The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 339 January 2nd 2025 Flir Comparison and more.

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/1eHZKaZLjNM

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I don't know I don't know So, hello and welcome. today is Friday January the 2nd of 2026 and this is back here at beekeeping questions and answers episode number 339 I'm frederick done and this is the way to be so I'm really glad that you're here starting off the new year and all the topics that we're going to discuss today were submitted over the past week and I hope that you're ready for this and that you're not in a terrible situation weather-wise if you want to know what we're going to talk about please look down

in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and there are some links to follow on information that you may find valuable if you want to know how to submit your own topic for future discussion please go to the way to be.org and click on the page marked contact if you've got something on your mind right now you want to share a picture you've got an idea that will help beekeepers but you're not selling stuff you can go to the fellowship the way to be fellowship on facebook and there you can share and get your opinions of all those who also keep bees in their backyards back yard beekeepers by the way it doesn't mean we're beginning beekeepers it just means your small scale and you have the time available to you

to really focus on your bees and maybe do things that commercial beekeepers can't just because it's too time consuming or there are too many moving parts we don't mind and it can be very simple can be very complicated so anyway we're going to kick off today right off the bat with what's going on outside of course it's only 16 degrees Fahrenheit and you'll notice on this graphic that it also shows the indoor temperature and some people go is that really the indoor temperature it is this space is cold that's why i wear a thick shirt so i can stay warm while i'm talking to you so anyway um that's minus 9 Celsius by the way 16 degrees Fahrenheit load of no wind even though we did have a couple of blasts of 60 mile per hour

winds very briefly a few days ago no big deal right now 98% relative humidity outside and it is actively snowing and tonight's full moon for those of you who follow that now it would be cool if it will clear off and at night then we could see everything what's known as a hunter's moon when the moon casts its light all over everything and speaking of everything what aren't the deer eating they're eating everything i have a very disturbing video sequence of the deer eating my holly bushes because they can walk right over fences and things like that now the snow's deep enough and uh you can hear them snacking on them very disturbing so i'm going to disturb them and get them away from my holly bushes hopefully we have near record snowfall

here and where it is here northeastern part of the united states northwestern part of the state of pennsylvania so the things that are going on here clearly are not what's happening where you are because yes i'm getting your messages that it's 70 degrees and sunny and you're worried about a sunburn and all those good things good for you so uh what else the walnut wars are full bore out there the little red squirrels uh scoot along right under the snow and they pop up all over the place and they go to war with uh gray squirrels and they go to war with fox squirrels and did you know that they're the only ones that hoard all their nuts the little red squirrels the fox squirrels and gray squirrels just distribute

their nuts everywhere and then they go find them but the little red squirrels that are super territorial that attack everything and everybody they pile up their nuts inside chicken coops and things like that so i knew you wanted to know because we're going to talk about bees and what's coming up next friday next friday i will not be sitting here talking to you why because uh there's a honeybee expo coming up you probably have not heard of it it's a north american honeybee expo and it's in Louisville, Kentucky, and it is probably going to be the largest gathering of beekeepers in the Northern Hemisphere. That's what they say. I don't know. There's a bunch of people going to be there. So I hope you are too, and I hope you'll stop and say hello if you happen to see me walking by.

I can only drink so many cups of coffee, so, and I might even buy you one at the free coffee bar there. Kamen Reynolds was on last night in the live stream talking about all kinds of things. So you can check that out too if you want to know more about that expo. and they're definitely getting things together last minute. So I think that's pretty much it. We're just going to jump right into today's topics. And the very first person to submit a question for today is Ross Wagner. Ross has been around a while, so I thank Ross for being a frequent viewer and commenter.

Because I want to get slatted racks and drill a hole in the back of them for exhalic acid vaporization, even though he writes OAV here. You spoke about how you would do that, and I've seen other techniques online. Do you have a video for how you set yours up for EZ-O-A-V? Now the videos that I have for exhalic acid vaporization, and if you don't know what it's for, it's to kill the road destructor mites when they're out scooting around. So rather than it's not like how to use your slatted rack at the bottom to, you know, deliver the exhalic acid into the beehive, it's just how to use.

