure that they go through. But I could just leave the bees out like this for the day and just spray them, but then the fluctuation in temperature is very difficult to manage. And within, you know, within half an hour the sun can come out and it overheats, and then I'm trying to hose them down. And I want to do the best for the bees, and I found doing the best for the bees is putting them in a cool room like that. And, you know, people might Still steal the secrets, but I don't care because I want what's best for the bees. So if you steal that secret and find that it works for you and get better success with bees going through the post, then brilliant. I've kind of done my job and I'm happy with that. Saved a few bees along the way. So most important part of the day now is we're going to have a coffee. Richard loves a coffee. I love a coffee. We're going to go sit down. We're going to have a chat. Got Richard's mic here. We'll mic him up. We'll have a chat and I'll play you kind of what's going on with that as well. Then we're going to pop up to the forest. Richard needs to grab a few bits from me up at the forest. I'll include that bit on here as well.

And then Richard will go on his way.

I'll come come back, I'll mist all of those again. I'll start doing all of the fulfillment, and then by that time the end of the day is here and the Royal Mail driver will come and collect them. And then we can breathe a sigh of relief and just wait for all the phone calls coming through tomorrow, which is saying, where are my bees? My bees are late. All of the good stuff that comes with sending lots of stuff through the post. But we've got very good customers, very understanding customers, and hopefully we do our best and provide a pretty good product to them. So let's go and get a coffee. So coffees are made, walking up to the garden now with Richard because I've got a perfect little spot by the pond where the, the chairs are uncomfortably close to each other so me and Richard can squeeze into one screen. We're just gonna have a chat about the nucs, have a debrief after sending out all of the nucs for the season. Huge amount of nucs that have gone this year, and Richard does an incredible job of getting them all ready. But it's, uh, it's, it's hard work. And we're going to chat to Richard now, talk about the things that he likes about the nucs, the things that he doesn't like about the nucs, maybe what's gone well, what's not gone so well, and then action plan for next year. So I'll get it all set up, we're gonna have a chat. Right, so we're done, finished for the year. Big sigh of relief.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

We're just sitting in the garden now, got the pond behind me, and we're having a coffee. You like a coffee, don't you?

Yeah, it's good. About 10 o'clock-ish, good?

10 o'clock-ish. So we're just chatting about Richard's routine and— go on, what'd you have for breakfast?

Nothing for breakfast.

Nothing for breakfast. What time did you get up?

Up at 3.

What time do you eat your first bit of food?

About up at 12.

Apparently that's dinner time. I call it lunch time. That's another thing where you sit on the fence. So you get up at half past 3, And you work from half 3 till like midday without eating, and then you have an apple. Yeah, or a couple of apples. 2 apples.

A couple of apples a morning.

And then what do you have after that? I'll take my hat off even though it's shaking here.

I don't. So I just eat a bit of fruit in the day because that keeps you hydrated.

You must have like a mega dinner.

No, I don't anymore. As you get older, Laurence, you don't need it.

You're not old. You need one when you're 50.

Yeah, I know, but you don't need it. That's the thing.

Just for anyone interested, let's compare what I do. So I get up at like 7-ish, make dinner for my— make breakfast for my daughter, eat half of it when she doesn't eat it, drop her off to school, come back, have another breakfast, and then have lunch like around normal time, and then have a snack around 3 or 4, and then have dinner, and then before I go to bed I have another snack. You can tell, packing on the pounds. So you're happy for the nukes to be finished for the year, yeah, or are you a little bit disappointed as well.

Well, it always, it always comes to the end quite quick, really. Um, yeah, you're happy to see the last day and the last delivery. On the other hand, you've got all the preparation for next year, so it doesn't really stop, it just changes focus.

And, and I think it is important because I've had loads of people call up this week saying, oh, can I, can I have a nuke, you know, can you just do one more? And it's— I do think you have to have like a hard line where you say That's it, because otherwise, like, we could keep on selling nucs, but the impact of selling like a few more nucs now has a massive impact next year, doesn't it?

Yeah, because you can't pick bees then to produce bees for winter. Yeah, and the last thing you want to be doing is struggling to get good colonies into winter.

