Simple Beekeeping Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

Today I'm going to tell you my top 10 beekeeping mistakes to avoid. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mans in Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I have made pretty much every mistake in beekeeping. I don't want you to make the same mistake, so I'm doing this video. I'm going to tell you about all my mistakes, round it up to the closest top 10, give you the information so you don't make the mistakes yourself. Straight in then. Number 1, do not interfere with your bees too much. And with all of these, I am talking from personal experience. I'm not saying, oh yeah, maybe you could make this mistake. I'm telling you mistakes that I have made that have been either detrimental to my wallet, to my bees, or I've just been really ineffective. Number 1, do not interfere with your bees too much. It took me a good few years to realize that The less I intervened with the bees, the better they did. The more honey they produced, the more splits I made. So do not interfere with your bees too much. And we're going to talk about later on in this video what is too much. We're going to talk about regular inspections. But what I mean by too much is do not fret over your bees. All you need to make sure with bees is that you're doing your varroa treatments at the right time of the year, they've got enough food to They get through the winter and they've got enough space. If you do all of those things, your bees should be fine. And okay, that's massively oversimplifying it, but the biggest mistake, and I've got this at number 1 for a reason, is it's so easy to get carried away with interfering with your bees. You might do a manipulation, you might add a queen in there, and you think, okay, it's supposed to be 48 hours before I check to see whether that queen's been accepted. And you're just getting kind of nervous after 24 hours. And I guarantee people will be sitting there watching this video and thinking, yeah, I did that 100%. And it took me years to realize it's better not to do that. And I do think the more colonies you get, the easier it is to say, okay, well, I'll just leave them for a little bit. If you've got one colony in your back garden, that's your only hope and you want to nurse it, you want to make sure it's okay. And you think by going and checking up on them, all you're doing by checking up on them is satisfying your own curiosity as to what's going on. And if you're not an expert, it's difficult to tell what's going on anyway. Every single time you open up that beehive, you set them back. If you can remember that, then it's a really good mantra to work by. Right, number 2, compatibility of beehives. Now, I remember when someone said to me very, very early on in beekeeping, choose your format and stick to your format. And I kind of thought the whole time, definitely got this bit of advice, nailed it. I've chosen my format, it's a national. Got that sorted. And it's only when I kind of looked around the other day, and I'm looking at it now, it's behind the camera, I'm kind of thinking I completely got that wrong. Like, even someone telling me it and then me trying to actually live with that advice, still got it wrong. So what that means is that beehives come in loads of different sizes and shapes, different formats, different frames. You've got your Dadants, your Commercials, your Langstroth, your Nationals. And then within the National, you've got National Deeps, 14x12, National Shallows. For beginners, it is a minefield. I do appreciate that, and I know that from experience. It's really, really difficult. The advice is though, is choose a hive type and stick to it. Religiously stick to it. And I just didn't do that, and I really do regret that decision. So I said, right, I'm going to go with the National hive type. That's the hive type that I'm choosing. So I bought loads of hives. National deep hives with national shallows as the supers. And already, without kind of thinking too much, I introduced 2 different size frames into my beekeeping operation. So I've got a national shallow and a national deep. And okay, it's fine to have 2 different frame sizes if you're not going to use them interchangeably. But then I made the decision to move to 14 by 12, and I just thought, right, I'm going to go to 14 by 12. I won't go into the reasons why, but I decided I'm going to move from a national deep to a national 14 by 12. So I bought 200 14x12 brood boxes. So already within that national format, I've got a 14x12 frame, a national deep frame, and a national shallow frame. Then we move on to mini mating nucs, and I bought loads of mini mating nucs with mini plus-size frames thinking, well, I don't want to waste a whole frame of bees mating some queens, so I'm going to go for a smaller one. So anyway, I'm going off and talking way too much about this. I've ended up with 4 different types of frame within a single format. So my advice to you is stick religiously to your format. Do your research first and make sure that you're not even expanding that within the national format. If you're going to go with 14 by 12, stick to 14 by 12. If you're going to go with national shallow supers as your supers, stick to that religiously. Don't chop and change. My advice is, if you can manage to lift a heavy national deep box full of honey, the best system In the UK is to use National Deeps for everything, for your supers and everything. It makes the manipulations the easiest, easiest things in the world. If you're anywhere else in the world, I would suggest going for one format of Langstroth and just choosing a single size box, and that will make your life so much easier. Right, next one then, and this is number 3, but this could equally be number 1. This is a big, big one, and Everybody makes this mistake. Every single person who starts beekeeping makes this mistake. And for some people, it's maybe not a mistake. It is a little bit subjective, this one. Placement of hives. Just have a think about where you're going to keep your hives, because I started out and I had 4 hives very similar to this in a garden that was about 10 meters by 6 meters. And they started off in spring, and I got the nucs, and I put the nucs in, had a swarm in there as well, and I thought, this is great. This is fine, no problem at all with them being in the garden. And then they grew to about this tall, and then they started swarming, and I