The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 364 with Frederick Dunn nectar rising, pollen incoming

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/V62ROuRLqkM?si=OSboftRTWVKEQxWR

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, July the 24th of 2006. This is back here to bekeeping questions and answers episode number 364. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here on this nice sunny, super warm Friday. And I'm located here in the northeastern United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. And if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description, all the topics will be listed in order. right along with timestamps. You can find your way to exactly what you're interested in so you don't waste your time. You might be wondering how do you submit a topic? How do you submit a question that could be considered for a future Friday Q&A? You go to the way to be.org. You click on the page mark contact, fill out the form, and there you go. That's how everyone that's in today's Q&A

submitted their topics and questions. You can also just write on a video or put something in response to a comment, something like that. I do try to read all of those, and sometimes I'll copy and paste or print that out and use that for a Q&A. So that's about it. If you want to listen rather than watch, please do a Google search for the podcast, The Way to Be podcast. You can also post pictures, share videos of conditions you might be seeing around your hive, plants, things like that. If you want to ask your peers, questions, go to the fellowship. It's the way to be fellowship on Facebook, and there you'll be able to post and share and there's no politics there's no marketing there's no anything it's free so i hope you'll go there great group of people so i know uh you're wondering what's going on outside we had a terrific

opening sequence today and i videoed all of that this morning right here in the state of pennsylvania so super nice outside in fact it was kind of hard to come inside and do this but see i don't want you to go without that's why i'm here so it's 78.8 degrees fahrenheit outside which is 26 Celsius, a perfect day. What's the wind speed? Zero miles per hour. What's that in kilometers? Zero kilometers per hour. 56% relative humidity. Thank goodness. Now that the rainstorms have gone through, it's dried up. And that's good news because guess what? The nectar is actually increasing. The weight of the beehives is on the rise. And so I was looking at observation hives today. And we can see that nice and shiny honey is being finished on the frames. And they're

expanding rather than contracting. And so during the rain, we even had some cold. You might be wondering how cold it got. Well, it was right down into the 40s in Fahrenheit here today. And of course, now it's worn right back up. But those overnights, what does that do? Causes your bees to turn around and consume the resources that they're storing. So that uncapped honey that they're working on, that they're evaporating down, they consume it. And they can consume it at an alarming rate. So what happens is production has to supersede or be better than consumption. So these cold weather days, rainy days, and stuff like that,

make your bees waste resources as far as we're concerned because we're looking for a surplus. And I think I'm going to get it this year. I hope you do too. So the bees were on Black Eyed Sousins. Now, I haven't normally seen bees get anything from Black Eyed Sousins. In fact, when it comes to honeybees, I don't think that that's a great flower for them.

but today changed my mind. So all these years later, I'm staring at things in the landscape. I see a honeybee on just a honeybee, by the way. So it's not like they were mobbing it, but it was collecting pollen from Black Eyed Sousins. I don't know the value of the pollen, how good it is. Ragweed is about to turn loose its pollen, and the honeybees go for ragweed pollen,

and guess what? No nectar comes with that. So anyway, Dutch Clover, that is a champion of the landscape. If you've got areas, patches of green, and you want to provide for pollinators, Dutch clover is a champion. It just keeps blooming and blooming. You can mow it. When you mow it, hopefully, you're telling people to mow late at night, late in the afternoon.

It's cooler anyway, easier on the mower. And by the way, a clover field is easier on your mower than mowing grass. Just think about it. It's good all the way around. Plus, then your lawn will feed the bees, and the bees are all over it. Virginia Creeper. Bees are on those flowers. right now. Milkweed is finishing up. Although we do see lots of young milkweed, so although

the milkweed is not as robust as it was just a week ago, there are small milkweed plants that are still just now coming into bloom. So the floral heads on those are a little bit smaller, but honeybees are really attending to those, and I'm really looking forward to milkweed honey. Thistle is blooming everywhere, too. There are a lot of different varieties of thistle, some invasive, some native. So I'm hoping it's the natives. And we beekeepers, we kind of can have a problem when it comes to plants that are considered invasive, particularly if we see our bees getting a lot of resources off of them, we can tend to not care too much about that invasive species, as long as it's providing nectar and or pollen for our bees. But definitely don't plant invasives. That's for sure.

Self-heal. I got a sweet close-up of that in the early morning with the sun coming through and I didn't get honeybees on it for that sequence but the bees are visiting self-heel that's good stuff nice little blue-purple flower and so the big thing is oh Joe pie weed also Joe pie weed is just now starting to bloom we might also start to see ironweed blooming and Cosmos a few of those are up but over the next couple of weeks they're really going to kick in so I think we're on the rise here we're doing well but there is a surplus of forage your out there. So what's that mean? It means there's also the potential for robbing and robbing can happen

really fast, particularly if you've got these small colonies that you just started up. If you just bought a nucleus hive or something like that or you have a package of bees that you purchased and you're just trying to get them going, please make sure those entrances are reduced so they can defend the space you've put them in. Robbing is high. Pollin is medium. I did pollen counts this morning to see which colonies were bringing them in. More of a landing board indicator to see if they likely have a queen in there that is laying in production. And so colonies are gaining weight. Things are looking good.

