The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A #358 June 6th

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

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

So hello and welcome, happy Saturday. Today's Saturday, June the 6th of 2026. This is Backyard, Bekeeping Questions and Answers, episode number 358. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here. I hope you didn't miss me yesterday. I got held up a little bit because I was doing an interview about what do you think? ticks of course. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today,

please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and there's a lot of them today. So if you've got a topic that you'd like to suggest to me, please go to my website, the wayto be.org, click on the pagemark contact and submit your topic or your question you never know. It could happen. Could show up on a future episode. And I know what you want to know. Well, first of all don't wreck your car don't wipe out your tractor don't drive your lawnmower into the bushes because you're trying to watch a youtube video this is also a podcast which is available right here on youtube but you can also just google the way to be podcasts and listen there you go so i know what you

want to know what's it doing outside there's a lot going on right now in fact the wind is picking up and there's a lot of rain supposedly going to happen we don't know we can't count on it because it's being by people who are frequently wrong, climatologists, weather people. But it's supposed to rain. It did rain last night and where are we at? The northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. So it's 76 degrees Fahrenheit outside. That's pretty decent, which is 24 Celsius, 78% relative humidity, which of course is going to increase because it's going to rain again, which is good news. I'll talk about that in a minute.

and it's gusty pretty decent gusts too 14 mile per hour wind gusts which is 22 kilometers per hour and it's supposed to rain heavy again today and I'm looking forward to that do you know why because on Memorial Day weekend I planted a whole bunch of seeds and it didn't rain at all until last night so but I learned something interesting I know you want to know that too do any of those seeds just come up on their own even with a lack of rain yes they do how about cosmos so the cosmos i planted and i planted a lot of them thousands and thousands of cosmos seeds and they started germinate even without the rain so the nectar flow outside nectar flow is low if you're checking your boxes here maybe it's different where you are but the bees are consuming more

resources then they are saving which is not good news so but the good news part of that is it reduces is our swarm risk so your swarm risk is very low in this part of the country but the pollen is high and people that have pollen allergies are not the least bit happy about it but beekeepers are borage has already come up that's what's blooming outside clover is blooming but that's the dutch clover white dutch clover the uh ladino ladino clover has not bloomed of course it's still only a couple inches tall buckwheat is up not blooming gold finches are eating the sea that I've thrown down. So some of the seeds you just throw on the top of the ground, like marigold seeds. The birds come in behind you and eat them. So don't put down treated seeds. I don't know what that's going to do with them.

And just secure for heavy weather. Be prepared for anything. If you've got your beehives already tied down, secured for heavy weather, then if it doesn't happen, you're still covered. Because I don't want to run out there in 76 degree weather and deal with a hive that's blown over on its side. in a time when there's a dearth momentary momentary dearth it's going to change all next week it's going to pick up you're going to see nectar coming in you're going to smell it in the air and it's going to be really good so i want to start right off with today's uh i'm going to give a shout out has been doing that recently so last time it was bug farmer and his excellent wooden wear uh today it's sourwood farm and you might wonder why would i mention sourwood farm well this is about

pro nukes and boy did some people have a lot to say about those now pro nukes if you don't know what they are nuke is short for nucleus that means the complete colony is in a small box and in this case they are five-frame deep plastic nucleus hive boxes and I think they're kind of weird to be honest now I don't slam products very much but the pro nukes I'll mention Sowerwood Farm and you can check out the YouTube channel I hope you do, but this is a pro new case you missed it. They're plastic.

Plastic is not great for a permanent beehive when it's thin. This is thin plastic. Now here's the thing. Why would I have it then? Why would I have bought it? Because these are good for carrying around five deep frames and you can work with your beehives and you can move stuff around. You can create splits and resource colonies and stuff like that.

And I mentioned that we want to put reflect texts up underneath the top, because this is just thick plastic. That thing is sitting out in the sun and it is going to make your bees work extra hard to stay cool. And they'll do it. If they have enough water, they'll do it, they'll stay cool. But here's the thing,

and why I'm excited about Saurwood Farm. Sowerwood Farm did a video about the pro nuke. What do you see different? Well, it has these little inserts. Now, by the way, the way he does it is different from what I'm doing, but the end result is the same. So these side panels, now by the way I just created these little inserts they're just reflect text folded over held together with HBAC tape

but they slide right into this space and I want you to notice that when you see all the space here if you leave your bees in this for an extended period of time and they actually consider it home which happens often with beekeepers we put them in a hive we think it's temporary and then they stay in it for a long time and then they do things that we know expect them to do we have to eliminate or at least fill to some degree that space on the sides of your pro nuke because they build a bunch of brace comb burcombe extra beeswax that we don't want so i'm going to put a link down there but i wish you would just go to it on your own the youtube

channel name is sourwood farm s o u r w o o d f-rm and look at the pro nuke uh set up there A lot more experience with them than I have. So he's come up with some workarounds and some important stuff that you're going to have to deal with if you use those. So why get them in the first place? First of all, they're never going to rot. They're never going to wear out. You don't have to paint them. They're ready to go.

