The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 347 March 13 of 2026 Ready for swarming and more.

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/bgRvpekuRu4

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 347. It's Friday the 13th. March the 13th of 2026. I'm Frederick Dunn and... So if you don't know who those two were, those are the Nature's Image Farm children who were put up to no good by Tom from Nature's Own Design. So thanks for that. So if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order and any follow-up links or things like that that you might find interesting will also be down there. And I hope you know that we have terrible weather conditions outside and you're probably wondering if you had a question or a topic you'd like me to consider for one of my Friday Q&As. Please go to the way to be.org. Click on the page mark contact. Then you can fill out the form and you never know. So all these topics today were submitted during the past week.

And if you've got a question on your mind and you just have to have someone answer it right now, please go to the way to be fellowship. And there is on Facebook and you'll get to talk to people, share pictures, show video sequences and things like that, get your questions answered by your peer group. So that's always fun and that's a growing community, fantastic group there. And if you don't want to wreck your car, you know, you're driving down the road, your yard you're doing something it's a podcast so if you just Google search the way to be podcast you'll find it it's on lots of different carriers so I think

that's about it can't get out of the weather situation here today nature is playing a bad trick on us right now really cold is just on the opening we have snow that's right and we have wind gusts too in fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if the power didn't go out while I'm doing this right now. So it's very bad. How bad is it in the northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania? Well, I'll tell you. Things are going to be different where you are, but here, this is what we have. 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit, that's minus 1.7 Celsius. 4.5 mile an hour winds, but you know what it's gusting. And at the time that I did the graphic that's up here, it's 7.2 kilometers per hour.

We had gusts to 37 miles per hour now. And they're promising us more than 50 mile an hour wind gusts. Isn't that great with all the rain and everything else? So 37 mile per hour wind gusts is 59.5 kilometers per hour. It is 89% relative humidity. The beast did fly out at tiny moments during this afternoon. before it got worse again. So the bees are just ready to go.

The minute there's any break in the weather, they're zipping out there and they're doing things. Why on earth would they do that? That's my segue into what is blooming outside. So the silver maples are doing fantastic. All the maple varieties are providing nectar and pollen right now. So that's a good thing. And for the pollen that's coming in,

the scant cabbage is still doing great. If you have access to the wetlands, I highly recommend you get down in there and look to see, of course, not during weather like this, but when it's quiet, when you can hear what's going on, you'll see honeybees flying out of the wetlands having visited the skunk cabbage plants. And that's a favorite thing for me to look at. I had the supervisor with me, and we were down there looking at all the different bees coming out of skunk cabbage.

So the willows, uh, Selex discolor, not open yet. So still ahead. there you go it's pretty much it and what else can we talk about I guess that's pretty much it we're going to jump right into the first question of the day which comes from Alvin from Yonka's New York hey Fred is it possible to make a split from two different hives for example can I make a queen can I take a queen and three frames from one hive and then two frames from another will this cause conflict between the bees or queen loss thanks for your time okay so here's the thing we did that and i have my own term for that i call it super splitting and we've done it in the past

and so one of the videos if you want to see how that's done is the keeper's hive two colony system which by the way is still alive still doing great what we did is my friend paula came here from new jersey you did one side i did the other side and so those two colonies represent six contributing colonies so how did we do it well we started off with finding a colony that looked like they were going to swarm anyway how would we know that so when you look in the colony and you see they're building swarm cells and they're not yet cab to you're ahead of the game and you can still find the queen so they've decided they're going to swarm so it's a great time to do a split so you find the queen you leave the queen cells in there behind and you pull a queen and one frame of brood and we start our super split that way so we did

that imagine the keeper's hive colony colony and the central shared column which is where they store their surplus honey together combined so she found her queen her frame i found my queen and two frames of brood i brought in and i started the setup that way now it is of course important that when you do that you bring drawn comb to the colony you're removing the queen and resources from. And you also push the remaining brood altogether. Don't checkerboard or split them apart, please. Okay.

And then so the new frames go to the outboard positions, number one, number 10, or number one or number eight, if it's an eight frame or 10 frame deep brood box. And then we go on. So I pulled two brood frames from three different colonies. She pulled two frames from three different colonies. And so we had six. and then of course added extra comb so that they could expand into those boxes.

