The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 366 with Frederick Dunn, honey flow is coming on.

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/E8MF-JYE39s

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, August the 7th of 2026. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 366. I'm Frederick Dunn and... This is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here and I hope that you're glad that I'm glad that you're glad that we're here and there's a lot going on outside. Storming, raining off and on. and it's hot. So if you want to know we're going to talk about today, please go down in the video description and look at all the topics listed in order with timestamps

that we'll let you know exactly where each topic starts and ends and that way you won't be wasting your time because I don't want to waste your time. And if you want to know what part of the country we're in, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania and the northeastern part of the United States of America. And so you may be wondering too, what if you had a question that you wanted to submit a topic,

you would go to the way to be, dot org click on the page mark contact and you can fill out the form there and submit something to me that would be fun and if you have something on your mind right now you have a picture of video of something that you've seen with your honeybees and you want to share it with others and get their opinions you go to the fellowship which fellowship the way to be fellowship on Facebook and it's fun it's free always free all the time no ads no politics no nothing I know the first thing that people want to know when we get started today. They want to know what's going on outside, so I'll tell you.

Well, it's hot and muggy, aside from the rain that you saw in the opening sequences. And at 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit, exactly, that's 25 Celsius, also 90% relative humidity. No great surprise. That's because, you know, it's been raining off and on, and the humidity's way up. So what does that mean for the bees? It means that they're having a hard time drying down their honey. and we're in a nectar flow right now. It's really kicking off great. And there's a little bit of wind, 3.1 miles per hour, which is 5 kilometers per hour. Not bad. Air quality, even with all the rain,

we're still in the yellow zone. So that means that like if you have any respiratory challenges, you shouldn't be outside like wasting your time, doing exercises, running, jogging, things like that. If you're normally healthy, you're okay, but it's not the green zone, which is what we'd like to see. and I'm really surprised that with all the rain that we've had that those particulates aren't knocked right out of the air but also understandable because there are fires all over the place. I don't know if you watch the news, but they recently nabbed a guy who started a whole bunch of fires,

a whole bunch of them. I can't wait to hear the story about why he thought that was important to do. So air quality, there you go. pollen coming up, the high pollen days for the next seven days. You're going to be the 12th and the 13th of August. And right now, ragweed, which is really interesting because ragweed doesn't provide nectar for your bees. The pollen's not that awesome, but it's a bridge. In other words, the quality of the pollen might be down a little bit,

but the amount of pollen available is going to make up for it with our bees here in this neck of the woods. Where you are may be different, of course. There's lots of other sources out there. But it's going to peak on the 12th and the 13th. So outside, as we saw in the opening sequence is Goldenrod. Goldenrod is starting up. I wanted to slow down. I want it to not all bloom at once,

and it's kind of looking like it can almost do that. But the bees are all over it. What do they get from Goldenrod? They get pollen and nectar. Not just that. In some places, people may say, Goldenrod really doesn't do that much for them. But I can tell you that here, in the state of Pennsylvania,

that when the temps get cooler at night, like it was last night, it was right down into the 60s, and then warm during the day, the value of the sucrose that's in that nectar is increased. That means higher sugar content for the nectar that the bees are getting from it. More payback for the effort they put out to get it. So that's pretty cool. Japanese knot wheat is all over the place.

I understand people probably don't like it, but the honeybees do. Iron weed is everywhere. Joe pie weed all over the wetlands. French Creek watershed. Dutch clover is everywhere. And by the way, I mowed last night. That's right, with my headlights on. Why would I mow at night?

Well, because I don't want to mow over the bees. It's not a feel-good thing to see bees. It should be moving out of the way of your mower, and they're not. So, mow later. It's cooler anyway. And when you do that, if you can mow at four inches or higher, if you can get away with it, you're leaving some of the clover heads on.

Why is that important? Because when they turn brown and they seed, they reseed the clover and that's what we wanted to do so i think that's a good idea uh so that's a really good nectar crop because the bees are all over that too hyssup i need more hyssup i need a lot more hyssop i need the anise hyssop however are you supposed to say it i know we get called out on how i pronounce anis hissup uh blue giant hyssup agostachi all that stuff it's all good stuff because it's got gives your honey that kind of licoricey flavor and it makes it smell strong. I think that honey should have some dynamic to it. It shouldn't just taste like thick sugar syrup or something. It should be really good.

Cell field. They're all over the cell field too. If you don't know what that is, look that up. It's a surprising sleeper, as we say, out there in the environment because the bees are on it, but you know, it's often very low to the ground around the fringe areas and stuff like that. we need to pay attention to where the bees are going, what they're doing. There's something else called bird's foot, tree foil. It's yellow, golden-colored flower, and the bees are in that. The jewel weed is kicking in pretty good. If you don't know what that is, that's where your bees fly into it and have to go inside to get the nectar.

And because the pollen anthers are on the top, when they push in to get at the nectar, they involuntarily get covered up with pollen, right on the thorax, their head, and sometimes a little bit of their abdomen. And when they come out, they leave this really dense, pale streak of highly concentrated pollen on their back that they can't clean off completely themselves. So sometimes people will look at that and see this little stripe down the thorax and go, what is that? And now you know, it could be jewelweed.

Or another plant like that that also makes the bees go inside to get the nectar while forcing them to carry the pollen to the next blossom. That's how plants make out with each other from a distance. use a go-between they use the honeybee and we had a bear visit which was pretty funny I mean I don't like the bears being around but I got two very short videos of bear running away he scooted in here alarms went off I don't have an electric fence still I just have these audible alarms that go off and so pictures of the alarm going off the bear running away as fast as it can go it came twice and ran away twice and then hasn't come back since

So I deployed more cameras, more alarms, and I'm ready for them, I think. It's not a challenge. I don't want them here. But that's just about it. Okay, so we covered that, how to submit your thing, what the weather is outside, what's going on. And we'll talk more in the fluff section. So we'll jump right in with the very first question, which comes from Gold Hamgeo. That's the YouTube channel name, and I'm sure I messed that up.

