During that time he started keeping bees, and 12 years later he now completely depends on his beekeeping to produce honey from his 200 plus production hives.

He also produces 120 nucleus colonies every year and uses the mini plus mating system to raise queens.

Richard says he got the break of a lifetime when he got to spend a week at Michael Palmer's operation in Vermont in 2015, and to this day he has only ever bought three colonies.

He makes his own bees from his own bees in his sustainable operation.

He loves to help others and share beekeeping skills, he loves raising queens, and he has a YouTube channel full of good tips on many subjects.

He really likes helping others and giving feedback and practical help to beekeepers when they need it.

So I hope that you will listen closely to Richard's presentation today and know that you can ask Richard questions.

So Richard will be presenting, showing you some beautiful photos and things.

In the meantime you can put any questions you have for Richard in the chat.

We have with us today behind the scenes Margarita López-Uribe and Tom Butzler, both who work for Penn State.

They'll be collating those questions and when Richard's done speaking I will ask him those questions that you have put in.

So with that I'm going to let Richard begin his presentation.

Thank you.

- Well, I'll just start again.

Hi everybody, welcome for that intro.

Sorry, thank you for that intro, really nice, Robyn.

I'm gonna give you a good overview of beekeeping in Brittany, France, and I'm not representing all beekeepers in France, there's a lot of beekeepers that do different things.

I am kind of a standard beekeeper, I keep my bees in standard boxes, I use Dadant hives, that will all become apparent.

But I just, I raise queens, I try to be as sustainable as I can, and I want to have beekeeping enjoyable and fun, and to me that has to be that as well.

So I'm going to give you in this topic a little bit about me, an overview of my operation, what we do and when.

Then I'm gonna talk about honey production, I'm going to do an overview of queen rearing, and a brief look because there's obviously so much to it.

And then I'm gonna talk about caging queens for brood breaks, which is a new thing we do in the last three years, that helps us deal with Varroa, and it seems to be the best way for us.

And then I'm gonna talk about Asian hornets, which are a big problem for us almost as much as a problem as Varroa.

It really is a nightmare. But that is what we're gonna do.

And the whole point of going through this first introduction slide was just to say I really want you just to have as much of a visual effect as possible to see what we do.

And the way to do that for me is to give you lots of photos.

But I will go through at quite a pace, we've got about 130 to go through.

So on with the bit about me.

I'm 53 years old now, born and grew up in Jersey Channel Islands.

And that's not Jersey you know, it's Jersey over the water for me, which is about 40 miles away.

I studied in horticulture in the UK.

Then I came back and jack that all in and join the ambulance service and became a paramedic.

Then I moved to France and went back to my horticultural background because that was the only thing I could do.

I didn't speak good enough French then.

And then I worked as a landscape gardener and run my own business in France is what we call pluriactive where you're allowed to have more than two activities which worked really well for me.

So I started heaping bees, oh, about 15 years ago now while I was doing landscape gardening.

And what I used to do and I will learn to do was put swarm traps in my clients gardens.

And then when I went around doing my grass cutting and hedge cutting and all that kind of stuff you do when you're a landscaper, I used to check the swarm traps and inevitably you end up doing more beekeeping than you do landscape gardening because it's such an addictive drug.

So I got my first three hives in 2009.

And I finally gave up my other jobs in 2020.

Where I live in Brittany is absolutely beautiful.

We are kind of pretty much quiet around here.

Not a lot happens. It's a great place to keep bees.

And there's a lot of retirees around here.

This is, historically Brittany is an area where Parisians retire to.

This is the type of housing you have.

And if you look to the right of the gable end of that house, you will also see a special house there that I built for my owls.

I keep barn owls and, well, I don't keep them.

You know the expression, if you build it, they will come.

That is what I do in my barn owl box.

I have almost a barn owl hotel.

And every year we have a fledgling of one or two broods of barn owls.

So that's what I do. That's what I love doing.

And I follow that on my cameras as well.

This is where I live.

To give you some idea and I talked about Jersey before, there you go, if you look directly north of that icon where I am at the moment, that's Jersey, and the Channel Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Herm, and Sark.

So that will just give you some idea of where we're talking about the moment and where I keep my bees.

You'll see we are very much influenced by the Gulf Stream.

We have generally mild winters unless we have air from the east.

And when we do get that, we have really, really cold weather all the way from Russia or northern Scandinavia, literally just gone into a cyclonic weather pattern now where we've got an easterly northeasterly flow.

We're now getting air off Europe, which is a lot colder, but it's dry.

Now this is a picture of what we get classically with a jet stream fuels up from the, I've got to say this right, the Gulf of Mexico and it comes all the way up over the channel and we get these big storms and where you see that low there, that's the classic rain and we call it rain and gales here.

Terrible weather, mostly autumn and winter.

We're just getting into a better kind of scenario now.

But we get snow rarely, but when we get it, it's very pretty.

But this was like we get it probably once every three or four years.

Once every 10 years, we'll get a good amount, but we often get cold, but it doesn't have necessarily wet.

And the problem we have is, as I said, we're close to the sea.

It's often messy weather we get.

So we get the sleet, the snow, the freezing rain, all the horrid stuff.

It's very rarely pretty like this.

So this is the hamlet I live in, is the hamlet called Treguihe.

And that is the correct spelling believe it or not.

And that is me underneath the little blue dot there where I'm speaking from now.

We're quite high up here, we have a valley all around.

And these valleys are absolutely full of flowers, trees, flowering trees, which we'll go through in a minute.

My local area is Corseul. That's my commune.

It's a Roman-Gallo village.

And you can see the ruins of a pantheon if you want to visit.

It's actually really, really cool to visit all these places.

So I have 14 non-migratory apiaries. Okay?

And when I made this slide, I wasn't doing buckwheat.

So I tell a little lie.

I do my grades, one of my apiaries to the buckwheat every year.

And I'll show you what buckwheat is in a little while.

But basically, we have two nectar flows each year.

And all my apiaries are about three kilometres between each one at the minimum, which is what I try and do for hygiene purposes if I have an outbreak of anything nasty.

But to this day, we're pretty lucky with our problems with disease, we do monitor carefully, obviously, we do brood checks every time we do an inspection.

But we generally rarely see anything, so we don't let it fester.

If there's a problem, we deal with it straight away.

We got a great diversity of pollens.

This is in fact, I use this a lot in my talks this slide because it is in fact some pollen I harvested from the bottom of my garden, but the other side of the road was a huge field of rapeseed.

Now you can see the yellow pollen in that and that will be the rapeseed but it just shows you the diversity of pollens we have from the amount of plants we have.

And it obviously changes throughout the year.

But we are lucky here, when we get pollen, we get loads.

Do we give pollen sub?

Generally no, when I do feed that is late in the summer to get the bees going again to help raise those young bees for the winter because we're still in a dearth then, but you'll see that as well in our nectar flows.

Very quickly, this is the man who got me into beekeeping.

This is Charles Basset who is sadly not with us anymore, but he taught me a lot about beekeeping.

He was the local beekeeper around here.

Everybody needs a mentor.

Everybody finds someone who's the old guy, the old beekeeper, and he was that guy.

Classic French van.

I went around many trips with him, and I learned so much of the area of how to catch swarms, of how to make...

I started basically making up nuc boxes so then I could use them to put out swarm traps, and then I went on from there.

