The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 356 with Frederick Dunn, Swarms, and forage...

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/AO2-uJs6iZY

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, May the 22nd of 2006. This is back here to bekeeping questions and answers episode number 356. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm glad that you're here if you want to know we're going to talk about today in this session. Please go down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order and maybe some additional links that will help you find things or get more information. So if you want to know how to submit a topic of your own for future consideration, please go to my main website, which is the wayto-be.org. Click on the page marked contact. And you can fill out a form.

And it doesn't have to be a question. It can be something that you might be interested in, and there just might be the chance that I would talk about it here. So I know what you want to know about right off the bat. What's going on outside? Well, interesting. And where is outside? northeastern part of the United States of America, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. 60 degrees Fahrenheit right now. It's over Caz, it's windy. And guess what's happening as a five minutes ago?

One of my colonies is swarming. All the conditions out there suggest that swarming would not happen yet. There they go. And I'm in here because I've put you first. That's how important you are. So 16 degrees Celsius. 12.5 mile an hour wind gusts right now. So that's what you're going to be. 20 kilometers per hour in case you're wondering and it's only going to get worse that's right look on the bright side today it's better than tomorrow tomorrow saturday it's going to be rainy 90% chance of rain partnered with a lot of wind and when you know we're having a gathering here not for you we're having a gathering here if you know my family the grand monkeys my sister stuff up got so top's warm risk you know other than clearly right now is going to be

Tuesday, May the 26th, and that's for the northeastern part of the U.S., of course. Where you are, it might be different. And Wednesday's going to be the hottest day, 75 degrees Fahrenheit, it's going to zip right up there. So for Memorial Day weekend, one of the things that people want to know, and by the way, there's a lot of pollen coming in. So what's it coming from? What's the source? What about nectar?

Where could they get that? Because we are talking about honeybees, and we're back our beekeepers, not necessarily beginner beekeepers, by the. the way. A large percentage of my audience has been keeping bees for a very long time and that's flattering that you're out there still watching because if you learn one new thing, right, it was worth it. So anyway, right outside, let's look past the fact that I have a big black bear roaming around and mostly we would panic about that because they would munch on the bees. But guess what's happening right now? It's what's called the fawn drop. So the white-tailed

deer are having fons and that means that the black bears a lot of them are fon hunting specialists and they have about three weeks to do it so i've got this big black bear creeping around looking for fons and he's going almost foot by foot into the wetlands here which is where there is a dough out there that's supposed to have a fon and they only have three weeks to catch up on them so that's happening out there right now oak pollen's coming in birch pale yellow pollen is coming in dandelions are still going but you notice the bees are backing off on them and why would they be doing that? because there's a lot of nectar and where is it? It's on the black locusts.

So we have those here if you have them where you are, check them out, get your binoculars and see what's going on. You can hear them before you can see them. It's that good. But you know the black locust bloom is only 10 to 14 days. So of course when it rains tomorrow it's going to mess that up. And then what's that going to do? Your bees are going to be consuming the resources they've recently gained in their hives. So now you have a judge for.

call. The other thing is, what do I like to do this time of year? Three-day weekend, of course. I like to plant seeds. When should you plant them ahead of a rain? When's it going to rain? Tomorrow. That means that as soon as I'm done doing this right now with you, I'm going to run outside and throw seeds all over the place. Well, you know, not random willy-nilly, but I'm going to go out in my pre-pre-pre-pre-plect locations and I'm going to plant seeds because in the rain's going to drive them in for me. What else? So plant your seeds. Oh, how about those opening sequences? Here's the thing. A lot of people buy B stuff, B equipment. Be equipment's expensive. Sometimes you pay a lot for B equipment and it's not that well made. So what do you think about the opening sequences where we give today a shout out to a small business, bug farmer. And that's where that hive box comes from. Customized, personalized, and how about the finish? So that's that.

on the be yard right now and guess what else there's bees in it are ready that's how quick I move and we're gonna see how that finish holds up there's a lot of beehives out there with a lot of different finishes from ecowood to endure hives plastic hives of course Paiapame lice and hives which are polystyrene and then they have to be painted and then we have this really good marine-grade finish by bug farmer so if you've never heard of that and I hope you have it's also a YouTube channel that you should check out go look at the stuff because the pricing is really good and I had no idea.

So tell me what you think. Go to that website. My inspection is done. That's right. The State Inspector, Department of Agriculture, State of Pennsylvania, showed up, did an inspection on me on Monday. How did I do? What do you think?

Perfect. Of course. Zero hits. No brew disease. No deforming virus. No. Parasitic mite syndrome. Everything was great. So I'm good to go for the rest of the year.

And you know when my last inspection had been before that like you care. But anyway, 2015. So, 11 years. Think about that. I think they just know, you know, my bees are okay. There's no reason to check me out. So what else is going on? I think that's pretty much it.

If you have a question right now, a picture you want to share, some topic you want to discuss with your friends leaving me out of it, you go to the fellowship on, on Facebook. The fellowship is called the way to be fellowship. You check them out. Talk to people. Look at stuff. So we're going to jump right in with the very first comment or question. This comes from Johno, who's been a long-term viewer and a frequent commenter.