I didn't see any problems here in my apiary. So I hope it's the same for you. And we're going to jump right in with the very first question, which comes from Thomas Bricker, 1140. That's a YouTube channel name that says, could you build something like this instead of outdoor hives? and we're referring to the observation hive that had just put in my observation hive building, which is the way to be Academy, glorified name for a shed. So it now has four observation hives in it, and I just installed the largest of the series,

and it was built by Ricky Wark, of course, and Ruth painted it with some of her honeybee paintings. So the whole idea is the downside other than costs as I've seen in northern countries, but more for winter weather. could the reverse work for keeping it cooler? We're in the hot tropics. So I like the idea of beehives and buildings. I think a lot of backyard beekeepers could certainly do it because we're working on a very small scale.

It's not a very practical thing if you're a big commercial operation. But I did talk with the people that have APAVER, AP-I-V-E-R-T-E, that is kind of an A-Z hive. and but it's with the Langstroth frames and stuff like that. So there are a lot of people doing buildings with beehives in them. You obviously would need a massive structure because the bees have to have access to the outside. And the big advantage is, well, there's a whole list of them.

But I can start right off the bat with, no matter what the weather's doing outside, it's not affecting the beehive itself. The bees will be only sensing what's going on outside through the entrance. So I do like it. I like being in the observation hive building. We can hear everything. We can smell it in there. And we can go in there on the worst rainy day, windy day, stormy day.

It doesn't matter. And we can look at the bees and see what's going on. Now, the step up from that is having a building with beehives in it that you can attend to the bees. And that's the whole purpose of the az hives. So an ape of air. The whole thing is that you can be in an enclosed space. Some people have their honey processing equipment all in the same building.

And that's so they can sit right in there, open the inside, and look into the bees and even inspect frames and things like that. I don't do a lot of that with the observation hives. We're looking at the outer frames of the triples that are in these observation hives. And we're assessing their status just from that alone. And they're not serviceable, really. So when it comes time to, let's say, take honey off. If I had to do that with an observation hive, I wouldn't recommend it. just because most people have observation hives in their house where people are,

and that means you have to disconnect it, close the exit, carry it outside. We're talking about potentially a 100-pound rig being hauled outside, down a flight of stairs, whatever. It depends on where your observation hive is, and then you have to attend to it outside. But if you configured it right, if it were a regular Langstroth-style hive, maybe it would be something you could do with nucleus hives. I think that would be a size that I would look at. because remember that the nucleus boxes are only five frames each that's deep five frames so

so maybe a 40 pound box full of honey and that's manageable so you could take them apart one by one and somehow enclose them but if it's a utility space like an outbuilding you could process honey and everything right there hive by hive but then you have to keep the bees out of your honey there's a lot to think about so hmm what do you think think I'm going to say if we needed to get honey out of a hive but we didn't want to open the hive and deal with all the other bees in the building is there a beehive that's already made that way where you can get the honey out of it without pulling frames and having bees all over the frames in a big sticky mess yes it's the flow hive now I know some of you right now are unsubscribing and

sending me angry messages because you don't like flow hives but we have to admit that the flow hives I have I would love to have them inside a building the bottom box which is your brood box that has the entrance it could very easily be modified to just have a tube that goes to an outside wall what wall would it be I would prefer the southern wall so if you're building a shed for this purpose that's what I would do and nothing changes as far as the brood box goes so then you put your flow super on top of that you would of course put a queen excluder under it and now you're sitting inside of building and then when the time comes and you have a big nectar flow on and your frames of honey are

full you're sitting in a building where we don't have to pull frames and do that kind of maintenance you will at times i should say this because i know it's going to come up too at times you will have to do inspections you are going to have to look at the frames you don't have to look at that all the time you don't have to look at it every time you're pulling honey though and that's the beauty of it no smoking we're inside a building don't have to the flow super and flow hive frames just get a tube put in them the frame gets activated and you drain honey sitting in the comfort of a building that is preventing flies and bugs and wass and everything else from coming around while you sit in comfort so the reason i bring it up it's kind of the only hive i can

think of that has that kind of advantage now when it comes time to inspect the brood you're going to have to do that and that means you're going to and by the way there's a lift system it's called the hive lifter that tilts the honey super off and then you can set that keep it on its end so frames would be vertical and then that lets you now look into the brood area and once you've done your inspection and know what you need to know you can close it back up now let's say the bees flew off into the building that you're in these are the considerations and i've been thinking about this for many years of course doors. All you have to do is turn off the lights. All you have to do is close off the windows. So in one of the small buildings I have that had my first observation hive in it, I had blackouts

for all the windows. So think of shutters, but they're on the inside of the building. And they were so that I could 100% control the light in there. But you only need one window that opens. So you could use a double hung window and push the top sash down. So the opening is at the top because when the bees go to the light, they're going to follow the light, they'll go onto the window, and they'll walk up, and they'll fly out. And once all the bees have flown out, you can close them up. But so having a single light source, a single outdoor window that's still open that has light coming through it, when you're working your bees after you're done,

all the bees that have escaped the hive and flown around in the space will then migrate to that light source and they'll collect on it. Now let's say it's not a window that you can open. Let's say you didn't think ahead. let's say you didn't listen to me and you didn't put in a hopper style window which is my second tier it's the best window too because it just