Now the way that is set up, it looks like a 10-frame length-strosth box, but I believe they're actually eight, because they have to accommodate the spacer that's in the middle that supports that central column. And of course, the bees share, as I mentioned before, that central column, there's a queen excluder there, so the queens stay on either side. When we did that, part of this question for Melvin is, do they fight? Is there a conflict? No, there was zero. What we're getting when we pull, and this is capped brood for the most part that we pulled because those are the ones are going to emerge soon.

Nurse bees when they come out, they're super easy going, but you also have to bring some nurse bees with them. So when you're doing your super split and when you're pulling from a contributing colony that's strong, you shake nurse bees into a tub or a container. Why not directly into the box where the frames are going? because what we want are the bees that can fly away, the foragers, for example, we want them to return to their colony. We just want the nurse bees. They're the ones that are going to stay on the hive and they're going to stay on the brood and keep it warm. And that's what's going on outside right now, by the way. I'm not talking about this split in particular, but the amount of

brood nests are to keep warm from the workers. You need lots of workers to do it. Those are some risks that we talk about later. But anyway, so we put those. all together and we do that during a prime swarm season when things everything's abundant and then they recover really fast and it worked very well so yes you can absolutely do it there's no honeymoon there you just put them all together and they'll get along nurse bees are very easy going so we're going to jump right into question number two now this is the YouTube channel is Derek Campbell but it says David so I posted to a group recent

that I have live active though diminished numbers in bees who are bringing in pollen. Does that mean I have a queen? You told me yes. And so my first look, southern central Pennsylvania, 77 degrees Fahrenheit, said I don't. I wasn't able to find any eggs or larva in my maybe too quick look in the box. I'll check again when the weather warms up again but here's something and I'm so glad that David asked this question because for a lot of beekeepers that got into their hives over the past week in particular we had the warm up last Friday I suggested for those of you who could take advantage of that warm weather get just a little bit of syrup on there to kick them off because it was going to get cold again and

here we are and the reason we only wanted to introduce a little bit of syrup not full feeders for example is we didn't want it still to be wet or those feeders to be full when we got into the current weather condition which was forecast that it would be cold and snowy and here it is just like that so they gave them a boost and so one of the things that happens if your bees are responding well in minor to the environment around them they don't actually build massive brood right now because it's a sketchy time of year. Remember what I said about the super split. We need to bring enough bees to cover the brood so they can keep them warm.

Because beyond just feeding and caring for them, resource-wise, they also have to have the numbers to cover that brood. Otherwise, you'll end up with what's called chilled brood. And they either cannibalize those depending on their stages of growth and development, or you can actually go out after this weather event. look at the landing boards and you may see pupa state bees pulled out onto the landing board because it just couldn't keep them warm and they died

so these are the risks in artificially building up a colony early in spring with a lot of brood and artificial nutrition and remember what I said last week water first and they need carbohydrates second these are the most important things in order for your colony to survive And then so the protein, which is the pollen that they're bringing in, is third. And so usually if that's in concert with what's going on in the environment, your bees tend to build at the right pace.

Now, if you got excited and threw a whole bunch of pollen patties in there and boosted the pollen and protein resources for your colonies, trying to build those brood areas, you may have done that. So if you have a bunch of open larvae, then it's more than they can keep up with. unless your colony is very strong population-wise, and you end up losing them. So the bees will pull back. So it's often common now to see what David's describing as,

no brood, no eggs, nothing yet. But we still have what's considered a queen-right colony. So the indicator that I referenced was the amount of pollen coming into the colony. So when bees are planning to leave or they don't have the resources to survive, you'll see them bringing in nectar, sure, carbohydrates any time but when it comes to the proteins the pollen that means there's brood present and they also put a count on that so when we send the supervisor and the other grand monkeys out they're looking for more than 10 loads of pollen per minute and that's midday

to early afternoon when it's nice and warm of course it doesn't count when it's cold freezing blowing or raining so when they go out there and there is not 10 per minute there was 20 30 and more per minute so when they're doing that um then we know that they're storing up and they're planning to produce uh their brood and increased brood if they haven't done it already and that's natural because it's coming from outside it's coming from the trees and resources in the environment so the other part of that is uh what happens if it's just a light load of pollen coming in wouldn't that also indicate that that They have brood and that there's a queen.