He says, hi, Fred. Hi, 44. Revisited. I hope it's still going well. Cheers. Johno. So, you know what I did? This is how much you care about the people that listen and watch. I went outside, I set up a camera, and I recorded Hive 44. And for those of you don't know, there's a video that I put out last year. Hyve 44 did some weird things. They built a shroud over their entrance out of Propolis and Bees Wax, and it was super interesting. The other thing was it was a profound underdog colony.

And that's because, much like right now, we have swarms that have multiple queens in them. This particular swarm had a queen in it, that none of the bees in the swarm cared about. So I put her in a queen clip. I put her on a woven wire fence and then waited for a cluster of bees to form around her. And then I put her in a ditch effort last minute.

Who cares, Nucleus Hive? And then we double up the nucleus box. That meant 10 deep Langstroth frames. And they did that weird shrouding over there. They went through winter. They're doing great. And so because of Gano asking about them, That's what the long run inset video is today.

That's hive number 44 that you're watching right now, and it will be there through the rest of this discussion. That's right. They're doing fantastic. In fact, it's one of those columns you just feel like it's never going to fail. It has no chance of failure. They're so healthy, so vibrant. And a little bit, little bit testy.

So I did go out there, though, without any production because I'm brave. Question number two, this comes from Aaron from Lincoln, Nebraska. Making Super Splits. Is nine frames of capped, brewed too many, as long as they have enough room? Okay, so what a super split is? Let's talk about that first, which is something that this is a really good time of year to be doing. When you want to build another colony, or you've got a colony that's underpopulated, I'm less of a fan of doing this for an underpopulated colony.

But if you got a new box, a new hive, for example, and you want it to populate it. But you don't want to put a big impact on the colony that you take resources from. And by resources, I mean the brood, some nurse bees, capped broods, maybe some honey or some open nectar cells, right? So what we do is we go around to a bunch of different colonies, and there are more than 43 right now here. We look at the ones that are super populated that have problems, that have issues. they might swarm let's add that off we can decongest their brood area by taking one or two frames out of a colony now that by itself would not make a very good starter colony so if we continue that though and we put each of them into a hive butler tote uh then as we go we are bringing empty frames

with drawn comb in them with us so we pull the frame of brood make sure the queen's not on it put that in there and then we replace it with a comb drawn comb foundation and so we're not leaving gaps and we're pushing them all together and keeping the brood area organized the way it was so when you remove a frame of brood and verify the queen's not on it if they only have one queen of course i'll talk about that in a minute you push the rest of them together and the frame that you brought with you with drawn comb goes on the number one or number 10 position if it's a 10 frame box, number one or number eight position if it's an eight frame box, because we want to keep all the brood nice and snug together,

particularly when we have weather that we have in the forecast right now. It's going to keep them all locked in. So anyway, then we go hive to hive to hive, and you're ultimately going to encounter a hive that's got queen cells in it under production. And then you're also going to come across the queen, as happens off. Now you have a queen to go with your super spade. So you've collected, let's say you hit three hives, two frames per hive, one of those had an extra queen, you took the queen.

And so now you've got six frames of brood, and you're going to put them in a 10 frame box. So it also is going to be very important to feed them. Now, capped brood is of course the most efficient, and you need to shake a few extra nurse bees in there too, just because they're going to have to keep that cap-brew warm. And the queen will probably go in delay. So then we'll put a light sugar syrup on there, one to one, close it up.

I would not go so far as to put nine frames in a 10-frame box, for example. I think it is too many because the population will explode. And it's unnecessary just for me. So now this is personal preference. If you had some kind of big situation coming up or you need a pile of bees in a hive to really go gangbusters. We're a couple of weeks out from a meaningful nectar flow around here, which is going to come from clover next.

So we're looking at, you know, well into June on that. So we need to watch out. And with cold weather, they need to keep it warm. So the larger the brood, the more bee power necessary to maintain that 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit to keep them warm. so I would not do you know that many because they're going to reproduce super fast anyway but again up to you but now you probably have to start off with two boxes instead of a single breed deep and you don't know you know that's cap to brew that you pulled out of there but they

can be in the process of emerging even when you pull those frames which is also why you handle them carefully and one of the ways that keeps them all calm is by putting them in something a tote like the hive butler toad fred 10 discount if you're going to get one anyway uh or is it fred 5 i don't even know you just have to ask but so when you put them in there they're very calm and here's the interesting thing too because it's something that no one taught me to do i just thought it was something that would be a good way to start a colony when we're putting all these brute frames together and the nurse bees together they're all getting along there's no conflict there aren't any dead bees or bees swirling around each other on the ground fighting

So it actually works very well and they accept the queen that we bring in at the same time and then she gets to go straight to work So we don't want to create a situation where they would potentially swarm right away too. So if you overpopulate it, you might have that situation So what are your thoughts by the way? Question number three. Let's move on. This comes from Kathy from Odessa, Delaware. My question is about venting. I'm going to overwinter using the condensing hive. However, I'm not sure how to handle the hot months. I live in Zone 7B. This past week, my two nuke colonies have been bearding, hanging out on the landing board and washboarding.