Yeah, and, you know, like, I've pinched your idea about getting in there early, middle of August, and feeding and treating for varroa early so that Your season's not that long, is it? Like, some people look at it from, like, say, March through to mid to end of September, but for you, you finished way earlier than that, didn't you?

Well, you've never finished, have you? But because generally, if you early feed, they turn that into bees, but then that's a good resource of bees to take your hive through the winter.

Yeah.

So you probably do end up feeding more, but then you're not tiring the bees out by expecting them to go out and get Himalayan balsam.

Yeah.

Which just depletes the colony, and you'll either struggle in the autumn or you'll struggle in the spring with it, you know. I've been there, done it, got the t-shirt.

Well, yeah, and so have I to a certain extent, and didn't really think that you could change it or do anything different. And then when you do, you see the benefits of doing it, your eyes are opened, aren't they, a bit?

Yeah.

So tell me about the nucs then, go on. So you've been out, we've got 150-odd nucs that have gone out today, you've picked them all. Just rewind to the beginning. How have you got all of those nucs up to me?

So we've started about 6 days ago. Um, I had a young lad over from New Zealand helping me for a few days, very good, Ethan. Um, and we picked, I suppose, about 30 a day roughly, you know, because it takes time. It's surprising how much time it does take, and not every hive you go to will be what you're expecting. So you might have to sort the hive out, put that back, and then go on to the next one.

Well, like you go in and they've swarmed, or they go in, they're not quite strong enough.

Swarms? No, swarming hasn't been a problem at all this year.

It's been good, hasn't it?

Mainly failing queens, really. And they've all just a queen that they've superseded. So if they've done that in the last 2 weeks, obviously there's a cell there. It may have actually, may not have, but it's Deciding whether you want to keep that cell and how you want to move forward with that hive. I mean, I tend to go to a site and I want to— so if I'm going to pick bees from the site, I want to pick the whole site because I don't want to be going back and having hives at different stages. And that has been my main aim this year, really, is to go to a site and once I leave, it's finished.

So you're going through, you're looking, you're doing your quality control. So then what constitutes a good nuc?

A good nuc. It definitely wants to have stores, which has been a problem this year.

Definitely.

So yeah, I mean, I haven't stopped feeding, and that is just unheard of. I mean, my dad, what's he, 70, 73, 74, and he's never known a season like it. He did get a bit of a spring crop, but you know, to feed, I mean, in Herefordshire, we would never feed You know, springtime, but we've had to this year. Yeah. So a good nuc would be 2 frames of stores ideally. That hasn't always been the case this year. Certainly the brood pattern needs to be right. So brood of all stages and preferably 3 or 4 frames of that, you know. Yeah.

And that can be eggs, capped brood. It can be kind of anything, can't it?

But I mean, I try to put in as much capped brood or near that stage as possible, because if they then in transport, the bees leave the, the, the, the, the larvae, then they will die in transport. Whereas if they're capped brood, the work's already done. All they've got to do is maintain heat, you know.

And it retains a bit of their own heat, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah. But there's a balance because, I mean, as we both found out this year, you know, the melting down issue is, is Is a problem really.

We had a few melt-outs in the post and we learned from it. It's not nice, is it, when you see the melt-outs, but we think it's wax that's just not quite old enough, and obviously we want to send out the nice freshest wax for people, don't we?

But I think it really wants to be like last year's wax.

It's got to be last year's wax.

Yeah, I mean, it's just like, it's no good trying to draw frames out on the old seed rape flow and then try and send in the post because that's what we did and it failed.

And it's not like a mass failure. Like, I think there was 100-odd Langstroth nucs that went out on that, and then there was 10 or 12 that died. And obviously we've replaced them at great expense, but it's learning, is it? So we're not going to do that again.

Yeah, and it's not even that for me. It's just the fact that you've looked after them bees and they've just died for no reason at all, you know.

And the most frustrating bit of it as well is I remember doing like the Langstroth ones And doing what we've done at the beginning of this video, pulling up and getting them out and just looking at them thinking, wow, because the Langstroth boxes are heavy anyway and they were full of stores, weren't they? They were big, heavy, full of bees, full of stores. And you're thinking, that is a really good nuc. Someone's going to be happy with that. And you know, it's the ones that you looked in like that, they're the ones that would have found them because they're just the biggest ones that go the quickest. Okay, so you're out, you go out, you pick your nucs, 30-odd nucs for the day. What do you do then?