No, and here's why. If you had, say, four or five coming in per minute. Now, this is comparative. You have to look at other colonies as well and see what their pollen loads are coming in, too. So we're looking for one that's underperforming, even though the environment provides what they need. So what you could have in that colony would be a laying worker group or a queen that is not capable of laying workers. instead lays drones. So it produces drone eggs. And then workers are capable of that too if there's a queen completely absent. So those are very distinctive. But the pollen count is your

early indicator that that might be going on. And that's why for David, and I suspect that if he watches this, that when it warms up again, the next phase, the next warm up, which happens later in the wheat you'll start to see eggs and subsequent larvae and then pupating bees i betcha so don't jump the gun don't order replacement queen stuff like that wait and see if they're provisioning the colony chances are still high question number three comes from julie from nicomas florida this was a pretty long question here it says um last week um i had a hive at a different apiary with a might count of 67 out of 300 sampled bees. All other hives around it were zero to three. So that's pretty good. I started an OAV series right away. So if you don't know what OAV is,

it's oxalic acid vaporization. And so here's my question. I was thinking I should re-queen that hive and never make splits from it. But then I got to wondering about the difference between hygienic mite behavior and mite resistant behavior and they do seem mite resistant in that they seem healthy and thriving no deforming virus no brood disease good laying pattern making drones packing in pollen and nectar there's such a thing as being resistant to the negative effects of mites and perhaps I should propagate the genetics of this queen. So, and this is a two-part question. I'm going to give Julie extra credit letter and ask two questions,

but I'm going to respond to this one first. So let's talk about the difference between resistance and tolerance. Think about resistance. If you were in a community and you're resisting an opposing force, you're going to do damage to them. So resistant genetics, resistant bees do damage and attack can defend themselves against mites physically. So that includes varroa's sensitive hygiene, which is when they uncap a cell that they smell varomites in. Sometimes it just uncap it, let it air

a little bit, which interrupts and destroys the reproductive capabilities. And then they may leave it open or just cap it again. And you can see that caps have been resealed. So that's hygienic behavior. They also have grooming, which I love to video. I have bees that are obsessive, compulsive groomers. And when When they groom a mite, they grab onto it and they chew its feet before they dispense with it, which is sad. It really is to look in a tray underneath this green bottom board and find a mite with its feet chewed off. But so those are resistant bees. They're actively getting rid of the physical mite itself. Now let's talk about tolerance. So if we have mite tolerant bees,

and that's what we're talking about here. Would you breed from tolerant bees? So that means we find a colony, we do a mite count, mite wash, and you find they have high numbers, but hey, the bees look okay, they're still functioning, they're still doing stuff. And now the question from Julie is, should you maybe actually rethink it, since they're demonstrating that they can live in concert with the mites, take the virus loads that they're vectoring around, and still survive, isn't that stock that we want? not really here's the point given those two choices so let's oversimplify it i've got resistance stock

that's actively going after the mites low numbers all treated the same those are the ones i want the ones that are showing a tolerance they're still living in spite of high mite loads they have the potential to spread the mites to other colonies that don't have that resistance this is overly simplified because they're also spreading disease and there are sublethal impacts. In other words, there are other performance gauges for that colony, like how well they produce surplus, the brood pattern looks good and things like that, but we're early in the year. We don't really want to tolerate the mites if we have the choice of bees that will do it on their own and go after them.

So personally, you could spread the mites and spread the disease to colonies that don't have that. tolerance, right? And so this could be an endless discussion because well then if we had more tolerant ones that had the mites with them and the ones that weren't tolerant just eventually died out, then we would still have bees that were tolerant, but you understand they can get a point in their reproduction where they're not so tolerant. In other words, where disease does start to show and having high numbers of road structure mites in a colony in a backyard apiary. is not a good thing in my opinion. So I'm going to suggest to someone who has this setup

that you do requeen from those that are showing might resistance over my tolerance. That's just my thing. So the second part of this is you mentioned last week that your deer hive 44 will be a prime hive for you to do splice. it's from is this because they're unique quirks and they're seeming seeming will to survive so colony 44 is just one of those anomalies that are fun to have if you've been keeping bees for a long time you get the odd little colony that does strange behaviors underdogs the one that people tell you they're not going to make it at all and yet here they are and we're going to assess them for might loads we have to this year we did not at any