They're stackable. So they take up a very small amount of space in your storage buildings. And who doesn't need more space in their bee storage area? They stack on top of each other. They don't slide off of each other because there's a recess and the roof and the bottom is fixed. right in there for the next one above and you can store empty frames in them i don't recommend them for storing heavy honeycomb frames that are full that are capped but very portable and they're great for catch and go so if you want to get out there and collect a swarm bring it home

they're set up for that enough said i hope you'll do that tell sarawood farm i said hello and maybe you'll even subscribe who knows people are doing a lot of good work out there so that's the very first part of question number one it just says I use pro nukes extensively in raising nucleus colonies for sale in Virginia and have landed in a very similar boat with the double bubble insulation but what I found works even better than the small sheet of bubble on top is to use double bubble that's cut for a 10 frame hive put it over onto the sides so one big sheet that goes over everything so there are many ways to do the same thing but those Nucleus colonies need insulation.

Insulation is important for sun or the cold. So moving on to question number two comes from Khalid at Greater Boston, Massachusetts. I have three hives in my backyard, and we're planning to have an event in the backyard, which many people will be attending. Says, what are some safe options for keeping the bees from flying in and out of their hives for a day?

Moving the hives to a different location is, unfortunately, not feasible and the event must happen in the backyard as per my wife he says so here's the thing this is really easy you should always have something like a robbing screen it doesn't have to be this one but this is a robbing screen you have the options to open so the bees can fly out or close them and then all you have is a vented entrance this is a little thicker this is from Cirrusel probably the most popular robbing screen and the most well-known is from bee smart designs this is a robbing screen but you know you have a party coming up people are going to come into your yard even against your wishes you're trying to keep it private for the bees

trying to keep the public safe and you don't want your wife to throw some big party and mess up your time with your bees but you can just get some rolled aluminum screen window screen you cut it to length you roll it up, you make a little cigar shape out of it, you compress it down, and then you push it right into the entrance of your hive. Because I've found out that that slows down ventilation, almost not at all. What it does stop is the bees from coming out, and it's no problem at all to keep your bees in your hive for an entire day. Just make sure they have plenty of ventilation.

We don't want to block them up. So that was the recommendation I already made because I knew that this was an emergency situation and required an immediate response. So robbing screen, whatever. They'll do fine because just think of it this way. If a big storm came through, if we got really cold or something, your bees would be staying inside anyway. So let's pretend that the people coming to your yard,

invited or not, are a storm. And you want to protect your bees from that storm. So that's easy. Rolled screen, robbing screen, block them up for a day. And you want to do this, by the way, the night before. Don't wait till the day of because forages will already be out. So make sure and jump on that early. Question number three comes from Diane from Warren, New Jersey.

Says, for your Langstroth, your long Langstroth. Do you leave your double bubble blanket gasket on all year, or is that just part of your winterizing setup? I leave it on all year. The last thing I want to do is store insulation. And here's the thing. Often people think this way, by the way. It's warm outside.

Summer's coming. They take the insulation off. and then when it starts to get cold again they put all the insulation back on why leave it in place just like for those by the way those pro nukes would be a hot box in the sun you have to have something to intercept that transmission of heat into your hive so i always leave it on i leave the insulation on the hive summer and winter but then of course i'm not wrapping my hives i realize that some people have hive huggers and some people put polystyrene I've even seen people wrap household insulation insulation side out around their hives tar paper all kinds of

stuff for those you probably want to take them off that's some odd stuff but when it comes to insulation inside the hive inside your covers intercover insulation stuff like that it benefits your bees to keep it on all year round so question number four it comes from klaus in midland ontario this is an interesting one so it says that i'm thinking about using langstroth foundation sideways in layens frames will the bees draw it out does the orientation matter and so the thing of it is i just drew a really quick sketch here but this part with the bee cells that are hexagonal of course pointing side down pointing side up and then if you turn the foundation which is pre-stamped with an orientation so when you buy industrial foundation it always has pointy side down pointy side up flat sides on the

sides but if you were to flip that foundation and now the flat is on the bottom and top and the pointy edges are on the sides poor engineering choice but the bees don't care i can say that because we look at observation hives we use foundation and foundationless And we have found that the bees, when drawing out the comb on their own, will often transition to flat-sided, you know, flat-bottomed cells. What doesn't change, though, is that they say at an angle. So roughly a 13-degree angle up from the horizontal angle, right? So if you had a 90-degree angle, 13 degrees up is the standard. Now, if you take pre-drawn comb that already has the cells fully formed, and you invert those.