I drive back home, I put them out, let them fly.

Okay.

Which then gives them a chance to sort of clean out any grubs that I've sort of cut in half when I've broken the frames or any dead bees.

And then you check for, obviously you check for the queen before that and you check the queen's marked and you mark them before they get there. Okay, cool.

Yeah. And just, I mean, ideally, once they have one move, they want 3 or 4 days really of of open flying.

Yeah.

Which has been another problem from this year. They just haven't had it, you know. Um, you know, it's, it's difficult. I mean, I did some grafting a week ago, and they had 3 days after the grafting where the bees didn't fly at all.

Yeah, not ideal, is it? But, and I, I think it is important, and, and we've, we've learned this process as well, but that those 3 or 4 days, and if you need to give them a feeder in that point you give them a little feed, but it's the sticking down of the frames again, isn't it? It's the chance for them to just like stick everything together ready for the post that makes a big, big difference.

Yeah, no, there's definitely— ideally they could do with 3 or 4 days before they get moved again and broken open, but then there's a downside to that as well, and it's trying to read 3 days or 4 days ahead in what you pick in the nuc, i.e., bees or capped brood, because Even in 3 or 4 days, so many hatch, and you could just tell by just walking along them early in the morning, how many's balled on the front. They're too strong, really. And then you have that risk of them melting down or dying out.

So it's a real balance. So you go out, you get your 30, you come back, and then I guess what, the next day, just same again? You're just bringing them back. So then you've got this batch, 150 at home ready to go. So then let's rewind to yesterday evening. And then how do you get them up to me from then?

This morning, I passed through.

Well, yeah, but do you, like, in terms of like the mesh screens and the screwing, do you do all that?

No, I put the mesh screens on now as I pick the nucs.

Okay, so you pick the nucs, mesh screens on?

Yeah. And then when I grow them, I just pop a cover over them.

Right. Okay, cool. Because that's what we advise people to do when the nucs get delivered, is to just take the nuc with the mesh screen, pop a cover on it, and then let them orientate and then fix it. Okay, so you go out, you pick them, you put the screens on, screw the screens down, And then bring them back.

No, no, no, I don't ever screw the screws down. No, I do it all, all on the morning and bring it up to you.

Right, okay, so let's, let's rewind to 3 o'clock this morning. Yeah, go on, what'd you do?

Screwing screws in polystyrene boxes, lots of.

Right, so you're screwing them all down, and then what time do you close the entrance?

I do it as soon as I went down.

So 3 in the morning?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, half past 3.

So I, I think that's really important because I've always Kind of thought, and I've done this previously, I'll go up 10 o'clock, half 10, 11 o'clock at night and close the entrance.

Yeah, I would never do that.

And no, you don't like it, do you?

No, the least amount of time they've got the door shut, the better.

Yeah, um, and I've thought, well, you know what, they're not flying anyway, so it doesn't really make a difference. But you're right, aren't you? Because you close the door and if you come back a couple of hours later, you can hear the stress, can't you?

Well, if you notice as well through the screen, they've always carried around bits of rubbish that they're trying to chuck out all the time. Which, whether they do that all night, I don't know, you know.

But even if they just know that they're confined, it is stressful. And for us, we want to limit and reduce that stress as much as possible, don't we? Okay, so right, so you go down in the morning, screw the lids down, screw the entrances shut, back of the trailer.

The back of the trailer.

And then up to here.

Yeah.

Okay, so then it joins in with what we've done in this video. They come here, we put the addresses on, we spray them. They go into the garage if it's a warm day. We've done a few days where we've put them in the garage and just left the doors open, you know, early on in the year where it's like 8 or 9 degrees for the overwintered nucs. You don't need the aircon on, do you? We put the aircon on today. And then that's it, we have a chat, don't we? Enjoying your coffee?

Yeah, it's very nice.

So what do you think has gone well this year with the nucs?

What's gone well? Well, it hasn't, it hasn't gone well really. We've done it though.

I think it has gone well.

No, it has.

Hard work and there's always challenges.

Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I mean, being able to just pick them has gone well, but there has been, whereas normally this last lot wouldn't be too much intervention with feed and stuff, So it's almost sort of maintained that high input from the start, hasn't it?

See what that is?

An aeroplane.

Yeah, see what plane it is though? Yeah, yeah, it's a Beluga. Beluga plane. Sorry, I won't— I'll see if I can swing it around. You're never going to be able to zoom in like that.

You think I shouldn't be able to fly, wouldn't you?

Yeah, the Beluga, the Airbus Beluga, massive plane that flies all these wings around Europe.

It's beautiful.

Pretty cool, isn't it? Yeah, it just goes like so slow.

Drop out of the sky. Yeah, so I mean, it hasn't, it hasn't been a bad season. It's actually the plus size, it's been very manageable in terms of if you want bees, feed bees to get bees.

Yeah. Whereas normally swarming would come into play and, and honey extraction would come into play.

Yeah, and just, yeah, I mean, which I've done none of, which I've missed You lie. You know, I was just saying to your wife actually how much I've missed being in the honey extraction room. It's my little bit of therapy, the honey extraction room.

I can't stand extracting honey. Like, the first day is nice and you get the knife out and you're like, oh, it smells nice, and you stink of honey.

No, no, no, no, no. It's nice when you've got buckets and buckets and buckets.

Yeah, I like— I'm a projects man. I like sitting back and reflecting at the end and saying, well, yeah, we've got loads of honey there. That's— I'm quite happy with that. But I think it's gone well. So like Richard, I deal with like the customer side of things and we do like the promoting and the YouTube and all of that. And obviously I make up my own nucs and sell my own nucs alongside Richard, but Richard does the vast majority of the nucs. And you see from the videos that we share genetics and there's a lot that gets done together. But what Richard never gets, I obviously give it back to you, but the feedback from people is exceptional. I told you the feedback I got the other day, didn't I? I've had it 2 or 3 times already this year, someone saying, um, an email, I've had the NBU come around and check the bees, just a normal standard inspection because I've got new bees in the area, and then they're asking questions about the bees and like, where did you get them from? And they got them from Black Mountain Honey. And, and the reviews that we've got from like the National Bee Unit inspectors saying the calmest bees that they have ever seen. And the bees, like, you put your hand over the bees And they just don't flinch, don't even come up and fly. But I get that feedback like on a daily and a weekly basis of people saying, I had a nuc off you and it's just tremendous, it's fantastic. So you've got to enjoy that and kind of relish that.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Because when I have the bee unit round, I mean, you know, there's certain members that say to me, I wish all my bees were like this, which is, you know, it's certainly a better place to be in working bees like that than the bees that I used to work with.

You know, the Vikings.

The Vikings. There's not many Vikings left.

It's good, isn't it? So God, your dad likes them as well, doesn't he? Now he's a fan.

Yeah, yeah, Dad. Dad. Yeah, he just wishes he had another twenty years go on and beekeep.

But yeah, with some nicer, calmer bees. Okay, right. So so we're at the end of the year for nucs.

Yeah.

So how do we get from now? To this point next year, what have you got to do?

More work.

Yeah, more work. What's the plan? What's the routine? What's the schedule?

Queen rearing will start now in earnest. I do have the first batch that I probably go back this afternoon and put into nuc boxes. So the young apprentice that I had, Ethan, he did 2 bars and ended up with 25 And I did 2 bars and only ended up with 27.

At least you've got 2 more though, eh?

But it's what was interesting actually, the very interesting part was on my bars the cells were all the same length and consistent right across, whereas his bars there was some up and down.

Yeah, so he's just cherry-picking.

And it's all to do with the stage of larvae, you know. But no, for him to get that, I, I was That's really good.

You know, it's not unheard of for people to have a go, even if you're getting the right size larvae, you know, they butcher them on the way in or the way out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I did get him eating them straight off the grafting tool. He was quite happy to do that.

Eating them?

Yeah. So if you fail, you put it in your mouth and just swallow it.

And he was all right with that? Yeah, no, he's good with that.

Oh, he's a proper country boy.

Yeah, my wife winds me up so much. I'm not a country boy. I live in the countryside, but I'm very much a Londoner. Cool, so it's just kind of week in, week out rearing, making splits, going to get bees.

