Strategy for the Season - 2020
In this video Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey outlines his comprehensive operational plan for the 2020 beekeeping season. He sets a hard cap of 100 production colonies and 50 nucs, abandons organic splits in favor of purchasing nucs/packages, and switches from double‑brood National boxes to single 14 × 12 brood boxes. He consolidates his apiaries to reduce travel, feeds colonies on‑site, and limits heather‑fielding to one strong apiary. His pest‑management relies solely on oxalic‑acid sublimation (three autumn blasts and one winter blast). Comb management involves re‑using dark comb for bait hives and using drawn brood frames as supers. Record‑keeping will use laminated roof‑edge sheets and a custom traffic‑light nuc‑disc system. Queens will be sourced as a single F0 Buckfast from Dr P Stoffen, with no in‑house queen testing. Feeding plans include pre‑made 1:1 syrup, stocked 2:1 invert syrup, and fondant for nucs. Inspection frequency shifts from weekly to bi‑weekly early in the season, returning to weekly later. Nuc production will focus on winter survival rather than early honey. Harvesting will be apiary‑centric, processing up to 100 supers at a time, and producing four standardized honey products (runny, soft‑set, pure pressed heather, cut‑comb heather) in 8‑oz jars with distinct tamper labels. Under‑floor entrances will be modified with inspection trays for varroa monitoring. He will skip oilseed‑rape foraging, deploy many bait boxes to capture feral swarms, but will not actively chase swarms. Transport will be streamlined by keeping apiaries static and moving colonies in bulk on a flat‑bed trailer. He concludes by urging beekeepers to document seasonal strategies to avoid past mistakes.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to be talking about my upcoming strategy for the beekeeping season. So in previous years, I have written down my strategy. I try to keep it kind of short and simple, limited to kind of like 10 to 15 main topics as to how I am going to manage my upcoming beekeeping season. So the purpose of this video is instead of writing it down, this time I'm going to do a video on it. I'm just going to kind of break it down into the key objectives that I've got for the season and how I'm going to manage my bees. So number 1, number of hives. Now in previous years my strategy has been I'm looking for kind of exponential increase, so that means I'll I want to kind of get up to as many hives as I possibly can in the shortest amount of time possible. That has caused me severe problems. As we discussed in previous videos, I was overly ambitious. Instead of maybe splitting a hive into 2 colonies, I split it into 4 or 5. Sometimes they were too small, and that overambition has cost me in that the colonies didn't make it through the winter. So I'm limiting myself now, and I'm at an absolute cap to where I want to be at the moment, and that is 100 production colonies and 50 nucs. So 150 colonies. My nucs are run on a 6x6 system, so I actually have 12 frames in there. So when they're big, kind of bustling colonies, they're kind of like a little bit bigger than a nuc. So that's number one. I'm going to limit the number of colonies that I've got, and I'm at an absolute maximum. Of 100 production colonies and 50 nucs. So another thing to say about that is that I'm not aiming to do any more organic increase. So that is, I'm not looking to kind of take the nucs, and I'm not looking to— so I'm not looking to take any colonies that may be swarming or are strong colonies and doing any either preemptive or reactive splits. So I'll be looking to buy in colonies, so either nucs, full colonies, or packages of bees, and that's how I'm going to increase my numbers this year. So number 2 is a brood box change. So in previous years I've used National brood boxes. I get them from Suyenti, poly boxes. They're my kind of brood box of choice at the moment. I use a number of Abelo boxes as well, but I do have more Suyenti than Abelo. The problem that I found with the bees that I kept was that they weren't quite prolific enough to fill both of the brood boxes, and in order to get them up to strength, i.e., filling both of those brood boxes at the correct time of year, was quite difficult without any stimulative feeding. So I also didn't like the fact with double brood that I had to kind of inspect 22 frames, and at some— I mean, sometimes I didn't. I'd kind of just target a box that I thought might have the swarm cells in, and sometimes of the year you obviously don't need to look for swarm cells anyway. So it's not kind of as clear-cut as I had to inspect 22 frames each time. I didn't, but there are kind of a number of negatives that come with double brood. Saying that, there's a number of loads of positives that come with double brood as well, and I'm fully aware of of all of those kind of positives and the ability to perform a number of manipulations on it. But I've taken the plunge to move over to 14x12 and run it on a single brood box. So I will save that for another video, the debate between kind of a double brood system and a single 14x12 brood box. But for the purpose of this video, that's my strategy. That's number 2, I'm changing over to 14x12 single brood box. Number 3, mentioned it earlier, But it's just kind of pulling it out for the sake of clarity. I'm not going to be doing any organic expansion this year, so every single kind of swarm manipulation that I do is going to be aimed at keeping one colony as one colony. I'll do vertical splits, but I won't be doing kind of any splits which turn one colony into 2 colonies or more. So I'll be buying stuff in, so I'll be buying nucleuses in from well-known