the angles are down instead of up now you have a problem the bees will refuse to use them so you give them a real challenge but if all we have is a heavy wax foundation it won't make a difference so draw it out either way they'll keep it going we've done it before and uh it's very easy so they seem to just follow whatever we decide for them in that regard which is interesting as much as the bees push back on our other desires and wishes question number five comes from david from cleveland ohio is there a product you would recommend for dealing with ticks in your apiary okay so now that's interesting and timely that question came out on the first of june so this was before i did the interview yesterday with dr machtinger so that's why i didn't have a friday q-na is because it was the only day she was

available to do the interview so i did that instead of a friday q-na i hope that you will listen to that interview because we talk about ticks and beekeepers are out and about and you're out in your yard and one of the number one things that we would say to control ticks of course is to keep the tall brush down so good yard maintenance weed whacking down or trimming down the grasses and stuff electric mowers by the way worked really well for that for not agitating your bees any vibration internal combustion engines vibrate a lot and they can annoy your bees but anyway trim everything down, try to limit your exposure to ticks, which according to Dr. Mactinger are often knee or waist height or lower, and that's so they can climb onto deer

and stuff like that that are walking past them. So, but there is some discussion about remedies and repellents, and she does go into some detail about some homemade repellents that you might find useful because beekeepers are out about. So I'm going to sidestep that one from David in Cleveland and say please just watch that interview about ticks. All the topics are segmented out so you can scan across it and see exactly what you want to know. Go straight to that. You do not have to watch, of course, the whole thing. So there you go.

Question number six comes from Jason in Alpine, Utah. In FAQ Video 4, you brought up that you have survivor bees. Are these different from your Saskatras bees? Saskatraz bees were from Saskatchewan, Canada. But the thing of it was they were brought here into the northern part of the state of California and a breeder there took care of them and they were mated in California

and then they shipped them out. So anyway, are they different from your Saskatraz bees and if so, what was the reasoning behind changing? What were the surveillance? survivor bees genetics if they are different bees as always thanks for all you teach okay so here's the thing for jason i got the saskatras bees because people were talking them up a lot that year man lake everybody was talking about saskatras and their natural resistance to varroa mites and things like that i did not have good luck with those bees so anyway that's the last time by the way that i purchased a package of bees

was so that I could get the Saskatras bees. But the stock that I keep, what I refer to as survivor stock, started with the Bee Weaver line. So B. Weaver out of Texas, that's Daniel Weaver. They won't ship you a package, but you can go there and buy things. They will ship you a queen.

So what you could do then is get a swarm, remove the queen, install their queen. You can do queen on a stick. There are a lot of ways to get a queen into a swarm. so and then into a hive so that she can set up a colony so that's what I did for my survivor line stock so what I was doing was keeping bees without treatment for 10 years my first 10 years and I tried IPM so integrated pest management brood of drone removal screen bottom boards the genetics of course watching everything and I was doing really

well actually it was doing okay and the problem with back-air beekeeping is for such small scale every time you make a new queen and my colonies do that frequently when the queen flies out and gets mated i don't know who she's mating with i don't know who her friends are who she hangs out with what drunk congregation areas she goes to to meet these single males but then she comes back mated and you have new genetics so what i decided to do after that is what i referred to referred to as my survivor line bees and those are now locally adapted bees and that just means every spring my bees swarm my drones go out so I'm spreading my genetics as much as I can to my neighboring beekeepers and there are quite a few some are friendly some are not I have

no idea what they're doing I'm not happy when I see a bunch of packaged bees show up because they've come from a different area and then those disrupt the work I'm trying to do here which is create locally adapted mutts that year after year do well through winter that have the disposition i like they're friendly they're easy going they're laid back and uh they brood up and brewed down at their appropriate time of year which means they're in sync with the environment and uh that gets disrupted anytime someone brings in new genetics so um but my bees are still doing remarkably well because i'm just flooding the area I also know when to see a bunch of packaged bees come in that somebody didn't do very well through winter.

So this can happen a lot too. You have bees that are not locally adapted that require a lot of help and care to get them through winter. More than just, you know, a little extra sugar syrup or something. So the beeweaver line, and of course I support other beekeepers that are doing genetics, but you're way ahead, first of all, economically your way ahead, just by raising your own. queens and bees and i do that through splitting i started doing the ecosystem and i see o t and that's for creating a bunch of queens and you know what you end up with a bunch of queens that i don't need then what i'm selling queens uh so i don't do that i do my own splits walk away splits are my favorites

uh rehiving swarms and letting the parent colony just replace their queen themselves fresh genetics uh every year are very good ideas I did a really interesting interview with Dr. Margarita Lopez Yerebe and that interview is really worth watching because we talk a lot about how each year when a queen gets produced in your colony from locally adapted stock, they are also being produced with the current virus and pathogen loads that your bees are facing and they're better equipped to cope with those. So nothing against big-time bee breeders and packaged sellers and nucleus sellers and things like that. But if you can get away with cycling back your own stock year after year in spring as a backyard beekeeper, you'll find it very satisfying and it's free. So there you go for Jason. Question number seven comes from Will from Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

It says I was on a break from breedkeeping until a hive that I left in the backyard captured a swarm that has happened several times and I'm joyful when it does I previously kept bees successfully in North Carolina but I used chemicals at that time now I'm in Northeast Ohio and I've tried several years to keep bees without the use of chemicals but have not been successful I use a lot of techniques from Michael Bush I use to buy local bees from a beekeeper that does not use chemicals but that is an expensive proposition. I've gotten hives into winter but have not been successful keeping them into spring. Now with this hive, I am giving it another try and would appreciate your advice on using