Yeah, and I think feeding is going to be a major issue as well, just going forward as well, just to keep the bees going forward rather than backwards, because you can't go into winter without enough bees because that'll just fail. Yeah, yeah.

Right, cool. So I think we're done. I'm gonna— we're gonna go and have a little visit up to the forest, aren't we? And then I'm gonna go back in and spray those bees again and get the nucs out. But for the purpose of the people on the— watching this, thank you. You know, no problem. Couldn't do the nucs without you. You do a fantastic job, and I'm not just saying this for the camera. You know I appreciate all you do and your experience and stuff. You're brilliant, and you, you make Black Mountain Honey nucs what they are.

You do. Thank you.

Good man.

And thank you for selling them.

Got to do, got to do something, haven't I? Right, so Richard's on his way and I need to go now inside here. It's about half 1, like to go in between 1 and half 1 and kind of spray those nucs down, get them nice and wet and cool. I'll, um, where is it? Here we go. You can see in the background there, got the air conditioner there, but it's been closed down so it'll be nice and cool in there at the moment. I'll flip the camera around though and I'll just show you kind of what's left outside the front. I've got a few nucs for collection, a couple that I'm going to go out and put into the apiary later this evening, let them orientate, and I'm going to pinch some brood to boost some colonies that I've got. But when you get into the garage, you'll see there is a lot of nucs in there. So I've got 3 Langstroth there, one that's being collected today and then 2 that are being collected in about a week's time. And then we've got a National nuc there for collection. And then I've got the 3 biggest, strongest ones there that I'm going to put onto my apiary, or put into my apiary later on this So then let's get inside the nucs. You'll see air conditioning unit there. Obviously the door comes down on the garage up there, and as you go in here, oh, really nice and cool. So very, very happy with that. Let's get that air conditioning unit out for a sec. So you can see I keep it stacks like that so I can get down the middle. And you'll see the reason for that in a sec. There's a huge, huge amount of nucs in here. So they start all the way over there in between my gym equipment, and then as I'm walking back, all the way to the ceiling, all the way down, lots and lots of nucs. So then what I do is I go and get my water like that, and then all I'm doing now is I'll spray at the top And then I spray in between the gaps like that. So just look, just a little bit of water going through each one. Where are we here? The idea being you're just chucking a little bit of moisture there if the bees need it. You're not drenching them now. Even at the beginning, wasn't really drenching them. Just never want them to overheat. And I can feel the temperature in here, really, really nice and cool. So that's all of the nucs sprayed up. Now what I do when I put them onto the Royal Mail truck is they get another spray, and that's when I give them a really good strong spray, make sure that they're soaked thoroughly, soaked through. Obviously not like drenching them, but I'll probably do like 10 hits of that gun, get all the frames nice and wet, and give them a really good kind of drenching before they go into the post office van. Because it's that first trip in the post office van that's quite warm, and I want to make sure that they're really nice and moist. And that they can fan themselves down to keep themselves cool as they're going to Chester. It's only like a 20-minute journey though to Chester, and then once they get to Chester, they get taken off into temperature-controlled storage. So they're really nice and cool. I've been into the storage there, and the storage is brilliant. It's kept around kind of like 16, 17 degrees, and then from there they go out to our customers. And that transit from kind of Chester to the customers is very, very quick. So they go out on Royal Mail Special Delivery Service for next-day delivery before 1 PM. But Royal Mail are so good with it, they try and get the nucs out to people as early as possible. So you will get the odd one that is delayed, you'll get the odd one that just arrives about 1 PM, but most of them are delivered very, very early. And sometimes Royal Mail even put on like a dedicated delivery driver to get them there kind of 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning. My favourite one is we sent 10 or 12 nucs up to Colin from Foxes Afloat who lives in the Highlands of Scotland, and they left here at 6 o'clock Kind of like half 5, 6 o'clock on a, on a Tuesday evening, and they got delivered at 6:30 on the Wednesday morning. I couldn't have left and driven them up there quicker myself. I didn't— I had no idea how they got them up there so quick. Absolutely bonkers. Right, next job though, I need to go into like the office and go and fulfill all of the orders. So let's get up there now and fulfill the orders and get the last batch of nucs away to our customers. Right, so back up at the office and I've got my phone