Hello this is the one i bought. The price has gone up ridiculously. I bought it when it was £800 www.abelo.co.uk/shop/extractors/electric-20-frame-radial-extractor/

@@MystTreeHoney thankyou I was looking at the Premium line one. I wonder if there’s much difference

Think the premium has a conical bottom or heated sides, but I'm unsure. Mine works fine either way. Just tilt it at the end of the day with a block of wood to get the last of the honey out overnight.

What a bittersweet story. You're never too old to learn how to keep bees. Someone bought their first nuc off me a few weeks ago, and they were in their mid 70's.

I have a love-hate relationship with apivar. I think it's an excellent product, really easy to use and doesn't cause the bees any trouble. Unfortunately for me, I use brood boxes as supers sometimes if I'm running low or the bees have filled one of their broods with honey. Last I heard, the miticide in apivar permanently taints the comb, meaning any honey stored in it is also tainted. It means that a lot of frames I have can't be used for honey that I can sell, so instead, I have to use those frames to feed back to the bees at winter. You might notice that some of my frames have "APV" written on their lugs. This is so I know I used them with an apivar strip. The drone removal is an excellent way to keep the mites down. I'm thinking about buying a load of drone foundation so I can put one in each hive and easily scrape the wax and brood off with a spatula throughout the year.

I like to use a shaker box when I definitely need to find a particularly pesky queen. Fortunately, using the queen excluder method is usually a faster method of locating the queen to a specific box, which I can either comb in more detail or just remove. Time is something I have very little of these days sadly

Glad you think so!

Thank you for that. I really appreciate you watching and always love the comments. I'll try to get your order to pick'n'mixers today or tomorrow if I can. I'm born and bred Rainford. Been here all my life. Only reason I'd leave is if there was a smallholding nearby that I could afford. Not sure where you heard Kent from. I buy my wildflower seeds from a farmer down south. It could be the video I talk about my wildflowers, and I've either misspoke or you've misheard me. I talk without thinking so probably the prior. Sorry for the confusion.

Hello, I'm glad you're still enjoying them. Formic Pro will dissipate after a few weeks, so your frames will be fine to continue to use without worry. Still take your supers off to use the stuff, though. It doesn't affect the honey, supposedly, but it's good to be safe. Only reason to make a note on your frames is if you use apivar or apistan as these use a miticide that stays in the wax and makes the honey dangerous for human consumption. Hope that helps!

@@MystTreeHoney thats awesome news greg, thank you. i will indeed extract my few frames before treatment..but good to know next season, if they use those frames i can extract honey from them...this year as first year its all been about getting drawn out comb and while i did my own split and theyve done pretty well. i dont have that much as a resource to not use back in the hives... x

First year is always the toughest. Get them through winter, and you're onto a winner.

@@MystTreeHoney aww thanks greg. i appreciate the encouragemnt :)

My edits never work right😂

I don't shake the frames with cells I want to keep. Once I've found a good one, then I shake the others as I will destroy them anyway, and I don't want to miss any. You'd be surprised what size colonies will swarm. I've had a nuc swarm with a caste in a colony that was half this size. That was when I was experimenting in my early years trying to see how small swarms can get. Got to the stage where all that was left in the nuc was a fist size of bees. Fortunately, I managed to collect all the swarms.

Oh dear. Sometimes, a virgin has emerged and is in the process of getting mated. A friend of mine Alex bought 2 queens off me and realised as he put one of the queens in her new colony that it already had a laying queen randomly. Check for queen cells torn down unless you know why the queen died

@@MystTreeHoney yes, I'll get back in there tomorrow, I'm hoping that is the situation. Thanks

Fingers crossed for you

That's why you have to have at least two hives. Accidents happen and you have to be prepared. If you had a second hive you could take a frame with eggs and very young larvae and let them make a new queen. Or you can merge them if the weather is not ideal or the season passed for a queen to mate and have a very strong hive for the winter.

@chrishar110 I have 4 hives but my eyes won't let me see eggs.

I got very worried reading that then😂 It's very easy to want to be in your hives all the time when you first start. I know I was constantly messing with mine when I was a newbie. I think the hardest thing to learn is to walk away from situations for a week to see if they solve themselves.