just thought, oh my God, what am I doing keeping 4 massive colonies of bees in a tiny little garden? And you could see the neighbors looking out the window, just like looking at you saying, what are you doing? You're ruining our nice small neighborhood with your aggressive swarmy bees. So I would always suggest keep bees on somebody else's land. Speak to farmers, speak to landowners. There are loads of places to keep bees well out of the way of people, out of the way of horses, public footpaths. Keep them out of your garden. Just have a think about it. Don't make the mistake of putting them somewhere that's really inconvenient to you, your family, your neighbors, and then have to go through the process of moving them. Because moving a big aggressive hive that's in the back garden to somewhere else is difficult. And if you put them somewhere else to start off, You never have to make that move. Number 4 is starting with one colony. I have a lot of people ringing me up for advice about this, 'cause we sell the queens. People are saying, I've got a colony in my back garden, it's 2 frames of bees, we're in September, there's no queen, there's no brood, there's nothing. I want to buy a new queen to get it through the winter. And I have to tell these people, I just say, you're wasting money on a new queen here. Adding a new queen to that size colony over winter It's just not worth it. So I say to them, you're best off just merging it if it's disease-free with another one of your colonies, or if you need to do test frames as well to check queenlessness state of a colony, taking frames of eggs from another colony. So my advice to everyone, start with 2 colonies. May seem expensive at the time, but when you get to the point where you're potentially going to lose one and you can split the other one, pays for itself within a single year. Right, number 5. Buying extraction equipment that is too small for your operation. Hands up, I am guilty of it. I bought a 2-frame manual extractor. I bought it new, I bought it from China. It's absolute rubbish. But I kind of thought when I bought it, you know what, I'm not going to need to extract loads of different frames. I'll do it with a little hand-run jig like that. This isn't going to become a business, this isn't going to grow to 10 or 12 hives, so I'm just going to cheap out and go for a £100 little manual 2-frame extractor. It's the biggest false economy in the world. If you're going to put your money anywhere, put your money into secondhand extraction equipment. Holds its value really, really well, and if it turns out you're not going to use it, you can just sell it on again for pretty much what you paid for it. If you buy it too small, you end up just chucking it away because no one's going to want to buy a secondhand 2-frame hand crank extractor, and if they do, you'll probably lose loads of money on it anyway. So my advice is make sure that you're buying the correct size equipment, always go that one step above. And then if you can't afford that one step above, buy it secondhand, make sure it works well, and then it will hold its value really well. If you want me to tell you a specific size of extractor, I would say go for a minimum 12-frame extractor, electric if you can afford it. And then the next step up from that is go for a 20-frame. If you can get a 20-frame electric extractor in your budget secondhand, then that is what I would be going for, even with, say, kind of 4 or 5 hives, and you will end up with 4 or 5 hives after a couple of years beekeeping. Number 6 is the quality of the beekeeping equipment that you buy, and this refers to extraction equipment and your beekeeping equipment as well. And I'll say this about the majority of the big suppliers in the UK, that they're all pretty good. Like, there's no one that's really, really bad who I'd say definitely don't buy it from them, they're really, really bad. All of the wooden cedar components that you can get in the UK are very, very good. However, I would just do your research, and this goes across all of it. Watch reviews on YouTube, go and have a look at them in person, look at it in the shows, see what people are saying on beekeeping forums, and just make an informed decision over the equipment that you're going to go with. Comes back to compatibility as well. If you choose a hive type that you can only add a super from that company, then you're locked into that. So if you buy 10 of them, then you're locked into that style. I really do like an option where it's fully compatible with a wooden national kit. And for me personally, if you're buying supers as well, I'm going down the route now of just buying seconds, cedar supers, and then mix and matching that with polystyrene brood boxes and roofs. Number 7, if anybody talks to you about doing a shook swarm every year because it's good for the bees, or that you should put matchsticks on your hive to give your hives top ventilation, then don't believe them because what they're saying is a load of rubbish. But also, you might want to kind of think about where they're getting their information from, because in my mind, doing a shook swarm out of nowhere is really, really bad advice. Putting matchsticks under a crown board to give the colony ventilation— really, really bad advice. And if they're giving you those 2 bits of bad advice, you might want to challenge the other advice they're giving you as well. Number 8: And this is going to be really, really contentious, so I apologize in advance if this doesn't apply to you. Make sure you treat your colonies for varroa. I'm firmly in the camp that I believe you should treat your colony every year a minimum of once for varroa if you're in the UK. Obviously, if you're somewhere that doesn't have varroa, you are incredibly lucky, but most of us have to deal with pests. So obviously in the US you've got small hive beetle as well, Over here, varroa is the one that causes the majority of the issues for us. If you hear people saying they're treatment-free, I'm not saying that there's not people that are treatment-free, but you have to understand the journey that they may have been on and the sacrifices that they might have to make to get to the point where their bees are treatment-free. So if you've got one colony of bees and you've just spent £1,000 on extraction equipment and your bee suit and your beehive, And you spent like 3 grand in total getting ready for bees, and then someone's saying to