use exalic acid i've done several those videos through the years but we're going to talk about this since this is a question from ross this is a slatted rack this particular one fits an eight-frame standard langstroth beehive so you have your bottom board the slatted rack sits on the bottom board there's always a solid piece of wood up here in the front and this is where the entrance of your hive would be and that's supposed to cut down on winter blasts that come into your hive so this is probably considered a cold weather additive to your equipment and this is two inches tall and then the slats of course line up with the frames that are inside the hive I like to deliver axallic acid vapor

now I started using slatted wrecks in the beginning I should probably give some history when I was using those pans that I got from the Blythewood B company very good company by the way and I would clip that little pan that was an aluminum pan probably had like a glow plug in it embedded in the aluminum and you clip it to your lawn tractor that battery or whatever you have and then you dump the exhalic acid in it and you delivered it in here and the reason I put the slatted rack on for that purpose was because if you just had the brood box here and just the entrance reducer below that that pan would

go in and of course deliver the exhalic acid vapor and more accurately probably it's called sublimation a lot of beads would die on it they'd hit that pan and get fried the other thing was the delivery of the exhalic acid the heat right there at the pan was also directly under the brood area right there and I used to push it the wand that would deliver that all the way back and I did videos about this that you can find would of course be really hard and that activity happens very close to the brood. So I decided, let's create a spacer.

That's why I started using the slatted racks. Now that's not why the slatted rack came out. That's just what I use it for. It's supposed to help reduce bearding on the front of your hive because it gives your bees more space underneath. See there's a big space here for that. They can gather. And so rather than collecting on the outside of the hive

when they're unemployed inside the hive, usually these are off-duty for. foragers they had a space now so does it reduce or completely remove bearding on your highs not by a lot just on my experience and also remember the climate place so different areas different things so then the pans are so 10 minutes ago something else came out there was something called the provap super expensive I bought one of course and I still have it. In fact, it's really grungy and sits on display so that I can teach people about that delivery system. Once I got that, then I could put the oxalic acid, apobioxyl, was the first one that

was approved here in the United States, and it came through BetterB. Once I started using that, I didn't have to worry about the pan and pulling out a pan with dead bees in it and things like that. Now remember we have to close up the entrance and for 10 minutes while we delivered, of course you have to follow the label of whatever you're using. And so I thought since I'm closing up the entrance, how about I go through the back of the beehive? And then I put a quarter 20 thumb screw in here. That's what I did. And where did I put it? Off center. So the thumb screw goes between these two frames. And remember, these line up with the frames above because i want to deliver this into the hive but i don't want it to go right

where for example the queen might be does exhalic acid when it's first delivered actually kill off any piece it can it can get the ones particularly that are right next to where you put that delivery tube uh which with the new one that i use is the instant vape and it has a brass tube but i just put that hole right there and uh you you deliver the acolyc acid. Now, I did other videos too because we want to see what it does once it gets inside, because notice that's off center, and then I get questions about why didn't you deliver it right in the middle where the varroa mites are? I'll explain that. I did not deliver it right in the middle because, again, the risk to the potential queen or even nurse bees, I don't want to hurt them. Once you introduce the exhalic acid vapor, it goes through the whole hive. The bees fan it around, and I've said before,

and I'll say it again today, it's a great way to find out if you have any leaks or gaps in your hives, even on the cover, because the exhalic acid vapor finds itself all over, fans itself with the help of the bees' wings, all through the hive, and then you find it creeping out different cracks and crevices, even at the top, even the inner cover. So it's a great way to find out how airtight your beehive is. And then once it's done, of course, you take it out, and then you just put your thumb screw or your quarter 20 screw some people are using golf teas and things like that whatever you put in there the bees are going to propolize anyway and that's why I like to have the thumb screw look at the length of it also remember we're only going through three quarter inch

material and so we want that thumb screw to pass all the way in and the reason for that is we don't want the bees to even partially block the hole that we've made for the exhalic acid vapor introduction so that's why I'm doing what I'm doing that's why it's from the back uh and other people want to know why don't you just deliver it at the top of the hive or the middle of the box or something like that because the only constant for this particular beehive is the bottom board or the slatted rack now when you have a solid bottom board let's go there uh you still have uh three quarter inch material at the back and you can still drill right into the back through the bottom board and so this then would be in the bottom board

instead of a slotted rack same thing off center try to get it to where there would be a gap between the two frames above it and just it helps spread that all over the place so if you want to see how that happens there is a video of the observation hive what a better what better place to see how exhalic acid moves through your hive than through an observation hive which already has windows everywhere and you'll see clearly in that video don't get caught up in the fact that it's an old video they're still good the information is still good and that was done with the provap which was my first xcelic acid vapor tube type system and it just goes everywhere the other thing is you can get you know some comforting visuals out of that because you'll realize the bees react to it initially but then they

