The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 360 with Frederick Dunn

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

This is the audio track from Today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/ejbRKCWjDKU

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, June the 19th of 2006. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 360. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm glad that you're here. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please look down at the video description, and you'll see all the topics listed in order.

And later on, it'll also be marked on the timeline so you can skip ahead to something that you might want to check out. And if you'd like to submit a question or a topic of your own, you can write it right in the comment section, or you can go to my website, the wayto-be.org, click on the pagemark contact, fill out the information, and there you go. There's also a fellowship, if you're wondering,

if you can share a picture, a video sample of something that you're seeing in your beehive, and you don't really understand what's going on, and you want to hear from your peers. People just like you all over the world go to the Way to Be fellowship. And they're going to see it. The other thing is you can listen to this is a podcast. YouTube hosts the podcast as well, but you can go to Podbean or High Heart Radio.

You can just Google the way to be podcast and you'll find it. So that way you don't wreck your stuff and you can commute or scroll around and do things and not have to look at your screen. So what else can we talk about? I know we can talk about what's going on. Heavy weather here in the United States. I don't know if you've been keeping track for those of you who are in the other parts of the world. We have tornadoes, heavy winds, high rains flooding. I haven't seen anything in the

news about beehives floating away. If you've suffered bee damage, let us know what happened and why you fail to protect your bees from two or three feet of water. So here where I am, we escaped it. We have high winds. We had some rains, some downpours and stuff like that. But to the south of us, we had some tornadoes. People lost some buildings. So It's rough around here, but right now, this minute, in the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania, 67 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 19 Celsius,

25 mile per hour wind gusts. Even today, that's 40 kilometers per hour. So it's gusty, it's unpleasant. This is not a great day to go out and do macro photography and video work because everything is moving. It's very annoying. I don't know how many of you try that stuff out, or if you've even tried, by the way,

your cell phone probably has a macro setting on it usually it's just a little picture of a flower head or something like that you can get amazingly close with your cell phone try it out look it up see what the capabilities are but anyway the nominal wind is 4.7 miles per hour which is 7.5 kilometers per hour 70% relative humidity and the bees are bearding and lined up on the landing boards near the entrance and they're fanning things down because there's a nectar flow on What's a nectar flow? Well, that's when flowers produce nectar. And your bees go together and they bring it in and it starts to load up. Some people call it the honey flow.

I don't think the honey's flowing. I think the nectar's flowing, which results in the honey flowing once they get inside the hive. But they start processing it. The minute the bees get on the flower and they access those nectaries and they get nectar in their honey crop. And when it's in there, there's enzyme activity happening already. ready. So while they're in the field, things are going on. The processing has begun. And when the bees fly back to the hive with the nectar that they've gathered, which is really sucrose,

they pass it on to another bee inside the hive. And that's called trophlaxis. The receiving bee is the one with the tongue out, if you're wondering what's going on. And sometimes this even happens right on the landing board. They're giving taste samples. They're like the people at the mall that flip little bits and pieces of candies and stuff at you, trying to get you to sample. so they can sell you a whole bag. When the bee goes inside the hive and goes to the waggle dance floor, it's usually the same area over and over, by the way.

They waggle away advertising that they found something great. And the bees that are in attendance there, they want to know what it is, they stick their tongues out. They want to sample. They want to taste and they want to smell it too, which is why they can locate it

once they get out to the area that has been indicated by the waggle dance. I know you wanted to know that. pollen is medium high today, higher tomorrow. That'll be cool if it doesn't rain a lot. And your swarm risk right now is about 30%. And it could be different where you are, of course. It has to do with whether or not you're in a dearth.

But your bees are probably built up a pretty decent population right now. So the swarm risk has gone down because in partnership with the lack of environmental resources, they're not getting the urge to swarm to reproduce and sometimes we look at that and we go wow the bees you know given the conditions outside they're going to swarm right now well remember swarm preparations start long before now because once they decide that they're going to replace their queen and push the existing queen out this happens weeks ago so we need to pay attention to that because it doesn't just happen because we have current weather

conditions and all of a sudden there's a lot of nectar out there and you can walk through your bee yard and smell the honey in the air i don't know how many of you experienced that but you smell bee bread by the way that's what i'm smelling right now more than anything be bread what is that that's the pollen that's being processed inside the hive and it gives off a scent so the way to be academy building where the observation hives are has a strong scent of bee bread inside so it's fermenting is doing things. So your swarm risk is down. If you want to know, based on your own location, what your chances are for swarming. In other words, how much is being provided to your bees and is there a dearth where you live? Go to a website called B-scape.psu.org.combe. P-S-U-U-D-U. And you can put in

your address and you can put a little, grab the little ticker mark from the top and then stick it on the map. and then it will let you know what the environmental situation is for you. It's pretty handy stuff. Pretty good. It's run by Penn State University, of course. And so you might wonder what's going on outside. I highly recommend you take a walk if you can. It hasn't been fun around here to do that.