But anyway, it says, are these your grandstands? son's bees that swarm and the question is regarding this observation hive that I just installed this year not too long ago did a video about it so if you want to see the video you go to my YouTube channel and you type in the top right hand corner observation hive and then just look at the most recent dates within the last couple of weeks so anyway no it is not the bees that swarmed on my grandson which he by the way has really bad luck with his he has two hives now even though he tries more he has two and no that's not the ones the bees that we found they were on the ground earlier in the summer it was a really cold night 50s and there was a swarm on the ground and it had rained on them

and rained them into the grass so nighttime was coming we thought that we would just find some way to salvage them it's kind of hard to do they're soaking wet it's not even a big cluster of bees on the ground so it's kind of questionable are they worth you your time. I think they are. And since the grandchildren are here, we have to set an example that we care, that we respect life, and we want to get them. So we just decided. I had some pro nuke sitting around. They already had frames sitting in them. Some of the frames had some drawn comb on them. So I thought, let's just take this out there and set it on the ground right next to the cluster and see if they go in. And it was like clockwork. We put it down there and to keep in mind,

the day's ending, the sky's darkening, the temperatures are dropping, and the rain is falling. So they weren't going to make it. Bees do die sometimes when they swarm at the wrong time and the wrong place under the wrong conditions. So I put that box down and didn't the bees go straight into it? Sure, slow motion. They started going in. They had water all over them. And they all went into that hive.

So the next part is I thought, it's a pro nuke. Those things are made out of plastic. I'm not super excited about them. They're kind of flimsy. They have kind of vent holes everywhere and a really strange entrance that stays basically wide open. And so I thought this is not ideal for bees to live in, but I'm out of space. I don't have hives to put bees in and I don't want to expand anymore. So we sat that once they moved into it.

I just sat it on a rack at the end of a series of hives and we left them there and didn't even give them a thought. And they made it. So after several weeks in that plastic five frame deep pro nuke, they were reproducing. And they're kicking things off. So why not? They seem to make themselves known to me as having potentials. It's like they were auditioning for a better hive. And so I took them and I put them into the 12 frame observation hive.

And that's what we're talking about here. So it's not the one that's warmed, but it is one that got my attention because sometimes when a queen and her cluster and her bees and her fellowship of bees make themselves known to you and they're doing exceptional things maybe surviving against all odds then we should you know go the extra yard and put them in something help them stick around so that's what's going on and i can't wait to do an update video on the observation hive that particular one uh because they're doing really well so get right into the next one this is j t learn it says that's a youtube channel name all right fred are you aware of tulip tree scale says they produce a honeydew that is indigestible to honeybees and causes dysentery.

The extended cold last winter led to 40 to 70% of the hives of my area dying from massive defecation in the cluster. So this leaves me to think about things. Now one of the things we have to be careful about when we're teaching other people about bees, you may have mentees that you're sharing because often plants and conditions like this come up and it can be alarming we can tell people about it and say that this particular nectar if they go to get it so for the tulip tree scale by the way the honeydew that's coming off of it the bees are going to get it but how can we stop them from doing that we really can't do anything about it but some of these darker honeies these high ash content honeies of course i looked into this

So I checked in with University of Massachusetts, UMass, Amherst, which my grandfather graduated from in 1929. Just thought I'd throw that in there. But anyway, the honey to do itself is not toxic, for example. So it's not that the quality is bad for the bees. It's this material that's in suspension in it that if you can imagine, let's get a traffic jam and eat a whole bunch of brand muffins.

and then drink, you know, a couple of cups of coffee. And what do you think is going to happen? You're going to get in trouble. You might have to go to the bathroom. And that's what happens to the bees. Instead of bran muffins, they're eating honey that has a whole bunch of particulates in it. These particulates build up in their gut.

And then they really have to eliminate. And bees do not like to eliminate inside their hive. That's why when the weather breaks in the wintertime, they do something called cleansing flights. So I'm sure most of you, they're listening, are aware of that. And bees fly out, do a cleansing flight. Their plan is to come back. And that's where you see little tan streaks and spots and globs in melted pockets in the snow, if there's snow everywhere. And then they hope to make it back.

Now, if they can't get out, it's too cold. Things are really bad, really bad temperatures. Or even worse. let's say, and this will be shocking to you, but sometimes beekeepers, they don't go to the extra yard and keep the entrance open in the wintertime. And I've even been ridiculed for demonstrating that not by everybody, by a select few, for cleaning out entrances in the wintertime, because this whole thing about bees should do that themselves, blah, blah, blah.