OA. So for those you don't know OA as exhalic acid. My goal for this hive will be to split into two or three hives and successfully get them through winter. My larger goal is just to have the joy of beekeeping as much as I would like to say chemical free. I'm trying to get my head around my lack of success without chemicals versus the use of exhalic acid. I intended to keep them as naturally as possible. I don't use foundation. I little to know honey. I don't take any of it. I feed sugar unless I don't feed sugar unless necessary, etc. I would like to have the hardest the hardiest bee is possible and OA would work against natural bee-king principles, but I am considering calling surrender in the battle and seeing if I can be successful

by using OA. If so, I can make future decisions about continued use of OA, and when I can sustain a B yard of about 8 to 10 hives from year to year, I know that you cannot make that decision for me, but evaluate your perspective on this. Thanks so much. That is right in line with, I want to keep bees naturally holistically without treatments without interventions and it was at a time starting in 2006 when oxalic acid was not approved so you couldn't use it it was being used in other parts of the world and it was an organic treatment so then i thought i would just do survivor stock and what dr thomas seeley refers to as darwinian beekeeping so that means hyverroa mite colonies have to be eliminated back our beekeepers have a hard time killing on

a colony of bees because they have a high varroa load so that tends not to work out and then after about 10 years of trying to do that then i shifted over to because what happened exhalic acid became legal and uh they had a dosing for that so i started to use that and i had remarkable results in varroa might control doing that so what i'm going to say for those who are starting to bridge over and if you're thinking that you need a little bit of help with the organics the Research has been done, field trials have been done, tests have been documented. And of course, the next argument would be when a test gets published and says that treatment-free colonies die out, they would say, well, you use the wrong treatment-free colonies.

You need a better ones, different ones, other genetic lines. And so there are Purdue ankle biters. There are a lot of different genetics out there that do really well until somebody shows up and messes up your genetics, as I described earlier on today. So anyway, the cheapest and safest, let's talk about. that. If you're going to use an exhalic acid vaporizer, those things are expensive and the prices just went up. So I'm looking for alternatives myself. I mean, I have the vaporizer, so I'm set, but if I'm talking to people, you have an option to get the dribble. And then make a dribble

solution with oxalic acid. Of course, you have to follow the labels to tell you how to do that. And I have to tell you that there are only a few sources for the exalic acid that are legal to use in your beehives. So better bee has apobioxal and you're going to find out a little bit of sticker shock there. So then we go to Mike's B's, which is EZ OX, EZ-TAC OX, and they sell axelic acid in tablet form and powder form. They are the least expensive approved exhalic acid for miticides in your hives right now. And you can make a dribble with that. and the reason I bring that up is you don't have to buy a vaporizer now it's physically a little more demanding to do because you have to get into the hives and you have to run this

oxalic acid dribble on the seams of the bees which is the space between the frames where the bees are occupying it but as far as safety equipment goes respiratory potential distress and things like that it's way up there in safety so that's what I would recommend and that's my perspective the other thing is keep up with the other control measures so if you have a colony that's struggling with might loads we don't want their drones anyway because genetically they're inferior so what are we going to do we're going to wait till the drones are capped and then that's the safest get rid of them after capping now if your hands on you're really going to stay tuned in and you're going to be all over it cage the drones in a queen isolation cage another expense put the frame of capped

in that cage, let those drones emerge from their cells, wait until they're two or three days old, and then they draw varro-destructor mites off of your nurse bees because those mites have a preference for young drones. And now you use that as a magnet for varro-destructor mites. You pull that out of the hive and you go straight to the freezer in a baggie. So that actually becomes varroa mite control. There you go. So there are a lot of ways to do it. And culling up. drones has been a long-standing method for bringing those mite numbers down then there's yeah there arguments to be made for leaving the parasitic pressure on your bees to see which bees rise to the top and do the best back-car beekeepers

have a very hard time doing that for the reason I described earlier on yeah you could have somebody a thousand yards away from you that brings in stocks that you don't know anything about they can be loaded with forode-destructor mites and they can work against your efforts into stealing your hives of all pro-destructor mites. So I'd like to blame all my problems on other beekeepers, but we have to monitor those things ourselves. So that's my recommendation.

And then that's about it. So question number eight comes from Edwin from Connersville, Indiana. Fred, I'm finishing up some new horizontal hives and decided to take your advice on paint. I went to the store and they had mistinted paint for $10 a gallon. it this a.m. I opened it and found I was going to have bubblegum pink hives. I hope the bees like it. By the way, I'm still waiting for the queen pipes that I ordered after your video.

So those are on back order, I guess. But bubblegum pink be hives. You know there have been studies done. I have a background in art. Don't know if you need that. But there have been studies done on the psychology, the psychological impact of different colors on people. And one of the things was if you wore pink, but they call it bazooka chewing gum pink, it actually made somebody that was looking at that weaker. So if you're going to fight somebody, you probably want to wear a suit that's bazook gum pinks and they feel weak. And they tested this out on people that were confined. I'll just leave your mind open to who that might be.