And now I don't do any of that.

I only use my own bees that I make from the queens that I raise.

So, he sold me my first three colonies.

I did ask him endless questions, and he taught me how to set swarm traps, as I've just said, but that was fantastic grounding in beekeeping.

When you understand about how bees swarm and when they're likely to swarm, it leads to a lot of other things.

So, there's my first three hives, and look how beautiful they are.

All on perfect blocks with not a single weed around them.

It's a far cry from when I have apiaries now, but it's a good thing to look at when you see this picture later on in your beekeeping life, because it reminds you where you've come from and how you wanna proceed.

So I have about 200 production colonies and I want to start raising that to 250.

I do not have mini plus mating nucs anymore because I've just changed over from those last year.

I now raise all my queens in my standard Dadant hives, in other words, in nucs.

Because I found that the problem is the transition between the mini plus, which is a type of small mating nuc, to the step the larger hives, it just took too much time, and I'm getting better results by standardizing everything and keeping everything the same size frame.

So as I said, current operation, current production hives, approximately 120 nucleus colonies that I make every year, that I either use them to sell, if I have a bad winter loss, I can use them for replacement, and obviously I can make gains and increase my apiary gains by making my own nucs and obviously that does bring in fresh queens, and it makes everything really, really peachy, as we say, and you have a good nice genetics coming in, renewing the old stuff and I do believe in that, I think it's good to renew genetics.

So there's the Dadant 10 framed hive, and I think you'd call these the Dadant-Blatt or the modified Dadant in other parts of the world.

In France, everybody has Dadants.

So there's the Langstroth coming in.

There is some Warre hives as well but the majority of people use Dadant as a standard frame, and that's the mini mating nucs I no longer use now but I wanted to show a picture.

That's what I used to do, but now I do the same, but with nucs.

And you'll see that surely.

This is my old workshop where I used to share with my ex colleague who taught me a lot as well.

This is another guy I got to know really well and he taught me a lot of the commercial side of beekeeping.

And this is the boxes we have stacked up every year, which is really good.

Good experience to use his, you know, his workshop and learn a lot from there.

And just to say at this point, in France, Nicot who make the queen cups that you probably buy for raising queens.

They also do these plastic bases uniquely for wooden hives, you can buy a plastic hide that they make as well, but everybody has these plastic bases, and you can, there's a tray you slide into the rear, so that you can vape your hives with oxalic acid or you can do a mite drop through the grill bottom.

I prefer personally and open mesh floor, and that's what this is.

And for transport you can see you've got a white or green for anti-hornet, white door that clips in, and it's absolutely brilliant this place, all the bases I bought over 12 years ago are still perfect.

So that's what we have in France that's a real help for us, we don't have to replace our woodenware in that respect.

So this is just give you a flowering sequence of all the major groups of flowers in the whole of France, okay, and as I said I don't represent all beekeepers, some regional differences are greater or lesser, but the overall thing is, we start off here with early spring flowers same as everybody, which is your plums, your blackthorn, your dandelions, your horse chestnut, your canola, your apples, your hawthorn, that is what we call our spring honey.

And then when that's nearly finished we get the acacia.

But that's more south of here, we do get acacia here.

And that would be probably mid-May time, and but you need warmth to have acacia you need a lot of acacia trees and they're very vulnerable to bad weather, if you get a hail storm, it can wreck the crop, some years they get no acacia.

So that's when after that's finished, we will be fixing swarmed hives because our spring flow is so strong everything seems to swarm or want to swarm.

And then we move hives to the buckwheat or we get ready for the summer flow.

Now just before the summer flow, the lime trees come into flower.

We don't have many lime trees around here but what I'm trying to do is show you and explain what happens in the rest of France in areas around Paris and certain places like that where there's no lime groves, the nectar flows of lime can be absolutely amazing.

But then, after the lime's finished, and often these trees overlap, we have the sweet chestnut and sweet chestnut for us here, Castanea Sativa is the name of the sweet chestnut and bramble flower at the same time so we get a really unique harvest, and the chestnut trees here are absolutely everywhere, which is brilliant.

So we have the potential from mid-June to mid-July, it's almost exactly the same time every year, we have the potential for a really good nectar flow.

So we get all our hives ready we do what we can, we combine swarmed colonies blah blah blah, like all beekeepers do in end of May, so that we know that our season will literally be finished for us here after the end of the chestnut flow which is mid-June to mid-July.

If you live further south in the Loire or south of France and if you've been on holiday over here, you will see fields and fields of sunflowers.

They generally come into flower, about the same time, obviously it's down to the farmers sowing them, but about the same time as the chestnut so you've got this, what do you do if you're a beekeeper further south, a lot of people go for the chestnut and then they also do some sunflower as well, but it's a big crop, the sunflower, if you have moisture in the ground it can yield really well, but it's all short yielding crops, the sunflower might only yield for three to four weeks at the most, all of our flows here aren't that huge and you get a lot of small flows, like really, it's start and stop.

Finally, we have the heather, which is always the last thing to flower.

And we've obviously got the bell heather then the ling heather, the bell heather flowers first.

In the UK for example they get a lot more and in Ireland and I've got some friends who have a lot of heather in Ireland which they crop, the ling heather.

Around here we have a tiny patch, which a lot of people go to so I just don't bother.

They say it's a great way to swap diseases if you want to do that at that time of the year, but it doesn't yield for us and we just forget it so we have two main nectar flows here, and the buckwheat as well.

So the basic beekeeping year, as an overview, February, March, we got obviously the first inspections, we're assessing and sorting winter losses, checking store levels.

Generally, in most years we have plenty of stores and hives and if anything in the spring we end up taking frames of honey out, which we can use to make nucs with when we do our first splits.

So, April and May is the start of the spring build up we're doing our regular checks, the same as you guys would all over the world in the northern hemisphere, we're adding honey supers, we're giving the bees space, and we're selling some overwinter nucs.

In May, we are harvesting spring honey which, as you know, spring honey, which is mostly canola here, well, canola mixed in with all the other honeys is so quick to crystallize, we have to have it off within, we say four weeks from the day you put the supers on, and if you don't, it's crystallized in the frames, you'll see that in a minute.

May and June, we're making splits for early sales or increasing our stock.

And we do, we start the first mating, in this case I was using mini mating nucs but I've told you know I do just nucs instead.

May and June, start the queen rearing, if we have a warm spell we can raise queens at the end of April, it just depends what your weather's like.

You need good nighttime temperatures, you can't raise good queens when you've got cold weather.

That's what we find.

And obviously you need a nice little brood to make a good cell builder.

And you want obviously drones to be in prolific numbers, and obviously if you've got loads of drones around that's a big help.

But some years, a little bit later in, you know, you need to give them about 40 days from the first day you see drones to make sure you've got good healthy strong mature drones.

And in June, we are obviously queen rearing, we're doing swarm checks and making nucleus colonies as well, it's a continuous thing.

So this is what we get.

Now, this is what is just starting to flower in Brittany, it's not a plant that gives us any nectar, it's mimosa, or acacia we call it, and it is a fantastic early plant So this year, this has been suppressed by the cold weather which is brilliant.

So if it goes warm in the next two or three weeks, the bees will just come back with the biggest pom poms on your legs you've ever seen.

They absolutely adore this, but it doesn't happen every year.