But for the most part, they don't need it. But sometimes dead bees pile up at the entrance of your hive. And if they do that, you don't clean it out. They can't get out to defecate. Where do they go? inside the hive. Inside the hive, you have a condition here like J.T. Learn has mentioned, where they start doing their droppings all over the other bees inside the hive, and that creates the situation. So bacteria just rages inside the hive. And the bees can't clean it up,

because the rest of them can't do cleansing flights either. So they've got all this dirt inside their hive that they can't get rid of. So what can you do? Well, you can harvest that honey, probably and not leave it for the bees in winter time which is a real challenge because it means you had to look at the frame and kind of guesstimate is that what this is from so the thing of it is i suppose you look to see if you have this plant around you this tulip tree now tulip trees we have in my area too i've seen them the bees really work them too so when they're in bloom they're really good for the honeybees so i don't know what you do about it one thing i do not want you to do is use systemic pesticides on these things

because your bees will also get that even through the honeydew. So when there's anything else that's acting on the surface of a plant and they're producing a honeydew from that that your bees will get even if these were spotted lanternflies because there's a lot of discussion about those

I haven't seen any where I am. They're in my state. My state is ground zero for the spotted lanternfly. So when we see them around if they're on trees and people are using pestis, pesticides, insecticides, specifically to deal with them. They are insects and then they don't kill them and they continue to produce honeydew even after they've been contaminated by this pesticide guess what's eating the honeydew, the honey bees and then honey bees are flying back with pesticides. So you could potentially bring harm because that was another thing I ran into when I looked into the scale thing the bees going on trees that have been treated with pesticides and getting honeydew from that. Not good, but any high ash, content. So that can be bad. Buckwheat, for example, which has nothing to do with this,

but can cause the same thing. Buckwheat honey, very high in ash. Honeydew, of course, extremely high. And then versus clover, for example, that produces a very light, clean, low ash residue honey. So I don't know what to say other than that, because we can put out a warning about that, but I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about it. So if you've encountered that, and it's in a quantity that's devastating to your hives along with JT. Learn here, what have you done?

If anything, maybe you just try to mitigate that by making sure they have other forage. If you're a backyard beekeeper, you're probably not going to move them to another location. So I don't know what to say. Maybe there's a mechanical means to deal with it and give your bees off of them.

But that was an interesting comment. The next comment comes from B-Cathy. Not as in B-Cathy, but a B-E-E-Cathy. So Kathy's into B's. So anyway, I may need to do a newspaper combined. It says the Queen Wright hive has a super on. Could I place newspaper above the super and place the queenless hive above to combine,

thinking it could be a sweet entrance to a new family? And you can do it. And this is, so yes. you can do that. And the newspaper thing that people often bring up, it should get a sheet of newsprint. I have boxes of it because you can use it for a lot of different things. But what I'd like to point out about that, when you're merging two colonies together, it's supposed to slow the blending of the two colonies.

And some people put little cuts in the newsprint and stuff like that, kind of to prime it to make it so the bees can go through it. And then they'll slowly introduce themselves. So I've done that in the past and had them moving. completely with the other colony because they're queenless where are they going to where a queen right scent is and they can be some fighting particularly if when you blend it there are laying workers with your colony so it's a shock for them because you just took them from wherever they are and put them on a new colony and now on top of the honey super honey supers have worker bees in it so the nurse

bees are not up there so it is likely to be an area that they could defend and might have some guards up in there. And so the newsprint could work, but now what we end up with is, you know, a triple stack. So B. Kathy didn't say how many boxes there were total, but I'm just guessing there's a brood box. And if it's a super, maybe it's a medium super. So now we're going to add another colony on top of that. Now the colony that's been queenless for a while, probably is likewise broodless. So this is just what I'm suggesting. Because I don't like it, you know, when I set up a hive like that, and I have all this space above this time of year,

and it's brood area because we're pulling a box that's got brood in a colony that doesn't have a queen. I don't like to see that turn into a honey super. And that's, you know, just logistics-wise, that's what would probably happen because it becomes the top box then. So I suggest you could put them on just like that with or without the paper. Try it out, see what happens. because then they have to tear out the paper and get rid of it on their own. You see them removing the paper pretty darn fast.

So, okay, let's move on to that. We've put them in, they've joined each other, they've combined all right. Unless there's a lot of resources in that box that you brought with them, that's at the point then, once we know they're getting along and contributing to that Queen Wright colony, I would put a B-escape underneath that top box, get them all out of it, and remove that box altogether. And then if you need to add another honey super, this would be the time, of course, to do it.

So give them extra space. They've got more bees now. They transited down in with the others. And now we can remove the brood box from above. That's just what I personally would do. Otherwise, you can end up with a honey super on top. That's maybe a deep box because that wasn't mentioned. But I'm assuming because it's a brood box from another hive that would also be deep.

I'd like to personally just get that off of there. So add another medium super. drawn comb if you've got it foundation if you don't it gives them more space and maybe you can get them to work it up this is different from hiving a swarm which is ready to build a bunch of new comb but it's warm enough now this time of year for them to continue to build comb so they could draw it out i think it's good what do you think how about comments from the inexpensive seats comments down below let us know what you think about that idea i think it would work good so moving on to the next one question which comes from rad W-R-A-D-2. That's the YouTube channel name. I have yellow clover growing.

Now my white sweet clover is going gangbusters, but now I have a new skunk. I had to laugh. The guy I buy my queens from went to Lowe's and bought aluminum carpet grippers to put on the edge of his landing boards as a predator deterrent, question mark. Says they are sharp. I don't think that's for me and then this is the part that got my attention. They can't eat that many bees. Okay, so here's what I want to talk about with skunks. Now this year has been a low skunk year for me. We see them cruising through and I noticed that the skunks are doing things.

Now we have become skunk central here in the past because I often heard people make comments about skunks and what they can and can't do, what they will and won't eat, whether they eat or spit and digest or all these comments about skunks and bees. So if you look at my bee yard right now, there are no beehives with a landing board lower than 17 to 18 inches off the ground. That has been the maximum skunk reach. Now, somebody else may say, why do you care?

Skunks can't do that much damage. We put all our hives right on the ground. Okay, I'm just saying, remember my philosophy is to fail safe, but I do. want to address the comment here that they can't eat that many bees oh they do they eat hundreds of bees if not thousands in a single night so and in other parts of the country maybe you don't have that many skunks maybe you don't have much much of an issue and some people practice the three s's i was told shoot shovel and shut up uh no i want the skunks here i like the skunks being around I just don't want them to eat my honeybees.