The temps have been in the low 90s, and they are in full sun until around 3 p.m. My current setup installed 5-frame nuke in 8-frame deep boxes on 5-5. Okay, so we did a transfer. We actually have an 8-frame box. sense and we are in an nectar flow and I checked on them five days later they were building fast so I put another deep five frame box on I have all foundation frames

that I rolled some extra wax on and did not have any top vents open I'm also feeding one-to-one sugar syrup you know if they're building really fast we almost don't need to continue to feed them but you can anyway with the high top feeder comb building many people in my club top vent and I'm wondering if I should be top venting in the summer months. Okay, so this is something I've shifted for myself through many years and I didn't do it all at once. I did it incrementally. I've stopped top venting. So there are a lot of things that the bees don't need. They don't need a top vent. So they can control the airflow very well,

even through a remarkably small opening. And I've used before, the examples of the deep south you know so we're talking about Georgia and we're talking about Louisiana and places like that where the humidity is incredibly high and there are colonies of bees living down there with very tiny entrances and they're venting and moving air and dehydrating honey and keeping themselves comfy just fine so here in the northeastern United States I haven't had to do that anymore and there's another thing that happens when the relative humidity drops, your bees are going to try to maintain roughly about a 65% relative humidity in the brood area in the hive. If you're venting that off because of heat,

you are also venting humidity out of that hive, which now your bees have to replace by getting fresh water, spreading it around, and using that to increase the humidity as they need it. The other thing is bees don't seek out spaces that have upper venting and upper air movement. they seek out on their own spaces that are enclosed with a single entrance. So once again, bees can do it. That doesn't mean it's not accelerated if you have an upper vent or something like that. But you also have an upper access point normally when you do that. And wax maws like to introduce things there.

Small high beetles like to get in through open vents and other areas of the hive. So you're way ahead in helping your bees defend the colony as well just by having a single entrance. You may be wondering what size entrance I've arrived at, thanks for asking, 3 eighths of an inch high, 3 to 4 inches wide, and that's it. I do have hives with fully open entrances on landing boards because I make comparisons season after season year after year. But if I had to pick a single entrance, a single design,

a standard Langstroth configuration, it would be a single entrance, 3 eighth of an inch high, 3 to 4 inches wide, and then no top venting, no upper entrances. And that's just to see this personal preference through many years of direct observation. Now the other thing is you want to put some kind of visor, some kind of shade on the front of your hive. So we have something called the hive visor. And if you want to know how to make your own, they're very simple to make. You can go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, top right, type in hive visor in the search.

and you'll see a demonstration how to make it. It works really, really well and drops the landing board area temperature in the front of your hive by 15 degrees. So that's a significant drop. And it's also why, because your bees are already outside, bearding and stuff. Why put them in sunstress?

That's why they hang under the hive, which puts them in jeopardy because now they're in reach of skunks and things like that. So if you have a hive visor or a nice big overhang on the front of your hive somehow. The bees have a place to go to stay cool and protect it from wind, rain, and pests, by the way. Question number four.

This comes from Rural Crane 30. That's the YouTube channel name. Says, hi Fred. How have the plastic hive portal discs held up for you? I like their size. I have some swarm traps with a 3 eighths inch high linear opening that they would work well for. great video thank you so this is a video about preventing absconding with

entrance queen includeers and that's a recent video so if you haven't seen it if you missed it because you don't follow my channel very well and I recommend that you change that really quick I did a whole thing you'll see in the opening sequence it's got these little blue entrances as the thumbnail image because I went through to see if entrances like this portal when they have a queen excluder built into it i've never used it see so how can i criticize or promote something that i've never used i certainly use the portals because they came on all the wooden nuclear nuclear the wooden nucleus hive boxes that i purchased from better be by the way and when i did that i got a whole bunch of them i

like them built-in bottom board everything is solid it's a super portable nuke situation so you can transport them around and it just have the hole in the front but the person that was making them passed away and no longer supplied them to betterby so betterby doesn't even have them anymore but they came with these so this is the hole on the front of the hive this is the position that i have it on and you'll see in most of my videos that i have it in this position where i divide that three quarters of an inch entrance in half uh if i were drilling those by the way myself I think I'd make them a full inch I would if not an inch and a quarter we don't need birdhouse size entrances but almost because we control the size of the entrance

with this and how do the bees let us know that the entrance is too big well they propolize everything here they start to really build it up how do we know if it's too small instead of propolizing they start chewing the wood so you can find out what your bees want but anyway in the video what we did is we spun this around and I caught the queen from a swarm several times over in the same video multiple swarms multiple queens multiple introduction sites and settings so then i put the queen in soon as the queen was in the box i shifted this to the queen now it's an includeer it's not an excluder because we're keeping the queen in rather than excluding her therefore i wanted to see because look how tiny this is

are the workers really going to be able to come through there and particularly in a swarm situation so they can and they did i was very impressed so the question here is how long does this piece of plastic last well i've got them out in the apiary for at least five years maybe six and they're still going now they do see how shiny and new they are you get this matte finish it is a piece of plastic but they're holding up they're still strong in other words when you go to move it or free it up from the propolis it doesn't crack or do anything and that stays out in winter all through all weather and with the south facing hives in full sun. So these are called Better Beehive Portals.