kind of reputable breeders, and I'll be buying packages in. Early in the season and try and kind of hopefully build them up to do well on the heather. So number 4, I'm looking to consolidate my apiaries. So last year I had 7 apiaries and it took me a while to kind of get around to them all. I had like between 10 to 15 colonies at each of these apiaries, so this year I'm consolidating them. I've kind of taken a look back and seen the data from which colonies and which apiaries have performed better than others, and I'm taking that data and I'm kind of just targeting the good apiaries that I know that will perform well and then upping the number of colonies that are at each apiary. So going up to kind of like 25 at each apiary plus another one where I'll manage my nucs. Idea between— idea for that is that it's going to reduce the amount of kind of travel time and it means that I can manage the colonies more efficiently by having them all in a single apiary and hopefully boost the overall output of honey by targeting the apiaries that are performing well. So feed at the apiaries. So last year I took a terrible decision to kind of move all of my colonies back to a single location to feed them all In hindsight, it was an incredibly stupid idea. I won't be doing that again. So next time, next year, I'll be feeding at the apiaries, taking the feed to the hives and leaving them where they are. So the colonies will just remain where they are kind of throughout the year. Number 6, the heather. So in previous years, I've tried to take all of my colonies up to the heather, and in, in one or two years that paid off. In other years, it's caused me a number of issues. So this year I'm only going to be taking one apiary's worth of colonies up to the heather. I'm going to be making sure that I choose my absolute strongest colonies and I'll be taking those to the heather. So I'm not going to kind of target all of them because it created too much of a workload for me. I find that for me the heather doesn't sell as well. I know kind of further afield from where I live the heather sells very well, but I don't kind of have the expansion into those markets yet. So if I could just get 20, 25 really, really strong colonies up to the heather, and we get a good flow, that will give me enough in order to kind of supply me with the honey that I need. So I'm trying to limit the work but kind of still get the reward and get enough of the honey that I actually need. So number 7, my treatments. Same as last year's, I'm going to do with this, I'm going to do all oxalic acid sublimation. So I'm not going to use any other treatments. I'm going to do an autumn treatment where I use 3 blasts over a 15-day period. In order to try and get kind of all the phoretic mites over those 3 blasts, and then I'll do 1 blast kind of around Christmas time, hopefully target it when there's no brood within the colony. So that's gonna be my strategy for this year. Number 8, comb changes. So I'm doing a lot of kind of moving over to 14x12, so I've got a lot of foundation that needs drawing out in the 14x12, but I'll be taking any kind of dark or black comb that's in my existing brood boxes and I'll be using those for bait hives. All of the rest of my drawn brood frames are going to be used as supers, so I'm no longer going to buy any supers. I've got enough, and any further boxes that I buy will be a normal national brood configuration, and I will use them within my colonies as supers. So I think you— I wouldn't want to just exclusively use brood boxes, but the fact as long as I've got kind of 1 or 2 supers per hive, then any of the boxes over and above that can be brood boxes, so that's going to be my strategy. The next one is notes and records. Now I think that I've kind of improved on this year after year. My original notes were pretty terrible. Going forward, I'm going to be using a laminated sheet under the edge of each roof, at the edge of each roof, so I'm just going to kind of pin that in place. I've really streamlined all the information that's on there, so I'm only kind of keeping the real critical information, kind of like the heritage of the queen, the performance in terms of honey, any disease recognition, trying to limit it to the absolute minimum and trying to kind of make that as slick as possible because it can really slow you down. I'm also running a traffic light system where I use a little mini nuc spinner to give me kind of a quick visual indication on the exterior of the hive as to the status of the hive. So whether it's kind of got a queen, whether it's performing well, whether it's got a disease. That's kind of something that I've developed. I know another number of other beekeepers use traffic light systems, but this one is based upon a spinning nuc disc, so you can actually have more than 3 lights or 3 kind of statuses in there. So I'll do a separate video on that, but that's my strategy for keeping notes going forward this season. In terms of queen rearing, I'm going to be buying another F0 selected breeder queen from Dr. P. Stoffen, so Buckfast in Germany. That's what I'm going to be using for all of my queens this year. I don't do any testing of queens, so I don't kind of take a selection of queens and do the testing. I'll leave that up to a kind of professional breeder to do that for me. They send me the F0 queen and then I breed from that queen. So kind of all of the daughters this year will be from one queen, and then the next year I'll make sure that I use another queen in order to kind of keep some diversity within the apiaries. So feeding and emergency feeding. I got caught out a number of times last year where the weather was so poor I should have fed when it got really, really bad. I