And I remember certain years we've had good years where this stuff is just such the bonus pollen through the door, and it really is good, if you get it right you can get loads of it, but it is what it is, we get dandelions, loads of those, they all seem to come at the same time, and we get kind of two blackthorns here, this is one of my apiaries up the road from me.

You can see the dandelions in the grass, you can see the blackthorn in the trees.

So as I said, we kind of have two times the blackthorn seems to flower.

There seems to be kind of two varieties that, I'm sure there's lots of varieties, but there's two kind of overlapping flowering times, and they only flower for about a week, each shrub.

So they go really quick.

And it all leads to then to the cherries and where you are, where we are with cherries, you know all about that, then you get the apples and then you get this.

This is what comes at the end.

Every farmer in Brittany seems to grow rapeseed or canola I think you call it in America or...

It is just everywhere.

And often you will just find all your bees will go to, will be a lot of this.

And it's great for bulk honey, it really yields well for us.

If we didn't have this we would struggle to have a good yield in some years.

But it is there.

I cream all my spring honey now and it gives a much better product.

It enables me to make good of what is not the best quality honey.

It's what we call, it crystallizes so quickly.

That's the honey harvest 2022.

We just literally, we had over three tons from 160 hives so we had a really good harvest that year.

Beautiful honey.

When you get it right it's so easy to manage, but when you're a bit late harvesting, as I said, it's real tricky.

I know then when I see this, this is Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna but the shrub in front is a Prunus padus, a shrub that flowers, or bird cherry we call it.

When I see these flowering I know that as soon as this has finished flowering, we are into the dearth, the spring dearth.

But this crop can be really good.

The Hawthorn can yield well. So we get swarming.

We're like all beekeepers. We are normal.

This was exactly what happens when you have bad weather for like a week on end and you haven't been to your apiaries because weather's been so bad and when you do turn up four or five hives are swarmed at the same time.

It's a bit embarrassing, but hey, that's beekeeping.

We are, as I just saw in that previous one, headless chickens.

I do harvest a bit of pollen. This is what we use.

It's very much your own thing what you do with pollen traps but these work quite well for me and our pollen yields in the spring can be really good.

And if people are questioning do you really need to take pollen, I say yes because it only takes a small percentage of what the bees actually bring into the colony and when there's a massive pollen flow on, they don't miss it.

A lot goes through on their legs.

So as I said before, spring honey is very quick to crystallize.

Some areas don't crystallize at all until later and you might get a week between crystallization of apiaries, and this is what we don't wanna see.

You pick up your supers and you start to see this and you're like, I don't believe, I'm sure I put my supers on on time but it happens but you just deal with it.

So then we have a June gap and it's actually for us mid-June to mid, sorry mid-May to mid-June.

There's still pollen but not too much nectar.

It's stuff like Rumex which is dock.

You get lots of pollen coming in so it's a good time to still raise queens if you get that time to start and it's a good time to split colonies if they haven't split themselves already, which sort of invariably they try to do.

So it's a very prolific time.

It's also important to comment that our actual season is incredibly short, and that's what I'm trying to show in this talk as well though.

Once it starts it's almost over before it's even started, but you'll see the timing.

We are just literally headless chickens for that, really from early May right the way through to the end of June and it's only till the main summer flow starts that we get a little bit more time to kind of think what was that all about?

So this is the summer period of the basic beekeeping year.

We are adding more honey supers hopefully in June and July and we're still queen rearing if we need to.

August is the start of the summer harvest and the same for you everywhere else.

Most people start treating their mites as soon as they can in August and obviously we know now that the sooner you treat your mites you avoid that crossover where the number of bees diminish and the number of mites increase and that's the key to good mite management.

August and September, we finished harvesting.

I laugh about that because often I'm harvesting it in October, but such is life.

We finish our mite treatments, removal of the mite strips if you're using strips and we do some last splits.

I still do splits then and we get the hives ready for the winter.

So you can see really between March and the end of July, August, that's the whole beekeeping season in terms of our intense work.

It's very very short.

Now we are also in October, we say, removing also mite treatments, but we are preparing for winter, trapping Asian hornets and that's the key moment the hornets get really bad.

You know November, December, winter preparation, insulation, centralizing the brood nest and last feeding, panic feeding if you haven't got them heavy enough.

So that's the summer honey we get.

We don't get huge crops but each one of these, I'm sorry, I'll just go back there, each one of those you can get about 28 kilos which is roughly 60 pounds of honey if you have a full Dadant super.

They are big boxes.

I took this apiary picture, shows you my, quote, wonky roofs because I bought a load of second hand gear and the supers are a tiny bit bigger than my roofs but it works.

It's kind of, the only problem is when harvest time comes and you use clear boards and if you haven't sealed the roofs up properly you come back and find two empty supers and very happy hives adjacently.

So we have the bramble, as I said, there's also lots of other insects that profit from that as well and we have this amazing chestnut, and the chestnut is so prolific around us.

The smell is so pungent and so strong as I was gonna say before but I think I digressed.

We uniquely get the two flowering at the same time, so chestnut on its own is very, very strong and pungent, but when you have the bramble mixed in with it, it's actually a very, very nice honey.

It's still a strong honey, but it isn't unpalatable and we get these, the trees, everywhere full of it.

That is one of the little valleys that you saw in the first picture.

Everywhere you look is a chestnut tree in flower or starting or finishing, some a bit further than others.

We have a full month if it's been moist the ground and the chestnut trees are deep rooted so we generally get a good nectar flow right the way through.

That's what we get, nice supers full of honey.

This is a 10 frame configuration so they build a little bit above into the bee space above but that's a nice super.

I use the Nicot cab which are plastic frames and they're semi-drawn and then the bees draw the rest of the plastic foundation.

The beauty of these frames is you can, if you get pollen in them, you can scrape the frames or pressure wash them.

You can't heat them but you can pressure wash them and they come up brand new and the bees will rebuild them after.

So you can basically treat them against disease, but we only use them for the honey supers.

Okay?

So this is buckwheat that I take my hives to in the summer just to show you the kind of apiaries I have.

I have small apiaries around small fields.

That is buckwheat, the flower.

It's an incredibly strong tasting honey.

Some people say molasses, very very intense, almost yeasty flavor.

I absolutely love it.

If you've never tasted it or smelt it before, immediately open the pot, you think a farmer has just spread manure on his fields around you but the taste is different to what it smells like, reassuringly much better.

So as I said I showed you the frames on a 10 frame configuration.

When you have your frames built, the following year you can put them into a box of eight frames and then they can be filled by the bees like that and you have less frames per hive with more honey on them and you get these beautiful frames that are really thick and they're absolutely a joy to extract if they're full of honey.

There you go 28 kilos is the weight.

That's a really full one though, so you imagine 24, 25, 26 kilos is an average full one but that one is an exceptional one.

So that's about 60 pounds weight. Honey harvest.

This is my veranda, a home or conservatory.

I have a 32 frame extractor on the left hand side there.

I have a decapping table, you can see there, this is post extraction.

Excuse the mess but this is the reality of it.

I've just finished here and you can see that I obviously had to do everything because I'm waiting for my new honey house to be finished.

You might know that if you follow my YouTube, but I work in barrels because that's what I've been taught to work in and everything goes for a strainer then we scrape the wax off after and we have everything in bags.

