Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 68 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. The weeks are flying by quickly now as we rush headlong into June and It’s time for our monthly Questions and Answers roundup.

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The bees appear to have finished their manic swarming session at last and things have begun to settle down a little as new queens are mated and starting to come into lay. I have noticed that several of my new queens appear to have been poorly mated, you can see this by the laying pattern that develops, sporadic eggs and larvae scattered around the frames rather than a well-mated queen who will lay a full side of a frame with eggs before moving on to the next frame. I’m really not too sure how or why this happens, I guess with open mating it’s still very much left to chance and a percentage of queens will fail to get sufficiently well mated. I also have a couple of drone laying queens where they don’t appear to be laying any fertilised eggs at all so unfortunately those will have to go and we’ll start over again with those nucleus colonies. June is my month for some serious queen rearing, this year we aim to produce some very specific darker queens and it will be interesting to see the phenotype of the emerging queens, that’s basically what they look like, and also the traits that they express. I’m going to be ruthless this year and anything that’s not completely dark is not going to pass.

I’ll talk some more about my queen rearing strategy and processes over the next couple of weeks but for now we need to get stuck in to the monthly batch of questions submitted by my very kind supporters on our Patreon page, this is where you can access lots more content and at the same time support our efforts to produce more beekeeping content to post. I’ll leave details of how you can support us in the podcast notes that accompany this podcast. Please do take time to check it out and if you can sign up that would be great.

Our first question comes from Mark Deeble, who sent in the following;

Hi - If you live in a part of the country (on an exposed coast) where it is always windy and never gets above 20 degrees, would you provide insulation above the crown board year-round. If so, can the insulation (2" 'wool' type) sit directly on the crown board? Many thanks!

Hi Mark and thank you for your question, interestingly, I was chatting to another beekeeper a couple of days ago about insulating hives as we were talking about the poly hives I’m using at the moment. I’m not certain I would add insulation to the hive, rather, I think, I would look for a locally raised bee that was best able to cope with those conditions. You don’t say exactly the location but I know several beekeepers in Scotland and Wales who probably have the conditions you describe and they don’t insulate their hives but have near-native or native bees that are well suited to those conditions. I think the issue with insulation is it’s great for the bees inside the hive but once they get out into the cooler conditions are they going to cope? Depending on the type of bees your currently running, I would perhaps give them some insulation short term but look to raise queens from local stock or find a local beekeeper near you who have locally adapted bees.

Next up is a question from  Eva Loysen;

Hi Stewart - I've read that Autumn is the best time to unite a weak colony with a stronger one. However, my weak one is tiny and