The wind has been blowing my chicken feathers backwards. Not mine, but my chickens' feathers. And they look like flipped umbrellas sometimes when it just gusts across the land. And so white clover right now is what they're. honey bees are on if you can get them to hold still long enough and this is why by the way you shouldn't be mowing in the middle of the day don't let people know your clover down with bees on it so you either want to start that early in the day or you want to do that near sunset when fewer bees and of course it's drier at the end of the day it probably makes more sense to do that but don't mow your bees so anyway

clover honey is fantastic and i highly recommend you practice something called micro harvesting. So what that is is you look at your beehives and you've got honey super zon most of you do now as we do and when you look at it and you see ah you've got you know three out of 10 frames are capped and by capped I mean the honey cells are full the honey is finished it's ripened it's been through it's invert so they have invertase that they use to break it down and take sucrose and make it glucose and fructose and all the fancy stuff that becomes honey but when it comes from clover the particulates in the clover are so few that it takes a long time for that honey to crystallize so this is

really good stuff and so micro harvesting is fantastic you pull two or three frames you're a backyard beekeeper you don't have to like light up a whole honey room and bring in the crew to run everything you're the crew i'd recommend grandchild labor while we're at it so the white clover just doing great everywhere The clover that I seeded hasn't bloomed yet, of course, but it is growing everywhere. Thank goodness. It's finally coming up. So also a basswood, just as I mentioned last week, linen trees. They were just starting then.

More blooms today and with the warm weather and the sun, but the wind works against us. It's hard to see them and listen to things when the wind is just blowing through the trees everywhere. But they're out there. Blackberries, raspberries, continuous. They're out there. All stages of development. So we're going to have berries pretty darn soon. And of course, I know you wanted to know.

What's the deer situation? Well, the white-tailed deer, one in particular, my least favorite, is walking around on his hind legs so that he can reach the mulvaries before they're even ripe. I don't like that. That's annoying to me. And the milkweed, by the way, is everywhere, and the flowers are all over it. But they're not open yet. But when they do open, what's going to happen?

Nectar out of the wazoo. the honeybees are going to go for the milkweed nectar it is fantastic it's for more than you know milkweed supports a lot of different insects and pollinators and we all know the monarch the monarch loves milkweeds milkweed does not love monarchs though it's trying to kill them actually if you really want to know but the monarchs need the nectar and of course it's the only thing that they parasitize that's right i said it monarch butterflies lay an egg on a milkweed plant they spread them out why do they spread the monarch eggs out on those leaves because if they put a bunch of them together on the same leaf guess what happens when those little caterpillars

come out they eat each other that's right they're dangerous to each other so they're not just munching away on the milkweed which we like because it produces milkweed honey which is really good but they go after each other they're not pleasant they're unfriendly anyway staghorn sumac that's coming in just starting by the way. So this is just a great time to take a hike and find out what's going on. I highly recommend crawling around on the ground, particularly when other people are around, just disappear into the ground cover. Sit still. See what's going on. Sometimes when you show up to a cluster of flowers, the bees fly away momentarily,

but if you sit tight, stay put, hang out, they'll come back. And you get to see what's going on and you can practice that macro setting on your phone and then post it on social media and show everyone the very first picture of a honeybee on a clover ever photographed if it could happen it could be you so anyway we're going to start right in with the people that have submitted questions we're going to kick off with ross wagner it says and this is a reference to of course episode number 359 which was last friday if bees are floral constant then why do bees and why does bee lining work I wish I had something to show you that would help me explain what bee lining even is. That was not planned.

Just happen to have it sitting here. This box is for bee lining. So what bee lining is, is something that Dr. Thomas Seeley talked about. I don't know if he originated it, but it's certainly part of the honeybee democracy and the biology of the honeybee and all the great books. If there's a book by Dr. Thomas Celia, I highly recommend that you go out and get it right now. but what happened is you go out into a field and you want to find bees so you go out at what time i don't know round noon uh this works really well later in the year and when the bees are up on flowers then you

catch a bee see that's fake honeycomb anyway you catch a bee in here so you close that up see what happens then we want that bee when they're inside this box we want them to go to the back of the box. Bees follow light. So if we pull this off of the back of the box, look what's there, a window. So the bee, and that helps us and the bee. See, the bee sees the light, it moves to the back of the box. And we have a window so we can see when the bee makes it back into the back of the box. And then what do we do? We close off this middle piece. See it made it back there. Once it's in the back, we close it off. Now we have access to the front without letting the bee go. And we put sugar syrup in this. and then we put the sugar syrup in here

and then we close this and then we pull this out now and now the back's closed so that it doesn't see light anymore so now it goes over here and goes wow sucrose thank you and then bees are sugar addicts so it's going to drink a whole bunch of that and then you're going to sit still and you're going to do

what I really like doing which is sit in a chair and stare at things for extended periods of time tell people that is a very important work and you really shouldn't be disturbed anyway then what it's done when it's had its fill, you can pop this out and the bee flies out. You can look at things. Anyway, when the bee's gone, it flies out, it's going to beeline. Whoa, that's probably why they

call it belining. It might do a little loop because now you've moved it a little bit and it's going to orient and it's going to look at this thing because what's in there, a resource, and then it's going to fly away to bring that resource home to its colony. So you pay attention. If that goes straight back to your apiary, forget it. Game over. Go find another. another bee. But what you want to do is you want to find a bee until you hear it beeline out to a wild area, not your neighbor's apiary either. So then you, when it comes back with its friends and it goes in there and it gets on this, we trap them. And now we can move on to another location altogether and then closer, you know,

where they came from. So we follow that line and then we set it down there again. And after they've had their fill, we open it back up and they fly out again to little loop-de-loo and then they fly further and then we follow that line again after they come back go in it fill up with nectar so it's called bee lining it's a lot of fun and nine times out of ten which is why this sits on a shelf in here instead of being out active and one of the fun things to do you end up going to a neighbor's bee yard or somebody's out yard it's very rare I can tell you I've never found a feral colony of bees and a tree using

this method. But depending on where you live, you may not have a bunch of beekeepers around you and you can do bee lining. Where can you get a box like this? Where do you think? Better be. So that's it. If you have one and it works out for you and you've done it before, I just ended up finding a neighbor's apiary and then you feel like a creeper. So don't go. But anyway, so part of this question is, if bees are floral constant, then why does bee lining work? Well, so we're taking advantage of the fact that they're sucrose addicts. Honeybees go after sucrose wherever they find it. However, if they're on a dandelion, they're only going to land on dandelions, but you can derail the bee from a dandelion and put it in that box, and now we shift it to sugar syrup. That is not

changing course for the bee away from a specific plant that they were working on before and onto another plant. So that's why floral constancy works. They will go after Like you could offer them honey, for example, finished honey, and they're going to go nuts over it. Because, again, they're addicts. And if we offer them, if we have them on a dandelion, then we offer them clover right next to it, will they jump from the dandelion to the clover?