That is a very good point. It's very easy for them to overheat, especially in hot weather, and if you've annoyed them before uniting. I've fortunately never had them die from it yet, but it's a good idea to maybe set up some ventilation holes in the side of the nuc or roof. Or maybe I could make some ekes that could fit on the nucs with holes drilled into them🤔 I might look into doing that this next time. I've just sold 2 queens, so I'll be combining 2 more nucs to this colony. Thanks for the heads up!

No, definetely not. Bees when they have a small gap on the top they seal it with propolis. If the gap is big they will leave the hive when they will feel that it is safe. Your bees died from another reason, they didn't have food, the queen died and they couldn't reqeeun the hive, or they were sick, not from heat. Bees survived for thousand years in cavities with no air circulation, with just a tiny entrance. They know how to do it themselves. They stand at critical places in front and inside the hive and they move their wings and they circulate the air inside the hive if it is too hot. Dont forget that larvae and brood need temps around 35°C or around 95F. So, you need temps over 40°C to see that. You won't see temps over 30-35°C iat Kent. Just dont leave the hive at a place that is in direct sun all day. It's good if they have the sun in the morning, that will help them to wake up faster after a chilly night, but under a shadow in the afternoon.

I just bought a bulk lot of them because whenever I give someone a link, they seem to sell out or are discontinued for some reason. I'll pop them on my online store this week. As well as the queen cages and marking cage I use. It seems to be a common question. I'll let you know when they're up

@@MystTreeHoney good on ya, thanks for that.

Are you in the uk? I hope so because I don't do international post😅

@@MystTreeHoney yes I am, in Kent.

Brill I'll let you know when the items are on the store page?

👋

Wow amazing work! I'm very jealous!

From my experience, I've seen multiple laying workers in a single colony. The best way to deal with them is to shake the colony out in front of another. The guard bees will get rid of the laying workers and let the rest in.

No laying workers as the eggs I found were at the very bottom of the cells and only one of them per cell. Laying workers usually have lots of eggs around the middle to top of the cell.

Good question. I think there were about 12 languages there. It seems Vita supply all over Europe

Yeah I prefer it too, especially when my back is starting to ache. Well done! Nice work! Love it when people have a successful first attempt! One of the reasons I post all my failings is to prove that it's perfectly normal for things to go wrong🙂 Really glad it went well for you!

@MystTreeHoney thanks. BTW, maybe you should double up on those gloves, might save your hands a little.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help. Stingers can get through two gloves annoyingly. I once bought some proper (expensive) surgeons gloves and they were excellent. They were made to stop needles from getting through. When I got stung, it just felt like a pin prick rather than a sting. Unfortunately, you only got 50 gloves per pack and they were just too expensive to keep getting

@MystTreeHoney have you tried washing-up gloves, they seem to work for me and I like the pink ones lol

Haha, I started with some, and they're very good. I like the disposable aspect of surgical gloves for disease control, though. As I always say, if something works for me, it doesn't necessarily mean it will work for others.

Thank you for your question. I tend to leave queen excluders off until the end of July when I shake all of the bees into the bottom box. This means that until the last two-three weeks of the summer flow, the queen has no restrictions on where she can go, reducing the swarm response. Sometimes, the bees can reach a "critical mass" and want to swarm even though they have loads of space. When this happens in a massive colony with multiple boxes and no queen excluders, it's exceptionally hard to find the queen to remove. I put a queen excluder in between each box and wait for 3-5 days before my next inspection. It means that only the box with eggs has a queen in it as she is unable to venture elsewhere. It's easy enough to just remove that box, and then you've removed the queen. I hope that makes sense?

@@MystTreeHoney That could be very easy to do if you have same size boxes everywhere, brood boxes and honey supers. You just put the brood box, even if it is 1st, 2nd or even 3rd box at the bottom, put everything else on the top and wait till they cap the honey.