tips open to the out side it's a single window opens out and then like a hopper and then the bees fly out and you pull a cord and close it back up again so you don't even have to climb up there and open it having it a little high on the wall is also an advantage and remember it should be the only

light source at the time you're doing that so there's a lot of ways to get bees out of the space and then if you couldn't open any windows what would you do then you have a be vac and you go around again you set up a light source and you have the bees go to it and then they congregate there you collect them with the be vac you go outside and let them all go back in through the entrance of the hive you're working on there you go so but actually for observation hives not practical great for looking at the bees bad for service because when you open it now it's here's the interesting part too though I

should probably hit on this when I have had to open the beehives the observation hives in that building a surprisingly few bees fly off the frames or fly out of the hive even with the whole side wall open and that's on a nice warm day also so they're more spread out and of course you would do it just like when you're inspecting your bees outside somewhere you don't want to look at them early in the morning when they're all cold and clustered and you don't want to look at them late in the afternoon when a whole bunch of foragers are coming back in and it's all a buzz inside with work you want to do it about midday one or two in the afternoon when most of the foragers are out of the hide that way you're dealing with fewer bees while you conduct your inspections so

that would hold true inside or outside but how to manage bees resources harvesting and general hive maintenance inside that space would be a big part of your planning and a big part of your selection process when it comes to what kind of hive would you put in there so if you yeah that's a good point some of my viewers most of them are way above average and probably already have buildings with bees in them and just don't talk about it why would they do that i happen to know there's some sneaky beekeepers out there i happen to know that there's beekeepers with fancy sheds that look just like a garden tool shed right in their yard and no one in their neighborhood even knows that it has beehives in it. Why would that be? Because they're not allowed. So they are secretive. It's clandescent beekeeping.

They put it in a shed. Some of them even have a little, it looks like a periscope, PVC pipe that goes up. There's a 90 up high. So people don't even see those bees coming and going and then they shroud that. So people can't see it. Very clever. So if you're one of these people that's part of the underground for beekeepers in suburban America or somewhere else, please just go ahead and we want. We want, tell just write in the comments or go to the way to be dot org and click on the page mark contact and fill me in tell me what's up and what's working for you i'm interested i want to know stuff that's why i'm here i just want to know all the time question number two comes from mickey carvalho and that is the youtube channel name of course that says i was going to mark a new queen

today and she flew off on me and uh was mated just bought her too well that's annoying and we don't want our queens to get away so let's talk about queen control when we're marking them and by the way I think I mentioned it before but the supervisor Quinn did mark his first queen this year let him do it he did it perfectly so let's talk about control how did that queen get away because this seems to happen to people you buy a queen it comes in a little cage like this if there's a whole rack of them in fact in our beat club recently somebody's looking for queens and we have people that sell queens so

then they would come in queen cages and they usually come already if the person is selling you a queen It should be marked and Some people buy them already clipped some people don't even ask you they just ship them marked and clipped and what does it mean to be clipped? They clip the wings on one side of the queen and that way she can only pin wheel by the way this is the very same thing we do with chickens If you have chickens it have to stay in a chicken yard and we don't want them to be able to fly over a low fence like a five-five foot fence they just clip the primary flight feathers on one side and then they're off balance they just pinwheel back to the ground it's kind of the same premise it doesn't hurt them doesn't hurt the queen doesn't hurt the chickens so but i'm going to talk to you about controlling your queen so it doesn't

fly off right so you got it in this cage maybe use one of these sweet queen pipes that i like so much that i use all the time and i carry these in my pocket whenever i go into the bee yard uh because you have to get a hold of the queen. And I understand some people when they go to get a whole of the queen, I want to share some things. You can use nitrile gloves that are nice and tight fitting because it gives your fingers a little more grip. And when you go to grip the queen, you get her by her wings over the thorax and you're going to be marking the thorax. Don't grab her abdomen. I'm very concerned when I see people grab the feet of the queen. There's a very good chance you could injure one of her legs if she kind of partially gets

out and then does a little spin and you're holding on to one of her try not to do that so here's the thing you're out in your B yard this of course is a piece of gear I'm not selling you anything I don't sell anything knowledge is my product so anyway this is the one-handed queen catcher and once you have your queen and you get her in this but you could even catch the queen with your queen pipe pull the end off aim it at your queen catcher close it off for the most part and then when the queen goes out into the space pull your queen pipe out close the queen catch her and she's in there

then you can mark her but here's a moment of truth after you mark her the paint has to dry then we have to get her out and return her to the hive so one of the ways when we take her out this is a little butterfly net or a pet observation viewing enclosure these are dirt cheap you get them on Amazon but you could close it up in there while you do this work so let's say because you're going to mark the queen and if there's a chance she's going to get away from you if you want her to get away in an enclosed space and just like the bees in the building that we just talked about they go towards light so if you could have a flashlight or something like that on one side of this and the queen got out this is overkill they would go towards the light and not towards

the exit which should be the darker part anyway that's the cheap one but let's say you're going do fancy things with your queen. So you bought this queen. You want to get her out of the cage because she's not marked and somehow you're going to mark her yourself. And I have my favorite markers. Of course, anyway, there is something called a queen introduction cage, which is different from a queen isolation cage. And some people, if this is a really expensive queen, you don't want the bees in the hive to be able to kill her. Also, it gives you an opportunity to find out once you put the queen in this queen introduction cage, it gives you a chance to find out,