No. But if we dipped it in sugar syrup, would they do it? Yeah. Because we changed it. We altered it. So it does not change the floral constant nature of the honey bee, but all bees, no matter what they're currently after as far as their nectar and pollen source in the environment,

they can be derailed by pure sucrose. Well, a high percentage. You know, two to one or something. If I were doing that, I would give them a light sugar syrup. That makes a point. If you do really light sugar syrup to where they have to fly a long distance with it, they won't come back. So what they're doing is they're going to go after the highest sugar concentration they can

find when you're offering it outside of a plant so and we've done all these tests before we i have backyard beekeeping so i put different percentages of sugar to water all the way up to two to one which is basically almost the consistency of honey itself and when you do that where do they go they go for the highest sugar concentration that's the same with plants and only that plants during the day have different concentrations of sucrose to water. So it might be as low as 10% early in the morning, which is one of the reasons why a lot of bees don't even forage for nectar early in the morning

because there might be heavy dew where you are, which dilutes it and makes it less of a benefit for that trip. They want to economize their energy. That's why 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and then they're peaking out around 2 p.m. foraging, and that's when, see, it should be drier unless we have a rain system coming through. and then the concentrations of the sugar syrup, the nectar, has more concentration of sugar than earlier in the day.

I hope that helps. But anyway, I suppose this doesn't occur naturally, though. It sure doesn't, because they're not just going to find a bee lining box out there somewhere made by other bees or ants or whatever wants to lure the bees in. Jumping spiders, if they could do it, they would set out little nectar jars and then sit by it, wait for the honeybee to come. to it and then they would just jump them and end their day and it wouldn't be good. So the next question comes from Mr. Dog Meat 1. That's an interesting YouTube name. How come there's no queen excluder between the medium honey super and the flow hive super?

Second question, did you ever try Demery split using the flow super as one of the honey collection boxes? Just curious if anyone has ever tried. So this is in response to a video about setting up your winter configurations for beehives. And so the thing is, early on, early on, I've only been keeping bees since 2006, so it hasn't been that early on. But I was testing out different queen excluders.

And at the time, I just had a bunch of plastic ones, whichever ones came for a mann lake or whoever was shipping them out. And so what I did is I set up a feeder, and you can look at this. You can go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, just to a search for queen excluders and you'll see it. The bees would come to the source and fly away with it.

And then overnight, I went out there, filled it up again, and I put a queen excluder over the top of it so that I can make a direct observation to see, can they get through it very well? Because it's a known source. Not only that, remember, there's sugar addicts, so they're going nuts for it. And could some bees have a problem getting through the queen excluder?

and some bees gave up. They couldn't get into it at all. Some of them got stuck halfway in. Their thorax is really the blocking point. So what it did was showed me the struggle that they had going through a queen excluder, and I didn't have the queen excluders that I have today. By the way, they weren't even being carried here.

And I also didn't have the knowledge about what is the optimum space for a queen excluder for the worker bee to get through it. Now I know today it's 4.2 millimeters. But it's not just that. It's the way it's made. You know, are the edges hard edges, or are they rounded edges? And today the metal ones are my favorite.

So anyway, when I observed that and saw how difficult it was for them to get through it, I needed a way around that. But then it occurred to me, I'm watching people that do these ripouts, these cutouts, people that have access to bees doing things that people are not involved with. Which is, again, let's mention Dr. Tom Sili. What would the bees be doing, he would say? if we were doing nothing at all.

So where do we find that? Hard to observe them in trees, but they move into abandoned buildings and things like that. And apparently in the south, there's a lot of that going on because Jeff Horchoff, Mr. Ed, and Randy McCaffrey, the dirt rooster, is they just do cut out after cut out after cutout.

So what do they find when they get in there? Do you see the queen excluder inside these cavities? Nope. But yet they'll find enormous volumes in some cases of capped honey that has nothing but capped honey. After they get to a certain point inside the cavity, it is honey, honey, honey, honey, and all the brood is in the lower third or the closest third roughly to the entrance. And the entrances often are incredibly small, which is another thing. But we're just talking about the layout of what bees do in a cavity.

So that's what had me thinking, validated by what they were seeing down there, is that if I just have a single entrance, because remember, when I first started out, everyone I knew was putting a top vent in an upper entrance, and I said it myself. I just parroted the exact same stuff I was hearing. So when there's an entrance and the bees come through it, that's for the brood area. That's the nursery. So why not just have an upper entrance and the foragers can,

bypass the brood area and go straight into the nectar area and store the honey so but when you do that we added ventilation up there and so you run the risk of having brood up there which means you had to add what a queen excluder below your honey super so then later i decided doing this on my own that if i stopped having that vent and i stopped having an upper entrance and i confined them to a single entrance on the landing board then what do they do they have a predictable progression and where did I see this play out in the observation hive? I had an entire building put in just for the observation hive at that time. One hive, one building.

