The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A #336 with Frederick Dunn. Frozen entrances and more.

Episode Date: December 13, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/6qTfSuC4lfA

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We're going to be able to be. We're going to be able to be. So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, December the 12th of 2025. This is back here beekeeping questions and answers. Episode number 336. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be so I'm really glad that you're here if you want to know what we're going to talk

about please look down to the video description and you'll see every topic listed in order this is not going to be a long one today famous last words and if you want to know what's going on outside let's jump right into that because did you see the opening of course you did that's how you got this far and snowing and blowing deep snow everywhere in fact some deliveries are not being made super sad and I know you want to know what the temperatures are 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit it's popsicle cold that's minus 3.7 Celsius and the feels like temp 21 degrees Fahrenheit which is minus 6 Celsius and the wind is blowing and gusty and the gusts are going up to 12.1 miles per hour which is

19.4 kilometers per hour. Eighty-eight one percent relative humidity pretty predictable we do have some issues with the bees that i need to warn you about so we're going to get to that soon but for those who are in my neck of the woods the northeastern part of the united states the northwestern part of the state of pennsylvania our warmest day ahead is going to be 40 degrees Fahrenheit and that's Thursday December the 18th which happens to be 4.4 degrees Celsius that's it every other day is below freezing and then I don't a lot of people looking at the national weather situation are dealing with either really weird heavy rains or snow or sleet or combinations and that's the problem we have right here we have

heavy snow cover and it went from way in the low teens and mid 20s up above freezing so what happened it rained so it rained on the snow then the snow got really dense and really thick and there were icicles hanging off the edges of the house and what happens then it went from rain to freezing again which means that it sealed things up what things did it seal up that we're worried the most about our beehives the whole front and sides of our beehives are glazed and that's not something your bees can keep up with because these patterns happen really fast so it is something you need to pay attention to we do not want to completely encapsulate our beehives with ice so we have to get out there and take care of it I'm going to talk about it at the very end but

So the opening sequences, the birds, we have them coming to the feeders, of course. And then there's Charlie the squirrel. She's a thief. She stills nuts from all the other squirrels and pops up through the snow. She has tunnels going through there. So that was really interesting and a lot of fun to watch. And some of the new species that you might have seen this week that you didn't see last week. There's the red-bellied woodpecker, pretty good-sized bird there.

And the blue jays showed up again. And most of the birds that are here now, black cap chickadee. they're birds that we normally see through winter I'm glad we're not seeing bluebirds and things like that that should of course migrate to warmer weather which appears that they have done so I think that's just about it if you have a question that you would like to submit or a topic that you just want me to think about for future reference or for a future show please go to the way to be.org click on the page marked contact and then fill out the form there and we'll go from there now Some people often say, I want to show a picture, I want to show a video, I want to get someone's opinion about it. Google the way to be fellowship and you'll find it on Facebook and there you can share your pictures and stuff. I don't respond to things there. It's a peer-to-peer group. So it's set up with moderators from all over the world so that you can talk with people with similar backgrounds

or have experience in the neck of the woods where you live all over the world. the number two audience here goes back and forth between Canada and Australia so I want to thank those of you who are tuning in from way off also if you want to know if you could just listen to this you have to watch maybe you don't like what you're seeing no you can listen you don't have to watch you can go to the way to be podcasts and you'll find it iHeart radio all of them they all carry them and it's hosted by pod bean so you can check that out subscribe the playlist goes on how many videos are in the playlist 336 yep so the very first one

comes in from st john coleman 8602 that's the youtube channel name says you mentioned that at 39 degrees Fahrenheit it's too cold for exhalic acid vaporization what is the coldest you do this i'm lazy but i also live in a warmer climate southeast coastal virginia a exome 7a if my bees are flying is this a good enough sign if I my bees routinely fly to the robbing station at 48 degrees Fahrenheit now that's interesting on a lot of fronts and bees that know where there's a resource so they know there's a high reward waiting for them somewhere they will fly out in cold attempts and I know some people come up and say bees don't fly under 60 degrees Fahrenheit well I think okay that's

partially true if they're searching for new resources they tend to not like to fly at below 60 degrees Fahrenheit now when it's much colder as St. John Coleman says here they will still fly out to known resources that they're repeating and they're visiting so we've done those tests and I need to actually make a page of all the backyard honeybee experiments that we've performed here so you can look at them all because a lot of this ground has been covered. And as far as exhalic acid vaporization, some of you may be new and not know what that even is for. So it's a hot topic these days because a lot of scientists and