And of course they get nothing for recommending that. And you can of course, if you go to buy some, I sell them in packs of five. And you can tell them that I sent you and ask for the Fred Dunn discount and pay the exact same as everyone else. But these work great. In fact, all of the ones worked well. the ones worked well this UV was the lowest performing no great surprise when it came to the workers going through the queen excluder function but it did serve its purpose which was to keep the

queen in so that what if they reject where you put them what if they found some dead bees in there what if they found some poor beekeeping practices and wanted to get right back out of there after you install them as a swarm well they can't because now there's queen exclude her there the workers can try to leave but they won't because the queen is stuck inside so they get stuck inside too and have to deal with whatever you've left now i'm not suggesting you leave a mess for them and you use a swarm to clean up a hive but um that can be one of the reasons that they don't go in the hive on their own so you should clean it out you should not have dead bees in there i've heard people say it just put a swarm in there and make them clean out the hive and clean the

dead outs and all that stuff that can help them but you set them way back plus you're exposing them to potential disease so that's it question number five comes from wendy from seattle washington help me with a swarm issue on may 4th after seeing several queen cells almost capped i removed three of eight deep brood frames from a double deep hive 20 frames total and started a new split with a frame of brood an undrawn frame and that some hive that same hive swarmed today the original by my calculation there should only be virgins in there the original queen having been removed 90 minutes away i noticed two distinct clumps on my raspberry bushes and successfully hived those now but if they are virgin queens i didn't actually see the queens weren't they just on their mating flight should i have let them be i'm going to into the hive for inspection okay first of all i don't know what's going on with the bees this year but there are so many queens and just yesterday i was out hiving a swarm that wasn't even very big and

doing you know spritzing with cold fresh water to tighten up the swarm cluster dumping them in a bucket and as soon as i dumped him in a bucket there was another little cluster on the branch so i thought what did i miss the queen what happened so because i put them in the bucket and then i put a big size queen excluder on top of the bucket and they didn't leave the bucket but a bunch of them did fly to the branch that usually means you missed a queen so they go up and i get another bucket and another queen excluder and i shake those into that bucket and uh put a queen excludeer on top of that and they stayed in that bucket i had four queens yesterday so these are tiny clusters almost worst little almost

worthless in my book. So here's the thing. Those are not a mating flights, but they are virgin queens. And these are referred to as tertiary swarms. Some people call them after swarms. What happens is they kind of get in a frenzy and they forget to kill each other. Yeah. So we know that most people will sit in a lecture and tell you be biology. And the first queen that comes out, scoots around. We hear queen piping. I've heard queen piping in my top hard hive again so uh the first queen out is supposed to hunt down and kill the other queens but if they're an active swarm mode and uh nothing killed them then you've got a bunch of unmaided queens scooting around the hive that have not drawn the preference of the resident colony

so they follow them out and i was collecting them with those queen pipes with her which are a lot of fun right now by the way and uh those were out of the uh those were out of the of stock after we did that video about how to use the queen pipe to hive your swarms and then of course the one about the entrance reducers that keep the swarms from absconding and they're back in stock so good news anyway um i was just collecting and hiving them now here's what i ended up doing because some of them were so tiny the size of your fist they're not on a mating flight so let's clear that up when they go on a mating flight they're not going to go and land at a branch with a bunch of bees around them there won't be any clustering.

A mating flight means that she got sexually mature, which usually, by the way, they don't just scoot right out of their queen cell and fly out of the hive and go somewhere else. They have to mature sexually. They have to physically get a better health. They have to vibrate their wings. Some queens even do orientation flights and go back into the hive. And some people call these fire drills because a bunch of

residents of that colony follow her outside but then when she goes back in they all go back into and so it looks like a false swarm false alarm kind of thing and so what happens is some of them can't fly very far so they are young queens they just get caught up in the frenzy so they fly 20 feet out of the hive and collect on the nearest bush or even the outside of the hive that they came out of so you can have a cluster a swarm cluster right on the side of the hive that that queen just emerged from because the queen's not ready to go and while she's in the cluster they're still feeding her and taking care of her of course so what i was doing is using those pipes as soon as i saw queen i removed her and then once you remove the queen from these small clusters they start scooting

all over looking for the queen and they look like they're in disarray and their little wings spread out too which lets you know they're upset and so then i would take that once i was sure i got the queen out of there and go over to another hive that I just hived a queen and a swarm from the same originating hive by the way this makes it easy so set in front of that in a bucket they smell another queen but it's related to them it's from their own mother from their own original queen that departed who knows when and so they accept that pheromone and they all just goes zipping in there because they don't have their queen anymore because someone took it away in a queen pipe So I consolidate them that way.

Another thing that you can also do is when you collect these swarms, you know there's multiple queens in them. You can put the whole thing in a hive, and then when the queens that are unpopular, realize how unpopular there, they try to get away. And if you have an entrance queen includer on the front, you'll see the queen that's trying to get away inside, just running back and forth, on our own,

trying to get out of there. because those are the ones that often the other bees, once they make their decision of which queen they're going to stay with, they'll kill the other queens. So it's a lot of extra effort, a lot of drama. But yeah, mating flights are by themselves, and these are actually tertiary swarms. Question number six.

This comes from EMQ-C-K-U-D-Q-L-O-W-X-P-E. That's a YouTube name. All right. I have a live camera monitoring a swarm trap in a distant location that I won't be able to reach for at least a week. Today I observed a decent size swarm move in, probably around two kilograms of bees. When I checked on them again around 10 p.m. at about 11 degrees Celsius, there was a small cluster of bees hanging on the outer wall of the hive, even though I'd say a good 90% of the swarm had clearly moved inside. They're not near the entrance and it doesn't look like classic bearding. More like a distinct little cluster on the outside.