Where they wanted to see if they could reduce some of their aggression through the color. And so it was momentary. you know they did have this weakness and for example the color cadmium red for example made somebody really strong so you wouldn't wear a cadmium red outfit unless you wanted to strengthen your opponent see where i'm going so maybe bubblegum pink beehives would create passive bees we don't know but the point to be made here is uh go to the person mixing paint at the building center wherever it is see if they've got returned paint that they have to get rid of and you'll get it for a fraction of its original cost. That's what that's about. Question number nine comes from Kenneth. Thank you for sharing so. Should one super the normal lang hives if there is a lot of bees bearding. And this question came about

because I put out a video recently where bees were clustered on the front of my Beersville bees long Langstroth hive and when I looked inside I realized that I could expand the colony and wouldn't it be cool to see if I just move the follower board on the long length roth pulled some empty frames over from the other side of it and put them in and see if by creating that space we can reduce some of the numbers of the foragers that are on the outside of the hive and it was at a time also when they're trying to dehydrate down their honey so and it worked so it reduced the numbers in the outside of the hive by a lot so this question is on a vertical hive configuration if we see a bunch of bees masks on the front

would they benefit from us now adding another super. So I say being that it's this time of year, that the temperatures are warming up, and that there is a nectar flow coming, that it wouldn't hurt to super up and pay attention to what your bees do and see if they don't go inside. This was one of the reasons why slatted racks were initially put in.

You may be wondering, what is a slatted rack now? Well, that sits on your standard bottom board, is a two inch thick shim that goes to the bottom that has slats in it that align with the frames up above it in your deep box that provided your bees another place to be and get out of the way of those that are working inside the hive and trying to dehydrate the hive dehydrate the honey so slatted racks were good because they didn't only provide that space I never saw that really reduced big numbers of bees that were clustered on the front of the hive, but it did help your queen lay eggs all the way down to the full depth of the frame. Often when we have a solid bottom board entrance at the bottom board,

which is where it normally is, the queen would stop laying your eggs in the bottom 20% of a frame would not be used for breed production. So this encouraged them to do that. So the slatted racks was one thing. So it doesn't hurt for you to try it. If you've got a colony, of course, if all your colonies are covering the fronts of their hives, there's bearding everywhere, that's just a heavy nectar flow. But if you go around and you see, and that's why I showed in the beginning of that video,

that hives normal, that hives normal, this hive has a big cluster in front of it. So things are a little different with this colony, which led me to think maybe they just need more space. because one of the last things we want to trigger is a swarm when they fill a space too much. So it worked out. So you get out of super. If you've got one colony that's really covered with bees, they're building up. In fact, that can be an early sign to you that you might have a colony who's getting ready to swarm. So when you go to super them up, you might also go ahead and do a cursory inspection of the brood area,

make sure they're not building queen cells because you could already be in a pickle. So the answer is yes, maybe. Question number 10 comes from Fred from Thorn Hill, Tennessee. I got the two colony Keepers Hive, planning on doing summer splits with two queens coming in first week of July. Our dearth starts middle of June. Northeast Tennessee, probably early this year, will feed one to one. That's sugar syrup, by the way, one part water, one part sugar,

and some pollen patty can to use a bucket feeder on top of the hive i would like to slow down how fast they take the syrup or should you use a divided feeder shim with a bag on each side oh so here's the thing this is an example of a feeder that you can put on top of your inner cover right over the feeder hole and uh it will trickle feed your bees this is important so if you look at this This is a one gallon feeder, but the bottom only has this little tiny feeder that sticks down in the hole. And it's enough space. A little air passes through there, but the bees themselves can't get up there. This thing holds over a gallon, and it's made by B-smart. Now, the reason I bring this up is I'm not a fan of inverted feeders, depending on the time of year.

So in other words, early spring, we have freezing nights, really warm days, and we have a flux and temperature of about 40 degrees in a lot of cases. And so what would happen is when an airspace develops up here, as it gets really cold overnight, what happens? The airspace shrinks and air is drawn in. Then it warms back up. The air that's up here expands and pushes syrup out whether your bees want it or not. So we experimented with a whole bunch of different feeders.