researchers and innovators are trying to find out new ways to deliver it, new doses to get approved, higher doses, and they still haven't figured out why or how it specifically kills the Varroa destructor mite, which predates upon your bees. and so they get the fat stores they attack the livers of your bees for an analogy there so they also get some hemalymph but it just makes your bees lethargic and it spreads disease so these are little pathogen spreaders so we want to kill them and get them out because they're the number one culprit behind killing off your bees at roughly the third year so the reason I bring that up is often brand new beekeepers will get started with their bees

and I say yep I'm treatment free and nothing's happening to my bees nothing's wrong with them I was one of those people second year nothing's wrong in them they're great they're fantastic my bees are doing great third year they kind of seem a little sluggish and at the end of the third winter this is when more than 80% of backyard beekeepers who started out keeping their bees lose them and then they get out of it and it can be a huge challenge finding ways to kill these things off and exhalic acid vaporization axelic acid itself has proven to be a very good organic treatment that knocks those mites down if we can just get a handle on how to

deliver it well exhalic acid vaporization can be delivered as long as the cluster is opened and expanded and the whole reason behind that is we want the exhalic acid to land on as many surfaces as many bees bodies as we can and once they do that somehow it gets into the body of the ferro destructor might and they die then that's it so we don't know how but we want to deliver it so the reason that this question is here is because in a cluster which my bees right now are tightly clustered and it'd be a waste of time for me to shoot the or sublimate oxalic acid into that hive right now because it will go on the surface of things but it would be on the outside the mantle

of the cluster which is composed of the bodies of other bees usually the older bees in the hive those are sure to expire during winter and so the mites where they located well in the center of the cluster they're on the nurse bees they're also in the brood area so the brood is very small right now which means that they have very limited numbers of brood to get into and reproduce in so that's where your mites are and the axallic acid vapor only works on the mites that are exposed we call that we used to say they're ferretic now they're in the dispersal phase and whatever term you want to assign to it it just means that they're not under the protection of the cappings of a pupating bee so the good news is we're not producing a lot of drones this time of year so

they have to make do with the worker cells that are available and i think a lot of people don't realize how many founder smites will occupy a single cell they're ganging up on them it's not just one mite producing offspring it's as many mites that can get in that cell before it gets capped as possible so if that cluster is open enough for air to move freely through and what happens is the bees start fanning as soon as the xylic acid vapor is introduced and they fan it all over the place they do a really good job of it too by the way in other words they spread that stuff everywhere where if there were no bees in the space it wouldn't even be as effective and we would think that naturally instinctively they would fan it right

out the entrance but they don't they circulate it everywhere and how do I know that because I've looked in observation hives where I've introduced exalic acid vapor and then watch the bees reaction to it and there's a video that shows you exactly what they do and initially they move away from it and then they once they realize the blast is kind of over with they spread back out again they kind of go back to work even though the fog is everywhere and they're circulating it everywhere instead of just out the entrance which instinctively you would think that they might do but they just go about their business and it has a pretty good hang time now the instructions require that you

block off the entrance for 10 minutes so that you can reduce the amount of venting out that might occur so other than that i've not done really cold weather evaluations where i could see what's going on because we might assume that if it cools off too soon it would settle early but the bees fix that by fanning it themselves so that's it if they're flying out as described here and there's activity in the hive and you don't have a means of kind of thermally evaluating how big the cluster is then you can assume cluster is broken because they're active inside the hive on their own so it would be safe to do that question number two comes from crawler crawley er 4919 that's the youtube channel name anyway it says what exactly would the purpose be for a colony of bees to attack and sting so much when they die after stinging are africanized bees able to live through stinging people why would they want to be killing themselves off so there's a whole bunch in this comment and this is on a video that i post

a while ago where beekeepers were being overrun by a very, very aggressive colony of bees. And they were attacking their livestock, they killed their chickens, they stung their hogs, everything. So I went to help them identify first of all which colony was doing it and then help them come up with a plan to wipe them out because if you have colonies that are killing people. Anyway, let's move on. So the question is regarding instinctively, doesn't this seem like a bad idea. If we have, and this is genetic, by the way, strongly genetic, there are times when, let's talk about this a little bit, your colony of bees can be riled up. In other words, they can be harassed and bothered and bothered. Vibration is really high up

the line. And so when they're tested and they're in a state of partial alert, they get worn out and they also will defend themselves at times when they otherwise wouldn't. So let's say, just for example, a skunk is attacking your hive every single night. And I have so much video of skunks eating bees. Just to see at what length they'll go to to get a hold of some bees. And I use this as part of my in-person presentation. I show the extent that skunks are willing to go to, the limits that they'll go to, to get into those bees.

And they'll feed on them for hours at a time night after night. And then for the beekeeper, who doesn't know that that's going on? You know, you just walk out into your bee yard, and the bees see you, and they fly at you and start stinging you, and it doesn't seem right. And we always think to ourselves, man, that bee just stung me for no reason at all. I mean, I'm a huge carbon-based biped. I'm walking in here. I know they want me to be here.