You are coming up on the time of year when you are about to do some weed whacking and come across a hole in the ground that is full of yellow jackets and they're going to fly out of there and start singing you and you will wish that your skunks had been out all year long

prowling around sniffing the ground digging them out skunks are omnivorous to eat a lot of stuff aside from your honeybees so all we have to do is get our hives off the ground to keep them away from the skunks.

That's it. It's super easy. we're backyard beekeepers. I understand the challenge if you're a commercial beekeeper and you've got those four-way pallets and you've got all these you can't on a practical level elevate all of those hives. But for the backyard beekeeper, you can. And it solves a lot of problems. In fact, let me go down before we talk about how skunks munch everything and we'll eat your bees all night long for hours straight. Anyway, how many of you mow your bee yard and you get your bees upset or you add work to yourself when you run the mower through there and the grass that you're cutting blows all over the landing boards and covers entrances and makes your bees mad which is why you have to wear your

full bee suit while you mow or you weed whack and while you're weed whacking it all goes right inside or onto the face of the bees where the guard bees are they're getting smacked with grass they get mad they chase you out and they're trying to sting you and they're all all over your veil where you're trying to see the detail of the clipping and mowing that you're doing. So if they were elevated, see the advantage? Now they're elevated. When you weed whack, it goes under the hive. When you mow, you can blow, well, blow away from your hives if you'd like to. I think that's a good idea. But when you mow right up next to the hives, the grass blows under them, not onto the landing boards. There are so many ways. The other thing is, think about,

this. Some people just can't avoid somewhat damp ground or you get a lot of rain. So you get a lot of rain, the rain ponds, the ground can only take so much moisture. The closer your beehives are to the ground, the higher the humidity level is at the entrance of your hive. Think about that. So while you're elevating them, you have airflow on every side of your hive. And they're up and away from the moist ground, away from predators. The list just goes on. The benefits. are fantastic. So I have no hives that have been visited by skunks this year and that's a good thing. You may be wondering if I don't see it, how do I know if skunks are going out and getting after my bees? Well, personality change in the hive, for one, they can become more defensive and you might be

wondering, they were super friendly, now they're defensive, what's going on with these bees? Look at the ground in front of the hive. You see a bunch of muddy patches there. You see that the grass is smashed around. You see little muddy hand. prints, assuming you're in an area where it's muddy. I mean, some of you might be living in arid regions where you don't have ground like that. But here in the Northeast, you see little dirty skunk paw prints right on the hive. Why are they putting their paw prints on the hive? Because they annoy the bees. It's nighttime. They know the bees can't see. And then they're scratching at it. And when the bees feel the scratching sensation and this vibration going

into the hive then they come to the entrance unless they're already at the entrance and they smell a skunk they get mad they fly out they try to defend the hive and instead they're becoming a snack so the skunk does this with this little paws it works its paws over the bee and they squash them up and kill them and then they eat the bee now sometimes they are chewing up a big glob of bees they're just getting the honey out of the crop or whatever and then they're spitting it back out and you can find globs the bees. The fun part is too, and I highly recommend this when you have grandchildren and little rascals around, that now we can teach them a little bit about scatology. That's the study of poo. So anyway, you gather up these skunk droppings and you put it on screen and then you run water through

it until you wash away the parts and you see what's in the scat. This is really fun because now it shows you what they've been eating. And sometimes you'll find little mammal bones in there. the skunks have also been eating mice and voles. Heaven forbid, we should have an animal out there that's killing voles that are trying to feed on your garden. So this is the whole chain that we want to keep going in my book. So yes, they eat them and swallow them and digest them. And yes, they also chew them up and spit them out. So there's evidence on both fronts. So they're doing it all. And they eat so many bees. So many bees. So many bees. So. So. Yes, you should lift it up.

And the other thing is your bees can get short in the lives. They're colony defenses are up. They're not getting a good night's rest. It's right. Your bees need to be calm and not be aggravated by anything. A lot of vibrations, sense they don't like. All these things around them should be calm and in harmony with nature overall. And bees that don't sleep well, don't forage well.

Bees that harassed by skunks and on constant alert, they're constantly at general quarters manning their station. they get worn out. And then when it comes time to do the work, they're not ready for a full day's work. So elevate your hives. Yes. And by the, oh yeah,

the carpet tack thing, the carpet strips with all the nails and stuff in them, 100% don't like it. Because if you have to put something on your hive that's going to scratch and hurt people or, you know, first of all, it just doesn't look cool. Let's talk about aesthetics. We want stuff to look good.

in our bee yard. We don't want a bunch of nails sticking up because I've heard the other part where people put roofing nails through a bunch of plywood and lay that down in front of your hives. Who wants that in front of their beehive? Not me. It's so easy just to put the whole thing up. Somebody else said roll a chicken wire up and put that in front of your hives. Well, when the grass grows into the chicken wire, now you've got another thing to deal with and another mess on your hands. I don't want rolled up chicken wire in front of my hive either. So all you have to do is elevate them 17 to 18 inches and by the way here's the advantage That puts them up at a really nice comfortable working height

So you're not bending over all the time you had to pick up that bottom box or something or you need to do something with the landing board of the entrance reducer Remember bees don't choose in the wild to be near on the ground. They'd rather be way up a tree. So we've already lowered them a lot. So that's all I'm gonna to say i think that's it so the next comment here comes from l-a-sd-h-m-k-26 youtube channel name says have you determined how many job responsibilities each bee has for a fully functioning hive to operate i've never thought about water collector bees before so interesting and amazing and so this is on a youtube video that i did where i showed the bees gathering water And Dr. Tom Seeley again, we always have to bring him up at Cornell, that they made all these observations about water foragers. Bees that go out for water. It is the most waggle danced for product in the hive. So it's very interesting. You can watch the same YouTube and everything, but I will run down. It's not how many jobs have I determined, but it's kind of what they do. There are jobs that bees do that are not listed in the job list.