kind of just go right back to work and the entire thing eventually becomes fogged just evenly throughout the entire interior of the hive and there's been some discussion I've asked a lot of questions about do we really need to cover the entrance for 10 minutes before we go on to the next hive? Could we just introduce it from the top, get it all over the bees, and let the bees vent it out, then we don't have to come back, then we don't have to take the damp cotton towel off that we put on the landing boards? No, we still need to block it up because it does keep more of the exhalic acid in suspension

inside the hive. So we want to keep that going, so I'm going to recommend that we're going. we not leave those entrances open. And of course, that's the way they qualified it in the first place. And if you haven't heard, the dosing has increased. So you have to follow the label, though. It's just about it. I have lots of questions for vendors and people that are selling apobioxel and easy ox and stuff like that. I want to talk to them, you know, about what they know, about the new stuff that's coming out. There's new oxalic acid dribble material, RTF, ready to use. That's also going to come out.

be available look that up pre-mixed everything they took all the guess workout under the new by the way four gram dose per brood box question number two comes from craig oh for dds says love the video and the fleer do you know if the handheld devices are more cold tolerant than the ones that attach to phones so just recently in fact yesterday i posted a video where we walked around I walked around in the snow and the cold and of course it was only in the teens and I had to move fast because I used the Fleer 1 Pro that's what this little dinky camera is now that has the battery in it also and it attaches to your smartphone so they make one for iPhones there's another one for Android and they're not

cheap by the way so I try to get the best one so the question is why would i use this this one on the phone allows me to take pictures with the phone through the thermal scanner it allows me to make videos and since i'm a content creator that's valuable to me and uh but it lets me down i get about three or four minutes with this and it blinks out you have to keep in your pocket you have to keep it warm you go outside and you look up the specs because you care probably should look those up before you even buy one And this is only good at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which is zero degrees Celsius or warmer.

And the upper range too is also limited. You might be wondering what those ranges are. And since I wrote it down, why am I going off the top of my head? So this is the Fleer 1 Pro. So let's talk about it. It's only good from zero Celsius to 35 Celsius. So in Fahrenheit, that's 32 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's from the manufacturer. they say that stuff believe them it'll let you down now it can actually if you're looking at freezers and coolant systems and things like that because let's face it that's what it's designed for it's not actually designed for beekeepers and i even reached out to the company by the way huge company huge department of defense contractor so this gets used in a lot of different ways now um so i find out it's very limited and it lives up to that reputation it quits on me so then i thought you know what I'm just going to keep this in my nice warm pocket and I put hot hands on it. And I put hot hands on my phone.

But by the way, my phone, Samsung, Galaxy, handles the cold just fine. It never goes on the blink. It handles everything. This is the weak link in there. And so let's move on. This is, as in the thumbnail today. Now this is an old one. Let's be honest, I've had this for many years.

This is the Fleer C2. Now what I like about it is, it has extended parameters. I have had this thing out in all weather conditions, which includes rain. So this is durable. This is rugged. This thing, look at how thin it is, goes in your pocket. You can carry this inside your jacket, inside your B jacket, things like that. It's handy, it's helpful.

When you take this out of your warm pocket and expose it to temperatures in the teens, you know what else it does it has a hard time calibrating so it has temperatures all over the place this thing calibrates itself very well and is usually within three degrees now since all we're looking for our hot spots or life or death when it comes to beekeeping this is just as good if you're in a warmer area you're not worried about this if you're in a very cold area this is what you want now the c2 is no longer available and uh what would i recommend if not if not the C2. Well, there's a FLIR C5 that is available on Amazon

and other places. And guess what its range is? It's good for minus 10 Celsius, which is 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Would have been perfect for me yesterday. And it also goes to 50 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit. So the operating environment for these handheld

self-contained units is fantastic, but if I'm talking to you, a youtube or a content creator somebody that needs to make a video about what they're seeing i have to have another camera i have to focus it on the back of this screen which is exactly what i've done in the past super annoying and so then i make a video off of this now this will record video and stills onto the card internally and then you can transfer that to whatever your editing software is you know what i found out another frustrating stopping point the codec i know some of you don't care about this. The codec for the video is not compatible with Premiere Pro and a lot of other