in while they were building up so we're gonna see what's going on with them because they're so strong and doing so well we just want to see what's going on now it's likely that they're just a mix of all the genetics that are already in my backyard apiary I can't help but think with all the colonies that we have here we are significantly impacting local genetics here which which makes our stewardship of our own bees that much more important so yeah I'm just going to work with them and follow along with them and use that queen as much as I possibly can and spread those resources around.

And by resources, I mean genetic resources. So if they build a bunch of queen cells, I'm going to keep that queen in her own little sanctuary so she doesn't get away from me. And I'm going to use the offspring, which of course, once those new queens emerge and they fly off and make new colonies, they're going to, of course, breed with drones. Which ones do I want them breeding with? Let's pretend we can control that. I want them breeding with the drones that are coming out within the next few weeks. The reason for that is I'm anticipating the end of March, the first week of April will be the first surge of swarming. And when they do that, we're going to get the genetics from these drones that have come also from overwintering colonies in a perfect world, feral colonies that are out in the woods

that are just doing super, but we'll just see how that goes. But that's why I'm, you know, playing with them Any of your top performing colonies, we want their reproductive material out in the environment, affecting other colonies, feral and managed as well, because we have other beekeepers in the area that their queens, their virgin queens will be flying out. We want to make sure they make with our drones. That way, along down the line, we get our own genetics back to us, locally adapted stock. That's what I'm doing. Okay, question number four comes from Jesse. This is a fourth year beekeeper with five overwintered hives in Kokomo, Indiana, north of Indianapolis. And it is March 5, 2006. It's 63 degrees Fahrenheit.

All five hives are bringing in lots of pollen on the warmer days, short of a few crocus. I am not aware of any pollen sources. Do you have any idea what the source of pollen is this time of year before? the spring flow. So we know we look early to tree pollen of course in the wetlands as I mentioned already there are lots of plants out there. There are apps by the way and I have several of them on my phone. So I look up to see what the pollen is and mostly that's geared towards people with allergies. So I look for apps that also describe the tree species, grass and things like that that are producing pollen. Of course it goes airborne

and causes humans great distress. So this also can help us with the bees. If you want to know what your environment is doing, what the nectar flow is and whether or not you're going to have a dearth and time of year when your bees will not have resources, you would go to a website called B-Scape.P-S-U-D-U. And there it tells you what your landscape is like, and that includes pollinator plants at different times of the year.

Like a lot of apps and like a lot of programs like that, it depends on users providing information. So when you and I walk outside and we look at some plants, something flowering or we hear the bees working something, you take a picture of it and you upload it and you get your plant identified. And it also contributes to a database that shows in this region these wild native plants are here and these flowers are providing, nectar and pollen or one or the other to your honeybees and then it becomes part of a pollinator map.

So that's really interesting and the longer that program exists, the more information it will provide and also meaningful to some backyard beekeepers or commercial beekeepers in particular. It reports on pesticide use through agriculture. So you'll also know what that loading looks like where you are. I learned something recent which was kind of bothering me. I didn't really that agricultural sprays and lawn sprays and things like that were actually killing robins because they're pulling worms up through the soil and eating in effect they're eating the pesticides so that was new interesting and so we definitely don't want to be in areas where people are spraying and if you can convince your neighbors people in your neighborhood people in urban areas not to use herbicides all kinds of pesticides on their lawns just to keep that perfect clean yard it would go a long way for not only helping out your honeybees but all kinds of other wildlife as well so anyway one of the apps that i checked into because of this question is called air scope a i r sceoppe and it's an app that you load up to your phone and it gives you a bunch of information

about pollen sources air quality even whether or not you can get a sunburn and uh it has a satellite scans as well. One of the reasons that that is interesting is because they show when wind is carrying pollen, in some cases 100 miles or more, which is super interesting. So those would be wind pollinated plants, of course, but that's included in that app. That thing is free. So you can go to Arescope and it's just something that I checked out myself and I have several others. And if you wanted to get the premium, it's $4.99 for a year to have it advertisement free. I didn't like that little ads pop up and block the data that I'm trying to look at.