should have fed and kept that queen going, kept her kind of laying eggs to kind of try and catch up later on in the season. I didn't do that because I didn't want to contaminate my supers with honey, but if we get a similar weather pattern this year, I'll have kind of no choice but to take the supers off and give them some real kind of stimulative feeding just to keep them going. So I didn't do that last year. What I did last year was I mixed up my own syrup So I think for 1:1 syrup, I'll continue to do that, but for when I'm doing any 2:1, I will buy that in and I'll have that kind of as a pre-purchased invert syrup. And that gives me the benefit that I can kind of keep it off-site somewhere, and whenever I need it, I can just go and get it straight away, as opposed to going and assessing the bees and saying, right, I need to feed them, so I have to go and mix up some syrup. So it's kind of minimizing that delay between identifying that there's an issue with the bees and they need feeding and actually getting some feed onto them. So that's the strategy for this season. So my inspection regime, I kind of religiously stuck to once a week per colony, no matter what time it is throughout the season, but I've kind of kept bees for long enough now to realize that early on in the season I really don't need to be doing that. My time can be kind of better spent doing something else. So the plan this year is to check them early on in the season, make sure they've got enough stores, make sure they're building up well. And then if the weather's nice, I'm going to kind of reduce that down and just do it on 2-weekly inspections until we kind of get to like maybe back end of April, early May. And then I'm going to kick in with my once-a-week inspections. And I might, I might miss 1 or 2 early swarms, but the chances are very, very low around North Wales. Like, the bees do take kind of a while to build up to get to that strong position. So there's no point me going out and kind of wasting my time doing these inspections if I don't need to do them. So I'm going to limit it. I'll do, like I say, I'll just do some early checks, make sure that they're kind of alive, they've got enough food, they're building up, and then if the weather is good, I'll leave them to it and I'll just kind of inspect them once every other week up until the back end of April, and then I'll move on to weekly inspections. So making up nucs, made the mistake last year of trying to make up early nucs to get honey out of them, so I sacrificed a number of production colonies to kind of make up good 3 or 4 frame nucs with the idea that I could hit some of the late flows with them. And what the mistake that I made was that I didn't feed them enough. So this year, if I make up any nucs and I intend to kind of split some of the packages out into nucs, I'm going to make sure that I feed them and just constantly feed them and get them to the point where my only aim for them is to get them through the winter So I've got no worries about kind of contaminating any sugar syrup within the products because they're not going to be used for honey production this year. So I'm going to make up nice early nucs and I'm just going to feed, feed, feed. I'll use up all the fondant that I've got. I find feeding nucs in fondant is a really good way to get up— to get rid of all of your winter fondant anyway. So I'll continue to give them kind of like pollen substitute if they take that down and continue to give them as much fondant as they take. And then we move into kind of the summer months, I'll give them 1:1 syrup and let them draw out some combs and hopefully get them onto a nice kind of 14x12 system ready for the winter. So talk a little bit about my harvesting strategy. I need to try and keep it as slick as I possibly can, so I'll be, as kind of mentioned on my website a couple of times, I'm going to be limiting it to the apiaries. So I'll be kind of harvesting my colonies by apiary as opposed to going around and taking maybe a super off a colony from different apiaries and mixing them up. So I will be just targeting them specifically, and with the fact that my colonies are more condensed into apiaries now, so there's more colonies per apiary, it's going to make that easier and more efficient to do. So my kind of harvesting line within the honey room can take kind of 50 supers at a time, so I can put 50 supers into the room put 50 supers onto the back of the truck, extract 100 supers at a time, and then go and put them back onto the colonies. So 100 supers should give me kind of plenty of honey to work with at that time as well. So that's the strategy, is kind of keep all of the honey confined to the specific apiary, and then I'll track that through all the way through kind of extraction, through the buckets, and then kind of into the jars. So each of the jars will be individually identified within the lot number and the barcode. Back to the apiary that it came from. So honey products are— I like to kind of offer as many honey products as I can, but with— I don't want to provide a very niche honey product. I'm not really in the market for that, so I'm going to limit it to the kind of main honey products that I provided previously, but I am going to add 2 more to it. So I'm going to be doing a runny honey, I'm going to be doing a soft-set honey, and I'm going to be doing a pure pressed heather honey, and I'm going to be doing a cut comb heather honey as well. So 4 main products. I'm not going to do any other, other ones from that. I keep it very, very efficient in my extraction room and in the jarring. So everything goes in 8-ounce jars, 8-ounce round jars, and then they all get the same label put on them as well. And then my