So this barrel line is in now and this isn't an ideal setup but it works for the moment.

As I said, I was using other workshops for about four years when I started to become professional and then because I couldn't afford to buy that at the time I had to move out and then I did my own thing while my own workshop was being built.

So there's a barrel full of honey.

That was the summer honey from this year.

Nice bit of lime in that as well.

That's what we end up with, about 280-270 kilos there in a barrel.

So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about queen rearing because it's really important to understand that to have strong colonies and good honey crops, you need prolific queens.

So, there's the queen I raised myself.

It's not difficult to raise queens.

You just have to be organized.

And you've got to remember, that Mike Palmer told me, it's all in the jelly.

That's what I like to see when we are raising queens.

I wanna see those cells completely full of jelly at the time that the larvae are growing before they hatch.

So, what I do, how I make my queens, I use a cell builder, which is a hopelessly queenless colony, and I stock it with frames of brood the week before.

So, I have a 10 over 10 configuration.

And the top 10 box has 10 frames of brood that I harvest from my brood factories that I have.

Separate colonies that give me just brood.

And you'll see there's a queen excluded there, so the queen can't come up and lay into those frames.

And at the end of 10 days, when all that brood's hashed out, I do a manipulation with the boxes, and I use that top box to make me a beautiful cell builder, because we raise queens over a 16-day period.

Here's a very rough graph, or rough table to show how we do our queen rearing.

And by the 27th day, theoretically, you can have a queen laying in the hive.

I've not gone into too much detail about this, but I start off with good genetics.

I do buy in some genetics.

These are two markings from Europe that I buy in.

Great queens.

So, you can spend ages selecting your own queens and everything in your own apiaries, but the problem is it's very, very difficult to get good results where you can go to a specialist who's been doing it for years, and you can bring in genetics into your own apiaries very easily at a small cost.

So, these are two F1s that are first-cross queens, and they will give great daughters, and 50% of these genetics will go into their daughters I make.

That's roughly how it works.

This is me grafting at home on the kitchen table.

I'm selecting larvae here, and I'm popping them into a cell, and then I take them to my cell builder, which is by this time ready to work.

And this is day one of the grafting period, and I make these lovely cells, but you need to have a good cell builder at the start.

You need loads of bees, you need a pollen frame, and this is what I like to have.

I want my colonies to be so strong so that they're giving those cells the maximum care and attention, and you get these wonderful cell builders.

These bees are completely lost.

They don't know what they're doing.

They've got no purpose until I give them those larvae, and as soon as they get those larvae, they jump on them, and they draw up these most beautiful queens.

So, I add pollen frames, as I said, because that's what they need to feed the larvae.

You can get them from queenless colonies in your own apiaries.

You get them from strong working colonies, because often you find in the summer, you just find pollen frame and pollen frame and pollen frame, or you can make a pollen frame.

You can rub pollen into a frame like this.

You can use pollen sub. It works.

Okay? There's loads of ways.

That was from the chestnut a couple of years ago.

Just shows you how much pollen we get from the chestnut when it starts, because it stinks.

The chestnut is so strong. So I get these beautiful cells.

That's what I've harvested from my finishers.

Okay, admittedly, not every single cell was like that at the start, so I gap up the cells when I make them.

And I then put my cells in a finisher, and a finisher is a queen-right colony with a queen excluder above the top and the bottom section, and I put my queen cells in the top that have been accepted, and they draw up these beautiful cells, because they want to finish these cells.

Excuse me a moment. So, you must feed your cell builder.

It's really important you do.

That's the take we get sometimes. That's like 95%...

Excuse me. Just got a tickle in my throat.

And we get amazing results, but sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're good, but sometimes it's just brilliant.

You don't seem to be able to do a dust graph set, and some years are just great.

There's my finishers.

If you look, you'll see a queen excluder between the top and the bottom section there.

You just make the edge of it out.

So I put my cells in the top, between the frames, and the bees come up and they finish the cells.

The cells are on the left-hand side here.

That's one day after grafting, and they're accepted larvae.

All they do then is finish the cells, because they know no different.

I feed them with pollen sub sometimes, if the dearth's strong and there's not much pollen around, and it does help.

So it's all about giving the bees the maximum they need to be able to do that.

And then I sometimes put the cells directly into colonies, into nucs, and sometimes I put them in an incubator to get them to hatch.

And there they are in the incubator hatch, and I'll run these into nucs.

I haven't done that so much recently because I'm finding that cells seem to be a better way to get them introduced.

But I might go back to doing that this year when I've got my new building finished, because it makes more sense to me to use all the resources I have.

So this is the nucs I make.

I've got lots of apiaries.

I said 14 apiaries scattered around.

I have a little feeder shell on top where I put my feeder underneath there.

It's just an eke that I make, and my ex-colleague helped me make all these.

And I've got the ability to feed without having to buy the expensive pre-made thing that they make.

And there's my nuc yard I've got at the moment.

I've got lots of bees. I try and make 120 nucs a year.

This is what we love to see.

Freshly laid eggs, not even lying down yet.

And if we see this in our colonies, everyone's happy.

That's just me preparing nuc boxes.

My old nucs that I got secondhand, they're great boxes, really well made, and I'm still using these today.

The red ones are the ones that I bought secondhand.

That was the first ones I bought.

The ones underneath are the ones I made, made for collecting swarms and learning how to make nucs.

There's me at one of the yards we used to use.

I don't use this one anymore, but that's how many I can get on the truck each time.

I think it's 28, seven across, yeah 35 nucs at a time I can transport in my truck.

So it works really well.

And that's well more than a day's work.

So you have enough work there for a day. You've got to feed.

You must feed a cell builder when you're raising queens.

And also you've got to feed your nucs when you're releasing your queens because you want them to be accepted.

And feed is the key to everything.

Good nutrition helps everything in the colony.

So we buy our feed, a liquid feed in a tanker, and we have a group of beekeepers that turn up and we have a bulk purchase and it obviously keeps the cost down.

Recently the cost of sugar has gone through the roof.

I think it's something like 38 or 42 cents a kilo more expensive than it was five years ago.

All the prices have gone up.

So I do augment my natural drone comb.

I put in drone frames.

Now, a lot of people like to use this as a way of controlling Varroa.

I beg to differ.

I think it's better to have good quality drones flying around the place and not to decap these and get the chickens to eat this because I feel that good quality drones are a much better resource.

That's just my point of view.

But we put in, our drone came approximately 40 days before we're ready to have queens flying around.

So that's what we want.

If you look in the center there, beautiful glistening raw jelly of larvae that just been laid.

That's what you want to see.

A colony full of resources, full of pollen.

I wish all my nucs looked like that when I put in a new queen.

So we are lucky.

We are very much like all northern beekeepers, northern hemisphere, but we're not as short as Canada and North America.

We can sometimes have our seasons carrying on later in the year.

But we do have a dearth from the second week of July until about the second week of September.

It works well for us to do what we do, but we can't push it all the time.

So let's just talk about caging my queens for superior mite control.

What is caging queens?

Basically, I get a queen and I put it in this cage and it confines the queen so she can't lay.

There's a little bit too more it than that.

But the reason why we do this is because we want to create a brood break in our colony so that then we can get the bees to look around, to clean all the cells out, to realize there's no brood, but at this time of year, there's a dearth running so they're not asking the queen to lay.