But what they might be doing is venting their anger, as if a bee can get anger, but sometimes angry. but sometimes you think they can because when you see them start to sting, there's always the one or two that fly up and just there's nothing you can do about them. That bee just wants to sting you and it hits your veil and revs up against the veil and tries to get at you and they really don't want to let it go. That's one B and that's pretty darn annoying. Our son pulls up, gets out of his car.

As soon as he steps out of the car, a bee flies over, stings him. It's almost a routine. He gets stung right in the head. that's because he's taller and he's high contrast so here's another part of it that I want you to think about as a backyard beekeeper we put up a building called the way to be academy and it's a very good placement as far as buildings go and here's why when you pull into our turnaround area or the parking area whatever it is the bees can no longer see you and they don't fly out and greet you in the way that they used to so even the bees are already

riled up and ready to sting someone and their guards are ready to go the guards don't do anything unless they see a target and where do they see the target from they see the target from the landing board so when you look at these landing boards you see a bunch of guards and their fore limbs are up and they're twitching every time a bee returns to the colony and they're kind of grabbing at them half-heartedly but then they'll grab a bee and then they'll really grip it and then they'll put their face against its face they're identifying it to see if it belongs there guard bees almost never fly off the landing board and hover around the hive to see if there's any threatening animal around they kind of stay on the landing board or the front of the hive right near the entrance and

they don't much spread out from that so i'm going to give you a tool your tool is anything that will block their view from where people walk because all we're trying to do is not engage a guard bee and i'll get to the rest of this but so some colonies put out more guard bees than others and then what's going to happen is they spread an alarm for a moan so if you have some visual block the bees can't see you they don't fly out to get you so then you go over and you sit next to a hive you want to stare at the landing board for a while you see that the guards are staring right at you they kind of do this thing like some kind of asian martial arts movie before they hit someone they center it up the guard bees tend to do that a little bit and when they fly they they do the same thing

it's this little etchice sketchy thing that they do trying to figure out exactly where to get you and they do that closer and closer and then they just grab you and start stinging you we want to block their ability to see us in the first place then they can't bother us so that's one the next one the next is we have colonies that are genetically predisposed to be more defensive and there's a lot of discussion about whether we can say the attack people that defend people they're dangerous or aggressive let me tell you what for those of you have all these passive ways of describing it it's an angsty bee that's a slightly defensive bee oh look who's cranky today the Australians like to say their bees

are cranky when you engage with a truly Africanized colony of bees it's not 10 or 15 bees that come out it's 1500 bees that come out or more in fact if we go back to the video that this comment was posted on one of the chickens was so covered with bees that only the feet could be seen that's how badly they were going after anything moving and there's more to it than this so if we are out and we're looking at bees that are foraging and they're on a flower or something you can flick at them or sometimes even just getting too close if you're a photographer you're trying to get a video sometimes you just get close and they fly away they don't want to be bothered with you so and any

little movement like you touch them like one of them lans and you touch it a little bit or blow on it with your breath and they'll just go away so they're pretty darn passive but something happens to the B and it's the workers we're talking about something happens when the alarm pheromone is released and when they deliver a sting and other bees smell the alarm pheromone and they're now encouraged also to sting this whole self-preservation behavior in the honey bee is out the window they're impervious to external stimulus at that point there's nothing you're going to do to discourage those bees from attacking you they go into we would you know if it were a human or a higher functioning animal we would say that they're in a rage

and once they get into a rage they don't react anymore into a slight restraint you know so they go full on and instead of 20 or 30 bees the colony seems to almost empty out so everything but the nurse bees that are too young to fly and don't really have fully developed defenses yet all the others are coming out so it's a disproportionate response and it seems like man like the comment says here that seems counterintuitive because every one of them that lands a sting on something loses its stinger and dies and answer the part of the question in here do they live through stinging people they do not their singers come out just like everyone else every other worker honeybee when they sing a mammal so anyway uh i had someone come up to me at a hospital and tell me that they didn't want to be interviewed about it and didn't want to be on my

social media but wanted me to know that their veil was so covered in bees that they couldn't even see to get out of the apiary. That's how angry. That's what the response level was. So they're no joke. And then you're going to have people that will say, I like hot hives, I like them, they do better. They're better at producing honey and all kinds of other things.