Could this be a second queen with her attendance? Yes. That's my high suspicion is that's exactly what's going on. And it's also why they're not moving in. See, they created this division and they divided up the voting base. I mean they divided it up. yeah the voting base so there's influencers in each cluster and one of them's winning out and one of them occupies the box the others are staying with the other queen that's outside and they're

nassanoffing and everything else trying to keep their cluster together now how would you know that there's a queen in there and that they're not just bearding or cooling off what do you think when you look at the surface of that cluster that's on the outside if you see waggle dancing going on they're flying out trying to find a place to live so they're waggle dancing that tells you that's a swarm on the go so what should you be doing about it you need to collect them and hive them or as i mentioned before find the queen she's less popular remove her anyway and now they have no more candidate to go after her except the one that's inside the box and in they will all go it's going to be like magic and if they still stall after you remove the queen and don't look flustered by that

Guess what? It's another queen there. I 99.9% guarantee there's another queen. And now you have to go find that one. So that's the likely scenario. Will they eventually merge in the rest of the swarm? Guess what they'll do? They'll sit out there and if they can't find a place to move to, they will not just merge with that swarm.

So they'll actually die of exposure. they often will even start to build comb right in an exposed location but they can't sustain that depending on the weather the climate conditions and everything else so that's it they'll probably be gone by the time we get there so i may never know or be sure so i'll keep watching it so here's one of the fixes for that if you're setting out a swarm trap like that put your swarm traps out in tandem have a couple of swarm traps nearby one another because when more than one because here's what can happen to scouts will go scout out the location and then they're of course feeding this information back to their parent colony where the swarm emits from so when they fly out with the swarm another colony may have also scouted the same

location and also in very similar timing you know why because the conditions that right before a storm or more often after a storm. Conditions are right for swarming, therefore multiple colonies emit swarms in close proximity and timing to one another. So they can both arrive at the same location, the same destination, ultimately, and then they have to divide up because somebody's already in there first. And aggressive colonies, like, for example, the Africanized bees would go right in, even if the others had already moved in, and they'd move in and do usurpation, which is where where they kill the queen and then they take it over hopefully your bees don't do that but that's my best guess as to what's going on second swarm this question number seven comes from george garcia

505-2 i wonder if in the long run how it impacts the swarms you collect from trees i can't wait for updates and i'll try to ask you the question in september or october as your swarm season should have concluded this is about the swarms swarm of bees to bowler hats surprising results I wish I had a bowler hat to talk to you about and I do so this is one of the ones that's been hanging in the tree right and I want to talk about this by the way because when it hangs in the tree we've been having a lot of wind lately so it spins a lot and it's also swinging a lot like this even in the heat not good I see B try to land on this and there'll be a little cluster of bees around it trying to land on it

and that's what it's doing so what's the fix well this is a boot string like shoelaces and you get these clips these are black heavy-duty clips if you call them photography clips the price triples but it's really just a heavy-duty wide clip so now what I'm doing is clipping on the lower brim as well run my line to of course the branch that supports it and the next string which is paracord now will go to the trunk of the tree and now we'll have it held at an angle in a static position so when the bees go to occupy it so the concave side of this the part that would go on your head should be leeward so the wind isn't blasting into it we want the bees to come in and find a nice safe little

cluster spot there and what's been happening with these which is very annoying to me is again these tiny swarms that are coming out one of those little swarms will move in here and occupy the hat and then it's not very usable so and they're so tiny that you can easily if you just watch them for a little while you'll see the queen come out and scoot around the top of it and then go back in so we need to get them out so that the real swarms the good swarms the more populated swarms can move in so anyway securing your hats if you're still doing this test and I hope you are because it's fun hanging these out 100% wool and they collect swarms so there you go and we have three different hats now by the way and just watching it blow in the wind like crazy just you know showed and it does look like the wind's going to be dying down so we're going to use that secured at at least two points hats out in the tree and we're going to

try to track swarms during the next swarm season which and by that I mean Monday or Tuesday Question number eight comes from Chris-O So how do you collect those See we're talking about swarms all the time How do you collect those swarms that land on

vertical tree trunks? I've got one to deal with tomorrow Funny thing is they were originally on a nice low horizontal branch but right before I got to them they took off climbed all

almost too high to sea and then dropped back down and gathered on a small tree, but 20 feet from the first spot, I wonder if the queen can't fly very well. I bet she can't. But as far as now on the ground, because we had one of those two, it was on a willow tree. So what you can do, and this is also, I'm going to give you a precursor just in description alone, of course, of another swarm collection method. it's very inexpensive and I like it and it would work for this purpose too so it's adding another tool to your tool chest when it comes to collecting swarms so what is it it's a canvas laundry bag

so you get these big canvas 100% cotton muslin whatever they are very in other words very friendly to wildlife and they're nice and big and they have a draw cord already built into them so it's a laundry bag cloth laundry bag get the biggest one you can find because that's what I did and I bought two of them Now this thing is versatile because it'll work for something like this so what you do is Turn it inside out Lay it on the ground all around the base of the tree where the swarm is and then you're going to spray the swarm of bees with your cold fresh water and get them to clump close together as much as possible because guess what else it does and this was a lot of fun and it cools her thorax and grounds them.