They know there's no chance of her laying eggs anyway.

So we just enhance that broodless period.

So what I do, the benefits are the bees will clean the whole frame.

It's been akin to doing a shook swarm but with comb, because you're getting all the combs cleaned out and there's no continuous brood in that colony.

And when we do it is when the bees would be broodless, but they're not completely broodless in the summer, but we make them completely broodless from mid June to mid-July.

And we are working with the bees. That's the key thing.

And you wouldn't wanna cage queens, in my opinion, when there's a nectar flow starting, because when there's a nectar flow, you want your queens to be laying.

That's the key to it.

So there's very few negatives in this in my mind because the whole idea is you are creating a broodless period in your colony, which you can utilize to get all your brood hatched out.

So all your Varroa is phoretic and all your Varroa is accessible with oxalic acid and it's brilliant, the effect, it works.

So we place the queen in a suitable cage to withhold her from normal laying, but allowing her to have full access to the bees.

So the cage design is critical with this and it's not the same as a mailing cage or the same as some other cages that have been made that claim to do this.

This is the only cage I've tried that actually works.

And we get no supercedure.

It helps massively with our integrated pest management system.

I basically try and cage all the queens in my production hives.

And that's brilliant because it means I don't have to use Apivar in those treatments.

All I use is oxalic acid after 21 to 24 days.

And this statement here, just because the chemical treatment appears to be working, it doesn't mean you should necessarily use it each year.

And that's something we should all bear in mind as beekeepers.

There is no new real chemical treatments due for release that are any better than what we've got already.

So we should be looking at better ways to deal with these mites, if we can.

And as I said before, we're working with our bees and we are seizing the moment in the colony's development period.

So in the summer, there's a dearth and that's a less intense development period.

And you just utilize that time to get a brood break.

So for us here, we have enough time because we're not expecting a crop for the bees to get back to work as soon as you cage those queens.

And then you basically have as good as a clean colony.

So this is the cage I use, it's the Api-Mo-Bru cage from Italy.

And they are really good.

They're patented, you've got to buy them.

But they are brilliant cages because if you look at the little holes in there, that allows the bees access in and out on both sides, so they don't feel the queen isn't there.

They are able to come in contact with her.

And when you cage her, you just either pick her up or you have a brilliant, really smart capturing device that you catch the queen.

You pop the tube in that hole and she walks into the cage.

You close the door by just pushing the little button there and it clicks the door shut.

And when you wanna release the queen, what you do is open the door and leave her walk out.

The problem is, if you take her out of the cage when you release her, you might not know this, but when you have queens that have been caged for a while, they become a little bit flighty.

So you wanna be a little bit careful that you open the door quickly and get that frame back in because you do not want her flying off because she could just end up somewhere else.

But that's what I use, if you wanna look up Api-Mo-Bru, there are Italian cages and all the Italians use these for their, because they have a long dearth as well.

I will add, if you wanna make the best of this, it fits in well when you have a dearth period.

So you can what we call retrofit the cages.

You can see I'm cutting a frame here with a knife just the size of the cage.

But between I've got, if you look at the bottom of that left hand picture, I've got wires that come down.

So I'm cutting a hole in between the wires, where the wires sit.

Or you can put the cages in earlier in the year and you can put a block of wood in them so that they don't build comb inside the cage.

And they will do it if there's a big flow running.

But at the end of it, bottom left, bottom right hand corner there, the cage is fitted and it's a brood frame because so that's what you want.

You want the you want the queen to be amongst the brood even though she's caged.

So what makes this cage special?

As I said just before, actually, the position of the cage near the brood nest is critical and they get access both sides.

They can walk in and out.

The queen is in contact with the nurse bees but cannot lay because there's nowhere to lay into.

And we release the queen, as I said, just by opening the door and she will come out within a half an hour or so.

And this is me post treatment.

I generally release the queens, if I can.

And the whole thing is all time.

You've got to write everything you do down.

But it's a doddle if you follow your notes you make.

Regarding drones in the colony, generally by July, we don't have many drones in the colonies because it's the dearth.

So the queen stops, or the colony stops producing drones.

So we're looking at most of the bees hatching out within 21 days, which makes the treatment even better, which means you can release your queens quicker.

And the oxalic acid treatment can be done in a timely fashion.

So I give two treatments, five to six days apart, but I'm actually upping my amount of oxalic acid I give, I give five grams now to one high because we have big frames.

If you don't know the size of Dadant frames, they're approximately two inches deeper than a Langstroth deep frame.

So they're big size frames.

And now most people, especially in America are saying that five grams is becoming a standard treatment for oxalic acid.

But when you treat oxalic acid, we have here, this is the Sublimox.

There's the ProVap as well. There you go.

And you've now got the Instavap which is a much better machine.

But when you've already invested in the older machines, you have to kind of use what you have.

But this is what I'd buy if I was buying it now.

Oxalic acid is gonna be coming into a lot more use if you're not using it already.

And I think most beekeepers know that and it seems to be now that, from what I gather, the the constant level of oxalic acid seems to suppress the mites entering into the cells.

There's a lot of debate on it, but it certainly does something to that as well as burning the feet of the phoretic mites.

So it's a good all round thing and is very, very, very unlikely it'll ever have any resistance to oxalic acid.

So obviously, don't forget your mite washes, but you'll find that when you treat, they say, you'll get 96 to 98 percent on your first hit.

And then if you do in second treatment a few days later, you're likely to get, or say five days later, you're likely to get 96 to 98 percent of the remaining two percent.

So you really mop up all your mites.

But if you really have got a completely broodless colony, I think those figures are higher.

That's my messy mite wash kit.

That's what you get, though, when you release the queen, you can't say what it's like until you see this.

But when you open a hive four or five days after you release the queen, you just see this amazing machine-done laid eggs.

All the queen wants to do is lay loads of brood.

So what I do at that time, I do give a slight stimulation feed if there's not much food in the colony, because often at that time I do make nucs.

So I do take some of the stores away.

And I also give pollen sub because it's really important to support the colony if you're still slightly at the end of the dearth, because I'll do a finishes when I'm releasing lots of queens.

So then she's got all of the last week of August and all of September to make a whole new load of brood and winter bees.

That's some of my nucs I made a couple of years ago.

I overwintered them in different apiaries.

This is the garden I used to look after.

And I get these amazing sites where they're so big that I get a place, I said, do you mind if I stick a few hives there?

And then I come back and go, you said just a few hives, but yeah.

Okay. So a little bit about the Asian Hornet.

If you don't know what it is, look it up.

I don't wanna go on too much about this, but I just wanna skim over the key points.

We have the common hornet here as well.

Vesper crabro on the right.

That's the much more orangey yellow one.

The one on the left is the Asian hornet that I'm looking at.

I hope you see the same.

It's marked as Frelon asiatique on this slide.

This shows you, it's the introduction into France since it was established.

And basically 2004 was when it came in and it's just rollercoaster all the way through.

No matter what we do, we can't control it.

I would hazard a bet that if it's already in some parts of America, it will not be stopping anywhere soon.

Unless something else comes out that stops it, perhaps genetically, we don't know yet, but there's nothing around that we know about that has an effect on it.

So this was just to add this in, this was the infection in Georgia last year or the end of the year before.