video editing software. So you have to make a video of the screen and use your phone or your video camera, whatever you have. So these are much durable, much more durable, much better. They're made like tanks. They've only improved them through the years. I wrote their marketing department. Why would I do that? Because they actually wrote them and asked them questions. about the fleer c5 i want to know the parameters other uses that it has and any upgrades that are coming out soon because you don't want to buy something only to find out that a week later somebody else has the exact same one only it performs better but i'm very comfortable with this parameter 14 degrees Fahrenheit to 122 degrees Fahrenheit

that's pretty good operating range of the camera itself so if you haven't bought one and you're in the market those are limitations but if you're in a warm area what do you care It's going to work just fine. Moving on to question number three, which comes from Susan from Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Says, I'm almost ready to build a horizontal hive and have a question concerning the entrances. I'm planning on two entrances on the front at opposite ends. I'll slightly slant the entrances upward from the landing board, which also will have a slight angle downward. What height and length do you?

you recommend. So I've arrived at, I'm just going to, this doesn't even matter if it's a horizontal hive, if it's a nucleus hive, if it's a standard Langstroth hive. The entrance and the entrance reducers that I've arrived at through the years here in the state of Pennsylvania, remember, might be different, I guess, where you are, but three inches wide, two to three inches wide. And if it were a long Langstroth hive, I'd go the full three inches wide and three-eighths of an inch high three eighths of an inch high is valuable to you here's why you never have to think about whether or not a mouse can get into your hive that already restricts it it also restricts things like think of the european hornet it can't get through that either that's a hard time

and so anything that wants to get into an entrance like that really has to chew away at it and will give itself away so the beekeeper can then respond So no matter what the entrance is, that's my recommended opening. If you're trying to build your own stuff, three-eighths inches high, and by the way, it's easy to remember because that's bee space. And the long length, Roth Hive, the other thing is, it goes on to say that they want the entrance near the bottom so they can use the scraper to clean out dead bees.

So you have an option there too. You can have it right on the bottom, and these plans, by the way, are available to you for free at the way to be.org, and you just click on the page. marked prints and plans it's a PDF Ross Miller finalized those PDFs for me and I'm very grateful for that and now you can be grateful too because you can use those as starting points I highly recommend building as is now what we're going to be adding to that will be my observation high final design so that's going to be in there too watch for it bookmark the page

or whatever people do and those just may be hand illustrated by me but I can do it fairly accurately so you can still see and imagine how to build it from that so those are things that are coming up but if you raise your entrance a little off the bottom just half an inch three quarters of an inch and then have that you'll be certain that the bees won't pile up dead and block that entrance and keep them from flying out doing cleansing flights right now while I'm sitting here there are a lot of beehives out there that have fully blocked entrances ice and snow and dead bees so as soon as we hit 30 degrees 32 degrees whenever we get some kind of warm up of the sun shines i'm going to be out there clearing every single entrance it's going to

become very important another side note to that is we built hive visors and put those on most of the hives why don't we do it to all of them we want to see the differences if you do everything to every hive you don't know if one's doing better than the other if it just happens to be a good or bad year and so on those who have hive visors on their hives should keep them on and should lower them and they keep the heavy snow and ice and things like that from enclosing and encasing your entrances so they work they work really well uh question number four comes from dustin from nishgorro wisconsin neshgoro nishgaro anyway wanted to build a cup of your hives uh what material are the most efficient Can I use marine plywood or something to make it last?

So anyway, again, we're talking about the same long hive. Marine grade plywood is good stuff, lasts a long time, handles exposure. I don't like any of the laminated material on my beehives. They seem to delaminate eventually, but marine grade stuff is designed for water exposure. That could hold up. I kind of think we almost built a coffer dam out of one of the those 100 years ago to access the whole of a ship and work in there but I think it really holds up well I don't think it would be very cost effective if you're going to make it

thick enough to provide the insulation that the standard long length straw hive design that we use is dimensional lumber so by that I mean 2x12s and 2x4s that's already thick stuff if you want to do that with plywood and add that thickness you're dealing with most plywoods three quarters of an inch thick so now we're at two layers of marine grade plywood and i think that the pine by itself is not laminate material is actually going to have a better r factor marginally but definitely cheaper and why not just build with that dimensional lumber i'm not sure about what makes marine grade plywood um marine grade so remember this this is up against your bees inside the hive they're going to be raising their young in there