So I control the light and do everything else. So what happened is a predictable arrangement. They had the brood area, they had mixed brood with resources, and they're progressing to eventually nothing but honey and then capped honey, which made perfect sense because if they're going to get robbed, most robbers are not coming in to get the larvae. They're coming to get the honey. That's the appeal. And if by robbers, I mean the worst robbers out there are other honeybee colonies.

So they pushed that in well into their hive. So it makes sense then. And then I started calling that the honey bridge. So what I did is I set up a deep brood box and that was for brood. Normally you would put your queen excluder on top of that one or the next box up. but I left it off. So then once they filled out their brood box, I put on a medium super.

When I put the medium super on, when it was seven out of ten frames of capped honey or almost capped honey, then I added another box above that. And I noticed that the queen was very unlikely to cross over frames of honey to lay her eggs. She'd rather sworn than do that. So that became known as the Honeybridge.

That's what I called it. still call it that today. And so once you establish a honey bridge, a box, it's mostly or all capped honey, then everything beyond that, up above that, your bees are going to put nothing but honey up there. So we did all of that without a queen excluder, which some people were also calling the honey excluder. Don the fat bee man.

I don't know if you've heard of him. He's been around a long time on YouTube. In fact, give him a shout out today. Don the fat bee man. Check out his stuff. He was also noticing the problems with Queen Excluders at the same time. I was doing my backyard tests. So I just left him out after that.

And here we are, all these years later. What am I doing? I'm right back with Queen Excluders, but that's because you run into other people that know things and practice things and try stuff in your area. So I run as Steve Rapasky who has a book called Swarm Essentials, and he talks about single, brood box management and everything else and he's in my state and so I just decided to try that

I didn't do all of my beehives I didn't change them all the same time the same year in fact last winter we put a whole bunch of single deeps through winter and we stopped it near the end of the year and by that I mean third week of September take no more honey and let them back fill their brood box with honey and then right into October and then we just see if they can make it in a single brood box and so the queen excluder confined them to that so I had to have it for the utility aspects and so why the change well one so I can try that single brood management and let me just cut to the chase it worked so that was really good and the other thing is these new queen excluders that actually they come from Poland sold by better bee and once I put those in

the bees move through those very effortlessly so that's interesting so I no longer use the honey bridge unless it's a configuration that doesn't suit itself to using a queen excluder so I still have some that don't have them and I have some that are I'm about 50% right now so I'm with some without but the honey bridge um So do I, beyond that, that's why I didn't have a queen excluder. And also it worked with a flow hive. That's why I stepped away from what the people at the honeyflow.com website were doing, which is going straight from a deep brood box right on with the flow super.

A lot of people were not getting results with their flow supers. They weren't getting the bees to fill them. They weren't finishing them up. And they had to have a queen excluder on straight over the deep brood box. and then into the flow super where I wanted to establish my honey bridge and by the way it's even in their book that's right fly I put out a book and the wintering section is where my stuff is so anyway the honey bridge works and because it did not impede the bees moving through the hive and going straight into the flow super I had really good luck with the flow super getting filled up here in northwestern Pennsylvania So, but then last year, part of my single breed management was that I took away that middle box and I put a queen excluter on, which is the way it comes. That's the way they want you to use it. And then I put the flow super on it and it filled up. And we did a really nice video about it, myself and the supervisor. So, and that was at the end of the year. So that's still ahead of us, by the way. Here in my neck of the woods, our heaviest nectar flow is at the end of summer.

goldenrod asses, all that stuff. It all hits like a tsunami of nectar. And so we can fill those all up. So what are we doing now? We're building brood. So I do have the Queen Exluder on and single brood box for that. And now Quinn, the copycat, that's my grandson. He wants that on his hives too because something about honey and things that rhyme with

honey that he can line his pockets with and brag to his friends about. That's what he's doing. they're working his flow supers of course already so it sounds ambiguous but that's it that's where we're at and that's why some have queen excluders on and some don't and why it works with or without so if you wanted to do upper venting for sure you want a queen excluder if you're not going to use upper venting and you're going to do what's known as the condensing hive now which before was just called single entrance beehive keeping which is what the bees prefer by the way it's what they do in their own when nobody is doing anything as far as people are concerned but it works

works both ways I don't have to deal with another honey super though between them so single brood management worked and I can't say I hate it moving on to the next question and by the way this name is difficult so I'm just going to say MJ 1S says here great info tonight on the oxalic acid I'm looking forward to the approved OA sponges And he goes on to say that a keeper in North Carolina had informative data on different mite treatments. He had great success with OA sponges left on for 90 days. And I think it was 90, he says, and he did a study. So the use was approved.

Now what I thought when I read this at first, I thought he meant he did a study like on his own. And therefore it was approved for him to use. use the OA sponges. But no, it was because he was participating in a study like the ones that you do at the University of Georgia Department of Entomology that they work on down there. Anyway, when you're part of a study, you get to use things like exhalic acid, extended release sponges and things like that. Because they're collecting data. They're reevaluating everything. Ultimately, it's going to have to get peer reviewed and it's going to do all these. It's going to pass all the wickets and, of course, get approved for us. That's why I have my eye on.

on Easyox, Mike's bees. He's got it in the works. It was going to be approved last spring with something happened. Still going to come out. That's what I'm getting. Anyway, it says you're a totally unrelated question. I caught a swarm two days ago. Nice size too. And I gave it to someone and he picked it up early evening. Foragers were still out. I put my trap back in place for them. How can they integrate or will the bees do that themselves? So this comes into play a lot when people are collecting swarms. This has been the year of swarms for a lot of people. They're sitting flush right now.