The red dots mark the nest that were apparently destroyed, but we've seen this all before and I don't, hand on heart, I don't have much confidence in you being able to control it.

I hope you can, but I don't think you will.

So Asian hornets cause colony stress and in France, we have a big problem.

And unfortunately, it arrives at the time when the bees are in their dearth.

And the intensity of the hawking and hunting intensifies because basically the lack of insects around that these insects would otherwise be feeding on dries up.

So then the Asian Hornets then go, right, well, where's the nearest food source?

Oh, let's go and get some juicy fat bees from that colony.

And then they all arrive at once because the other food source has dried up.

So this puts pressure on the colony, the queen stops laying and then little or no winter bees are made.

Huge stretches at a very fragile time and a very important time, as you all know, in the colony's development.

And then basically the colonies collapse just like Varroa deaths.

And that's the key to say that is because the deaths look like Varroa, but there's just no young bees.

So remember, it's not just about your bees.

Asian hornets are ecosystem depressors, a fully mature Asian hornet's nest will consume approximately 12 kilos, and I put this in for you guys, 25 pounds of insects if you're into pounds, in weight to finish its life cycle.

So one nest will consume all those insects from the surrounding environment on average.

Okay?

So that's birds, that's caterpillars, that's spiders from webs, all the birds and insects, bats, anything that takes insects from the food chain will suffer because of these invasive species.

This is the Asian hornets when you have a dead out in the hive.

Long story short, this was a hive at my apiaries.

This is an extreme photo, but it just shows you what you can have when you turn up to apiary, suddenly there's the Asian Hornet nests have all increased.

You're at the end of the season, it's hot, you've got a couple of colonies that were weak.

They will push themselves under the door and take over a weak colony.

They don't necessarily kill a colony, but they just constantly pressurize it and add pressure to the developing, to all the messages.

So basically the colony doesn't receive messages from the outside and bees disappear slowly.

So, the queen stops laying and then those young bees aren't replaced and you're missing a vital part of the system of how the colony works.

So this is just a video. I hope you can see it.

This is 2022 and we had a terrible year.

Constant pressure, day in, day out.

You notice the bees on the front, they're mounding around the front and this is what they do in an attempt to help returning bees.

So, the Asian hornet will constantly hawk and they will try and pick off one bee at a time.

They will then take it to a tree, remove the head and take the body, the abdomen of the bee and then feed it to their young.

That's exactly what they do and this is constant.

And no matter how much walking up and down the apiary with badminton rackets and swatting and trapping you do, when you have a bad year, you really have a bad year.

This is a very quick overview of the life cycle of the hornet.

They start off in January and February in hibernation and then you'll see these small little starter nests in April and May.

If we put our traps out at the right time in the spring, we really can trap a lot of founding queens.

Okay? That's the key to it.

There's little point in trapping after the queens are laying in their nest because until about May time the founding queens are doing everything themselves so that's why they're so vulnerable.

They're weak, they're cold and in a year where there's not much natural food around and it's a cold spring, they're at their most vulnerable.

So for instance last year they didn't do very well, probably because of that weather, and we trapped well as well.

But then by the end of June, July, August, they've left their small nest, migrated to the top of a tree somewhere or in a bramble bush now, we're getting them in brambles on the ground, and suddenly there's workers with them.

And because there's so many insects, they proliferate and they make these enormous nests.

And then you've got a huge amount of workers and then the end of the season they make drones and queens and then the queens disperse and the whole life cycle starts again.

But at the end of October when the queens are released we can trap as well.

So we can mop up these, mop up all the queens that emerge from the nest.

There's a handsome chap, sorry to throw that one in, but it just gives you an idea of the size of the nest they make.

This is a small one, they are sometimes double the size, but up in Brittany where it's colder you imagine there's less insects so it takes longer to make a nest.

So this is a classic picture, you get a plum tree that loses its leaves earlier in late summer, and you find you've got an Asian hornet's nest in your garden that you never even knew was there.

This is how they're like.

This is one I had in the front of my garden, in the brambles in front of my house, I didn't even know was there, because there was plenty of insects around when the nest was being made, and I didn't see insects, I didn't see Asian hornets at my apiary, some 40 meters away, just one or two, because Asian hornets are opportunists and they will predate where they find the best food source.

This is inside the nest.

This was actually killed, this hole is where the commune came and injected some powder based permethrin, some permethrin based powder into the colony and it killed the colony.

There's lots of different ways of killing the nest now but the most effective and quick way is probably using a selective insecticide, but we can use a very small amount now, and there's new ways of destroying nests.

Obviously the key to Asian hornet nest control is really trapping with traps, VespaCatch are a type of trap we use.

They're still one of the best but there's new models coming out this year.

And we set lots of traps, the trap on the left is a trap made by Jabeprode.

You can look them up if you want that but they are only really effective when you have a big outbreak, but when you have a big outbreak you need these traps to mop up all the Asian Hornets, and that's the bait we use.

The results we get from spring trapping are absolutely brilliant.

In one apiary the year before last following 2022, I trapped over 200 founding queens in each apiary, and you see there we have very little bycatch in that right hand side picture there.

Okay, so we trap between end of February to mid-May and we don't want to trap any later than mid-May because for about a month, we have the common hornets that fly that are natural predators of lots of other insects that we don't want to trap the queens of those so much, as much as they're a pain, we like the indigenous hornet to not be targeted by the Asian hornet's appearance.

So we are doing all we can, but spring and summer...

Last year were normal beekeeping years, and only a few appearing in the traps at the end of the year.

Excuse me.

So to finish off, I just wanna give you an overview of the honey house I just had built.

This was an apiary at bottom of my garden that I put in planning application, just off the blue.

I thought I wonder if they'll let me build here so I applied, and I got a, we call a certificate of urbanism in France, then I progressed to getting architects involved, and then I put my building up.

And we built the slab at first.

And then we put the building up.

So I built a 300 square meter shed, but it's fully insulated, door, wall, ceiling, all with 60 millimeter insulation.

There you go, there's it finished.

And it means I now have a honey house.

So that was two years ago, and this is it now inside.

I've just completed the inside.

I've now created an extraction room with an extraction line.

And I've gone for extraction line this time because all my frames are universal.

I put in a mezzanine, and I put in a warming room at the back so I can keep my honey warm in the spring.

And I think it's yeah I put underfloor heating in.

So, I really gave my honey house everything that I could, have thrown every penny I had at it and I hope that it's gonna be a good investment.

Mike Palmer told me, if you ever get the chance to put underfloor heating in your warming room, put it in.

It's a no brainer.

So I have it under the whole honey house where I'm gonna be extracting and in the warming room.

And there's the finished extraction room.

So, I've got a paradise honey extraction line, got resin on the floor, I've got walls and ceiling made of insulating material but it is the same material that we use for making a cold room so it's sterile.

It's all stainless steel so I've invested in what I hope is a good thing to invest in.

I need to be able to pack honey.

And I need to do it cleanly and in a timely fashion.

And that's what I'm aiming at.

I have only just started, I do supply a couple of people already but I just bottle for them, but recently I'm now starting my own labels.

And I sell to my local boulangerie, where my son is an apprentice, and he's the local apprentice baker.

And if you look there you can see my honey on the shelves which I'm so proud about, but I'm gonna be stock in the supermarket soon as well, my local supermarket, and we'll see where that takes me.