i don't know if there's any off gassing that happens i didn't look into that further but i can imagine if it's certified to be put in waterways in water rivers and lakes and things like that that hopefully it wouldn't be leaching out any chemicals but i've not looked into that but i would just say the most usable lumber to use are two by 12s and two by fours there's some two by sixes you can definitely get that lumber almost anywhere and i highly recommend that's what you use and then finish it off with um semi-gloss exterior latex paint it works really well and there's a lot of exterior latex paint that has the primer and final coat mixed together all in one especially when it's brand new lumber and you can take care of that easy to do it's lasting a long time

so and if it you know it doesn't hold up you can scrape it down of course recode it with paint again later on so i highly recommend dimensional pine lumber from your building center for you know what else while we're on the topic i don't know where you are or if there's a lot of construction going on where you are but look at this i look at every pile of lumber as how it could use that for something in beekeeping or bird boxes or something like that And when I see piles of lumber in front of a construction site, unbelievable what they're throwing away that you could get. And so look at things like that.

The other thing is, you know, how people put, especially in the new year, a lot of people are getting rid of old furnishings and stuff, take a look at the furniture people are throwing out. I saw a coffee table that was put out by one of my neighbors, and I just saw the lumber that was in it. It was nothing was laminated. It's not MDF. It was real thick.

plank lumber and it was just out for the trash that is some good lumber i snatched that up right away i am not too proud than to stop and get somebody's refuse if it has good lumber get it but construction sites especially if they're demoing an old building look at the lumber in there go get some with the permission of whoever the site supervisor is of course whoever the contractor is get that stuff you can build with it it's really good wait is that it oh and this next one is this is question number five this comes from evil gibson that's the youtube channel name which i think is funny uh when splitting a top our hive into two colonies do you need to position it so each half receives approximately the same amount of sunlight

not for me i don't um and that's because the long axis of my top our hive which by the way is a remarkable beehive I dragged my feet on top bar hives forever because of early experience I didn't want to try them again but anyway let's go with any hive not just the top bar hive if you've got a standard long access beehive layance long laying top bar those are the top three I run the long wall of it with the entrances on there facing south anywhere so it makes no difference whether it's southeast or southwest makes no difference And there are some that would argue that it makes no difference period that they could have their entrances on the north, the south, the east, the west. It makes no difference. It makes a huge difference here. I'll tell you why. If you had a beehive out there that was facing west during the 60 mile an hour winds it came through and the snowing and the blowing and the ice and the sleet and everything else, any entrances facing those prevailing winds got really jammed up. That's why I have no beehives with a western facing entrance. because that's where our prevailing winds are coming from all the time.

It does make a difference. It does. Trust me. So anyway, when you're splitting into two colonies, does not make a difference other than because the whole hive is that way. The other thing is the long axis, prevailing winds, you present the smallest sale area, whatever you want to call it, to the prevailing winds, and therefore it's a more stable setup system. So you always have to think about,

Where are overall the prevailing winds coming from through the year? And you'll be way ahead if you do that. I don't worry about it. When a 60-mile-an-hour wind gust came through, not the least about worried about any of my long hives. They are secure. They are solid. Those that present the biggest sale area are the land's hives as far as long hides go.

So it's fantastic. Everything's good. Lost nothing. So the next question I have is from Marianne. 7904 YouTube channel name. If it's made from cedar, this is because I've recently put together a hive that was made from Western Red Cedar. If it's made from cedar, does it reduce the incidence of wax moths, varroa mites, and small eye beetles? No. And Marianne also went on to say that I read the bees are not fond of cedar. your thoughts so the bees being fond of cedar or not fond of cedar they move into it voluntarily

so there's no problem there and i think the reason that people think that cedar cedar chips some people do quilt boxes which i don't but they fill bags or quilt boxes with cedar chips to thinking that that adds another layer of some defense as well as insulation so regular pine shave so the most absorbent they're the best insulating and things like that if you're just using bags of it for something but when it comes to the cedar and the cedar oils i understand that aroma makes us think that it's great and they may come from people that historically kept cedar lined chess and that's for their sweater storage and then they had cedar lined closets in fact i built cedar lined closets in both my nephew's bedroom in Ohio and my mom's third story and it turned out to actually be a good selling feature when they