They can't fly right away. So we grounded a queen this way from a swarm that was actually leaving a branch. And my wife was my witness. So I just started spraying them because they were leaving. You know, we took so much time to set up, we talked too long, all that stuff. And then they were flying off the branch and we were going to lose them. A lot of ease. So I just started spritzing them with cold water.

And I keep that water cold, by the way. That's very important. And before you know what, they were landing all over the ground within 20 feet of the tree they were trying to fly away from. So we grounded them because it was windy and it was already a marginal day where it was only in the 50s. So you combine that with the wind and it cooled them down and they had to land.

And then where are they going to clump around the queen? So we could then find the queen because they landed in a cornfield. So that was a lot of fun. But anyway, spressing with cold water slows them down, bunches them up. brush them off with your brush onto the fabric. Once they're on the fabric, you can transport them on that. Of course, we're going to start moving around,

but now you can pull it because it was inside out, remember? So you can reach your hand in there, and here's the other tip that I have for you. When you get a laundry bag, or if you're using a big pillowcase or something like that, take a corner of the pillowcase and stitch across it. Have someone sew it up. So that you have a piece of fabric that you can grab that will not not have a bunch of bees in between your fingers there so you're not smashing bees and releasing a bunch

of alarm pheromones and i do this with my nets too that i use on the big butterfly net collection systems so anyway you turn it inside out with all the bees inside you can then use the cinch you can close it up goose neck it twist it around and tie it again so none of the bees can come out and you have a transport bag it's perfect you can lay that thing in the back seat of your car you know whatever they don't go anywhere and then when you get them where you want them to be you have the hive that you want to install them in you can open the bag blouse it back a little bit and clip it with clips like these right onto the landing board and it stays there and the bees climb up they get to the

landing board they see you provided them with the home and in they go it's a win it's so easy and i can't wait to make a video about it so you heard about it here but the video will have to come later and one of the things about that is the think picture of the big laundry bag you have to go collect a swarm let's see you're registered with be swarmed dot org b-a-r-m-ed-o-o-r-g and i've got a lot of swarm alerts from that this year and you show up and it's you know eye level but there's you know a huge swarm a big one and the branch is just bending down under the weight of the swarm hopefully the person that called you owns the tree that they're on and you get permission to clip the branch it's so easy either way you can take the bag follow with the cold freshwater sprits that i just described so it'll tighten them up and it adds weight

which makes them more shakeable and you pull your pillowcase or your big laundry bag if you want to look like a professional and you'll you can cinch it right up on the branch tie it right there and then you have the option to clip the branch and take it with you all in a nice bundle or once it's in like that shake it just shake it like crazy get them all off the branch and they all go on to the inside of this laundry bag and then you take that off the the branch and then cinch it, gooseneck it and cinch it again. And you've got yourself a bag of bees. And the cool thing about that is, because it's fabric, they breathe everywhere. They're not suffocating, which they easily can in a plastic bucket, a water bottle, something like that. It is the most ventilated system you could use. Works great. Try it. You're going to look like a

pro. So question number nine comes from Julie from Levin, Washington let's see says this is related to episode number 355 question number one at five minutes and 28 seconds that's pretty precise when she and the brood frame are returned to the original hive does there need to be some type of reintroduction like when starting a package to avoid fighting where they still recognize her so this is one of the things where you are doing an inspection and you see that you've got queen cells and you find a queen in there that you know they're going to swarm. So we take her in a cage, queen cage, isolation cage, hopefully.

Or if you don't have that, you can just create a nuke, but you need to move that queen with a frame of brood and a frame of resources at least into your nucleus hive. That's your insurance policy against what? Against these replacement queens if they do not successfully mate and come back to the hive and then produce eggs and carry on with that original colony, they're in jeopardy. You have to evaluate and know when to get that queen if they proved that they did not mate within, you need that to happen within 12 or 13 days. So we're going to re-inspect.

And if we don't see that they're laying eggs, then we can bring the queen and the resources back. Plus, we haven't lost time because she's laying eggs in the nucleus high that you set up. And we use frame feeders as placeholders so we can bring. bring them back and put them back in the hive pull the feeders out replace them with the frames again they accept that queen right away because keep in mind the bees look at the time frame that we've had they are all from that queen so she is genetically connected to them they accept feed her take care of her right away because guess what else they're queenless now so then she goes right back in so it was kind of a weird demuree method except that you took the queen away instead of just removing frames of brood decongest

the rude area we took the actual queen away took away that stimulus is swarm and off they went so that works works really well question number 10 comes from klaus from midland ontario california it is understood that a queen can select what type of egg to deposit into the cell determined by the cell size can she specifically lay a queen egg into a queen cell? Would these queens be superior in emergency queens? Okay, so here's the thing. Emergency queens usually means something suddenly happened, you know, to the queen. She got smashed because somebody inspected and rolled the queen,

which I've heard of, never done it myself, but I've heard of it. I've also seen somebody do a might wash and might wash their actual queen. I've never done it. I've seen it and heard about it. When you do that, thank goodness they have eggs. Thank goodness those eggs will hatch and become larvae and give your nurse bees a chance to figure out which one of those they want to turn into an emergency replacement queen. So the queen does not lay an egg that is different from a worker egg

when she is putting it in a queen cell. It is the same worker egg. There's diploid and haploid. This is diploid. Haploid are drones or unfertilized eggs. She does put unfertilized eggs in large cells, which is those are the drone cells. So what changes that into a queen is the kind and quantity of feed the nurse bees provide. So back in the day, we used to say, oh, if it's going to be a queen, she gets, you know, royal jelly. And the workers just get worker jelly.