So if we were looking at a scope of work where somebody's about to be employed as a bee, you will be expected to. You go right on a list of all the skills and qualifications you must have and physical ability and everything else. It doesn't include things like how about groomer? How about varroa mite foot muncher? These are other jobs inside the hive. How about washboarder? So like sailors, holy stoning a deck. teak deck on the USS New Jersey, the Iowa, the Missouri, something like that way to get out there in that deck department

They've got these stones. They've got a post in the stone and they're scrubbing it back and forth Scrubing down that teak wood Honeybees go all over the hive and they use their mandibles and their little front feet go really fast and they're rubbing the surface and they're working things down Outside inside time to lean time to clean They're working on their hives and that's not listed. It's not in the job scope. I don't want to point that out but a lot of people get recruited into the armed forces and find out that there's jobs that they're going to have to do that we're not listed in the job scope doesn't matter what service you were in okay but I will talk about it so day one day one is the 22nd day after an egg is laid so they come out they emerge let's say now by the way they don't you know it's not in the job scope here

jobs for drones that's not in here at all nowhere does it say wait to be fed, groom your hair, wait for virgin queen, wait to be fed, go to local singles, drone congregation area, look for a queen, come back home, wait to be fed. See what I'm saying? That job's not in here at all. So, but the workers, so these are jobs for females only. So only females need to apply to any of these positions. So the cleaners, day one to day to they come out of their cell they're scooting around they're cleaning up that's what they do there also heater bees at that time if you don't know what that is in the wintertime or around the brood which conveniently they just emerged from their cell they're already in the brood area see how

economy minded they are they don't even have to go somewhere else to do their work it's right here it's like if babies were in the baby place in the hospital and we put them right to work the minute they came out and they're cleaning the nursery that's That's what these bees are doing. And then other babies need warmth. So they're also providing that warmth with their thorax. So day one and day two, these are the bees that are doing it. The youngest, easygoing bees, they don't even sting yet.

They're totally laid back. But now let's jump up to 3 to 11, 3 to 11 days after emergence. They're nurse bees. What's that mean? They're feeding other bees. Open larvae. They might take a turn. If they're lucky, they get to be part of the Queen's Retinue.

The queen's retinue are a bunch of nurse bees that hover around her, constantly cleaning her, removing her waste material, feeding her, grooming her, and going everywhere she goes. But if you start marking those little workers, those nurse bees that are surrounding the queen, that's a high turnover rate. So it's a slight few bees, by the way. Keep in mind that over a thousand new bees emerge in a 24-hour period, they're not all going to attend to the queen. So, that wasn't listed.

Queen's retinue is not one of the jobs that we see in that biology scope. So anyway, they're nurse bees up to the 11th day they're feeding and taking care of things. Then they graduate from nurse bees on the 11th day. Now keep in mind, if you see one doing this on the 9th day instead of the 11th day, there are variables. These are the averages. So on the 12th day, they get into food management. So they're storekeepers. I call them storekeeper bees. And so what are they storing?

Well, the bees that are going out doing the foraging, those are the advanced senior bees at the peak of their physical development. They're out there, they're collecting resources, and they're getting nectar, and they're bringing it back in their nectar crop. When they fly back with nectar in the nectar crop from the nectar source, from the nectar rees,

from the flowers that they visited, assuming they have nectar, and they're not just bringing in pollen, that's a different thing. But they bring in this nectar, and then the tongue comes out from a receiver bee. So those are storekeepers that haven't been outside yet. So this is their taste of outside.

They're tasting liquid sunshine. So the forager that's come in passes it off through something called trophlaxis. And they stick their tongue out and they draw that into their honey crop. Now what's going on with these food management bees, they're also putting an enzyme in there. It's called Invertase.

So honey is not just dried out nectar. It's being exposed to enzymes that create invert sugar. So invertase, invert sugar. It goes from sucrose to glucose and fructose. I knew you wanted to know. And so the more bees it passes off to one another inside the hive, keep in mind, 12 to 17 days of age, this is what they're doing. And then they're the ones that take it up.

up and spread it out into the cells in honey storage, assuming that those are there. But now let's think about this. Storekeeper bees just got a bunch of nectar from a forager, and they're 12 to 17 days old. They go to store it now in the storage area, the drawn honeycomb, not enough cells. So now what do they do? Conveniently enough, their union has allowed them to also pull double duty as wax workers. So this also means that the bees that are receiving that resource can also use their what? These are wax glands.

So they have wax glands on their abdomen and they produce wax shingles and then they gather those shingles and they go up and they create the cells and they're using honey to do it. See how convenient that is? They already have it with them. So they're consuming resources to produce wax infrastructure. these are also your interior construction workers, their interior finishers. And so once those cells are constructed again, they can go back to filling them unless they turn 18 days old.

Now, from the 18th to the 21st day, what are they doing? They're pulling guard duty. But here again, I question it. Okay, if we have a thousand new bees, that's conservative this time of year. It's closer to probably 15 or 1,600 new bees every day. So we have all these bees moving down the line, right? They don't start dying until they start flying. So that's where you get the term dying, flying, flying, dying. They wear themselves out at the end of their long life. So from 18 to 21 days, they're supposed to be open for guard duty.