Most of the people in my area have more bees than they know what to do with. So I'm sure other areas, maybe it's hard. Has this been a great year for you? I don't know. Maybe right in the comments section. Are you sitting better than you were last year at this time through swarms alone? But anyway, what happens when a beekeeper shows up to collect a swarm, the afternoon they registered let's say on a website like be swarmed.org b-b-e-es-w-w-a-r-r-m-ed-d-

which everybody should register on I got notifications from that site through my phone several times this year and I turn them all down because I don't need them so I just let other people go get them but anyway what happens when the foragers come back there can be a lot of them by the way and they're not just foragers although they do forage when they're in a Bivouac location, that's when you find the swarm on a tree or something. So they're going out and getting some resources because we see this exchange. When they come back to the cluster on the tree, you'll see that trophylaxis. You'll see the tongues coming out.

What really annoys me, and I was looking at that this morning, if there's a swarm cluster somewhere and a whole bunch of drones just show up and they beg resources off of the nurse bees that just happen to be with the swarm. They're putting attacks on the resources they brought with them. bivouk. They're not resident bees. So anyway, foragers do come back, but the biggest group that's out and about are the scouts trying to find a new location. And when a beekeeper comes along and collects that swarm from its bivouac location, its temporary location on a branch. They're interrupting the process. They're interrupting the natural order like we were. Myself and the supervisor,

we interrupted that natural progression from hive to a bivouac. to a final destination and we use a laundry bag this time just for kicks 100% cotton laundry bag you find those bees on you find those bees on a on a twig or a branch and it's small enough that you can get a big laundry bag around it and just clip the branch and it's inside and you walk away five minutes tops in this case it was four minutes and 20 seconds which included all the clipping so do we get a video of it we sure did super easy but anyway they find their way to other colonies and if they can't find a place to be they go home for example when you find a cluster on a tree branch and you

out of a miracle just happen to look at the right side of that cluster at the moment the queen surfaces and she kind of crowdsurfs over the bees and if you're quick about it you can get a hold of that queen and you can grab her with your clean clip and you can put her in one of these queen cages like this one or the easy be easy one or whatever you want to do and then once you get her and take her away they go from being settled and clustered on their branch to starting to look around and then they get all upset and they kind of get frenzied and if they can't find the queen they all start taking to the air and they zig around in all these directions

in the vicinity of where the queen had last been and they're trying to fly through her pheromone stream and if they can't find it where do they go they go right back to the hive they left from and it's just like turning a garden hose on that hive because all those bees flood back in because what they who knows what they really think but the queen's gone so what does she do change her mind went back home that's what they're thinking that's why they all changed their minds and they go back home because they can't find the queen without the queen they have no future so they end up somewhere there's nothing to worry about They don't get lost. Don't be mad at the beekeeper because after he or she left, there were bees that showed up and were missing the movement.

In the Navy, you would call that missing ship's movement. You don't want to do that. You got to watch out. Sometimes your ship would pull into a foreign port and we didn't have cell phones and stuff. So what they did, they had these guys, we call them skivy waivers. And they were semaphore people. You've seen them. you know, doing the flags and stuff. They signaled with flags, and they would run up a pendant. You know what was called the recall pendant. And you were supposed to look back at your ship from wherever you were, and if you see the recall pendant up,

it was time to go back to the ship. So that's what happens when bees raised the nascentoff. They get their abdomens up in the air. They fan the nascent off. That's the recall pendant, pheromone-wise, for bees on the lansanoff. landing board of the hive that swarm left from there's kind of a divide that happens and then a bunch of them are on the landing board recalling a bunch of the colony members that flew away isn't that interesting see i'm giving you nautical trivia the next question comes from klaus from midland

ontario so this is it and i don't know what's going on this is not the only person who's asked me the same thing but you know what i'm flattered that people think that i would know the answer that i'm the person to ask about it. I saw a TED talk about treating bees with biomagnetism. I don't even know what that is. I couldn't find more on this treatment. Have you heard of it? So yes, I have heard of it. I've had people who must have seen the same TED talk or seen a YouTube about the same person. I always talk about biome and magnetic arrays, by the way. That's when you have a bunch of magnets and they're in specific patterns to take advantage of the magnetic flux so magnetic flux leaves the magnet it's kind of like if you looked at

the earth and we have magnetic north and south and then there's magnetic flux that leaves the poles right and travels from one pole to the other and so that's through the earth and then around it so there's a magnetic force right so if you had a magnet you see the magnets when you put them try to put the same poles together, they repel. So there's this real powerful energy. So there is magnetic energy. You can feel it.

So if you pick up magnets, you feel that happening, and it's really fun. And so you can use magnets to find discontinuities in ferromagnetic materials. Because wherever there is a break in that steel or that iron or anything that's got ferron in it, whenever there's a little break there, what happens? It creates another pole. leaks magnetic flux and then iron particles react to that flux leakage. So now we get to see this energy and we can use it to find out when things are good and bad. So there's AC coils, there's DC coils, direct current, alternating current,

surface currents, relay waves. Don't even get me started. So anyway, on the TED talk, this, because it talks about You know, they get fancy because they take advantage of medical truths. So let's start with that. When it comes to magnetic, people who respond, you know you've got iron in your blood, right? So you can have a reaction to magnetism. So anyway, there's a well-known alternative medicine practice. Now keep in mind we're talking about alternative medicine.