Now, another one was the bee buffet. worked really well also but when it came to trickle feeding so this particular one lasted many days on its own expanding and contracting and it did not push out as much syrup as some of the others did bucket feeders pushed out a lot um so here's the thing this provides a constant resource of sugar syrup the letter sugar syrup so when you fill it up your bees can't even get to it that fast so even if they work it constantly day and night they will continually have this resource of carbohydrates that comes through but doesn't flood the colony they can't suddenly take in a whole bunch of sugar syrup which in some cases depending on the

feeder a rapid round for example you can put half a gallon of sugar syrup in a rapid round feeder and they can empty it overnight because they all have access to it it's unrestricted and they just consume it really fast now rapid round does not express itself into the hive the way contained feeders do like buckets like this but this was the slowest one so your bees can keep up with this in other words even if the temperature increase and an air pocket expander put pressure on it the bees the exposure area is so small that the bees actually keep up with what's being expressed down into the hive now i do recommend that you drill a hole in this case it's only a one inch hole so make an inch and a quarter

diameter hole in the corners or backs of your inner cover put this towards the back because now it's not centered directly over your brood and you could have more than one see we could have two gallons up there and keep things going and this would work in your horizontal hives or vertical hives and i think they're great for that so that's one example and those are not that expensive just look up just google it a lot of different people carry them the uh It's probably called the ultimate feeder or something like that, but it's the only in hive, hive top feeder that Be Smart produces. So look for that.

They work. They trickle out there. Question number 11 comes from Brad, Cranesville, Pennsylvania. So I have two deep eight-frame hives. I saw my queen. Now this is important. I saw my queen. I also observed a charged queen cell on May,

22nd no queen i could have missed seeing her the queen cell was capped on may 29th this queen cell was open at the bottom however i observed several other queen cells both at the bottom of frames and emergency cells in the middle frames i did observe some capped brood with a good pattern and saw some larvae but no eggs when should i check in the hive and what should I see then. So, but I want to backtrack, when you see that they're building queen cells and you come across the queen, the existing queen in the colony,

this is your chance to stop a swarm or at least save that queen as an insurance policy. So collect that queen, move her into a resource hive, a five-frame nuke with a frame of brood and don't bring any of that have the queen cells on. bring the frame of brood and a frame of resources and put together a very small insurance policy colony then go back and look at your remaining frames and if you're

trying to keep them from swarming go back to the hive and carefully look at each and every frame in your hive and make sure that you smash every single queen cell in there because then what'll happen is they'll look for the opportunity to make new queen cells in the absence of those queen cells so then what will happen is they need eggs or emerged recently emerged or hatched larvae so once that passes the open larvae phase once that passes there's no way they can make an emergency queen so you have to go back in and smush them until your eggs and open larvae are too big to be used for queens smash them up then when you find out they didn't make a queen cell after that, after two weeks, if they did make a queen and you didn't catch it,

after two weeks you should see her in there or evidence that there is a queen. If not, now we can bring back the original queen with all of the larvae that she's been producing while she's been gone and put them right back in the hive. And then you can work them up. But let's say we have this scenario, the queen's gone, there was some open larvae now, no eggs and we're thinking that they produce another queen how long should we wait within two weeks of seeing what's described here you should be able to get back in the hive and you should see eggs and then you'll know that the queen was successful at getting mated and that's your queen right again but all of that could have been headed off and that stress

could have been removed by when you came across the queen while they're making these queen cells removing cur and creating that insurance policy hive you'd have been good to go that's would have should have been could have i know it's too late for that but for those listening you come across the queen and queen cells in the same hive get that queen out of there and keep her from swarming out and then go around if you're trying to keep your population up kill off uh the residual queens question number 12 comes from diane from warren new jersey finally got a colony moved into my long langstroth hive last tuesday and it was from a prime swarrow in April. As I moved them, I noticed that they are in swarm preparation mode.

So I gave them more space, got rid of as many swarm cells as I could find about 10 of them. If I didn't succeed in heading them off and they do swarm, could I rehive them in the long Langstroth and put them with frames, unfortunately, no tron comb, but heavy wax foundation on the far side of the honey about eight medium frames worth. There are also about five. new heavywax foundation frames next to the brood I really want this colony to produce excess honey I don't want another hive so I'm going to say the same thing as before if we're worried about them making new queens we need to sequester the queen that you know about because you're not losing the workforce then and then be vigilant at hunting down all queen cells

So we want to reduce them to one queen. Now if worse comes to worst you're trying to produce honey, you can combine colonies together by removing whichever is the least productive queen, favoring the one that is the most productive, combining colonies. But I realize now a lot of people have different size boxes, deeps and mediums. Some people use all mediums. So that makes everything 100% interchangeable. But you can combine colonies if your goal is hunting.

then you want to have a maximum workforce in a colony so they can take advantage of the nectar flow when it comes but you need to expand and have all the space that you require so and with long lengths this expansion and contraction is very easy any horizontal hansel zyve configuration horizontal hives allow you to expand and contract in the moment almost so when you see there's a bunch of frames they're not using it don't seem to intend to even use you can move those on the outside of your follower board and close up the colony space a little bit and they'll work faster in spaces that are appropriate to the population of the bees that occupy them so i hope that works out question number 13 comes from laurel from lindenhurst maybe it's illinois because it just says two huh anyway enjoyed a jump in spider video and discovered one eating a bee on my hive it captured in a queen clip because she would not leave her meal now guarding an egg mass I'm waiting for spiderlings so here's the thing we see jumping spiders around our hides all the time I have a reason for you to keep them just hear me out it's okay when you find the jumping spider and I recently had a queen in a queen pipe one of those crystal clear ones and it had a little bold male jumping spider come skipping over and jump right onto my hand and right onto the pipe because I can see the movement in the pipe that's how boldly

they are right on my hand so here's the thing when we have these little and this is in the state of pennsylvania of course you may have different species of spiders i'm not saying do this with every spider but the bold jumping spiders habituate to an area they realize that you're not smashing them every time they see you which means now they don't hide anymore and they are bold that's where they get their name bold jumping spider but here's the reason i want you to leave them there you know where they are they're up underneath the cover the telescoping cover of your hive They're scooting around the edges. I'm sure people get alarmed because they see one come down and grab a worker honeybee.