sold her house and the thing is it prevents moths that eat your clothing it does not prevent the moths that produce wax worms and one of the main reasons for that is when they're smelling the bee bread and everything else it's inside a beehive that draws them in there to the first place and of course the bees wax which is what they're after it does not stop them doesn't slow them down and as the scientists would say because i did read some studies on it because it's been done uh no significant difference so then the bees of course being repelled by cedar or attracted to cedar neither way they treat it the same based on the space it's available scouts explore them the same and everything else so probably you could say

the strong suit is that maybe it slows down carpenter bees from chewing into the hive i don't know i can't trust carpenter bees i've seen them chew a hole right in the side of a beehive right where the handle is and once they realized that the material was too thin and they cut all the way through they just left and next thing you know you've got bees that are coming and going through a newly discovered entrance so but as far as that small high beetles looked up that i looked that up no impact pheromites zero impact on pheromites and so it's just a long lasting material that doesn't degrade in the weather like some other materials do and so cedar hives cedar bird boxes here's another thing that i was thinking about while giving full thought to this thought line

i built bluebird boxes out of cedar also and yellow jacket wasps built their nests in some of those unoccupied boxes so i know it does also not deter vespidae so there's that it's not really a pest control measure at all question number seven comes from christie mitchell says great tips i have another flow super to put together one of these days making sure the flow frames are flush to the front is also helpful because they did recently an assembly video putting together in the flow hive two which is made out of cedar which is why i got these last two questions there says i made every mistake in my cold climate of Quebec. I've given up on the lovely flow hive roof in favor of an insulated feeder

shim and flat lid. So anyway, if an established hive gets a bit off level in the winter, is it okay to wait for spring to level it again or would you level it up right away? Okay, so that depends and here's why. And we do need to keep an eye on all of our beehives. There's frost heave, there's a lot of snow and ice going on, there's blowing and snowing, and so it goes. Which one would get my attention right away? If the hive has somehow tilted backwards. So that means entrances over here, and then the back of the hive, if it tilts back, and it's a solid bottom board, not a screen bottom board with a removable tray.

I do need to do something to level that up, and here's why. When the weather warms up and there's condensation inside the, the hive, we need surplus condensation to be able to move out of the entrance. The other thing is the snowpack that's on the front of the hive. I don't want it to melt off and go right into the hive and stay there. So tilting towards the landing board is very important. Aside from that, if the hive is tilted side to side or something like that, which is key when the bees are building bees wax, then I would level that up when the time comes. After the spring, frost heave and all that other stuff because it's too cold for them to build honeycomb right now so that's a good news so it's yes and

no and it depends on what's going on out there and i would always uh try to find ground that is as dry as possible for those of you who are thinking about where to place your highs your brand new beekeeper and spring is coming and you've ordered everything or you're sitting in your basement you've put together all your hive equipment you can't wait to put it out there um Look at the weather conditions. Look at where the ground stays moist. Look at the grade. Look what happens when snow melts. Where does runoff go? Is there a lot of ponding and puddling that goes on in an area that you're thinking about putting your beehives in? Beehives do so much better on ground that is not damp, that does not have a lot of moisture in it, and is not pond or is not in an area where a lot of water runs through during runoff. So this gives you a chance to start to plan your plot. and the other thing is I highly recommend not setting beehives directly on the ground and I know that you see thousands of beehives directly on the ground often it's commercial beekeepers they load their hives on a palette they move the pallets around with equipment and they can't take the time remember what I said in the opening today if you're a back-haired beekeeper you have a lot of time on your hands to do things differently at that benefit the bees so

i want all my beehives well off the ground and uh for a lot of reasons but it gets them away from the moisture and the dampness that's also they're exposed to uh when you put beehives on the ground if it's going to stay there for any length of time you're going to have voles and you're going to have mice and everything else also living right underneath the beehives and uh makes it tougher when you go to mow the area you're going to blow grass and everything over the entrances you got to go get those and the bees get upset that you mow around them so It just depends on what your beekeeping style is going to be, but you can eliminate or greatly reduce a lot of problems

by where you cite your beehives and how high they are off the ground. 16 to 18 inches off the ground will keep them out of skunk range. So if you have skunks where you live, that helps too. So leveling it up right now, not so much. Just depends on what's going on. We're already on the last question of the day. That's right. Happy Friday.