So this isn't mainstream science in medicine yet, if ever. but it's called biomagnetic pear therapy which uses magnets to supposedly balance the body's pH and energetic frequencies and attempts to apply it to what agriculture and because we often hear about insects being affected by magnetic flux the polarization of the earth and as they fly if there's any ferron in their system at all then they can get a sense of the pole and know that the direction relation to like if they're flying east to west then they would be at a normal incident angle from the magnetic flux follows the surface of the earth that sounds pretty good to me so anyway they can navigate by it so there are little bits and pieces and this is why i always say question everything i like it when i get questions i don't like it when somebody makes a comment about something i've said on their way out the door and

and then I can't have the discussion because if I'm wrong, I want to see if what I think happens holds up in the face of those who think it doesn't happen. So that's why I want the discussion, the back and forth. I want to be able to pick apart their idea and their stance on something, and I want them to do the same. Pick me apart on the same thing with what you know, with what you've observed.

And then we both find out if one has a stronger position or an opinion that is grounded in science. That's what I want. That's all I want. But anyway, so you know what I do? I reach out, and you've got to be careful sometimes. You can lose credibility. Not me, because, I mean, I don't have any anyway. So when I reach out to entomologist,

like, hey, how about electromagnetism? How about the impact on the bees and the bee health and well-being? Because there's a lot that actually gets looked at. when someone is studying entomology or even if they're studying physics we like to find out how these energy fields which we know exists we can prove they exist we can measure them so we can quantify it we have to find out does this impact living organisms so they test it they test this on plants and stuff too you want to go down a rabbit hole i don't even know if i should say it but there's a look at a documentary about grounding about earthing about grounding yourself

and then they go into a whole thing about the fact that when did people stop getting grounded when they started wearing sneakers when they started wearing tennis shoes they were saying that people are no longer connected to the earth as far as you know being grounded electrically because then of course we can both sit down and make a case on either side very easily that's what debate is and why debate is so much fun because we can talk about what first we have to establish that we're electrical to begin with that we have electrical impulses that we have uh neurology that if we killed all the electricity in our body would we still function you can take your head off sorry to be graphic but you know that your heart will still pump it has its own generator it has its own

way to keep firing at a rhythm that is not driven or controlled by your brain. See? So all these energy fields are around and then we find out that things react to them, we can derive from that other things that are very difficult to prove. So this is one study, one person, TED Talk, and by the way, TED talks are a lot of different levels. So TED Talks are where they get to give a presentation about something that they're doing, that they know, that they understand that they think they know, and then an audience gets to listen to it. And then you get to send it to your favorite YouTuber

and try to get them to validate or echo chamber what you are believing happens. And I'm not saying that Klaus believes it, but when you start to get into the science and try to find people that will back it up, and as soon as they throw in this term, are you ready for it? It uses magnets supposedly to balance the body's piece,

and energetic frequencies and attempts to apply it to agriculture. While it makes for an inspiring video, the global entomological community treats it as pseudoscience. So nobody's bought in yet. I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying right now it's one thing, one place, with a very focused application that has not been broadened or retested,

retested or repeated or had entomologists feel like it was worth their time in other words the early evidence needs to be enough needs to be credible enough for others to follow suit and validate that so if they don't feel it and so the person that I reached out to doesn't feel it doesn't feel it at all I'm not laughing about it because I know I have a background in magnetics but not bio-electile like this, biomagnetic paratherapy, that sounds really good. But no, I'm just a non-destructive test guy. So we did wet bath, too, magnetic particle inspections, by the way,

with fluorescent dyes. So fluorescent dye particle stuff. I know you wanted to know that. You want to know. So, no, I'm sorry, I just don't know any more than that. And if you have thoughts about that, three people sent me stuff. One even sent me the whole schematic on how. So that's another thing.

We could talk about that. So as soon as I saw the mosaic of magnets that was sent to me, because I know that we have near field magnetism. Magnetic energy only passes so far into a material. And then once outside of the material, the flux only goes so far. So we had flux indicators, flux meters. We had all of these ways of measure. the electromagnetic field and therefore how effective it will be in helping us find a

discontinuity so we notice it's limited so if you are putting these magnetic you know these magnets themselves into a beehive and I think it was set up so that the bees would pass over it when they enter and depart the hive is that sufficient to align the magnetic particles in the bee and have a better benefit for the bee each time they leave and come back and then I was thinking about you know again ships maritime they have degossing stations you heard of that so entire ships hulls pass over an electromagnetic field that degauses or demagnetizes the hull of a ship pretty interesting stuff so right now there just isn't enough to justify it it is

something worth looking into but as I always say question everything and I we're in the fluff section right now and I want to start right off in the fluff section with that I put a video out about using bees wax that was low temp rendered and runs for a cheese grater and they put on the landing board of a hive and then watching the bees take the bees wax from the landing board outside the hive through the entrance and our next step of course is to see how they're using it inside the hive And it was really cool because my wife, by the way, who pretty much runs things around here.