If you've got bees, there's some kind of tradeoff and you're not living somewhere where they could put someone's life in jeopardy because that's what we're talking about, good for you. If you want to wear three layers of whatever you have to wear to get out there just to work your bees and you think that that's a good trade-off there will be a lot of discussion about that in other words they don't put up with varroa and they don't do this and they don't do that so the logic that i think of beyond you know why would they have this kind of aggression and how could they survive then you have to consider where they've come from and you have to consider the wildlife in those areas and if the early experience of any animal is that they'll get an intense attack response from these honeybees bees, then you'll avoid them. So I think the long-term, genetically, the long-term message is this colony of bees cannot be messed with. Your chances of survival are profoundly reduced. So you might want to be doing a little Google search to find out which insects kill more people

than any other insects. Now we're not talking about the full-on attack, right? I mean, that's one thing and that's kind of what people think about. the honey bee the you know the africanized bee that really attacks but it's usually people that are allergic but you can take and I can't give you a solid number how many stings you can take before you're in serious jeopardy but you can take a lot of stings so anyway the fact that they release their stinger I think is an advancement because even when you kill the bee the stinger continues to deliver on its own and what else is it doing is spreading

an alarm pheromone soliciting the stings of its sisters so they all come in and keep coming in and with each new sting that gets delivered a refreshed alarm pheromone hits the air so it just keeps going this is not a good thing so anyway um yeah it does seem counterintuitive but like i'm saying uh you would learn quickly that this is not a bee to mess with and how i found the colony that was so defensive all i did was stop in front of it. And it was a good thing that I wore a, well, my most protective bee suit and stood right in front of it. And they ruined my video because you could not hear the audio. You couldn't hear what I was saying because the bees were also mobbing the microphones on the cameras I was using. So very interesting, very alarming, and a lesson learned for beekeepers.

backyard beekeepers in particular know the disposition of the bees that you're keeping and gentleness is one of the things that backguard beekeepers breed for so i had this discussion also with the um bee weaver group and to talk about some of their genetics and to see if they were spicy or defensive and they work hard to keep their genetics approachable and workable also because they have a lot going on for the public their bee thing which is in Nova Soda Texas so even the weaver bees are in an area where they could get those genetics so I'm a big fan of getting aggressive genetics out of your apiary so we'll move on to question number three this comes from Laura in Lima Ohio says okay here's the thing says my husband I hope the husband doesn't watch this but it's in it so my husband your podcast and hinted he wants a b-themed baseball cap for christmas so i'm probably blowing this for laura but anyway i can't think of a better surprise for him surprise than a baseball cap with one of your

way to be apiary designs currently you only have a bucket cap in your store would you consider adding ball caps so this comes up actually a lot that people would like for me to do ball caps don't and here's well first of all I don't make any of the things myself so the stuff the artwork and things that I do which by the way I'm putting out a whole new line of t-shirts this weekend and you have to go to my store so the store is a T-spring or now it's just called spring because they used to just do t-shirts now they do a lot of other stuff I don't sell ball caps and here's why there you go that ball cap is a B-weaver ball cap

line of bees that I really like by the way this is my embroidered patch so these patches are sold for my website and I know this isn't the artwork that we're talking about but it is a patch and my thinking was people would buy their favorite hat and then they just buy the patch and this will go on to anything you wear it can go on your jacket can go on your shirt can go on your hat can go on your B suit a lot of people have I've noticed and thank you by the way those who send pictures of yourselves with these on your B-suits I think that's cool these are iron on patches so then this just goes on the hat that you already like you can stitch it on but it's also an iron on I guess ironing onto a hat can be a challenge

because you have to get this up to about 365 degrees Fahrenheit which is 182 Celsius but you can also just stitch it on so that's why I sell the pack because those can go on anything the markup is really low and I do have to do a new patch design but I did do new shirt designs so I that's why we do that and actually need to redo these because we're getting to the end of that supply and thank you to those who have it's just a way to support the channel and get something for your money so that's it I don't sell ball caps and T-spring I'm not excited about the ball caps that they make so there's that uh so there's the yeah that's pretty

much it and check out so if you want to see what other things like the shirts the jerseys even annette's famous don't forget the chickens rendering which is so photo real that you will think you're looking at an actual chicken so those are available through my store and how do you find the store you can go to tea spring and i think it's frederick done or fred's fine fowl you can go to my website which is the way to be dot org because it's the holiday season and you can go to the page that says i think it says store so there it is and you can order things right there sweatshirt so it's the whole nine yards so one way question number four this comes from steve from orangeville ontario canada how much sharp is two degrees on a langstroth box