Now you can be called into action as a guard anytime your colony is threatened. So there are always guard bees on the landing board, just inside the entrance, making sure that anything coming into the hive belongs there, that it's a resident bee. You'll see them with their forelimbs up and their mandibles wide open, and they flick and twitch and look around any time a bee is coming in. And if they smell it, and that bee's okay, they don't touch them. But if they're suspicious, they grab it, and you'll see them shove their mouth into the mouth of the other bee. And what they're doing is smelling its, they're not smelling its breath. They are smelling. They are smelling.

to make sure that that has the queen medibular pheromone of the colony that they're living in. And if it doesn't, they shake them down. That's right. They check them out to make sure if they're free-loading, potential robbers, or if they're bringing a bunch of resources in. Pollin on the corbicula? Good to go. Full of nectar, welcome aboard. So they actually check them out, and that's called drift when that happens. A bee full of resources from one high flies out, gathers a new resources comes into a hive that's not theirs but carries all the stuff with them they get invited in now they're members of that colony because they brought stuff no freeloaders but if you come in with stuff you get in so guard duty now sometimes you'll see guards out there doing that but they'll also

line up with each other while their mandibles are open while their forelimbs are up they start fanning and so sometimes they'll turn around and face the hive entrance so their abdomens are phasing out away from the hive and they'll just start fanning so now they're pulling double duty not only are the guards when they need to be guards, but they're also the fanning force. Now that becomes more viable when we start thinking about the numbers. Because when we think about how many bees is it take to ventilate this hive, bring fresh air in, move sail air out, remove the humid air, replace with low humidity air, which is really hard today because remember we're in the 90s

for relative humidity. It's very difficult for them to do. So now I can get it. Hundreds, if not, maybe, thousands. over a thousand bees passively ventilating in the hive and sometimes actively ventilating the hive so they pick it up or they back off depending on how much air movement is necessary and guess what they do they get aligned with each other so when moist air is coming through that needs to be moved along and out of the hive they move into the path of that so when they detect that there's more humidity

over here or more air movement is over here necessary they move over and start a line with that they draft off of each other and move that air right out meanwhile in other locations of the hive air is being brought in it's pretty interesting stuff so they pull guard duty and ventilation duty it's interchangeable but it's very rare if you see all these bees acting like guards that means the colony is threatened it's not the normal behavior what would cause them to go into action like that and maybe activate 100% of the guard taking them away from their ventilation duties and putting them on deck to defend the colony how about a skunk in the middle of the night because somebody did not put their beehive up high

enough to protect them from skunk raids see what happens and then when they go out there those guards go outside they're munched it's not a good scene now we go from day 22 to the end of their life so what are they going to do the rest of the time they're going to go for nectar colony needs that they're going to go for pollen sometimes it's is nectar and pollen at the same time, same flight, same source, which is really good. If you find a pollen source that is also a nectar source that's really good for the colony, that's a one-stop shop that's fantastic. And they also go for water.

And those that go for water don't go for other things. They only go for water. And that's any bee that's over 22 days old could be a water bee. And they may not come back and do another job. They may only be a water bee. They don't have to be. that's just the way it seems to work out. So water and propolis is another one depending on the time of year and the state of repair of the hive. If they have things that need to be patched in that hive,

little cracks and crevices, there is a demand now for resins from plants. And when they get those resins from the plants, they bring them in and they tuck point everything. Tuck point is probably not the word. I know that's a masonry word. They're filling cracks and crevices. And also it's medicinal. So they're actually sanitizing the hive with materials they're finding. outside. So propolis is another one. What other job do they have that you won't often see mentioned? Well, the foragers guess what else they are and what they're going to be next month? They're going to be thieves. So these foragers are going to go out there and if you've got a big colony with a lot of foragers in it, because look at the span. From 22 days to the end of their life, we know that

these bees at this time of year average six weeks of life. So now we have this big surplus. force hanging out doing nothing and some bee comes back and lets them know that it's found a source of finished food what is that honey where is it in a hive that has very low defenses let's go get them so then they send out 20 or 30 bees and there's two or 300 and then before you know they've deployed a thousand foragers to raid that hive and this is the funny part too i don't mean it's funny strange not making fun of them but sometimes the hives the colonies that are doing the robbing end up getting robbed because they have so much activity there's so much honey there's so much open honey being brought in the scent is heavy on the air and other bees pick up on that they see all the activity at the hive

and they go in and then they get their friends and now they're raiding the hive that was the raider sorry to be so graphic now then so there are other do you. duties because there's other kinds of workers. We know about the drones, the end of the year, they're going to be starved, tossed out, the females don't care, don't want them, don't need them. But they make a new kind of bee. Okay. So you're going to hear a couple of terms. These fat-bodied winter bees, I hope you've heard about that before. They're also called diutinous bees. If you want to be nerdy about it, diutinous bees. So what that is, these are bees. These are bees. that actually don't go out and forage and do this work. They're being made at the end of the year,

which is why it's so important for you to get your colonies under control to maximize their health and well-being and make sure that at the time when they start to produce these bees at the end of the year, that they are at maximum health and their nutrition and everything else is just peaked out because these worker bees are going to stay inside the hive and they're going to take care of your colony through winter. They can live six months, which is very different from six weeks. And here's the thing. What's their job? They're not going to fly. They're not going to forage. The only flying they're going to do, if any, is during the wintertime. When you get one of those warm days, you know, when the temperatures soar above, you know,

31 degrees, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's sunny outside, they fly out to do a cleansing flight. Remember, we talked before about all the solid materials that are in their gut, and they need to get rid of it and they don't want to dispense that stuff inside the hive. What do they do? They fly out, and now they're disoriented. Not only is it cold, this is something I want you to notice because I have spent more than probably the amount of time I should have watching bees flying out in winter and looking at their behavior. And a video, and of course share it with you because I want you to see what I see and know what I know, that kind of thing. So let's say it's a fat-bodied winter be incredibly valuable. We need her a bag. But she flies out and what does she see now? There's this white stuff which makes it difficult.

for them to determine up and down. They have a dorsal response, so that's their back, dorsal response to this white, which seems like that should be up. So you'll see them right onto the snow upside down and start spinning donuts on their back. And it looks like someone even said, wow, I never knew they clean themselves like that. They're not cleaning themselves. They're just oriented because it's white. they don't understand.