Anyway, she was looking at the comments and she read a comment to me and it was a really good one. Something about, Fred, you're always putting to practical use, so many different theories, blah, blah, blah, yada, was a really good comment, really good. Like in other words, just really fluffed you up. Made you feel like maybe you had a purpose for being on YouTube that maybe the things that you were saying were well grounded, practical enough to be implemented by backyard beekeepers, and at the same time, you're really being appreciated, and it was a nice paragraph. And before you knew it, there were like 20 thumbs up on the comment,

which is pretty darn rare in a comment for a Q&A or something like that, where we're putting beeswax on the landing board of a hive just to see if we could augment the wax use inside the hive. And then my bouncer writes to me, and by that I mean, half tracks and honey Keith Spillman wrote to me and says hey you know that comment that's on your video there you know that's a bot that that's an avatar it's an AI person and I thought what are you talking about anyway sure enough that comment on my video which was so nice so complimentary so well written the punctuation was perfect everything about it

so I wrote on the comment that's on there it was the top comment so I wrote hey someone mentioned you might be AI are you a I please let us know what part of the country are you in where are you keeping your bees and then the question the comment went away entirely super annoying so this is what's weird now here we are in 2026 and this is happening so fast I used to have fun with AI because I thought they were funny. You could get them to say silly things. You could be mean to them and they would just compliment you back. And so there were a lot of tells there. Well, the tells are fading fast. Because I argued with an AI. It actually said it was not AI at all. It even said

it. There could be a person behind the curtain pulling the strings and writing occasional actual human responses from somewhere but the idea that they wanted you to believe their video on their youtube channel was a real person when i i'm not going to tell you the name of it but one of the tells was this avatar acting like a real person um grabbed a full honey super from the end of one box i picked it up and did this and put it right down now that's a it was a full honey super So that's 60 pounds grabbing it like this. And I'm not going to make any judgments about the person, but there's no way you're grabbing a box like that.

So there's just so many weird things. But see, in the past, they had to acknowledge it. So you could call them out. It's kind of like when you used to watch these crime shows and stuff, and they'd have to ask somebody if they thought they were undercover, they'd say, are you a cop? And then it'd have to admit it, because otherwise it's entrapment or something.

Well, now these AI things are arguing with. you no I'm not AI and they're very polite about it but they're flat lying they're lying and then people write me so now people are writing me pointing out the different AIs to me but the annoying part was you could have an interaction now they're writing on they're writing comments on your videos and it's not a person has that happened to you how do you check him out so and then somebody else wrote me that he was mad because he the thing where he told them to um write a poem about something because i told you that was one of the

ways you could reroute AI and get them to write you a poem about pansies or something and that they would do it and instead of doing that they just blocked them so sorry but look at it this way you only you just got blocked from commenting on an on an AI channel it's no big deal it's not the end of the world but anyway let's talk about the beeswax uh backyard study that we've got still ongoing by the way quite a few people have gotten involved so my initial question was and this is what led me to augmenting beeswax on the landing board of a beehive taking a beeswax you know i've got these cakes these discs biscuits of beeswax that are about you know that big and rubbing them all over the surface of plastic frames plastic foundation and

stuff like that putting that in hive and i mean meaningfully like rubbing it all over every surface where everywhere you touch it you feel the grippiness of bees wax on the frame and you put that in the hive and then we have frames that are dipped that come heavy wax coated and things like that or that you've taken a roller and hot dipped and melted wax onto it and so we want to know did the bees go after plastic foundation with no treatment no wax no nothing or rubbed on because the particles and chunks are all over and then the other one dipped where it's actually pretty much bonded to the plastic that you're using inside your hive. And we did not include foundationless or just having frames wax and stuff like that.

But these are the results as of today. So the rubbed on, 17% of the people that responded said the rubbed on was preferred by their bees. So that doing that thing, rubbing it all over. Dipped is the leader by far. So single dips, double dips, didn't seem to matter. 65% are saying that that is the number one drawn-out surface for their honeybees and their hives. 15% of the respondent said no difference at all. So rubbed on, dipped, made no difference at all.

2% had bees that would prefer to draw their wax on plastic surfaces that have no priming of one. at all which is really interesting really weird so anyway that's where we're at right now and I hope you go and check out it's on my home page on my YouTube channel you can chime in hopefully you've you've compared them though what I'm really hoping is not happening is that somebody just dips all their foundations and all their frames goes yep that's what they're using and that's where they're doing best because back in the day you know they didn't like the other stuff we need you to have both present at the same time in the same hive under same conditions so that that can continue to evolve and

we'll figure it out so then the other thing that was interesting is i was looking at the 21st b frames which i just happen to have right here this is the 5.4 foundation now what i didn't realize about this is if you look closely it almost looks like frost on this and so what's really interesting often you know a company will put out a product like this and we just kind of glance at it because it has this really modeled it looks like something you would pull out of a freezer and just has like a layer of morning frost on it so i want you to try to see that a little bit and it looks kind of loose and uh kind of grainy looking and they actually tested the way they were putting the wax on the frames and they found that this little frosty little tiny bits on the surface thing rather than the smooth dip stuff this was used by the bees the quickest and the most in other words it slowed it down if they rolled or dipped the wax onto these frames I think that's really interesting and I didn't know that until just a couple of days ago so 21st B has another method

of putting the wax on and look it's even on my fingertips you can't even it's like it's like you have sawdust but it's bees wax on your fingers so that's another thing and I'm sure that process is very expensive it's something a backyard beekeeper can't do so we can't test it to find out if the bees really like it better and I did notice because I went and looked at some presentations that they did they have a YouTube channel so that's another shout-out then 21st B look at

I really notice it because they have medium frames that are they have bars in the middle and it's got a wedge across the top and open fields so no foundation and the purpose is so you'll have comb honey in those frames but what I noticed when he brought out the samples that showed you know the partially complete and then the completed comb honey segments the surrounding plastic on the 21st B frames there was smooth and shiny. So what the bees had done is cleared it away from the surfaces of that frame. At least that's what I'm seeing. I didn't ask him, you know, but I just looked at the video and that's what it looks like to me. It's shiny and clean looking. So it looks like they cleared it from the surface and then reattached it where they were building foundationless cone in that. Super interesting stuff. So anyway, that's where we're at on that. 21st bee wax process. Very interesting. interested in that. In fact, that was something that I was talking to the owner of Pierce beekeeping who sold out. I think they were bought out completely by Manlake now. They were always at the North American Honeybee Expo. And great guy, great family. They had all those Pierce uncapping knives and stuff like that. But I was talking with him and I thought we were getting traction on talking about a system where we could, I'm not going to tell anybody else, but where we were going to actually have like a cylinder where you