are there laying workers in there, or is there still, by chance, by some miracle, another queen? So how would you do that? You have a queen muff. That's what this is. I know it seems big. I know it seems obnoxious, and for a lot of you,

completely unnecessary. But it's Velcro, which means that you can pick the whole cage with a frame, in it and then once the cage with the frame is in here and the top is laying on the bottom because it's the queen Introduction cage you close all these parts up so it's all Velker had closed There's no chance for her to get away and look at the ends here your hands can go in So you would have your queen in this fancy queen pipe or your one-handed queen catcher and you go right in here Do to do to do you take the queen

out and you put her inside the cage on the frame and you carefully move that around until you get it all closed up once that cage Queen introduction cage is closed up the top is on it now you're safe you can pull the Velcro again pull the whole cage out there was no chance of your queen flying off and you got to show off the piece of gear that's been sitting in your shed in your toolkit for years in some cases I had to go out and get mine hanging on the wall I don't use it very often, but when I do, it's amazing. You go, well, wait, whoa, what are we about to do? Let me go get my queen muff, and I'm going to come out and we're going to do this transfer.

Now, you don't have that. You don't want to spend the money. So you got your queen in a cage. You're going to mark her. What should you do? Take her into the bathroom. Close the space up. Go into a small space and do it right there.

Mark the queen. Put her back in your control cage once everything is done. Because if she flew away while you're inside the bathroom, or some other controlled confined space, then she'll fly to the window again because you'll flip off the lights if she gets away from you and she'll go to the window and just go and collect your queen again and no harm, no foul. She doesn't get away. So super easy. So if after I've told you that, that's Mickey Carvalho, after I've told you that, if you lose another queen, it's on you. So I told you how to do it. I give you an opportunity to spend money to get

a piece of kit you can get a rest cloud enclosure like that one of the little butterfly enclosures or you can spring for the big bucks oh you might be wondering where'd you get the queen muff what do you think better be dot com as for the fred done discount pay exactly the same as everybody else they don't have one okay question number three comes from Arizona wild says do you think the free the three frame width is long term sustainable as a permanent hive. So once again we're talking about the observation hive and a friend of mine at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center where I spent yesterday we were talking about honeybees there we had an observation hive and visitors could come and talk about things and one of

the guys in our clubs said I know you like those triple frames because I didn't really like the observation hive we had there even though we were there for the public. It was in singles so it was three single deeps one directly over the other and And so even in a space like that, let's think about it. There's brood in there because we like people to see the queen. She's usually on a brood frame. And we want to see bees emerging and stuff like that. And it only holds as many bees as you could get on three deep frames that are in that hive.

And it was connecting a tube. And then there was a flyway, a screened in area. So people could see the bees fly out into that screened area. But here's the thing. If it is 69 or 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the room, your bees still need to warm their brood to keep them up to temperature. So that means 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit in that space. This is why, and the first big observation hive that I had was from Bonteira bees.

Super nice, really well made, swing view. So you could flip it on its axis and look at both sides. but it only had frames in pairs. So eight frames total. So my new observation hive, and that's because, by the way, look at the phase frame. The only space that they really control in there

in the doubles, so even doubles weren't good enough in my book. When they're between the doubles, they control the interior space, but look what happens when we get these really cold nights, even with insulation and stuff. We have this big broad surface that just isn't insulated enough.

and so they don't like to keep their brood on the outside of it. And when they do, they have to just massively cover it with bee bodies so they can keep the brood warm and they don't get chilled brood and have to get rid of it. So then we advance to triples now. So every winter, that hive died. Even though I had two inches of rigid foam board insulation, making full contact on both sides of that observation hive.

So I said to myself, hmm when I do my own observation hive I'm going to have it in triples so 3d and people will say things like but I want to see the bees this whole point of the observation I don't know if you do that you can't see the bees yes you can eventually they build all the way out to the outside of those frames now sure now we have four surfaces that we cannot see and I don't care because the bees do so much better they build better they draw it comb better they manage the space better and they winter over in an unheated space. And so they're also suitable for a heated space.

It makes a heavier hive, it makes a larger hive, but better for the bees. That's why, but for long-term sustainable, it says here, as a permanent hive. That new one with 12 frames in it, that definitely is sustainable. And because I've already practiced for many years with the nine frames, and we had a 12 frame that was all medium frame, so even smaller. And so going with triples that are four levels high, and now we have the 12 frames, I have the ideal observation hive, in my opinion, right now.

So they did go through winter perfectly. So they can do that with insulation on them. I use double bubble insulation on the outside of it, because those broad surfaces have to be cared for. So is it long term and sustainable? Yes, it is. And we try to keep the numbers down. Here's the thing, you can see it.