here. So the way that I fulfill my orders is I go onto my Wix app And I open up the the Wix app like that, and then I on each of the delivery notes that I have, I put the order number. And I didn't used to do that, and it caused quite a lot of issues. But the reason I do that is it means that I can go into my orders on the Wix app like that, and then I search for the number. First one here is one two four nine six. Brings the order up on here, so I get to like double check that I've got the right order, and then. I add tracking, and then basically all I do is I go up there and I scan the QR code. And that is typical that it's not working first time there. If this, if this doesn't work, we're in, we're in serious problems here because it's very, very long doing it any other way. There we go. So that's scanned now. It seems like first one or two just didn't scan very well, and then it, uh, it starts to kick in and knows what you're doing. So what that does is that fulfills the order on the website But that also sends a tracking email to everyone to say, right, your nuke's been dispatched, it'll be delivered tomorrow, and here's the tracking details that come with it as well. So then they can go on, they can click on it, they can track their nuke all the way through the system. So then I just go through this particular person here's ordered 12 nukes. So I just filter down. I only have to do that once for this guy. Filter down to the next order, which coincidentally is another person who's ordered 10 nukes in this instance here. So 1, 2, 4, 12420. Obviously not telling you their names. And then we do the same thing again, add tracking number, see if it was a bit quicker this time. I scan it. Oh no, it's going to be one of those days, going to be really slow. There you go, scan that one. So that's it. I basically do that for absolutely ages now. So I've got 100 and 150-odd nukes I've got to do. So go through every single one of those, track all the orders. I always do this before the nukes get sent. Really important. And again, do it before the nukes get sent. Had my fingers burnt, which is I'll then run a fulfillment tracker on the website again to make sure that everybody's nukes are on the tracker. So then it should show that they're all fulfilled and it should give me the right amount of spares. And then I always keep a few spares, so if I've missed someone's order or their order's hidden on the website in some way, I can do that due diligence now and check before the nukes actually get sent. So it gives me like a little bit of a buffer to fix any mistakes that I've got. But there's a lot of admin that kind of goes behind sending that many nukes on a weekly basis, which is brilliant. Like, I love it. I really appreciate the support that everyone gets buying the nukes from me and buying the nukes from Richard. But there's quite a lot that goes into, into behind the scenes as well. So it's worth adding, by the way, that I don't normally do this. This is— I'm doing this as a favor to Helen. Helen does this. This is Helen's job. In terms of like the admin and producing all of this stuff. So it's only because I'm, I'm on leave and Helen's decided to have the baby today. Helen does all of this normally. And I'm off working, doing my normal job. So I'll continue fulfilling all of these orders now, 150 of them to go. And then by the time I fulfilled them, it's probably something about an hour, it's going to be close to Royal Mail delivery driver getting here. I'll go and move the cars and get them ready for them reversing back onto the drive. And then fill up all the water, fill up everything ready to go, fulfill, uh, the manifest. So do the manifest for the wall mounts. They can actually come and collect everything. They can scan the paperwork. Basically just get prepared for the final bit of the day, which is getting the nucs out of the door. So let's go ahead and continue with this scanning now. So there we go, another nuc season complete. Quite a lot of work that goes into sending those nucs out. It's about half 5 now, and as I said, we wait really, really late to get those nucs out because I know that they're in the kind of best condition with me. And that I can look after them the best means that instead of sending them at like 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon when it's hot, it's much, much later in the day, half 5, and it's probably like 11, 12 degrees now. Perfect, perfect weather today for sending nucs. If you're wondering what I'm cooking for dinner, I stuck the old rotisserie chicken on the go as well. Love my rotisserie chicken. Big Green Egg— not a Big Green Egg, it's like a Komodo Joe. It's basically a Big Green Egg. So Another nuke season done. I hope you enjoyed that channel exclusive members video, little insight into what goes on behind the scenes at Black Mountain Honey on nukes day. Massive thanks to Richard. Mathix. I get my words out. Massive thanks to Richard. Massive thanks to the Royal Mail driver. Won't say his name, but Royal Mail in general because they look after the bees so well. But most of all, huge, huge thank you to my customers who allow me to do this every single year. I really do appreciate it and I love it so much.