And when you hit the ad trying to move it around, it takes you to someplace where you can buy, step in, sketch your shoes or something like that, which you certainly don't need. So anyway, that's it. That's how we do it. So physically going out, looking for pollen and nectar sources, and that's your best really. In fact, it gets you out, get you active, gets you looking around.

But other than that, bee scape. And then, of course, now I'm trying out air scope premium. Question number five comes from Wendy, Wendy in Seattle, Washington. Since I don't want sugar syrup being stored in my long laying deeps along with nectar, is there a reason not to supplementary feed my bees with fondant during these next 10 days of

atmospheric river in the Pacific Northwest. Do they store fondant in the frames along with nectar? Also, don't want to encourage robbing in sugar syrup. So here's the thing. One of the benefits of the hive alive syrup is it does not kick off robbing in the same way that Honeybee Healthy syrup does because it's that lemon grass that's in Honeybee Healthy that draws them in. where a hive lives smells more like time all.

And so that scent doesn't really draw a lot of bees in the same robbing frenzy that they do towards other syrups. But I'm also going to answer this question about the fondant. That depends on what your fondant is made out of, but here's the thing, any supplement you're putting in your beehive that your bees are going to eat, regardless of the level of likelihood that they'll store it as honey. Sugar syrup, guaranteed.

some of it is going to make it into your stored honey and even when you use dry sugars sugar bricks sugar blocks things like that it has the potential to show up in stored honey if you put in a fondant pack like hive live fondant which you should be using fred 10 so you guess get a discount on if you buy it any of the hive live live products by the way you have to anticipate that it could potentially get into of course the sugar syrup get into the honey and get into capped honey. So then you couldn't say it's 100% environmental wildflower honey, for example. So when your honey supers are on, you're no longer feeding like that.

You shouldn't be. Now, if you're at the time of year where all we're doing is building brood, which I am personally here, it would be safe to put any of that on because it's going to find its way into those frames and cells in the comb that are adjacent to the brood building. so they're using it just for survival and for kicking off the spring flow and then when the spring flow kicks in the nectar flow and the dandy lions that's my indicator here a field of dandy lions of full bloom that's it no more subsequent feeding of any hive that you plan to pull honey supers from so once the supers are on all feeding stops all of it you can't guarantee it just depends on how much of a purist you

you want to be. But for me personally, that's the cut. As soon as the super goes on, all feed stops. So fondant, is it likely that fondant is going to find its way into your finished honey in the hive? No. Is it possible? Yes. So it just depends on how far you want to take that. Question number six comes from Jen, Charlotte, Michigan. Is it possible to move a colony from our Langstroth hive into a top bar hive if so how would that work so I'm not going to steal anyone's thunder here I know how I do I know how to do it I have one of these adapters out in another building here it's a like a nucleus hive deep box five-framer that goes on the end of your top bar hive and you're probably wondering

where would you see that where would you get plans if you wanted to build one yourself What if you just wanted to buy one? Then you go to this website. This is my shout-out for today. No great surprise. Be mindful.com. B-E-E-E-Mindful.com. They have the vertical to horizontal hive conversion.

That's what you're looking for. They have the prints. They have pictures. They have demonstrations. That website is great at teaching people. And then if you absolutely have to buy something, because you can't cut wood or find someone else who can cut wood for you

or find an old nucleus box that you can chop up. They have the prints there and they will also sell you one. So it's up to you. But that's it. I want to send you to that website. Be mindful and for that's the vertical

to horizontal hive conversion. I have not put mine out. So I will say this about the top R hive because I'm putting another one out. The top of our hive. bar hive it's easiest just to put swarms in them for me and now that I have an established top bar hive and a colony in it and I set up a new top bar hive and I need to colonize that it's going to be easy because when these wise guys that are over here in the top bar hive that's just come out of winter

when they start building up and they want to run out their queen and they start building their queen cells I can pull the queen out put her in the new top bar hive and pull a couple of frames and then get those top bars going and there you have it easy-peasy transfer same to same otherwise you do have to cut you'd have to physically modify the hive to do it so moving swarms in is your easiest most pain-free way and since we're in advance of swarm season you have time to do it why not catch some swarms next question is number seven comes from damien i'm going to mess this up dunedin Otago, Or Itago, New Zealand.