You know what's going on. And count on them, the smaller ones definitely swarm out. Now, recently somebody was asking me, what else can they do? You know, they created extra space. They did all this stuff and the bees are still swarming. In fact, they're wondering if this wasn't a huge swarming year, like overall, everywhere, like there's a trend or something's happening. But there are genetics, by the way, that are known. not to swarm so much. So buckfast bees, for example, Caucasians, for example, Italians tend to swarm less

than a lot of other genetic lines. So your genetics also kind of dictate the propensity for your bees to swarm. So we all know that if you had Africanized honeybees, and I hope you're not keeping those, but if you did, you would realize that they start swarming even while they're very small. So they're prolific. They just keep cranking out new colonies of bees, and that's how they sustain themselves in those hotter climates where they live. So, sustainable. Finding bees that occupy that space, and it will turn into somewhat of a swarm generator, which there again, you can control. You can rob them and treat it like a resource hive. You can take frames of brood away and restore it with drawn comb and things like that, just to refresh them. But there again, it involves getting

into your observation hives and treating them with some utility which kind of defeats the fun of watching them grow and expand and that's one of the funest things if you haven't seen it when you set up the observation hive which i just did and posted the video about it this past week um when you look at that we have a lot of unoccupied frames so there's five occupied frames of bees in there remember we have 12 frames in the hive so a big part of the fun is watching them expand and use the space as time passes and we have plenty of summer left to do it they're going to be doing that all through the month of August and into September so it's going to be fun and that can be your beehive it depends on what you want out of them but for a

lot of people if all you want is to be in the company of bees and all you want to do is keep them healthy and you don't have any plans to extract a bunch of honey or anything like that then actually it's kind of an ideal situation I think And before anybody says it, no, I have not thought about putting flow frames inside an observation hive with a spout on the side of it. I just haven't even considered that. And it's not in my plans. So I hope that's it. Question number four.

It comes from Enum Begum. Sorry if I mispronounced that. That's a YouTube name. It says, you said that you thought I would be better off running singles or deep. and a half rather than double-deep brood areas. I know most beekeepers around where I am run double-deeps, but I've seen arguments for all kinds of different configurations. Would you mind elaborating?

No, I don't mind elaborating. So here's the thing. I've done the double-deep configurations for years. I did that when I first started out. When you buy a hive kit, it doesn't make a difference which one it seems to be. It could be a license insulated kit. it could be a hive IQ that we just put together that apparently a lot of people don't like and a lot of people seem to love it it's it's like the weirdest thing but it comes as a kit with two deeps and two mediums you can get a standard kit i suppose a lot of them have a lot of different options if you go to appamay they'll have deeps and mediums and all the options but when you buy wooden hives standard langstroth 10 frame or eight frame boxes you tend to get two deeps and two mediums and then people just in some cases put their bees in it and put all those boxes together and go for it.

So what's happened for me is through the years I've changed my configurations in tiny micro alterations. If I made an all-in switch, so let's say one day I go to a seminar somewhere and I see somebody talk and they make sense and I listen to somebody like Steve Rapasky who lives in my state who says you need to have single brood management. What I do, I have. a million guillian hives then you should do what I do because it works I don't do that although I might get some ideas and go hmm I'm gonna go home and try the single deep brood bogs see how that goes and then I'll just do a medium honey super on top of that and see how that goes and so I did have Italians in the very

beginning and they were prolific so I had my super colonies so of course I had the kind of trademark stack of honey supers by this time of year, where they were just mediums over mediums over mediums with double deep brood boxes, the queen excluder and everything else. But those bees ate me out of house and home. When it came time for winter, I needed about 74 pounds of honey to get them through winter. And also, in some cases, once you stack all these extra boxes on, if you lost them due to a swarm or something, and they were kind of starting over, they were very slow to build. So in contrast, set up a deep-brewed box.

That's the starter box. Don't use any other box, just that with frames. Put an insulated intercover on, which in the very beginning I wasn't. I was using the standard intercover with the notch in it, the hole in the middle, and then following all the instructions on how to put nickels under it and let them vent in the summertime and all that other stuff, which had to be done by the way because it has that very thin. looking back, had the very thin kind of leon material that was clad with sheet metal,

and that thing was hitting about 135 degrees in the sun. So you needed the air gap, you needed the inner cover to kind of protect your bees from the heat of that thing, and then you vented through the top. It's just what everyone I knew did, and it's all anyone told me to do. So then you start looking at honeybee biology, and you start looking into the works of Dr. Thomas Seeley. And, we start to understand that maybe there are different ways to do it. So let's start with the deep brood box. Let's put an insulated inner cover on that thing.

And let's put a telescoping outer cover on top of the insulation of the inner cover. And let's see how that goes. So now this is being done side by side. This isn't shifting. If I did it to all of them at once, I could have just had a different year. Climate could play, temperature, different, you know, weather patterns could shift that year. But by splitting the apiary and doing some,

beehives that way and some the other way now we can make comparisons so first off that insulated and recover resulted in a much reduced consumption of resources so hmm why is that well first of all I wasn't venting anymore I insulated so the insulation gives the bees more control where do they control that through the entrance how many entrances one okay so today it's called the condensing hive back then it was just a closed-up high with single entrance which is basically an imitation of what we find in nature when bees are left to themselves so now when i put so let's advance so we've got a deep root box both 10 frames uh they both build eight out of 10 frames now it's time super up okay so because they built up we have to super before they're packed solid so now on one of those