Well, they all get royal jelly, as it turns out. But there are variances in the composition of what they're being fed and the quantity. So when the nurse bees recognize that they need to create a queen, the queen's cell, of course, is different. It's a vertical cell. And they can build that out from the face of the frame, which is also why you see emergency cells come out of the middle of the frame. If they knew in advance and if they were planning for it,

they would start with the queen cup that looks like a little acorn top, and it's just sticking out from the side around the fringe of the frame where there tends to be more room, and they're going to build out that larger cell, which accommodates the developing queen. So it's all through diet, and it's the nurse bees that do it. The queen does not. So it is interesting, though.

It is still a miracle that they can change the cast of this insect just by the diet that they're feeding it while it's developing. And that's just amazing. Number 11 comes from Brian from Hayden Idaho. It says question when bees have dedicated a space on a brood frame for drone production. If that frame is moved to another position, a different hive, or the colony rediscovers that frame next spring, will that patch of drone come forever be drone comb or do the bees rebuild this to worker comb? It's always drone comb. So drone comb cells are larger, but it's not just used for drone production.

So this is something that is very interesting. I bought a whole box of acorn heavy waxed drone frames. Here's why. When you set up an 8 or 10 frame standard Langstroth deep box, they have to find a place. Usually it's one of the outer frames. and it's a little distant from worker brute, and then they'll run drone comb when they're building their own size. And they also build it, of course, between frames, between boxes.

But if you provide them with a drone-sized comb foundation, and they build that out, that is what they're going to put their drones in, which is this all originated because they're using it as integrated pest management for Verroa Destructor Mike control. control. And so what happens when they're not doing drones yet or if they never get to the drone development stage? It just gets used for storage. So it can be used for honey storage. So we do see honey being capped. So it's developed, put in there, finished, capped, and stored on drone comb. So that's the only other thing they substitute. I've never seen workers come out of

drone-sized comb, drone-sized cells, but I have seen drones come out of worker-sized cells. And what drones do you think those are? Those are the ones that tend to occur when the queen's been gone for at least 21 days, and nurse bees have activated their ovaries, and then they lay their own haploid eggs, and because they have ovaries, they don't have, they're not as developed as a queen, and then those produce drones. And some of the tini drones will come out of worker cells and they'll look like little bullet shells, bullet cells because they're really convex.

They really stick out. And also they lay multiple eggs sometimes. But then they have to please those up. All those eggs do not hatch and develop equally. So only one per cell will develop. So that's what that's about. but drone con gets used for other things or it just sits empty it's up to them so one of the question number 12 comes from paul andowski an extra benefit of marking queens is that you can know

a high swarm because queen is there and is not marked that is true so i went to mark queens because it's a necessary skill to have and for those of you don't know and i meant to bring one of the new markers with me because for back-haired beekeepers if you're not in queen production or something like that and you just want to know for grins and giggles if your queen has been replaced if she died if you killed her if they swarmed what else is going on you can mark your queen and then you'll know if that queen has been in your colony all year I have found here that often people have no when queens are replaced and here's why it happens really fast so we have these big colonies particularly this time of year and we just had a beekeeping breakfast and a lot of people

talked about this if you're not home to see it like I'm sitting here right now and I know full well that there's a large swarm right now collecting on something out there and it's not collecting on this bowler hat because I have this here that when I'm done here I'm going to go out and I'm going to find it. But what happens is if we mark the queens, we'll know that they've sworn, but guess what happened when they swarmed? They already had been producing replacement queens. Those cells are either capped or about to be capped at the time that they flew out, which means in less than a week new queens are going to emerge. Now, what's going on too? They still have full brood in there. The queen,

queen was productive usually right up to within a few days of actually departing the hive and so there is very little brood break when this happens when the bees planet and the bees execute the plan there are still new bees coming out there's still pollen coming in there's all these indicators that it's a thriving healthy you know developing colony of bees at the right time of year. So unless you marked that queen, you may not even know that that happened. They can shed thousands of bees in a swarm and look like business as usual when you go and check out the hive. I have hives out there that I know have replaced their queens and they look perfectly normal on the landing board. Pollin is just going in. A lot of those were in the opening sequence today.

and so one of the things I say is we know that we have these standard five colors but if all you want to know is if that queen is yours and if it's one you've seen before then you can mark it and what is the most visible marker that you can use it's actually pink so it's like a fluorescent pink people see that easier quicker better than the white the yellow the blue the red, right? So that's pretty much it. Use pink. Mark your own queens unless you're some kind of seller or something and you need to prove things. And that way you'll know whether your bees have swarmed or not. And you'll also know that when you collect a swarm on a branch somewhere that that's one of yours. That's the other thing. Did that come in from somewhere else? because my wife is convinced that this huge swarm showed up from somewhere else.

I don't know who these people are, but I don't want their bees. I want my own bees. I want them back. But yeah, marking them is a good way to know. Because unless you mark them, you may have no idea. So fluid, so quick. And happens in, of course, prime season when a lot of resources are coming in, just might have no idea.