It would melt the wax at just the right temperature and then we could spray it on to stuff. What it ends up being is incredibly expensive. So not something for a backyard person. I had ulterior motives because if I could get them to make one, to market one, then maybe I would get one. So the other thing is I thought about like hot glue guns. You know, if we could just get that so it only gets up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. And then we could like put wax in it and then,

just like trigger it out onto things. But then it doesn't have these really fine particulates like we have there at 21st B. Interesting stuff. There's so much room for innovation in back-haired beekeeping. So what I want you to do this week, of course, and you know, you're in a different location, so maybe it won't apply to you, but those are in the northern climates and northeast and so on. Just check your queen status. A lot of people have reported we had a bee breakfast this last Wednesday and there was a lot of discussion from people who had not seen their queen for as long as 21 days but there were other tells this is the beauty of getting together in a group when you find out that other people are seeing the same things that you're seeing and you can help

problem solve you can brainstorm it you can do you see that too do you see that too what are they acting like are they unsettled are they noisy when you open it no they're calm they're laid back and then you've got somebody that says you know on the 20th day all of the sudden out of the blue the queens laying eggs so the queen was around but the resources coming into the hive did not support breed building so there you go you're not always queenless so queen's status not as straightforward as you might think be very careful about that don't just jump the gun and buy in another queen and try to install her in your hive and just have them kill her because there's a queen present they just don't feel like making eggs right now they don't have the resources to do it

great time of year for landscaping smoothing things over beehives in your apiary keep things trimmed down it'll help trust me trim it all down keep it clean keep it organized don't lose your hive tool so i had a friskers friskers anyway i had a really nice pruning snipper that i used to get my swarm and I had to walk through a whole bunch of milkweed and really tall grasses and stuff. And then when it got all the way back and took the laundry bag that had the high, had the swarm in it and clipped it onto the landing board where I wanted the bees to go into the hive because I'm just going to let them do it on their own because there's surplus bees right now. Then I realized I was missing my, oh, Felco, Falco sevens, not friskers.

Felcos, they're expensive. You buy one, use them forever. Somewhere in that tall grass, it was lost. So if you can keep things trimmed down in your backyard apiary and well organized, you're not spending a lot of time hunting things around, is what I'm saying. Landscaping is important. Remember, ticks. We don't want that. You don't want ants on your bees.

Okay, the number one challenge environmentally. Oh, that's what I want to know. What's going on with you, where you are? You know, I've got the deer that's walking around on its hind feet, like it's some kind of monster out of the twilight zone, eating the mulberries out of the trees. Who knows what else it's doing in the woods? Just walking around like it's on stilts.

What are your challenges as far as wildlife goes? What environmental challenges do you have? Like maybe you've got those thorny roses growing everywhere or something. But what kind of critters are giving you and your bees a hard time? And what are your challenges? So, by the way, Sunday's coming. Do you know what's going to happen on Sunday? Father's Day.

Do you know what that used to mean? Back in the day, Father's Day was the number one day for collect phone calls to your dad. So on Father's Day, what did everyone do? All the kids spent their father's money so they could wish them a happy Father's Day. Top day for collect calls. I'm going to be at Ernst Seeds tomorrow, Saturday. You're having a field day there. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to make some videos.

Lots of cool people are going to be there. And I'm going to make some videos and share them with you. At least I hope I can share them with you. If not, they'll be on the website, which is the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. And probably look at the media page or something like that. I don't know. That's where you'll be able to see them. Demonstrations, you know, be stuff. the other thing is a couple of people wrote me because they tried to order smoker pellets

which are of course being sold through non-profit the northwestern pennsylvania beekeepers association and it said they were out of stock or the link was broken something like that what really happened is we have one person he's a volunteer everyone is a volunteer no one's getting paid it goes to the association under outreach and education programs but uh the switch grass smoker pellets are back they're there you can get them the guy that was doing it was out of town and they switched off the website for a moment so they could do that but you can get those if you don't know already those are the longest burning smoker pellets smoker fuel hands down that I've ever used and I get nothing for saying that of course because it's nonprofit I don't get a percentage

I don't get dittly-nit-nitly but once you get them lit you go work in your bee yard all day long on one smoker full of those pellets and then you put a cork in it you can probably get another day out of them but they go on and on and we've had lots of feedback in the comment section from people that have used them and it's absolutely true you can't put them out once you lit them how many times have you gotten involved in a bee inspection you're looking through everything you puffed them with smoke when you started out but you feel like you need a little more smoke you grab your smoker you give a few puffs and it's not lit anymore very annoying so you don't have that problem with these pellets so that's it for

today don't forget to celebrate Father's Day most of you out there have had a father sometime or another at least if they're not around anymore you can visit their memories this is my dad's shirt that's right this shirt is from the 80s so that's how I celebrate my dad for Father's Day so I want to thank you for watching me today remember that if you have a question go ahead and write it down the comment section or go to the way to be dot or click on the page mark contact fill out the forum let me know what's going on and see if it's something we shouldn't be talking about on some friday so i want to thank you again for being here i'm frederick done this has been the way to be