I'm guessing three quarters of an inch. If you shave a wedge off the bottom of a slatted rack or some or other shim from zero at the front to three quarters of the back, you can have sloped bottom board while the rest of the stack stays true and level. Doing the same at the top would be a rear slant above the shim, I believe. That is true. That's true. And you can make a wedge and you can also use a spirit,

level or something like that these round ones are what i use these set right on the lid and you can tilt it back and the middle ring right here is two degrees there are also little spirit levels that photographers use that's what this one is it goes into a cold shoe on your camera and uh it angles in every direction so you can level things out and when you run the bubble to one of these black lines either way that's two degrees by the way so that works too so yes if you had a three quarter inch shim at one end and you tilted it back and left it in that position you would always be ready to draw the honey off of a flow hive super so um it doesn't hurt if you ran it a little farther than that but the first one the basic the flow high basic that came out in

2015 had the bottom board with that exact same kind of shim in it screen bottom board with the core flute insert which I don't really care too much about that anymore I like the trays to pull out but that was already pre tilted so it's the same thing but yes three quarters of an inch the fact if you want to know rise and run if you really ran it out to 21.48 inches in length and shimmed at three quarters of an inch that's exactly a two degree tilt so by bringing that in shorter at three quarters of an inch it's even a little more than a two degree tilt so you're good to go now we're on the question number five this is from Ian

from Hacken Villa Georgia have you read the study okay so this is an interesting one had you read this study and what do you think impact of UV induced blue fluorescence entrances on honeybee swarm traps this was in bee culture magazine and I wasn't even going to look at it but see like last year somebody sent me a uv entrance cover and actually tested it out on my top bar hive and you might be thinking well uv first of all ultraviolet right so it takes advantage of a spectrum that honey bees see so the very first thing let's be a scout so when we're zipping out there flying around we're looking for resources but we also might be a scout that's looking for a place to live and before a colony of bees

actually swarms out. They've got, you know, new queens in the oven, so to speak. The old queen is getting exercise. She joined 24-hour fitness, and she's being trained up so she can fly away. And the forager scouts are out looking for a place to live. So even though they're going to leave the hive and go to a bivouac spot, they already check out new spots. So I did look at this article and I read the whole thing. And it's on bee culture, for those of you want to look into it's called the ultraviolet entrance and of course it's 2020 2021 bee culture you're looking for an article by brian flechman okay so i read it this was actually a very small study so brian used six swarm traps for two years that's why we have the two 2020 2021 so everything being the same

And he followed with the cavity dimensions and the placement specifications that Dr. Thomas Sealy came out with. Someone else said that Tom Sealy recommended this ultraviolet entrance. I saw that in a comment. No. Dr. Thomas Sealy did no research or evaluations with ultraviolet entrance entrances. So what he did was the facing of the entrance, the size of the entrance, the size of the space. the size of the space and of course the orientation and height of the hive and those are all statistically very significant very good study there so then what's different is brian came out with

knowing that they would use this ultraviolet marker would the bees then go and these scouts that are going out looking for a place to move into before the swarm emits would they be more apt to go to a hive that had this kind of entrance on it with all things being equal would they choose it over a hive that just has for example a white entrance reducer on it that's you know as far as dimensions and shape and everything else they're identical so that becomes the control and so according to that study they were very successful in fact while I was looking at that because I was thinking that actually worked that was pretty interesting i didn't need it on my top bar hive because i

ended up installing a swarm myself so i didn't wait for them it was not a previously occupied hive but the statistics in the study that spanned two years um were pretty convincing so even for a small study 100% of the uv let's be correct in how i describe it uv reactive blue swarm trap entrance is what it's called so they went for that over the white control entrance and the entrance is pretty involved because i looked that up too now here's the thing some other people probably read the article and they jumped in there and they started making their ultraviolet blue entrance covers it's just what i'm guessing because it kind of showed up at the same time and then so i think it's kind of important to be testing the one that the person who did these experiments

produced so i thought certainly they must have described what it is where to get it or whether not you can make one yourself and they did this is what it looks like so if you look at this thing this is kind of interesting so of course this is a black and white print but this is the entrance over here this hexagon threads onto this and this is where you've baited it so he's got a cavity here to bait this entrance now that throws another level into it if we're putting bait here but remember the other one is configured the same it's just white this one's blue so the bait was also the same now you want to know why I like this because even apart from the blue and by the way I should clear this up I don't have anything to do with

the person who did the study who sells these I'm just providing with information and if you buy it or don't doesn't change what i do one bit in fact when you go here if you buy these mention my name pay exactly the same as everybody else so this bait thing this unscrews but notice this is a queen excluder see so this kind of falls in my lap with my desire to retain bees and keep them from absconding later because you notice this is threaded too so when the bees swarm into this and apparently according to the study they will and according to those who have purchased these and left their comments and feedback there was no negative feedback on these you unscrew this and you screw it over this and now you have a queen excluder the queen cannot abscond so we have a control i like this thing to the point where i voted with my tax dollars is that my tax dollars I voted with my money so your dollars are your strongest

