Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 88 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. It’s never too early to start planning for the new season so this week I’m starting to look at my plans for next year so stay tuned for some new hive plans and some thoughts on what we’ll be getting up to for 2020

Welcome to another podcast, and as I prepare this week’s update I’m looking at some very dull, grey skies outside. We’ve had more rain, although today is dry and we’re settling into that familiar late Autumn, early Winter feel to conditions. Unfortunately, the forecast is for possibly more rain. It would be nice to have a prolonged spell of dry weather now, just to let the land soak up all of the surface water that we have.

Spring always seems such a long way off at this point and although we’ve only just put our hive tools down it seems such a long time ago that we were inspecting bees.

That’s not to say there isn’t work to be getting on with, sometimes, as a small commercial beekeeping outfit, it can seem like there is just too much to do. I find myself in the space between having enough for one person to get on with and needing further full-time support to really move the business forward. I’m sure there are many people out there running their own businesses trying to grow and finding challenges at every corner. I have to say the dreaded back problem has been a constant niggle, improving but always there to remind me not to go too fast. I think I get frustrated knowing I could do so much more but limited in the available space that we have. Time to put some major plans down on paper, and, I guess, if I share my plans and goals with you I might just have to go through with them. I’m even thinking of giving you a monthly update of each of the goals just to keep me focussed. As you are probably aware, I do get distracted quite easily and what was once the number one priority sometimes slips down the pecking order.

So today’s podcast is an opportunity for me to share with you, in no particular order as yet, my thoughts on how to proceed next year to build my business and enjoy the journey at the same time.

So, first up is an overhaul of the Patreon page, I need to improve the way the videos and podcasts are delivered. I think the quality of the videos is pretty good, we have some great camera gear and apart from an occasional out of focus shot, I think we get a pretty good image of what we’re trying to do. That said, I want to create a series of videos for the season, following a particular method or apiary or colony. A kind of “warts and all” reality TV series. I was thinking maybe we could set up a brand new apiary with new colonies created for the purpose, to show how someone might start with just a couple of hives and end up with an apiary of 8 to 12 hives by the end of the season.

Perhaps we should concentrate on queen rearing again as I know this is an area that I get a lot of questions about. I have over the previous few seasons created a number of queen rearing videos but I don’t think we’ve created a full series showing start to finish what happens, the good bits, the bad bits and of course all of the mistakes that happen along the way.

If anyone out there has any thoughts on a video series for next year please do get in touch.

I also want to offer a few beekeeping days specifically for my supporters on Patreon so do look out for news about those on the Patreon website, these will be heavily discounted days for those long term supporters, a way for me to say thank you for sticking with me.

I’ve mentioned before that I want to build a top bar hive, well I think I have just the material to be able to do it now, well, at least part of the material. I was given some very long pallets with some very good looking wood. The pallets are about 3 metres long so I intend carefu