i put a medium honey super on the other one i put a deep super. Okay. So roughly the same population of bees, same season, same location, everything else, as close as you can get to being the same, which one built faster, which one drew out the comb quicker on the new heavy wax foundation of the next box up? The medium frame did. So, hmm, but then you're thinking, yeah, but you know, once they fill out those deep frames, if they do it, then you're going to be way ahead because now we have double brood. So, I have found that if we restrict them to one deep box, it's rare to get more than about seven, eight frames of full brood. It's rare. The difference is when I go to double boxes, if there's

no queen excluder, and there wouldn't be, the cluster of the beast kind of moves up in between the two boxes. So the upper third of the bottom box, which is where I want to keep them all now, but now they kind of spread into both boxes. And this is something also that happens with people that do nothing but medium boxes if you do medium over medium over medium and that's right three mediums equals two deeps then when you divide out those brood boxes when you have to pull them apart for inspection you're always pulling apart directly in the middle of your brood so the brood cluster occupies multiple boxes in that case so steve rpassky gets a win for me he also is the author of swarm essentials

if you want to check that out. So he's also a Pennsylvania beekeeper. And once you set them up in that brood box in the bottom, and they stay there, and you add a medium instead of a deep soup or above that, the mediums do get pulled out quicker. And here's why. Less space.

Less of an impact on the bees, you know, utility. In other words, their ability to manage the space of their end, the number of bees it takes to police it to start to draw at comb, we need a lot of warmth to draw out comb so that's number one if we have a big deep box directly above while we're trying to expand then that's more space that challenges them because they have to worm the air around and over at the comb that they're working the more effort that it takes to do that the less of it they're going to do and so that's why we get this feeling it's like wow we put them in this big space they just seem to quit work it's like they don't even want to do it what's happening

well we gave them too much space and so now because the warmth has to really it's secondary warmth that's coming from the cluster for one keep in mind they're also warming their brood in there and then they have to warm the area or be in a warm space which if it's vented through the top that warmth is dissipating they don't control it they can't keep it in there because they needed to be in the high 80s low 90s just for that to work so that would be right around 33 Celsius and once it's in that temperature and they have that control over that tiny space, they go to work. They draw out the comb. They're far more challenged, let's say, in a larger space and it takes them longer to do it. So then the fix is to boost it more bees, load it up, really jamming with

some bees and get a lot of production going in there because now there's secondary warmth coming off the body of the bees. They're occupying the space more. So now the outside temperatures, especially at night like I just described we dropped into the the 40s last night so with more bees that has a lower impact on those in the space and production can continue so that's why these smaller spaces smaller increments tend to be more productive so deep root box and then mediums going up after that because as they start to of course even store honey and everything even that management is more efficient with a smaller space This is why we're all sitting around scratching our heads, not all of us, but the ones who have set up the nucleus hives in our apiaries, the five frame deeps, the wooden boxes, five over five over five over five.

So now we've got 15 deep frames and they're outperforming the larger hives because it's their ability to manage more efficiently smaller spatial increases bit by bit. Tell me what you think about that. I'm interested. Seriously. Write it down in the comments section. If we can be more involved and do micro advancements in providing them with more space to work and more comb to draw and the B numbers gradually build and stay with are scaled right

for the space that they're occupying, then you get better production out of them. I'm telling you, not wrong. It's looking good. Because those smaller hives also, Also, what happens overnight? Let's do that again. They're going to consume a lot of resources to keep their brood warm.

And if there's insulation can make up for it. So let's back paddle. So I have no plans, I'm just going to be honest. I don't have plans to do polystyrene hives all over my apiary. I'm just having it here as an evaluation opportunity. They are super insulated. So keep in mind, the more surface area, the more transfer of heat. So heat loss, which means the bees have to compensate for what they're losing from their clustering in the brood management area.

So one of the ways that we compensate for the big space that we provided them is that we can really insulate it. And that's, I think, we're like these polystyrene hives have a big advantage because they have a lot of insulation. There's standard cedar or pine or hoop pine or whatever your box is made out of. It's regular wood. It doesn't take much poly to really enhance that. So if you've got some insulation, that's going to make up for the fact that you suck your bees in a space too large to manage and may help them catch up. This is also why I suspect a lot of people remark that these insulated hives, they see a new comb being drawn out much quicker than with their wooden wear. And that is one of the reasons why, I think.

So that's it. So that's why I thought better off running singles with a medium instead of the double deeps. You can do double deeps. I've just abandoned that here. You see a couple here and there, but they're not my top performers. I can tell you that. Question number five. Oh, this is an interesting one. Okay. This is from Bernie the beekeeper. Now, here's the thing. I don't often accept it when somebody just writes me and says, hey, I have a suggestion for a shout out since you do those. And this would be kind of cool. I kind of glance over those because I'm highly suspicious. the motivations of people telling me to give somebody a shout-out.