I have videos of those. I include that in my presentation about bees and beekeeping. And a bull jumping spider will run right out on the landing board right in front of the entrance and nab a bee and leave with it. And none of the guards care. Now I have some experience keeping jumping spiders inside in enclosures and kind of seeing what their capacity is to even, eat how many honey bees how many adult honey bees could a jumping spider take out every single day maybe one and then maybe just three a week so is it worth it to have it around so why keep it around let me make that case for you let the jumping spider stick around because you know what else

is trying to scoot into your inner covers uh under your outer cover on top of your inner cover and get things going in there small high beetles for one wax maws fly around at night and lay their eggs on crevices and stuff on your hive but if you have a bold jumping spider in residency there and in this case several jumping spiders maybe um i've pulled hive covers today telescoping covers and had jumping spiders at opposite corners so multiples and again some people get wigged out because spiders are at the low end of things people are going to like but i want you to take your time and really consider the jumping spider they will eat wax moths. They will catch other bugs that are trying to scoot up underneath your inner cover

and they can't eat a lot of them. But the fact that they're there at all means that bugs that are trying to move in, avoid the area. What do you think? Sound logic. And I name all the females Janice. All the males are called Jasper. Jasper is impressive. They're funny. If it's doing this with its hands with its four legs when you come up and it's getting close that semaphore behavior is only exhibited by the males so that's really interesting too they're just they're saying hey they're seeing what's going on question number 14 comes from derrick from chambersburg pennsylvania i heard yesterday that you can tell a mated queen by the fact that she has three abdominal segments beyond her wing length Is there something identifiable that can tell us whether a queen is mated or a virgin

other than the more subjective things we hear, plumber, wider, etc.? Okay, so for Derek, the abdomen of the queen, that's not always, by the way, a great way to tell if she's mated and in production. Mated just means that she could have come back from a drone congregationer and she's mated, but she has not built up all the eggs that she starts to produce and her abdomen doesn't get really full. The number of segments past the wings would be very hard for you to observe in a queen that's on the go inside your hive. But we definitely look for that nice full abdomen

because she's in production. Now we can have a dearth period, which a lot of people are going into right now, which means the queen leans out and she reduces her egg production, which also means then that her absente, demand would be a little smaller. So you wouldn't be able to just look at her and go, oh, she's no longer mated. No, she's just a little bit economizing her egg production. So it wouldn't always be the case.

Now, in a full nectar flow with plenty of pollen and everything else around, what you're describing is probably true. But it wouldn't be assigned across the board in every time of year. So your best indicator that you've got a queen is of course the sound of the hive, the behavior of the hive, how settled they are, and whether or not of course she's producing prude, particularly this time of year. Looking physically at the queen and trying to count segments beyond the tail, not beyond the wings, then, I mean, that may be decent, but your best production, your best indicator, that she's in production is the eggs that she's making. So knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

15. This is question number 15 comes from Roxanne, Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. Just want to let you know my grandson had a blast marking drones yesterday. Best idea ever. Give your young beekeeper something to do. Give them a paint marker and let them practice on drones. Now my supervisor, the grandson, marked his first real queen this past week. So I did finally let him after he marked all these drones, after he was doing a good job, the paint dog was where it's supposed to be on the thorax.

If you can mark a drone, you can mark a queen. Drones are much more powerful. They're super squirrelly. They're covered in air and they're harder to hold on to you for kids. So I'm glad that happened. Plus it's fun to see where these drones show up everywhere. Last question of the day. Question number 16 comes from Julie from Leavenworth. West Virginia. So I am a new beekeeper. I've had my top bar high for only a couple of months. I know that many of a ronite treatments should not be used when the supers are on, but I don't know how I will tell when the equivalent of my super will be on. I assume it will be when the bees are making combs, but no putting brood in the cells,

and filling with nectar only. And I assume that I will observe this is, part of my regular inspections. Approximately, when might that happen? Even though I'm in West Virginia, I think my microclimate climate parallels yours based on your reports and intros. I'm at the 47th latitude. In the shadow of a mountain, I won't be making any honey this year since my colonies are just getting started. What does supercipically, when do supercipically get taken off? So you have to know when your nectar flows are you have to know when you have a potential dearth and when it comes to the horizontal hives it's a pretty predictable order um just as described with a single entrance no additional venting they keep their brood near the entrance and they start to fill out their frames of brood as they go

mixing with brood and resources and ultimately having nothing but capped honey going down the way and here's the cautionary tail as far as the treatments go too by the way i would only use This is personal opinion. You can do anything you want. There are synthetics and there are organics when it comes to treatments for varodistructor mites. Why not always use only an organic treatment that is safe to use and approved to use with honey supers on? So for that it's what we talked about earlier, exhalic acid Formic pro is another one and there are others you can look up. So you do a search for organic varroa mite treatment Mides, Penn State, Dr. Robin Underwood did a really good study. You can find a lot of information about that.