As you were speaking last week about robbing in its autumn or fall here and the robbing pressure is intense, I've always wondered about the guard bees and the hive scent. The guard bees can tell if a bee comes in and is from their hive or not. But say there's a swarm.

I hive that swarm in the apiary, and now I have two hives with the same hive scent. and for a while the bees from the hived swarm could go back to the old hive since they smell right what causes this change new queen and the old hive and how long do they have access to the old hive are you aware of any research on this well the research i'm going to quote comes from the university of direct experience and that is a university that we're all enrolled in because we're going to get out there we're going to look at them we're going to see what happens and this is pretty easy to figure out and it's a lot of fun by the way back here beekeepers play with swarms it's so fun

so let's talk about what's happening when they're swarming they can send out the old existing queen has she been made it she sure has because she's the queen mother of that entire colony of bees with the exception of drifters that have moved in uninvited so you always have a percentage of bees in every colony that aren't from that queen let's move on so the swarm goes out they cluster on a branch they're a bit of whacking and you're going to hive those in another hive in your own aviary no problem at all what queen do the bees prefer to be with they want to be with the queen that's made it she smells the best and one of the ways that you can find this out is a back-haired beekeeper who just wants to experiment and doesn't care if things go wrong

if you have queens and queen clips and you hang them up near one another and one is mated and one is made it and one is a virgin queen so we have virgin queens in the colony that they left that means her pheromones are not as strong so they're still spreading around for a while it's not very long actually the physical queen mandibular pheromone the queen that's leaving that has left and that keeps them cohesive they know that they belong there and we've got foragers out and about that weren't even home by the way when the swarm happened so they blew it they missed it they missed all the action they just come home and up to 70% of the population is gone. And when they're met at the landing board, by the way, as soon as the swarm emits, do you know what the remaining bees do that are on the landing

board? They fan their nascent off glands, as if they're changing their minds. They're trying to solicit as many recruits as they possibly can back from that swarm that took off that's on a bivouac location somewhere. And so they're just trying to get all these bees back. But you know that even bees that are just flying by will join the colony. and particularly if they're in a similar situation where they've also swarmed because here's what happens swarming tends to happen at least where i am in groups like one colony swarms at 11 a.m. While you're out there trying to catch that one you hear a loud noise and another colony of swarming as well and then later that afternoon you hear another one and they're swarming it's because they've all got the same

exposure they've all got the same climate conditions and they're all prone to swarm at the same time assuming you haven't done anything to stop it so the queen that's been mated that's out with the new swarm that's the strongest one now the foragers have a tendency to forget and go back home and that's okay percentage of them always do that here's the beauty of a newly-hived swarm in your own apiary there will be other bees that fly by that just volunteer to join them they're in flux all the time someone did do a study since the request was about studies that an average of 20% of the resident workers, foragers, and any hive at any given time are not from that colony. They just happen to move in. And we can prove that over and over again. So it's nothing to worry about, by the way, and the newly hived swarm,

I use those for comb builders. So there's an example, you're establishing a new brood box, and they're ready to build comb. They will build comb if they're suck out, side for two days. Up here behind me on this branch is comb that was on a tree branch during a bivouac. A 24-hour bivouac they built that comb on a tree branch near the end of the year. So they're just they're primed. They're ready to build comb and I highly recommend since we're talking about swarm season now that when you do hive a new swarm of bees that you load them up with

one-to-one sugar syrup. If you don't want to feed your bees anything that's on you. That's good. that's fine but I like them to be heavily provisioned and here's why they will build a bunch of comb you can put new foundation in there you can put foundation less frames in there which is just a wooden frame with nothing on it you just run a little primer bead of beeswax and they start drawing out comb you can keep them doing that by keeping them provided with one to one sugar syrup one part dry sugar to one part water and feed that to that colony because they keep building comb. Now once that sugar syrup resource stops,

if you let it run out or you don't do it at all, then once what they've carried with them is exhausted and once what they're getting out of the environment, wanes momentarily, the cone production drops way off. They also need warmth for the most part and that warmth can come from the population. Some swarms, prime swarms in spring, can be huge, can be bigger than a five frame nucleus hive