you, you need to not treat your bees because it's good for the whole community. I would challenge that and say, well, I'll probably end up stopping beekeeping in a couple of years because that colony is going to die. And it might not die, but I would say it's highly, highly unlikely to survive over the course of about 3 years unless you do your varroa treatments. Like I said, get the comments on here because that is really contentious. But if you're a new beekeeper, I would say get your varroa treatments on. Make sure your bees don't die due to varroa viruses. Right, number 9, and I said we'd talk a little bit about inspections. Not inspecting your bees at all or enough. And I see so much of this, which is people saying, oh, I want to get a beehive, I want to buy a beehive, I'm going to put it at the back of the garden, I'm going to put it on some land, and I'm just going to leave it alone. Not going to do anything, I'm saving the bees. My argument to that is you're definitely not saving the bees. What you're doing is causing a real hazard and a nuisance to your neighbours, and you're causing a real hazard and a nuisance to other local beekeepers because you're not being a responsible beekeeper by checking your colony for disease at regular intervals. You might have thought with the best intentions, I'm going to get a beehive, I'm not going to do anything with it, and I'm saving the bees. And my argument, like I said, is you're doing the complete opposite of that. You're causing a nuisance by doing that. So the mistake that some people might make is they don't inspect their bees at all or enough. And when we come to inspections, what I say is you don't need to go and inspect your bees every other day. You need to inspect your bees every single week, once a week at the same time every week, 7-day intervals. And you're checking them for disease and you're checking them for swarm control. It's as simple as that, 7-day inspections. And then the final one is, is more of a mantra Really, and it's just a bit of a challenge out there to everyone. Always learn from your own experiences. I post a lot on Facebook, and I post a lot on social media, and I get people challenging me a lot of the time, saying you shouldn't do that, you've done that wrong. And I love a challenge. I love a discussion about beekeeping. But what I say to them is, have you tried this? They generally don't come back with a comment. And then my argument is, well, if you haven't tried it yourself. How do you know? Because you're just going on what you maybe think or what somebody else has told you. I'm going on my own experience and showing you my own experience. So for example, someone was challenging the other day that you shouldn't put a box of foundation underneath a brood box in spring in order for them to expand down and to draw out the combs underneath. Now I've tried that and I've done that a lot, and I find that's a really good way for them to expand It's maybe not as quick as doing it above, but if you've got fondant on your colonies, you can do it underneath and they'll expand down fine. There's no problem with it whatsoever. I've learned that from my own experience, so if someone challenges me, I can say, well, I've done it and it works and there's no problems with it whatsoever, so I think that's a valid technique. Please don't get into the mindset of hearing something from somebody else. Somebody in your beekeeping association is saying, well, I do this, and then going and taking that piece of information and using it to challenge others. Because beekeeping, there is so much bad information out there. Like, it's just littered across forums, across old books, but mostly it's in people's minds. And people will say it with such force and authority that people think, well, that's definitely real. Another example I had the other day was how late can you add foundation into a hive? And I was showing that it's possible to do it in October. The video showed that I put a frame of foundation in, fed them, and 4 days later they'd drawn out the frame of foundation. It didn't have any drone cells on it, so there's a real benefit there. Now, I was challenged on that to say it takes 8 pounds of honey for the bees to draw out 1 pound of wax. And I said, well, thanks very much for that statistic, but have you ever weighed a frame of foundation, or ever weighed a frame of drawn comb? Because I'd wager it's probably cost me about 6p in feed in order to get that drawn out. But that was their challenge. And the challenge also came back saying that you shouldn't put it in between the brood because you're going to split the brood. But I've just showed them in the video that they drew the comb out, and then I went back a week later and they'd filled it with eggs. So I'm talking from my own experience, but I'm being challenged by people who are just hypothesizing. And like I said, Please don't let that put you off challenging me on things. I'm not saying that I'm the authority, but what I'm saying is this is how I do something. Here is an example of me doing it, and I'm talking to you about my experiences. I would recommend for everybody to try and do that yourselves. Put stuff into practice, try things out. Some things will work, some things won't work. And talk with authority about the things that you've done that work versus the things that you haven't done that you don't know work. So there we go, 10 top mistakes that I hope you won't make. And I can guarantee you will make some of those mistakes, and I can guarantee I will make some of those mistakes again, guaranteed, because they're very, very difficult ones to not make. But even on some of those things there, people have recommended that to me, people have given me the advice, and it wasn't me saying, I don't trust your advice, I think I know better, I'm going to do it a different way. Like with the issue of compatibility of hive components, I had it in my mind the whole time, make your hives compatible, only use one format, and I've just found myself in a bit of a mess and I'm thinking, how have I done that? So even with the best intentions, you can get it wrong. People will get it wrong, but you just need to think carefully about what you're doing, try and limit the mistakes that you make, but most importantly, learn from the mistakes that you make. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. Don't make the mistakes. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.