And so it's interesting for your log. Question number 13. Last question of the day, finally. I know you're happy about that. It says Mike of Borg 2. One of mine swarmed yesterday. Sorry about all the swarm stuff, but it's on your mines,

so that's why we're talking about it. One of mine swarmed yesterday was able to get them in a box and back home. My other colony tore down the queen cells for some reason, but are making new ones now. I didn't see many mites or small-high beetles, and the brood looked great with a good pattern. I saw the queen and she is back laying, so I have no clue why they did that.

Now, this is one of the reasons why I like the insurance policy practice that we talked about earlier. You see that they're building queen cells, and then the queen is still there. So as an insurance policy, you take her away. That prevents them from swarming with her. And then you put that in a nucleus hive, and you have your insurance policy. Then you come back and you do an inspection, expecting to see cap cells and hearing queen piping and stuff like that talking to each other from inside their cells and they're gone they're either chewed down to about a third or completely gone sometimes the the nutrition levels can drop off all of a sudden the weather can

change they can face challenges that were unforeseen and they don't feel like they can make a replacement queen anymore and they can chew away all those cells and make it look like nothing was ever there in the first place now what would you do you have queenless colony oh you have a resource hive now that you can bring the queen back from and put her back in there. And your insurance policy proved to work. So it just sometimes happens. They build things up and tear things down. And I don't know, we don't always know why.

But the speculation is that it's nutritional. So in other words, they just can't afford to make a new queen right now. They change your minds, keep the old one, which you took away. after you listen to somebody on YouTube or whatever. And now you have to bring her back so that things don't go bad all the way for the colony. So that's just it. We're in the fluff section now.

So I just want to give you the heads up. This is the weekend. Traditionally, historically, the almanac, everything else. Following this weekend, you can plant your plantings, all the stuff. So I am going to plant actually right now as soon as I get done here. So I'm going to get my seeds out there. I haven't done any tilling yet, so I'm not doing the cosmos and stuff yet, but I am doing borage and the rest of my Ladino, Ladino, whatever it's called, Clover.

And I'm just going to throw my seeds all over the areas that I can still see dirt patches on, and I'm going to let the rain do the work for me and drive that seed into the ground. Another advantage of doing that right at night. I have free-ranging chickens, by the way. It's a complete failure. if the birds can see what i'm doing and they'll come running over to see what i'm up to and of course they're going to eat most of what i throw out there i'm also planting and these plant on the surface by the way so marigolds have lots of marigolds i know um some people will push back on that because

those are not native plants but when you see how many bees go after these really tall african marigolds fantastic so i'm using those as all my corner areas fringe areas and stuff like that much like the Ladino Ladino clover that I've put in areas that are boggy and wet all the time but yet get full sun so I'm really hoping to get a really good at least micro nectar deal from that I'm also planning a lot of hyssup even though I have a very good surprise patch of hiss up last year I just had this practice of tossing seeds and not caring and then we were just looking at things two-thirds of the way through the summer and didn't I end up with a huge hiss-up pass through the years so it can pay off ultimately just keep seating and don't forget to remember those who have served and passed on ahead of us serve the United States military Monday is Memorial Day so you'll be flying your colors at half-mast run them all the way up bring them down halfway and then I believe at noon time you go back up to full mast anyway so it's also

time when the weather comes up super up get those super's on right now I've already started that too strongest colonies get them first and I'm doing a I'm practicing this right now and I'm seeing early results that I want to share with you and so if you are preparing plastic foundation or plastic frames of any kind to have your bees draw out the comb. I have these thick chunks of processed filtered beeswax that I've saved and so I'm just scraping it on the surface So scraping this big wheel, like a big cheese wheel, of bees wax all over the plastic surfaces of any frame, wooden or plastic that I'm putting inside a hive. And then we're going to compare that to melting wax onto wood or melting and rolling wax onto the foundation,

plastic foundation. Which one do you think the bees draw out and work first? I'll wait. Oh wait while you tell me. I don't want you to do and I told you so. Go ahead. Say what you think it is.

The rubbed wax with the little bits and pieces all over the place gets worked first by the bees. Try it out. Do it at home. Do one where you dipped it. You rolled it.

You heated it. You went all the extra effort. You did all the extra work. And you got a full coverage by dipping a frame. And then compare that to the one that you just rubbed it like a big crayon on all the surfaces.

And see what. which one put them side by side same hive see which one they draw out first they're drawing out the rubbed one first we're on to something do it you can even rub the interior side walls of your hive because you know what the bees do they come along and they repurpose that they even carry that stuff around it is very interesting i'm very excited it was just a thought something to do if you've done that in the past i would love to hear about it but i'd like to kick off a backyard um test on that get more people to do it because a lot of people are putting frames in their supering hives and things like that make that comparison if you're already the kind of person that that you know has a fryer or something and

melts your beeswax down and dips a paintbrush or a heavy nap roller and rolls it on there or even has a big enough thing where you dip the whole frame do the rub on one the dipping on the other tell me what happened I'm looking for a consensus on that okay so super super super super clover's weeks out be ready for that feed your small colonies if you've hived one of those tiny clusters the cold weather in the northeastern u.s and combined with the wind and the rain they're going to fall way back on any day that they can't forage so you want to put a light sugar syrup on those one-to-one sugar syrup on a feeder in the hive don't try to open feed robbing is a high potential right now from the really strong colonies so that's it for today

I hope you got something out of today's Q&A. And I want to thank you for watching. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this has been The Way to Be. Have a nice, long weekend.