And so they invert right on to it until they get their bearings and flip back over. And if they haven't cooled off too much, hopefully it's a nice sunny day. If they haven't cooled off too much, then they'll be able to make it back to the hive they left. Sometimes it's a one-way trip because remember, also, some bees are at the end of their life.

But what happens is by the time you're getting into the month of November, so by the time you're into November, you have a pretty stable population of bees because the bulk of the bees inside that hive at that point, November, December, January, February, March, those are going to be these diutinous bees, these long-lived, fat-bodied bees that their job is to continue that colony and make sure they always have some brood present. Now when spring comes around and we get, and it really hasn't turned into full spring, but there are some resources to.

discovered outside, these are the bees that also at the end of their life start to do these emergency foraging runs to bring in early sources of pollen and stuff that we see on these weird warm days in spring. So these are different jobs. These bees maintain the brood. These are like super nurses. They can provide a bunch of other tasks too at the end of their life. But for the most part, they're not supposed to be out flying and doing the menial tasks because they are responsible for the core survival of that colony of bees keeping brood fed and cared for so those are the jobs so that was my answer for la s d hm k 26 and they hope you enjoyed that too there are lots of jobs inside hives that are not documented in the list in the statement of work let's move on to the

next one this is from wood cokla w o d c o c kla and so it says here assuming that the bees know when it's time to cap the honey's cell that means they know it is at its perfect moisture content question mark therefore if we process the honey from decapping to bottle within two hours why are we then worried about the the moisture contact regards Brian. So this is from Brian. Now this comes up and I'm going to talk about this next week. We have a gathering and I get to talk to beekeepers. It's one of my favorite things to do like I'm doing right now, sharing with you, stuff like this. So when people are harvesting honey, that's why this is a really timely comment. Oftentimes we'll say, in fact, some people harvest honey that isn't even capped. It isn't capped. It doesn't cap. It

go straight into a dryer system. They don't even wait for it because they're taking advantage of a good weather day and it seems right to them. They're going to get the moisture out of it anyway. So it's considered unfinished honey. So we think that the peas, well, they know what's up. Bees do things on their own. They wouldn't mess up their own honey. So they're drying it down through fanning. But sometimes circumstances are not good and there are variables that cause the honey to be too wet and they cap it anyway. It's true. So just for example, normally when you uncap honey, you do a refractometer is what it's called when you look at the honey and it tells you the percentage of the water in the honey it'll say roughly 18.6 percent that's what most beekeepers

find when they uncapped the honey and still do the testing and now if you've done this for a long time there are a lot of kind of old-school tests where people will let the honey run down the blade of a knife and if it drips off before it gets to the end of the knife blade to drip off if it drips midway it's too wet. So that's an old school test. I can't say that that's great. I probably should run through some of these to see what's good or not. But that was one test.

The other thing is some people feel like, you know, if they can just, if they shake it and nothing comes out, then it's viscous enough that it's staying in the cells. And therefore it's good enough. So I can't vouch for that. I'm just saying this is what some people demonstrate and do. often when the frame that you pull up is 70% capped and the rest of it still has glistening uncapped surfaces of honey in there that you could say that's pretty good

in fact by the time you uncap it and put it in the extractor whatever your process is by the time you mix it up in there if it's a little wet around the edges it's going to all even out because honey is hygroscopic it's going to just balance out the moisture content throughout the honey and then you'll be good to go. But I should caution you that there are times when the bees, particularly with what's coming up for us here. So here in the northeastern part of the United States, starting, so we're almost halfway through, we're going to, so by the last week of August, first week of September, we face a massive nectar flow, assuming that we don't have bad weather at the same time. So let's say everything goes great. Cool nights, warm days, high sucrose

concentration, asters start to bloom, Golden Rod is still out there finishing up. We have Maximilions, all kinds of other stuff out there too. But this results in air you can almost wear. You smell the honey on the air. It is incredible. Okay. Well, they are maximizing productivity inside the hides. And sometimes what happens under circumstances like that. The bees don't finish drying down the honey and they start capping early. I don't know why they do it. High production, they get in hurry, they're wrapping up a job before it's ready. I don't know what happens, but they end up capping it and sometimes when you look at the honey, even when it's half-capped or something, you'll see little bubbles in it or you see little foamy bits. When you start to see that, that's a high-risk situation because high-humidity environments make it difficult

for your bees to dry down their honey. So they're just doing it with fanning alone. But they'll end up sometimes capping that. And if you smell a sour smell in the hive, it smells like fermentation, it is fermenting. So the problem is it's not a reversible process once that starts. And this is also why sometimes the bees accelerate

their capping to protect their honey. And I wish they would just consume it and get rid of it. But I don't know if you end up with drunken bees. I don't know what's going on. But they can actually have too high a moisture content, and we don't want our honey to start fermentation at all. So if you've got honey that's over 20% water,

the risk of fermentation is incredibly high. The other thing is we have sugar concentrated in there. We have all the stuff. It's prime for fermentation if there's enough water to make it happen. That's why some of the foam that you see on the surface is hydrogen peroxide. The bees are actually trying to protect themselves. So they're trying to protect their food resource. Obviously, if they weren't any good at this,

they probably wouldn't last very long. But when you are collecting it all and putting this all together in your plastic buckets, your extractors, whatever you're using, every beekeeper should have a refractometer. And what we do here is, I have the manual refractometers. We have a club gathering. We have a beekeeper breakfast, and I always bring the MISCO, which is what we use to calibrate the standards that we have everyone else do their standard analog refractometers. And those things are digitized, and so the MISCO ones are digitized.