But in this case, it was good. So I'm going to thank Bernie the beekeeper. The shout-out is for a website that is pretty darn interesting. And I know I send people to several websites. In fact, why don't we name them all just to keep it fair right now? So I recommend to people that they go to when they're trying to find out if you're going to have a dearth, if you're going to have what kind of environment you're in, is it suitable? What kind of wild area is there for bees if they fly away and are not hive-by?

a beekeeper, where would a feral colony live, and what are the chances they find one? So, beescape.org used to be the way it was, but it's been taken over by Penn State University. So it's bescape. dot psu.d.u. The other one is how to get free bees. How do you collect a swarm? So how do you get notified when there's a swarm in your area and you're not a member of a club or anything else? well you go to be swarmed b-e-es-w-a-r-m-ed-r-m-ed dot org or is it dot-com

bee swarmed anyway you go there you register and you say your beekeeper and you're willing to go after bees two miles from your house and then you get notified so now here's another one this is called my bee calendar.com. My B, M-Y-B-E-E-C-A-L-E-N-D-A-R dot com. So guess what you do? You go there, My-B-C-Callender. It's a work in progress. It's free, by the way, which I really like, and I'm impressed that this individual did this. And by the way, I wrote, because I feel that there's an area where you can comment. And Nick wrote me back. This is new. He's a Missouri, third year beekeeper, but he has a background in software development. So here's the thing. What do you think it's about? You go to my bee calendar, and I hope you do,

and you click on it, and you put your zip code in there. And when you put your zip code in there, guess what there is? There's a sliding line for the date, and down this line, it shows you what your sources of nectar are going to be, pollen for your bees. And then there's a whole bunch of other information down there about things you can plant when you can plant them what it does in other words for pollinators is it for nectar is it for pollen is it for what how do you plant what do you plant when do you plant where do you plant it blah blah blah my be calendar dot com i hope you go there now so you might be wondering how does somebody like that make any money okay so there are things for sale on the site that use affiliate

links. So I look at that stuff because I don't want to recommend something. It's going to send people somewhere, but they just get pitched something to buy a bunch of stuff. But here's why that's good. I don't know if you know how affiliate links work. When you go shopping on Amazon, if you were looking at a blog somewhere or listening to a video and they say links are down in the video description, which I often do, some of mine are affiliate links and some are not. When you click on anything that says AMZ in it, that usually indicates it's going to be an affiliate link. So that means the person that gave you the link gets maybe three cents or three percent of the sale. It just depends on what's going on when you go shopping on Amazon.

So what does that change as far as the amount of money you're going to pay when you buy it? It doesn't, not at all. You're paying the same price, exactly. So what happens is the seller has agreed with Amazon that a percentage of that sale will go to the person that provided a link that led you to the product that you eventually, hopefully purchased. That's how it works.

It doesn't change the price of it at all. It is shouldered by Amazon and or the seller. And that's the way that works. So that's the way this person works. So I think it's called AdSense or something like that. But anyway, it's a way for you to support people that produce content that you like. But anyway, it's totally free.

There aren't a bunch of pop-ups. There's no cookies that jump on your computer. And if you don't know what that is, cookies track your activities on the internet. So for right now, my beCalendar.com is an interesting resource. Scope it out. It's my shout-out for today. I think it's great to give shout-outs,

and I definitely like to reward people that are just kind of giving back to the beekeeping community and they're sharp enough to be able to set up a website. like that. Very interesting. Okay, question number six. This comes from Frederick and Rhonda. It says, Keepers 2 Queen Hive. It says, can you use a migratory cover with a bucket feeder on top? How does this not cause robbing or fighting between the two sides? We'd like to limit the feed rate to draw out comb. Okay. So we're talking about the Keepers Hive. If you don't know what that is, I've done videos about it.

I have the single colony Keepers Hive. I have the dual colony Keepers Hive. And this question is the same question I had when I was talking to the inventor and that whole team that has put together the Keepers Hive. Because, and you can look at the interviews I did with them.

I talked with them at the North American Honeybee Expo one year. I also interviewed them at the Pennsylvania State Banquet. So the State Beekippers Association. and he said they just get along in there, but I've got some thoughts about it. Some people have told me they've had queen issues. So here's the thing. What's the premise? It's a two colony system, not new.

So what is different? So two colonies side by side put together, bottom boards, and then you've got a common, so it partially overlays both of the brood boxes. So that means your center column, which is your honey super, normally there's a utility space there too that has a divider so the bees can store honey right up into the second box and then there's a queen excluder on top of that so there's a divider up until that point so we've got two brood boxes we've got a queen excluder underneath of those for summertime

and then we've got the next box up was just transitional and that's for honey and it's divided and then when wintertime comes we actually cover that with the queen excluder and the bees from down below can go up into that space above that they are sharing a common honey super so that means that the bees inside each hive on each side other than the queen herself on each side are joining in the same storage area and they're cooperating which is really interesting to me that does it work yeah they do it so here's the thing i was thinking about though why are their queen issues sometimes where one side can reject the other side or there can be workers that kind of chase down a queen in the other side.

I think it's kind of like what we practice with poultry if it's a big poultry operation, all in and all out. So when you're setting up your colonies, your two queen system and your two colony system, we set them up on the same day at the same time. I had a friend here that came from New Jersey and we stocked both of our brood boxes at exactly the same time and installed their queens at exactly the same time. So in other words, they never knew these spaces up above without encountering the scent and pheromone of another queen's colony. And they did that up there.