But that's why I've invested in trying to get a good setup that is sterile, clean, easy to manage, easy to extract, efficient.

That's what I have to aim for, I couldn't carry on for any longer in my veranda, but it served the purpose, and it got me to where I am now.

So thank you all for your time.

I know it's been a bit of a whistle stop tour but I hope you enjoyed the talk, and I am delighted to take questions.

- Okay, thank you so much.

So everybody at home, it is one o'clock so if your lunch break is over and you have to go, just know that we'll be recording the rest of this.

Richard said he can stay on for a little while to answer questions.

So you'll be able to catch that in the recording.

I have to say you have me itching for spring, I really wanna get out with my bees, and I'm super jealous of that building.

(laughs) I'm sure everyone- - It's been a long time coming. Thank you.

- Yeah.

Okay, so thank you to Margarita and Tom who were collating some questions here in the background, I'll do my best to get to most topics that you guys asked about.

Okay, let's see.

- It was a lot I talked about I must admit but you kind of see what you do now so.

- (laughs) Let's see.

There are some specific beekeeping questions.

Can you tell us more about that plastic bottom board that you showed us, I actually looked it up and didn't find it to buy.

- Yeah. Okay.

First of all, I do know that people use them on some Langstroth hives, and you can modify your Langstroth to fit.

It's made by Nicot, N-I-C-O-T, you might call it if you're in America, you might call it, and this is a way called annus horribilis, okay, you call it Nicot, but it doesn't, it's Nicot in France, okay?

I have to say that because don't say Nicot, it's like, it doesn't exist.

But they're a brilliant company.

They make lots of injection mold in plastic, but the real deal is they last, you know?

And they're great. They are great trays.

And there's talk of them making them...

They just made actually a base for the nucs that I use as well.

So if I was to make my own wooden nucs or buy their nucs they're making as well, they make a base for that.

But basically, Dadant also do a 12 framed hive.

And you can actually put a piece of wood on each side of that hive, that base.

And you can have a 12 frame Dadant hive on the same base as the 10.

So it is a little bit adaptable, but it's just rugged.

It just seems to last forever.

And you can pressure wash it, and you can use hot water on it.

You get sometimes they propolize up the holes at the bottom.

But that's the normal thing you get with screen bottom boards.

Bottom boards is what you call them?

- We do. - Yes.

Thought so. - Great.

I like rugged equipment, you know, stuff that you can pound and have a- - Absolutely.

Believe you me, you get that with equipment here the same as I'm sure with you.

You try and look after all, but eventually it gets knocked and banged and scraped and has to last.

- Yes.

Can you tell us what kind of bees you keep?

So you said you buy queens. Are there certain lines?

Is there a subspecies that you have there?

Tell us about that.

- Okay, I generally keep Buckfast because I find they work really well.

But after last year's experience, I actually lost some hives because of starvation, believe it or not.

I'll tell you the scenario very briefly.

We were at a terrible spring. We had honey on the hives.

I was harvesting some of the honey, then working my way back feeding.

By the time I got to the end of all the apiaries, some week and a half later, the ones that had honey on had eaten it all.

Because the problem with Buckfast is they're so prolific and they have so much brood.

So I've gone over to trying a few Carniolans and bringing some Carniolans into my genetic, because they're, even though people say they swarm more in the spring, I'm ready for swarming because it just means if they're gonna swarm earlier, we'll just deal with it earlier.

But they're not so hard on, apparently they're not so hard on resources.

And we basically almost need our bees to be a little bit less prolific at that time of year.

So I'm trying some Carnis.

I've also got some Carpathians in my apiary.

I bought some from Romania this year from Apis Donau, which is a European company in Romania.

The beauty of living where I do is I can get queens from all over Europe and there's some amazing breeds in Europe.

But Buckfast are really the best queen for here.

They're just really performing. They build up really well.

The trouble is holding them in the boxes.

And I still to this day just add this.

No matter what queens you buy, we just find that you get to that first spring flow and the weather is usually pretty bad until then, and then the nectar flow pours in and then your brood nest becomes full before you know it.

And literally within three or four days.

And the queen goes, right, well, we'll swarm.

It's been so bad for so long.

So no matter what you seem to do, because our spring flow with all the canola is so prolific, you have to be on the ball.

You know, you just have to give those bees so much space or make a split and then you're okay.

But it's just that critical May time.

And we've tried so many things.

The only way you can do is do a Demaree where you put your queen or your bees on top and just give them loads of space underneath.

That's probably the only way.

Or that type of manual handling with each colony is the only way you're gonna maintain your bees in the box.

It's tricky. But Buckfast, I love them.

- We have the same problem here.

Swarm season is crazy.

I usually get a twitchy eye, you know, from anxiety.

- And just days and days of going in and finding more queen cells that you've cut out when they were small.

And you think...

Excuse me. And you think, they won't go.

And they do.

- Yep, they do.

Okay, one thing that people were, I'll let you drink, were very interested in was that the cage that you were using for your brood breaks.

And I'm curious to know, do you know what a Scalvini cage is?

- Yes, I do. And I tried them.

- Okay, tell us about that.

- And the problem we find with the Scalvini cage is that the Scalvini cage allows the queen to lay underneath the plastic cage.

And there's only a certain amount of space for the bees to get in.

And the queen, so the bees can only get in one side.

And what I'm finding, this is just my opinion, but I know lots of people who tried the Scalvini cage and they say, oh, it kind of works.

It didn't work that well.

Well, my theory is that the Scalvini cage gives the bees false messages because if you look at the depth of the cage, the bees can't build a proper amount of brood above that cage, above the, what's the word, above where the lava is in the cell.

And then they scrap them and they're constantly doing that.

So they're almost getting negative vibes from the queen that she's not performing properly.

And it doesn't create the right atmosphere in the colony.

That's just kind of my opinion I've deduced.

Whereas the cages I've got, they're bigger.

They literally take up the space between the frame.

The bees can access her from both sides.

Now, I've had twice that I've, or more than that, but certainly twice I can remember really well, that I've gone into the colony after I caged the queen and I've gone, why is there brood in this colony yet the queen's in the cage?

It was because there was two queens in the colony and they're on their way to superseding her before.

And it's surprising how often that happens.

But that's, it wasn't the fact that they killed the queen and made another one because she wouldn't have started laying yet and there wouldn't be the development of brood that there was in that colony.

So I kind of know what I'm talking about when I see that.

And very rarely, very, very rarely do you get them making a supersedure cell outside the cage after you caged her.

Because there's a dearth on you working with the bees, whereas the Scalvini cage just gives the wrong messages.

And that's why it works really well for us here.

That answers questions, but that's just my opinion on it.

I mean, I'm not getting the guys from Scalvini coming at me with knives going, you shouldn't say that.

But it is what it is.

You go by what you have, you use what you have.

And I find these new cages are brilliant.

- Okay, there were some questions about some of the plants that you were showing.

Can you tell us another name for this lime tree that you mentioned?

- Yeah, you call it, oh, there's loads of names for- - Linden, is it linden?

- Basswood, linden tree. - Okay.

- But we don't, we have a little bit around here.

And occasionally this year we had a little bit in our honey, but it's, you know how flows go?

Sometimes it just pours out the right trees at the right time.