vote and you're probably wondering what do they cost well I paid eight dollars each for them and about a bunch of them before telling you just in case there might have been like four left or something I just want to make sure that I get what I need and then whatever's left over you feel free to order them if you want them so I'm to tell you where they're actually and and this was key because again remember there were several that were there this is the only one that looks like this and who's selling it the guy that did the study the guy that wrote the article and their Etsy store name is Apotech store so API-T-E-K

and then they have a store on Etsy now if things go bad for you and nothing to do with that I'm just giving you information that you can pursue or not pursue so I bought mine they're going to be here because I'm giving I'm giving a talk at a bee breakfast this coming Wednesday. And I'm hoping to have some of these with me so I can talk about it. And so people will think I'm on the cutting edge of something, even though it's been out since 2021. So that's what it's going to be.

And I think I like what I read. I think it's going to work. Oh, there's some things you should know. Because I did some research on it's plastic. It's got this ultraviolet aspect to it, which means it's conspicuous to the vision of a, a bee which makes sense because when the bees are flying over little meadows and stuff like that the flowers that have these leading lines going towards the center that are usually on the petals of the

flowers they're ultraviolet and the bees then can see from a distance that this flower might have something interesting in the center where the nectaries are and where the pollen anthers are and so they're taking advantage of this but it's plastic with that to grade in the sun yes it Apparently it would. So I'm suggesting that you have a little hive visor on the front of your bait hives or your swarm traps, whatever you want to call them. Because you want to keep that out of direct sunlight. You don't want to reduce its appeal to the bees.

Now, I realize now the bee has to be at a lower point, but if you're following Dr. Tom Seeley, that thing is probably at 10 to 12 feet off the ground anyway. I no longer personally put swarm traps that high off the ground because they don't need I've learned that the bees will move into other boxes so I'm going to try this out on other things my nucleus hives have little front holes in them like that so we're going to see if we can get them in there and guess what hive I'm going to try this out on this year the beersville bees B-E-A-R-S-V-I-L-E-D-com long lancroth hive has a whole bunch of control wheels all down the length of it I don't give it about all the control wheels i only want one entrance so i'm going to be pulling those off and i'm

going to be putting one or two of these on one at each end see what happens then i'm going to put brood frame in there brood frames like if let's say one of my colonies dies however unlikely that might be through the winter that we're having let's say one of them doesn't make it we're going to clean it up we're going to clean out all the cells we're going to pull brood frames we're going to put about five or six of them in each end of that beardsville bees langstroth long langstroth hive and we're putting these on the front of it and then we're going to see what happens but according to the study and the feedback but it's going to work so a regular entrance on a regular hive that won't fit so you either have to make another hole or do something to that entrance it's going to work on your land's hives

It's going to work on your long Langstroth hives. It's going to work on your top bar hives. And your nucleus hives. Other than that, you might be building a custom deal if you want to have an entrance that those can use. But I don't have them in hand yet. I will this week because according to the shipping notification, they should be here Monday or Tuesday

just in time for the Wednesday beekeeper breakfast. So if you're at that, we're going to talk. Now we're in the fluff section today because it's cold and snowy. annoying out there so i don't want you to be stuck here staring at the internet forever but anyway um the number one thing that i want you to think about if you're in the northeast or any of this heavy snow belt nonsense that's going on you want to go out and clear the ice from those entrances that is not an easy thing to do if you look at the apame hives

they're ice solid so the entrances now the good news about appame hives upper control wheels little upper entrances so you could shift that a little bit but those are covered in ice too so what are we going to do do you want to go out there and chop at that with your um hive tool that your grandson needs go out there and whack away at a plastic hive at the entrance no because we risk breaking it when it's really cold so here's what i'm doing uh i'm going to use a battery powered uh heat gun now i know heat guns By the way, if you're buying the battery and everything, these things are expensive. So if you already have a tool like DeWalt or Makita or something like that, get one of their heat guns.

Because a battery powered heat guns don't actually make much heat. They're not cool, like the really hot ones that you can plug things in and then start a fire with them. I'm not saying that you need to start fires with them, but they're so hot that they, you run the risk of starting fire, but they also draw a huge amount of power. so in order to economize the power that they're consuming to put out heat they actually blow a much lower temperature range and then you run them off of your battery which means you can take it with you out to your beehive and you can melt away the entrance a little bit so that you can get those screws out of the apamate entrances i'm going to pull the screws out store them somewhere and then i'll just lift it up so that it can be cleaned out in case there's dead bees up against it but at the very least we have to have a path to ventilation in there it doesn't mean that they're they're going to be dead right what it does mean though because here's why i'm sharing this with you the importance of getting those entrances open what does happen what did i tell you was going to come up here on i believe