differentiator is the tamper label. So heather will have a different tamper label Sofset has a different tamper label, and obviously the cut comb products are slightly different. And we're still looking for suitable plastic-free packaging for our cut comb, so that one may well not go ahead, but we'll see where we get to. I did a video a few, a couple of months back now about underfloor entrances. So I'm going to mod all of my underfloor entrances for this year just so I can put an inspection tray in. I did that on a couple of them and it worked really well, so I'm just going to mod them. I'm just going to pin a little bit of batten on there so I can put the Correx in And have a tray to kind of monitor varroa on them. I'm probably going to leave them in over winter as well. I found that this year has been particularly kind of windy, and I think that the colonies maybe suffered a little bit. So I'm just going to, just going to test that out, and it might be next year I take those trays back out, but I'm going to do it this year. So this upcoming winter, I'm going to mod all of my underfloor entrances and put a mesh tray in— I'm sorry, and put a Correx tray in. so that it's effectively a solid floor over winter. So oilseed rape, I'm not going to do the oilseed rape this year. I've been 2 years in a row, it's not performed well. I'm struggling to find a suitable location for it, I'm struggling with the number of colonies that I want to kind of get what I need to get out of it, so not going to do the oilseed rape this year and that's a decision that I'll stick by. Did a video the other week on this one, so bait boxes. Strategy this year is put as many bait boxes up as I possibly can, so I'm not going to do any organic Splits. I'm not going to split my own colonies, but I'm going to try and catch as many feral colonies as I can, and I'm going to do that through using bait boxes. So the bait boxes will consist of kind of either 6 or 12 really, really dark black, the absolute worst of my old brood frames. And you see the previous video, I'll put them up, hang them up to a tree, and I'll try and catch some swarms. So hopefully I can get maybe like 10 or 15 swarms that way. And then I'll assess the colonies and probably give them a new queen and then see if I can get them to overwinter successfully. Which leads me nicely on to my next point, which is catching swarms. So not catching any swarms this year, and I've said that previously and I've actually gone back on it and gone and caught a couple, but for me it's just not worth the time and effort kind of going out trying to catch these swarms. It's just not kind of— it doesn't give me enough reward, although it gives me quite a lot of satisfaction to go and catch them. I just can't justify the amount of time that I spent doing it previously. So strategy for this year is not going out, not catching any swarms. Talk a little bit about transport. So I've struggled previously with my pickup truck, so I can only get 4 colonies in the back of my pickup truck, and I really struggled kind of ferrying stuff around and making numerous trips. So the idea this year is that all of my, all of my apiaries now become static apiaries. I'm not going to be transporting stuff around, so I've said I'm not going to go to the oilseed rape. I'll take one apiary's worth of bees up to the heather, but I'll strap them to kind of the back of a flatbed trailer and take them up in one hit. So I'm just trying to kind of streamline the process as much as I possibly can whilst maintaining that reward for kind of going up there. So trying to eliminate kind of unnecessary journeys within the pickup truck. So that's it, very quick video just kind of documenting my strategy for the season. I'm going to do another video on the mistakes that I've made in a previous season And then I'll do a final video, um, at the end of the year reviewing how the season's gone versus my strategy for the season, and I'll kind of give you a bit of an indication as to how well my strategy went and if I followed it effectively. Like I said, I used to write it down and document it on a piece of paper. Going forward, I'll just stick it on a video, and then other people can kind of maybe think about what they want to do for their upcoming season, put in place some really, really good objectives and targets and try and understand how they're going to manage their bees throughout the season, as opposed to being confronted by situations and then not really having a plan as to how to manage them. It's all too easy with bees to get carried away, as I well and truly know. It really is. You can just get carried away and then it gets out of control quite quickly. So putting in place these kind of plans and mitigations early on in the season give you your best chance of success and getting something out of the bees at the end of the season. So I urge everyone just to kind of, even if you're just going to sit down and have a think about it, scribble it on the back of a piece of paper. What's your plan for the season? What went wrong in previous seasons? How you plan to manage your bees this season? What's your strategy for success? Just get that documented down and then review it at the end of the season and see kind of how close you came to kind of achieving your goals. So that's it for today's video. I really hope you've enjoyed it and it's educational for everyone. It's good for me just to kind of get these things off my chest, get it onto a video, and hopefully kind of guide other people into not making the mistakes that I've made in previous seasons and giving them a bit of kind of like forward vision as to what I'm hoping to achieve. Hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