So anyway, this is question number eight. It comes from Bobby Perkins, 9188. So it says it's 70 degrees and the bees were bringing in pollen. Have had bees for six years. Don't ever remember that happening in December. And here's the thing. When you see your bees coming in with pollen at a time when pollen should not be available to them where you live, I recommend catching a couple of those pollen-bearing bees. and get the pollen off their legs that's right rob them and collect that pollen and get it under magnification and find out if it's actually pollen because you

know what they might be doing they could be getting dust these they could get sawdust if it's finely ground sawdust like if you have a sander and things like that and you connect like that in a bin or you've got a chicken feeder you've got chickens and you've got pellet feed or crumbles or mash or whatever you have especially mash if it's dry mash for chickens. Honeybees will fly right in there, roll around in it, pack it on their hind legs, just like pollen and fly at home. Is any of that going to benefit your bees?

Probably not. But you can look at it. It's very easy to identify not what the pollen source is because pollen identification is kind of a high-level thing that people do. They're a specialist for that. But you can identify if it is pollen or not. so you can get that on a slide underneath the magnifying glass and you'll see right away whoa is this just some kind of dust from something else because i have my suspicions

particularly given the fact that six years never seen pollen coming in can't think of a plant that would be producing pollen this time of year if you have a neighbor who's a beekeeper who's put out some kind of pollen substitute what's that going to look like underneath your microscope it's not going to look like pollen pollen looks round and spiky and has all these very distinctive traits and you can look it up online macro images of pollen and see if it looks like any of that if it doesn't look like it came from a living thing then your bees are just collecting stuff they aren't good at deciding what they should be bringing back or not so that's where we're at we're in the fluff section are ready

I want to talk to you about B insurance I'm just kidding it's really not B insurance there's a new book that just came out when did it come out January of

2006 what's the title of the book The Mason Bee Revolution and it's by Dave Hunter and Jill Lightner the reason this is good if you're a beekeeper now when we say beekeeper we usually mean

honeybees but I'm suggesting that as a backyard beekeeper that you buffer yourself with keeping other species of bees in fact native bees as well they don't put pressure on the honey bees and the honey bees don't put a lot of pressure on them based on what I've seen and so the thing of it is this book the Mason Bee Revolution that just came out we'll show you how to make mason bee houses with the tubes and everything i've already had them here for several years and i'm going to expand my native bee kind of nesting habitat tubes that are about six inches deep on average variable diameters and last year in particular we had a real push in the bees that were coming in all these bobs blue orchards bees and things like that we have a lot of solitary bees around and if you can establish places for them to nest and if you can leave things like they tell you not to cut everything down not to brush hog everything in the fall because those tubes and things like that are left for the bees however first thing in spring people are

mowing it down and brush hogging so leaving it through the winter might accomplish them wintering but what happens when you mulch them all up in spring before they've even hatched and emerged from those tubes so i'm going to recommend that not necessarily you have to buy this book although you could have no affiliation with these people they have no idea who i am but uh you can do very simple houses that provide nesting areas for native bees bubble bees and things like that they do their own stuff and if we can do that then what we're is we're preserving biodiversity so we're trying to keep our bees around we want to make sure that the habitat is the number one thing that we're focused on because it benefits all bees so it also

if you have knowledge of mason bees and solitary bees in your area fumble bees as many different species as you can there are 20,000 different species of bees worldwide and some of them are in jeopardy but you should know about more than honeybees and there's nothing wrong with keeping both on your property I think it's really good so part of let's see of course I mentioned already keeping your entrances clear in the Northeast is going to be really important if we get a warm up and we've been promised temperatures all the way up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming week should be awesome so emergency feeding have it ready I'm telling you if you're

a new beekeeper and you're thinking that it's just more holistic to just let them live or die. That doesn't feel good when you open a hive and realize that it was just starvation that took out your bees. If you can provide them with emergency food resources, I highly, highly recommend that you do it. Please do. The other thing is I was looking at Bob Benny's YouTube channel. I'm not sure what the YouTube channel is called, but they have an insulated intercover for facilitating. feeding of your bees. Now where Bob lives, he doesn't probably have a big issue with winter survival, but they were having problems with huge amounts of condensation inside their beehives