it was thursday mm-hmm what's going to be the hottest day of the week Thursday day. What's going to happen then? Lots of condensation. If that entrance is really tight and really small, there'll be more condensation building up in the bottom. So we want to help alleviate that. So we're going to heat the entrance. I'm telling you what I'm doing. Maybe you don't want to do it. But find a way to open it up and make sure you don't have dead bees piled up against that. We'll get a long cold snap here. Okay, so and the other thing, obviously, check the feed on your hives i don't check the feed unless i see that the cluster has moved up near the top already i have fondent packs on almost every hive this year so now peace of mind i'm not even worried about them and uh the thermal scans are showing that they're still in the lower third of the hives so we're perfectly situated so far going to winter and i have proof of life which is the other thing people want to know um so check the feed make sure that's on there it's emergency feed that's all i'm stand. If you're comfortable just leaving honey on and not having an emergency resource just in case that's okay for you.

So leave deep snow around your hives. I do not snow blow snow off of my hives or out from around them. Leave it there. That benefits your bees. Unless it's covering the entrance itself, having snow banked up against your hive, I think is a huge advantage because it's going to cut down on the really low temps that otherwise would be hitting that. So now if you've got outbuildings and storage areas where you've got your B-frames and your hive butler toats and things like that, the high butler toads do a very good job of keeping rodents out. But if you do what I used to do, which is just stack a bunch of hives, and I still do that, rodents can chew into them. They have all winter to do it. So nothing but time on their hands. And as they chew, they find stuff to eat. So I just want to make you aware that you need to look for rodents. How do you know if they're in your area and stuff you look for droppings don't sniff them it's really bad it's

not good for you on the best day it's not good for you on your worst day it's hantavirus you don't want that so find out they're there and use either copper they're like brillo pads there's copper and there's stainless steel and they're designed for you to poke into holes so that the rodents aren't getting in and because you're going to have to trap them you'd have to deal with them so I'm at war right now in one of my buildings I don't want to talk about it but I have one rodent who's taking me on it's not gonna go well for one of us have to keep them out so let's see inspect for ruins oh I have an art page on my website for you how's it for you well here's the thing and what's

the website the way to be dot org and now the page is marked art by Fred and so when you go to that page it helps you spend some of these long winter days in the dark making artistic things everyone can do art on some level so i have pyrography on there and i decided rather than make people search for them on my main youtube channel page which is frederick done i don't know if i classified them wrong or what but the tutorials are on there so remember what people used to woodburn so it's just a like a soldering iron and you turn it on and you can make dark marks on wood well do you know the fancy name for that is pyrography so using heat and burning wood to make art and so they actually

make better tools for that so i have two or three videos on there already that shows you how to do that now my plan i don't know if it's going to come to fruition but my plan this winter is to come up with things for you to do in your house nice and warm make something creative and then give it to people so that they can't get rid of it make a gift of it when you do paintings give us away to people and make them hang it somewhere conspicuous for the rest of their lives people have a hard time thrown away even the worst paintings because after all you created it they're afraid that they'll insult you and every time you visit them ask about your painting and how much they like it

so it's a lot of fun but that page it's my art page there's how to draw a bee for example and I don't just draw a bee and put on some music that will make you stir crazy I tell you about the bee while I carry you through the process of drawing the bee now is this a fantastic drawing no not in particular but it's educational so there you go and I do it with the primography too there's a queen we talk about the queen in her parts anyway it's there the page is live on the way to be the other thing that's coming up is we're going to talk about planting inside i'm waiting until january several people have asked what i plan to plant and i have all my seeds now one of the things

i want to grow i don't know if you've done it um creeping time so t h y m e and because it's an herb and i guess people can use it for a lot of things i just want a ground cover that's better than grass that when I walk on it smells good and pollinators visit it so that's one of the things I'm going to grow inside this year what are you planting I know a lot of people that plant stuff have a lot on their minds but I mentioned it last time you know there are plants that I'm not going to start inside at all I want to start them outside so I will do some hyssup plants as well but I'm going to start those later so in January I'll be starting the the time plants so if you have used time if you've got it in your yard i want to know about it which seed did you plant

which type did you plant that the bees are using the most so it's low growing ground cover kind of looks to me like self-heel so we'll see how that goes but that's what i'm doing and i hope that you got something out of today's Q&A don't forget is there something you're wondering about that you want to know please go ahead and go to the way to be dot or click on the page mark contact and write in there exactly what it is you'd like me to cover someone did write me and asked about our current proposed b law changes in the state of pennsylvania i don't have much of a comment about that here's the thing i do know a lot of people that are beekeepers that are on the board that have those proposals going