So once they've done that, they're adapted, and things are kind of working out, there's nothing new. In other words, it's already a new space, so they're already adapting to that. And I did what's called super splitting, which means that we didn't just take a whole colony from somewhere put it in and a whole colony for the other side, put it in we went and piece mailed out frames of cap brood and put it in there and then we each found a

queen from different colonies and then we put that in there and we chose the colony that was producing queen cells it was going to get rid of their queen anyway and that's when we pulled the queen and then left the other colonies intact to replace her so once those are set up and they they got along on both sides of it so it just works out and i think the problem comes into play when you're missing a queen on one side but not the other because now your bees are starting to maybe maintain and move over into both sides of the hive and then when you bring something new in another queen or something they start to reject her it's just my guess it just seems like it makes sense so if you were going to replace a queen on one side then i would withdraw the queen from the other side as well at the same

time for a couple of days put her in a nucleus holding hive something like that and then bring them all back together and let them reestablish and start that ever again. That's just what I would do. But the idea about limiting the feed and to draw out comb. So the same thing. I don't like the idea of the migratory cover because it does not, at least where I am, see I don't know where people are that are doing this. But when you have an insulated cover, the advantages are really big when it comes time for both processing honey, drawing out new comb, and things like that. The other part of this is the trickle feeder. So having a sugar syrup one-to-one is recommended, by the way. It can even be a little leaner than that. If you're going to put

that on for them to draw home and create infrastructure. And if you put buckets on, now let's just look at like today, for example, here where I am. If we started off, if it was 46 degrees Fahrenheit in the morning and it was 78 by mid-afternoon, the expansion of the air inside a bucket that's inverted would be substantial and it would express the sugar syrup out and onto those frames down below. So I'm very careful about where, how, and what kind of feeder I put that's on a hive like that. It's going to be inverted and we're going to trap the air. I would highly recommend looking into the B buffet and using something like that instead of using a big bucket or even one of the ones that trickled out the lowest amount was the B-smart one-gallon size in hive feeder.

So I don't put them on top of hives and I don't use migratory covers for that because I want that insulation. I want it enclosed. I also want the feeder to be enclosed in a medium box. And that's just me. That's what I do. But limiting the rate of flow, if you insist on using a bucket, there are probably some of the spuds that are in them that allow the bees to access the syrup the the idea that you're going to trickle that out or slow feed it to help them continually have a resource that

they'll draw at the comb we need to know too that if your nights wherever you are getting really cold it's going to slow that down and so having it again inside a feeder shim is a big advantage and having an insulated cover over the top so I'll leave that to you but that's my thinking on that and when i did all these uh feeders by themselves so it would be like this was the test unoccupied hives so these are feeders inverted jars so everything for the mason jar with holes in the lid the be smart one gallon thing that looks this is it right here little holes this one even uh the jars and everything else once the airspace was developed Expansion happened was more dramatic. The top performing feeder like that was the bee buffet, but people don't want any of their bees to get caught and drowned. And so the bee buffet went through some modifications to make sure the bees would not be drowned. But so the bucket feeder, this kind of feeder, inverted jars and things like that. Bees don't drown in them. However, because they have the potential to express,

so much liquid down into the hive when we get these rapid temperature changes just because they're not drowning up in the feeder itself doesn't mean you're not causing damage if it all drips down onto your brood areas because a sugar syrup dripping down all over your brood can very quickly suffocate brood just food for thought there so we're in the fluff section already and i just want to talk about it. For those of you who are assessing, controlling, killing, and removing varroa destructor mites from your hives, you're still in the zone. This is the time to really be doing that. We have to be thinking ahead to the fat bodied winter bees and everything getting ready, but there's never a bad time to kill the varroa destructor mite. So food for thought there. Prepare your honey supers if you're in the

northeast because early golden rod is already looking like it's about to start blooming. They're still kind of green yellow but that's early golden rod by the way is a a version of golden rod there's like 20 different species i don't know how many there are but um the early stuff is about to bloom and when that kicks off you're going to get a lot of nectar all of a sudden so have your honey super is ready don't be caught off guard they start back filling robbing is very high so through the years again this is what i've arrived at your entrances on your standard eight frame or 10 frame langstroth boxes three of an inch high by three inches or four inches in width depending on the hive that works really well but the potential for them to rob right now if you're leaving them open so they can evaporate honey

you're putting that hive at risk plus there's a lot for them to defend and make sure be stressed queen status know what's going on there so use queen right plan for fall planting and the reason i say that now is a lot of the seed companies are putting their seeds on sale because most people have made their purchases already and you could be getting deals. There'll probably be more later on, but sometimes people plan a plot or an area that they want a seed and they want to get something from outside pride or urn't seeds or Eden Brothers or something like that. And the seeds that you want are just out of stock. I'm going to try to expand my milkweed. I've tried this for years, but I'm hopeful because

I saw swamp milkweed this year. for the first time. I've been trying that for so long. So anyway, plan for fall. Goldenrod about to open. I already talked about that. Hot week ahead. So it's cold now here in the Northeast,

but it's going to be hot. And you're going to be able to do a lot. So that's it. I want to thank you for watching and spending your time with me here on this Friday. And I hope that going forward this week, weekend you have a great time don't forget to leave comments down the comment

section and if you've got a question for me go to the way to be dot org fill out the form on the page marked contact and we'll see what happens I'm Frederick done and this has been the way to be