But if you haven't got many of them, you don't get much this year.

Sorry, last year, 2024, we had a bit of lime in a lot of our early spring honey.

So early, you know, it's like mid-summer, summer honey.

And it came at the same time as the chestnut started.

It was still in the flower. So we were surprised.

But there is huge areas of lime in France.

I mean, like where, I've heard stories from my ex colleague and he used to do beekeeping in Paris.

And you would literally go to the lime trees to see what you bees were doing there.

And you'd find underneath the lime trees thousands of bees, because the lime trees are so full of lime and the nectar is so strong.

The bees become intoxicated by the nectar and they literally are asleep on their backs under the tree.

And about an hour and a half later, they get up and go off.

You can smell it. And it's only, it's rare, but it happens.

That's the kind of flows we get at certain times from the lime.

I don't know what it's like in where you are.

I know when I was up in Vermont, Mike Palmer was telling me all about his linden or basswood, they call it.

And it is a certain time like we have here.

But you have to know the area you're in to be able to harvest it.

It's all these things are for every beekeeper, everyone's area is completely unique, no matter what anyone says.

Oh, well, you can do that, because you can.

Well, yeah, but until you've had bees in the area, then you know what it's like.

You get to know what is gonna come in in most years.

- Yeah, so one of my passions of research is looking at honeydew honey.

Do you make anything like that?

- Yes, we only had it once.

Okay, so I'll tell you the story.

2022 was like a nightmare year.

We had a massive drought.

So the year started really well.

Terrible year for Asian hornets.

As I said, often you get a bad year when it's hot.

So we harvested our spring honey.

We put the supers back on the honey, on the hives as we do, trying as quick as we can.

We haven't got enough supers to take.

You know, there's always like this.

Got to get them back on quick as I can.

But there's a dearth on.

So there's less swarming impulse. It's a bit calmer.

And hopefully you've dealt with it anyway.

But when we came back to our hives two weeks later and there's the center of the, you know, the five, six frames in the middle was full of honey.

So I was chatting to these old timers and saying, well, do you think it's the end of the spring flow?

Oh, yeah, it's the hawthorn.

It must be the end of the hawthorn. So I got it analyzed.

100 percent miele, we call it, or miele is a honeydew honey.

Obviously, it's when the bees collect the honeydew from the aphids because they excrete it.

And then I had it analyzed. I got a full breakdown.

I'll actually send you if you want to see the report.

But it was fascinating for me because I wanted proof.

And these people that said to me, oh, no, it's definitely a, you know, a honeydew honey.

It wasn't. It was just such a surprise to me.

And you know what? It was really rich, the flavor.

Absolutely fantastic. We sold it as a spring honey.

It all sold really well. But a really interesting thing.

And it appears that you need it really hot, really still.

And the bees have to have nothing around that they're on as well.

And that's why we got it, because there was nothing else.

It was a, you know, it was in that May to June gap and it was there.

It was perfect weather.

But I'm so glad now that I learned from that.

But it's the only ever time I've seen it here.

The only other time you get it in France, apparently is in the Alps on the pine tree.

That's what I've heard.

I don't know if you can tell me more, but...

- No, I just study what we get in Pennsylvania and nearby.

I know it's more common in Europe, so that's why I wanted to ask.

I think in most years you probably always get a tiny bit, but to have it as pure as we did that time was just down to specific weather circumstances and the fact that it was stinking hot.

You know, it was lovely weather. We were just so surprised.

- I see.

So I saw you had all your boxes stacked outside.

Do you have to deal with wax moth and small hive beetle and pests like that?

- Right. We don't have small hive beetle.

I'm touching the table hard at the moment. Okay.

We don't have that problem.

What we do is we let the hives get robbed out at the end of the season so they're dry.

And then we just make, we just remove any hives that have pollen, scrape them out.

As I said, they're plastic frames.

So we remove the majority of pollen.

It's obviously the pollen that mostly attracts the wax moth to lay into those cells.

But generally we find as long as they're protected from mice, we put a metal queen excluder at the bottom of the stack and a metal queen excluder on the top.

We find that we don't have a problem with wax moth as long as you get them dealt with and they're clean from pollen earlier in the season.

You know what it's like, if you get a dead out in July and you forget about it, it's wax moth city larvae.

It's a mess.

But if you get it at September, October, you get very little damage.

And that's when we finish extracting most of our honey.

So then our supers are just cleaned out and we stack them dry and they're outside.

But they were under cover.

So they are protected from the worst of the weather.

They just get lots of air through them.

And don't forget, we have fairly cool, miserable cold winters that are like between four, five and ten Celsius most of the time.

So it's not really prolific wax moth growing weather.

So we can, that's kind of how it works for us.

Other people like to wrap them. They like to store them wet.

We just do it dry. I might try other methods.

It's all down to what you, I don't like the idea of wrapping supers for the winter because I think that you're wasting an awful lot of plastic and then you have to dump that plastic in the spring.

That's just, I'm not, you know, I try and be as environmentally friendly as I can.

I think the basis we use, even though they're plastic, they're great because I don't have to find new wood.

So every few, three or four or five, six years, however long they last.

But I just think along those lines now and I just think if you have to wrap your hives using an awful lot of plastic to do it, whereas you could stack them dry.

In our area, we get away with it. We go through that...

We have to do a lot of work on our supers every year.

As I said, we have a configuration of 10 frames and eight frames and the ones that get built on the tens every year, we put into an eight frame if we can the following year.

And that means more honey per box and less moving of frames because it's eight frames rather than 10 and they're heavier.

So yeah, that's what we do. Maybe I'll change in the future.

Some people use Certan and they have no problems.

They just spray the frames.

The bacillus thuringiensis in Certan does a really good job.

And you never see any wax on it, but we don't have anything to really worry about.

- Very nice. Well, it's 1:15 so I think we'll wrap it up.

- Okay.

- There are some people very interested in your building and things like that.

Did you say that there's information about all of that on your YouTube- - Yeah, if you wanna go to my YouTube channel, Richard Noel Bees, I've got lots of videos on it.

You can find contact on that.

I also am on Instagram and Twitter or X, sorry, Bees in Brittany. You look up Bees in Brittany.

I'm on that as well.

Yeah, you can you can contact me on that and ask me questions, but you'll see a lot of the building.

I went through the process of doing my build over the last two years.

It's been and I'm only just now gonna be moving into it properly.

I've used the building up till now, but only the storage of equipment.

But I'm actually gonna be extracting in it from this spring.

So it's all really exciting.

So you can follow the progress on there.

- Very cool. Yes. - Thank you very much.

- Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing Beekeeping in France with us.

I hope everyone will join us for our next five webinars, and maybe, Richard, you can listen into those as well.

- Catch them at the time.

I'll certainly tune in. They will be brilliant.

- Very good.

Thanks again. And happy beekeeping.

- Thank you. Hope you have a great season too.

Thank you, everybody.

Take care. Bye bye.

Reviews

Write Your Own Review

Only registered users can write reviews. Please Sign in or create an account

We found other products you might like!

Webinars

Beekeeping Around the World: France

When Watch Now

Length 1 hour

Recorded Feb 6, 2025

Learn beekeeping in Brittany, France—manage honey bees, harvest honey, and more. Perfect for beekeepers, anyone interested in bees, and global agriculture enthusiasts.

Free