with uninsulated intercovers and uninsulated lids. So that company, Bob Benny, it's just a shout out for them. If you go to his YouTube channel, you'll see it right away. And they have rigid foam board in this insulated intercover, and they've allowed to give. gap for winter patties and things like that he also puts hive alive on his hives and he had some protein patties he had some pollen patties so they kind of given these bees a big buffet underneath this thing but remember he's a commercial beekeeper he's trying to produce a bunch of bees all the pressures that i do not have here but i did like the look of that rigid foam board insulation with something like reflectex he did not use double bubble but it is another foil face

insulation material that covers the interior surface because otherwise the bees would chew away and excavate your polystyrene or your rigid foam board inside that unit so it's pretty well thought out and he used ply material but it's right up underneath the outer cover so that of course would shelter and protect it from wind rain and things like that but I wanted to give a shout out on that because I like the look of it I think a lot of beekeepers could benefit from it and if he's going to be offering those that the North American Honeybee Expo well worth nabbing them and save yourself from shipping I would think so moving on the be mindful top bar hive I promise people updates through the winner on that we did a video yesterday and I'm really impressed by the top bar hive instinctively I wanted to put insulation over those top bars but when you look at it and you really think about it the top bars on that one by be mindful are really thick they're like two inch thick top bars I did another video of course to follow this whole thing

from beginning to end which there may not be an end because the bees are making it they're doing good things in there all the comb they made themselves without foundation without frames without anything but what top bars and so they're not even half of the way through their winter resources in that hive and they're glowing brightly so you're talking about about someone that's looking for a hive that they could build themselves or get relatively inexpensively that one is by be mindful so if you want to look those up I think they also post their plans and prints and things like that remember

there's no standard for those so you can make it as long as you want you decide what your frame sizes are going to be because there are no frames are only top bars and so it's an interesting hive it's something going to have to pay attention to because talk about building a hive out of scrap lumber and letting it just take off on its own nothing is more basic than a hive like that and if it's going to work here's why i know it seems a little scattered here's why i didn't start with them years ago when i was giving beekeeping uh seminars to whole foods groups and things like that one of the directors there in fact the director of education went to vermont

studied bees studied top bar hives came back wanted to do the top our hives i tried to help them with them and so we installed swarms in the top our hives and they would just depart one after another they would also abscond from his topar hives and so a lot of people were just like yeah they just don't make it in the cold so you know they just why bother and it kind of held true because they were leaving and so when a colony upscans like he called me over to help him collect a swarm one day and then when i collected he said you know what i'd actually like to keep it here if i could so i drove all the way across town to do that but i was glad to give them back to him and let him try again with the top bar hive and it failed but i don't know if it has to do with the design or the thickness

of the top bars or if this is beginner's luck with the top bar hive um less crowder has uh to do with this design also uh natalie b which you may have heard of her uh also has to do with the design and marketing of this and uh i'm starting to think man if you can just cut up a bunch of dimensional lumber and it's two by tens not even two by twelfths my long langstroth is two by twelf's and if you can get into beekeeping with just a few pieces of plank lumber and you can you can get into beekeeping with just a few pieces of plank lumber and you can you can get into you don't need a lot of carpentry skills to do it and if it's going to work like this one's working and if when spring arrives if it's still doing as well as it looks like it might i think i'm going to be adding some more top bar hives because again it's a horizontal format there's no lifting of boxes you're only pulling frames there's no extraction equipment because remember these are top bars and the comb is all natural without any frames on the sides i know that you can rig you know like a cage around it so you could put it in an extractor but it's designed for you to cut away the comb and crush and strain

or make cut comb from it uh so it's looking good if you want to see those thermals look at the video that was posted yesterday highly recommend that you if you're brand new to be keeping and you want to consider something and you're kind of looking for a holistic minimal approach to be keeping, I would call that among the top most affordable methods of housing and keeping honeybees. So other people were asking, am I going to do vendor interviews this year at the North American Honeybee Expo? Yes, I am. We've already made up a list of vendors that must see kind of vendor lists. And yeah, so we're going to be posting those videos. So if you can't make it and you're not a subscriber you should subscribe because i'm going to talk to the vendors i have

good questions and we're going to talk about things that are there and i just want to give a shout out ahead of time in case i forget during my presentation at the honeybee expo i want to thank half tracks and honey for sponsoring me for the north american honeybee expo and i want to thank you for watching this video today the second of january in 2006 and i hope that you'll stick around for things that are to come later in the year so i want to wish you all the best you and your honeybees thanks for watching i'm frederick done and this has been the way to be you Thank you. Thank you.