and so the chances of a passing are low to none right now so i'm not paying a lot of attention to it i know that people are somewhat alarmed thinking it's going to change the way b law is written for a whole bunch of other states here in the united states and i don't feel that at all because what i found talking to different b clubs i've been to a few of them to give presentations in different states and i'm always amazed at how little uh their state is involved in their b clubs and i've been to a few of them to give presentations in their state is involved in their beekeeping in a lot of areas. So depending on where you are in the state that you're occupying the Department of Agriculture and how active they are in controlling beekeeping, whether it's backyard or commercial,

in the state of Pennsylvania, we have a pretty darn involved Department of Agriculture when it comes to keeping bees. And I find that a lot of people don't follow any rules, no matter what they are. Ordinances, regulations don't seem to mean anything to them. at all and I'm probably one of the few people that likes to follow the rules so where I know regulations exist and I know the restrictions and what they are I just comply with them so there are concerns that people have about things like see it's the wording that has people concern but remember it's not law it hasn't

gotten through the chances of it getting through are teeny teeny tiny like it's not going to happen probably and they don't just get to like let it ride so to speak until next year and that kind of goes ahead into the process again no they have to actively resubmit everything every time so um some of the things that really alarm people you know they want their autonomy protected a bee inspector that can come to your property and walk onto your property without your permission that alarms everybody uh the point of it is if someone's keeping bees. It's not like they show up the very first day, hey, you're keeping B's. You're not registered. I'm going to walk in and see what you got going on. No, they're going to send you a letter.

They're going to post a letter that lets you know that, hey, you're keeping Bs. You may not be familiar with these regulations. It starts soft. Now, here's the thing. What I did was I went the other way. How many beekeepers have been prosecuted under B law? In other words, how many times to the department of ag really good award against a beekeeper and then what's the likelihood that they would be able to even do all these things so i'm not telling you that because everybody's driving 95 nobody's going to get pulled over even though it's an 85 mile an hour speed limit which probably doesn't exist but let's say that it's 85 mile on our speed limit everybody's doing 95 nobody's getting pulled over it's kind of like that now however because there is a speed limit established at 85 if anybody's

doing 86 or 87 you could get pulled over because you are exceeding the speed limit so they have the option to implement those activities including going onto a property that I think is derelict that might have diseased bees things like that so they have the tools to use if they so choose to use them but they haven't do you know we have one inspector and she has to cover more than 700 beekeepers so who's going to get the attention somebody that's breeding bees selling bees shipping bees you cannot bring bees across the border um between pennsylvania and you know new york for example uh yet people do it all the time they're just regular roads it's not like there's a big block a that you have to go through so it's the honor system

in the event that somebody's doing something wrong they have the ability now the law if it gets passed to go and do that to deal with them i can't say i hate it because there are people that are doing things that should not be doing with beekeeping and if things really go bad then they're going to have to own that most of the people that i talk to don't even register their bees everyone is supposed to and they just don't want the man involved in their beekeeping And I understand that. But when I first started keeping bees in 2006, the first thing I did is, what are the restrictions, where are the rules, where are the regulations?

You know, I'm in an agricultural area. I'm in farm country. So I don't have restrictions as far as that goes. But there are proposed restrictions on the number of bees you can keep on a plot of land. You know, only so many hives per so many acres of bees. And let me tell you, the number is really high. So I'm not worried about that. either and I see nothing wrong with a restriction like that when I see what the numbers are

they would definitely wipe out forage for the area and all the bees would not have adequate forage and would require supplemental feed constantly just to have an operation like that so if you did that would you be impacting native pollinators which is something that makes native pollinator enthusiasts bristle because commercial bee operations can use up in area's resources now The counter argument to that is that a lot of the native bees can fly around and access plants and resources that honeybees can't, which is true. But I don't want the densities. The limits, I think the limits are viable. So the other thing is, often people say, well, these are just people making laws that don't know anything about bees.

No, that's not the case. There are top-tier beekeepers there, people with 200 hives and even more than that. that have been keeping bees for a long time, that have a vested interest in having a practical law that still has the potential to help maintain healthier apiary practices within our Department of Agriculture. So there again, my opinion is wait and see because not only that, if they have to resubmit it,

they also have an opportunity to make changes. So when the session is finished or the time frame and the opportunity for it to get through and get passed or not, when that passes, then now they can revisit all of these other aspects. So if you're in the state of Pennsylvania at that time, you can make your thoughts and opinions known to those who are on those boards that are helping to make those decisions and drive that potential B law. So that's it.

I will see you next week. stay warm keep your entrances clear and i want to thank you for being here and watching me if you like what you've seen and heard don't forget you can subscribe if you want to thanks a lot