can even handle. You can fill a 10 frame, frame brood bonds with one swarm fill it and then also super it at the same time it all just depends on how big the colony is that you collect but around here you can get massive colonies so they do the queen that departed actually has the greatest attraction to other bees in the vicinity and uh they'll just do fine so i hope that helps i don't even worry about you know i put them right in the same apiary three hives over whatever hive is empty and we'll talk about that a little bit of course at the end of today but we're going to go to question number eight which comes from frederick in thornhill tennessee

says i have one dead out and believe i will lose one more of my three hives had two days in the eighties so inspected weak hive only the size of a baseball at this point cluster is trying to raise brood One strong hive has two frames of capped brood and my question is about my resources. I'm getting four packages the first week of April and three packages the second week of April. I probably have three frames of empty comb. I have 12 deep frames of funny honey and 24 if I lose the other hive. I do have eight frames of better comb. How should I set up 10 frame deeps and 5 frame?

nukes. I thought about extracting honey to feed back and let the bees clean the frames, but worried about setting up robbing. You're right there. Don't extract honey and put comb in that's covered in, freshly extracted honey on a new colony that you're making with these packaged bees. So once you put the package bees in, this is a two-part question, so I'll deal with this part first. I just spread those resources evenly. Now, Frederick here, mentioned better comb. Better comb is synthetic comb for better bee. That is my emergency late season backup comb for underdogs. It's expensive. It's about $10 a frame by the way, fully drawn. But the bees do use it straight away. But when you're putting together packages, I would not waste it on them

as long as I had other resources as described here. So I would take the 12 frames of honey and the 8 frames store the a frames of better comb off to the side I would put the foundation in the combs of honey in each of those hives equally distributed and I would center those up and move all the rest of the frames in there with heavy wax foundation hopefully and put feed on every one of those packages package bees are very different from a swarm that you collect they're not necessarily primed to build comb and we don't know how they've been treated or where they've come from and they just dump them all in boxes they're not sorting them out or anything so you get the package you need to take care of them because

we need them to last long enough to make sure that your new queen in each box broods up so that would be what i would do that's probably overly simplified but i would just spread it apart i would hold that better come keep that for an ace in the hole sort of thing says you're on a side question adding a lot of propolis hive bodies so if a double deep is set up with only one propolis body should it be the top should it be the bottom and so here's the thing so if it sounds like a double deep so if you have two deep boxes you have 10 frame propolis box so propola is a company is a hive that comes out of premier you can also get those boxes from nature's image farm those were the the children that said this is the way to be at the beginning of this video today

and they sell propola boxes that are treated as endura hives and you could get those two so if I had one of those and then I had a plane box when we're starting a new colony we only want one box set up in the first place but if we're ultimately know that we're going to put up to the first box a brood box should be the one with that roughed up interior that is for and that's because it's your brood area that is medicinally the most critical area of the entire hive so we know that that's going to be that way going forward and then the honey supers above that could be anything so less important so that's easy to answer that one so I want to thank you for those questions

that was the last one for the day we're in the fluff section already while a storm rages outside and I'm here for you because I don't care of the storms raging outside. And it's Friday of the 13th, so I'm going to be watching scary movies tonight. It's because I like to do that. And I know you wanted to know that I like to do that. So anyway, the fluff section, be ready for swarming. Do not be off guard. Hopefully it hasn't already happened.

Now, I know the people in the South, I know they've all got 100 swarms already. I'm sure Jeff Horschoff and Randy McCaffrey, they're just loaded with swarms every two feet that they walk. there's another swarm and they get them and they want to live with them and all that stuff good for them let's move on so swarm season is coming here you've got dead outs in your backyard i have some i don't have near as many as i hope for i mean anticipated this spring uh so what you need to do right now is instead of sitting out swarm traps all over the place if you're already back yard beekeeper and you've got dead outs your swarm traps are already there in your apiary there's no reason for you to go anywhere else

That's just between us. So you want to clean out your deadouts. So get yourself a wolf box. Sounds cool. Those are just little pocket blowers that they have a USB battery on them. I have two of them. So I keep them both charged up in case one runs out. And they were reviewed by a YouTube channel called Project Farm.