But when it comes to what honey can you take? So let's, so we establish it. If we're going to do exhalic acid treatments, please only use what's already approved with honey superson. I think that's just a great way to go. No potential failure and you can treat it anytime. Some of them have a removal withdrawal timeframe, like in other words, you have to get the,

might decide off and before you can add the honey supers at all and so this is it can be cumbersome so when it comes to the horizontal hives when I have four or five deep frames of honey that's enough to get my colony through winter that's all they need four or five deep frames of honey in my standard long lengthroth hive with insulated cover blanket beyond that fair game that's for anybody to take so then you can pull it and I also like the idea of micro harvesting which is going to be fun to do and I'm really hoping I can do some mark micro harvesting at the end of next week we have kind of uh withdrawal period now so production is higher than resources coming in and by that I mean brood production is exceeding the nectar flow so that's about to shift in favor of the bees and that's when I'm going to be able to start doing some demonstrations about micro harvesting honey so i hope you'll come back for that and that's coming up so if you want to know where you are whether or not you've got a dearth coming up if the environment that you're in support your bees how

strong is the nectar flow what plants are even providing resources for your bees there's a website so here it is beescape b-e-e-se-a-pe dot psu dot edu and once you get on that page you have to type in your address once you type in your address there's a little marker in the top left that you drag down and you put it on the map and That marks the spot that you want to know about the environmental resources So there you can find out are there a lot of pesticides in use so those who use pesticides as part of the Department of Agriculture are required to register their pesticides and so you'll know are you putting your bees in an area where you have a high pesticide load, which can then potentially challenge your bees. So the other thing is it talks about whether or not there's a dearth. Even the environment's ability to support feral colonies of bees and trees. So all of these things get different grades. So where I live, there's no dearth.

So we have some reduced nectar flow plants at the end of the year, which by the way with Goldenrod and asters and things like that, we have a heavy nectar flow at the end of the year. We have a heavy nectar flow at the of the year. In fact, we could get our entire main honey harvest if all we did was take care of our bees and wait until the end of July going into August and then we start to use that heavy fall nectar flow as our honey harvest opportunity because the bee populations are at their largest. They can forage faster and get resources quicker and more efficiently and then you can reap the benefits. and then later of course as we get to the end of september early october we're packing down our colonies are ready for winter so that's it we are in the fluff section so plan of the week i want you to super your hives as necessary so you have to assess the population of the hive and add a super or expand it if it's a horizontal hive give them more frames uh in sync with uh the size of the colony that's in there you need to look at the amount of capped brood you have

If you've got four or five frames of capped, brood, you are about to have a population explosion in the hive. And you need to advance the space available to them so that when they do come out, they are working the colony. That they have a lot of space to deal with and you won't be causing another swarm. At a time of year, you don't want one. So super is necessary. Verify you've got a queen. Look for the resources. Look for the eggs and everything in there.

Inspect for queen's cells. If you've got queen's cells in production and you find your queen, we already talked about it today. You're going to decide whether you want to lose the queen or if you want to put her in a resource or insurance policy hive and make sure you have something that will leave you with resources in the event that the replacement queens don't make it. And it can happen. You can end up with a queenless colony. Look up brood health, by the way. I want everyone to think about this booklet.

it's called honey bees and their melodies it is put out by Penn State we can't all call our mentor and look at what different brood disorders might look like this little booklet is pocket-sized so you can take this out and really give your hives a once-over make sure everything is good to go i highly suspect if you had disease and your beehives you would know it by now most people discover that stuff early spring but it doesn't hurt hurt right now to check everything out and know that you're good to go so and that honeybees and normalities is available at extension.psu.edu tell them I sent you ask for a discount pay the same as everybody else and watch out for ticks don't let your apiary get super

overgrown with tall grass bushes and thistles and things like that there is where you're going to have to work your bees who wants to lose a hive tool for example so it's it's the benefits are multiple just keep things groomed down it's easier to work your bees cut down on ticks pollinator plants go out do a nature walk find out what your bees are on what they're doing and think about areas that maybe aren't being used for pollinator plants that are available that you could be getting some plantings going i have a neighbor here that just decided out of the blue to till a huge part of his field and just wants to know what kind of plants I want to have put in there. So my wife went up there with her sister and they decided what he's going to plant to add to the pollinator resources on his property.

That's the kind of neighbors we need. So anyway, I want to thank you for watching. I want to thank you for being here. And I hope that you have a fantastic weekend. What's left of it, you and your bees. I'm Frederick Dunn and this has been The Way to Be. Thank you.