One of my biggest regrets is not just sticking to a single box size. If I could start again, I'd just get Brood boxes only.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate your comment

Thank you for your comment. If I need more land to put bees on, I usually put a post up on my local community Facebook page. I usually end up getting quite a few people getting in touch, which means I can go around and appraise the sites before choosing. This means I can look at the space, security, and how much work would be required to get it ready for the bees. The cost for keeping the hives there is a big point, too. Some people just want to help the bees and don't want anything (I spoil these amazing people with honey whenever they want it). Some want monetary payment, which I draw up a contract for, so there's no misunderstandings. Thank you for the tip. I bulk buy my queen excluders, and they don't really last longer than 4 years of heavy use, so after the 4 year mark, I give them away for free and buy brand new. Softening and flattening them makes sense for around 10 QE's, but I've got around 60 and very little time as it is, so I've decided to just get fresh ones.

Thank you🙂

I'm a font of random knowledge 😅 thank you for commenting

I'm jealous 😫

@MystTreeHoney don't be as not as nice today but hey it's Scotland

I've been to Scotland a fair few times. From my knowledge it's either raining sideways, blowing like a hurricane or humid and hot with the air filled with midges. Never had just a normal day all the times I've been there.

To be fair, I may not have checked thoroughly for a queen cell. I think that all of this was completely my fault for not inspecting them every week.

As a very experienced beekeper-scientist said, I wrote a lot of books that I explained the bees' behavior, the problem is that bees never read them and they still do what ever they want.

I love to say "bees don't read books"

No idea how she got up there either... a problem for tomorrow's Greg to deal with as today was too rainy

Haha poor things having to learn my smell and shape😂 feel like I need to work out now😅

I use predominantly poly nucs from maisemore. I have a few bs honey nucs, but I found them very faffy to deal with. My hives are a mix between abelo poly hives (I bought when they were at a reasonable price) and wooden 2nds I bought from either maisemore, thornes, or simonthebeekeeper (whichever is cheapest during the sales)

I started in 2020 with my wife and just two colonies. Here's a blog post we did about it🙂 www.mysttree.com/post/the-beeginning

Thank you for commenting 🙂

Haha that is definitely an option I forgot about! I find it mostly happens at the mating apiary when queens out on their mating flight get a little lost on their return and enter a random queenless colony (housing a grafted queen cell about to emerge). It's very annoying

I think the same thing sometimes when I'm elbows deep in an angry hive.

@@MystTreeHoney i would be terrified 💀🙏

Once you've been stung a few times, the fear disappears. Just feels like someone pinching me now.

These are the same ones as before, just making shorts out of my videos to create interest 😅 Nothing formal as a response. He called me and another bee farmer who had issues with his queens incompetent beekeepers, among other insults. Horrible person, it turns out. I'll never send him another penny. As for the name, I mentioned it in one of my earlier videos before I started having issues.

@@MystTreeHoney I won’t be using them either

Definitely a smart move

Then I need a backup backup torch to find my backup torch to find my torch

I said that to myself when I made this short! Really does!

Bees love that musk😂

Thank you so much, I really appreciate your comment.

Hello. Yes, I sell nucleus colonies. It's not a massive part of my business as I only sell 10-15 a year, but it's definitely something I do😅

@@MystTreeHoney I am just wondering where you are based? I am a newBee, just starting out. Have you got a website?

I'm based in Merseyside. www.mysttree.com is my website but nuc sales are made via my email [email protected]

You do something called grafting. I tried to do a video on how to do it but it got to 4hrs long 🤦‍♂️ I'll try to cut it down for you and post it

@@MystTreeHoney i dont mind a 4 hour video, if thats what it is..people can fast forward where they want..i listen to podcasts longer than that..and thank you for your reply. i appreciate you x

I'm not a fan of the chance of disease that swarms bring. I know several bee keepers that love swarms because they just replace the queens, wait a few weeks, and then sell them for £150... "Easy money." Personally, I'm not a fan of the idea of selling swarms. I do have swarm catching boxes up, but this is to catch my own bees. I don't want my swarms to cause problems for others.

@@MystTreeHoney Ah yes. Selling swarms - not my personal practice I must say. I like to leave my swarms alone and keep them going long enough to asses them. Occasionally I get a really good one - a bonus! When it comes to selling bees (I only sell a few colonies a year) I like them to have my queens that I have bred for the purpose.

I prefer to build my own nucs for sale. It means if anything goes wrong then I know it was my fault and I can fix it. Swarms are an unknown variable.

I appreciate that information, thank you