That guy does the best reviews on gear, hands down, of anybody. So you take these wolf box things out, you open up the hive, you pull the frames out and you blow every dead bee out of there that you can. Clear out any leftover capped honey. Get it out completely. Replace it if you have to with new foundation, new frames, things like that. We don't want any pollen left in there. You don't even want one dead bee left in there. You want it as clean as possible and we're going to use the old brood comb. We're going to pack it down. If it's more than one box, we're going to pack it down to one. box. We're going to close off the top and not have any venting in that. You want an

insulated cover. You do not want to put any kind of sugar syrup or any food resources in that hive at all. It was a dead out. We're going to clean it out and now we're using it to draw the attention of scouts from colonies that are making preparations to swarm in the next few weeks. Because what happens is scouts go out in advance of your bees departing in a swarm even before they've gone to their bivouac location the scouts have been out and they're checking out different beehives you can and trust me on this I've had 100% success getting unoccupied dead out hive bodies in my apiary occupied by swarms on their own we call those

self-hiving swarms you can do it. However, if the scouts show up and they zip inside a hive and they start checking it out and it's got the great smell of propolis, it's got the great smell of old brood comb, the things that drew them there in the first place, but then they come across a patch of mold and dead bees and all clustered in a corner and you're one of the beekeepers that somebody said, hey, just put a swarm in there and it'll clean all those things out for you. No, you clean them out. Use air as much as possible. I also have an air compressor and I have a little nozzle that goes with it that is long and very narrow so it really focuses a concentrated airflow and you can blow dead bees out of the cells with that and remember the brood comb has pretty tough cells in the first place so the wolf box blower clears it'll blow right off the bottom of everything so don't just dirty up your bee brush and things like that use air as much as possible just blow it right out on the ground it doesn't matter. And clean all your frames, get it all back together and put your most used brood

comb in the center and then if you've got new foundation that you have to put in there because you throw away frames or something like that. We rotate the comb, the old comb out on every five years. So at the five year point, 20% of the frames from every hive, especially brood comb, gets removed and you can power wash it and make your own decisions about how you want to get rid of that. But so that's coming up. Swarm season's coming. So and it's a dead out. So you can do that in any weather. You cannot use weather as an excuse for not working in your B yard for that stuff. So pack it on single deeps, put a tiny touch of swarm commander in there. And you can even test out those ultraviolet entrances that we talked about in the past. Look up UV Beehive entrance. And they're

blue in color. The guy that did the article and research about that sells his on Etsy. And you could get those if you want to try that out. But I've had no problem getting the bees, the scouts to find it, the bees to occupy those boxes without any special entrance mods or attractants. Other than you can put a little touch of Swarm Commander in there. That stuff works. Now here's the thing. Some people are new. Some people are using Swarm Commander. and they do a little spritz here and it sprits there and everywhere. Don't. Don't overdo it. If you overdo Swarm Commander, which is really a synthetic Nassanoff scent,

it smells like lemongrass. It's far more complex than that. It is very good stuff. It'll last you for years. I know there's an expiration on the bottle. I've got a bottle in there that's five years old and still attracts bees. Here's the other thing that you can do. It's premature.

for that right now if you're in my neck of the woods but let's say the end of next week at the end of next week pick a branch on a tree that you historically have had swarms bivouac on pick the branch that you want the bees to collect on and lightly spritz it with swarm commander you get bees to stop and check it out just because of the way it smells because what they think is there are other bees that are on there that are fanning the nassanauts gland and uh they're attracting other bees to join them and bees do just randomly join up but then when they realize there's no queen because that's now that's the queen mandibular pheromone that they're searching for they don't find it so it just gets some use to coming to that spot and eventually you'll get

swarms collecting on that tree those branches um it works kind of like a russian sion without actually being a russian sion it's another attractive method but finding a bruce branch and just using that same branch year after year works perfectly for me it will work for you too so i hope that's enough to get you guys going uh for the coming week i want to thank you for being here if you have any questions at all please write them down in the comment section below this video you can also don't forget go to the way to be dot org click on the page mark contact fill out the form and let me know what's on your mind thank you for being here i'm frederick done and this has been the way to be See?