They're calibrated. They're verified. And those are what inspectors use. Food inspectors, state inspectors use this certified calibrated refractometers. And then you can get that. So if your club bought one of those, everybody else could get together. You could pick a standard honey jar. You could establish that room temperature that everybody else is in, exactly what that percentage is of water, of that honey. And then you have everyone else take their refractometers, and then they put that same honey under the same environment onto their refractometers, and then they calibrate them. There's a little calibration screw right on top of the refractometer,

and you adjust it until it's exactly there. You cover the entire refractometer window. If you don't cover the entire refractometer window, the line that shows a transition that shows exactly where your moisture content is will be hazy. If you want a nice, sharp, crisp line, you have to cover the entire window. So then you can have this calibration party,

and now everybody knows. So for me personally, I don't. If I've got honey that's above 18%, it goes into the dryer. A dryer can be a draped space. For me, it's a Vivo Sun grow tent, which is, I'm looking at it right now in this room. We zip it shut. It has fans all over it in there. There's a heater that's on an oscillator in there, and there's also a dehumidifier, just like you would put in your basement, sitting in there. The dehumidifier, I just put it in always on. So when we turn that on, it drops to about 30% relative humidity inside that space with air blowing in every direction, and it keeps it all closed up. And then we can shed more than a percentage point of moisture every 12 to 24 hours.

So I don't want to leave it there and forget about it because it also goes down to you don't want honey that's too dry also. happy medium anything under 18% is good to go 17% is more common and my wife has me right on the top of every jar with a sticky exactly what the moisture content is of every single jar of honey so uh but the thing is too for example and i just want to talk about this because some people new beekeepers in particular often because i did this myself i thought man if they need 60 pounds of honey to get through winter i'm going to leave them 80 pounds of honey i'm going to leave two deep boxes full of honey and create a super colony they're going to do fantastic that backfires here's why if we put too much honey on the hive we leave too much honey on the hive and the cluster of the bees does not occupy enough space to maintain it they're still over their brood when the cold weather gets here and they migrate slowly with their brood as they move up through the hive if it's a horizontal hive they're gradually laterally moving this happens more i'll say

this for sure with horizontal hives than it does with vertical hives if i left a whole bunch of frames way down i need about seven frames of capped honey for a horizontal hive to get the beast this is past the brood cluster when we hit cold weather i need about seven frames to get them through winter with surplus so then if we go beyond that let's say i decided you i'm just going to superchart I'm going to leave a whole bunch of honey on there. Beyond that, you know what happens? That area becomes just as cold as the outside. Same thing with your oversized boxes. If you have too many boxes, your clusters way down here and you've got you know boxes above it and the very top box is just as cold eventually as the outside.

Here's the problem with that too. When it's way oversized for the number of bees inside the hive, the warm air, the passive warm air that goes above them, should hit insulation and provide a warmer surface that prevents the dew point from happening. The dew point is when the moist air cools enough to condensate and provide moisture inside your hive. We actually want that. We just don't want it above our bees. Now, if your hive has so much space above it and you've got this, you've heard of the term heat sink. Well, it's also a cold sink. In other words, when it gets really cold at night, that honey that's way up away from your bees

gets really cold almost if not at the outside temperatures and then what happens when the next day comes the sun hits the hive your bees cluster loosens maybe a little bit all this humidity and stuff is coming off the cluster of the bees and it goes above them and condensates now where not just on the inner cover on the honey that you have that the bees are not parked over and that their passive heat is not keeping up above the dew point that means we now have condensation on top of the honey which means and a lot of

people think that because it has wax caps on it that moisture will not migrate through those white cappings into the honey increasing the moisture content of your honey and potentially ruining it so you left it in there you put too much of it in there and you have what happens to me when you open it up in spring after the colony died So they then when you have all these frames of capped honey up at the top, they also have something on them which refer to as the bloom. It looks like oxidation on the surface of the bees wax. And so if you hit that with a heat dryer, a hair dryer, something like that, you'll see it go away right off. So what that is too is that stuff that your bees weren't walking on and working and taking care of.

They weren't policing that entire space in the colder months, which is no great surprise. This is why, and I'm telling you ahead of time, so you won't make the mistake, when the time comes and temperatures drop, that you provide too much of a resource inside the hive for the bees. And some people will say, and they should, because I like people to question absolutely everything they're told to do. So some people will say, well, then what do they do on their own? Well, I can tell you, on their own, I've never seen a cavity that size. On their own, I've never seen something the size of a 10-frame length of box going four boxes high for a feral colony of bees inside a tree. So their spaces historically outside are much smaller, much higher insulation value, and much lower demand on resources going through winter.

So these conditions only exist in the hives that we are providing for. them. I lost my observation hive bees every single winter until I went with triples instead of doubles, added more mass, and super insulated the outside of that hive after providing them with the correctly sized space. When you're dealing with an observation hive, we can't expand and contract it. All we can do is insulate the wazoo out at the outside of it and hope for the best. With our beehives, if it's a horizontal hive, vertical length troth, whatever it is, size it for winter. We size it for the colony going into winter. Remember what we talked about, the lifespan of these bees. So you'll see a big drop-off in your bee population going to the end of the

year. And so you're not going to get an increase. So you can size it for the cluster that you have in October and then you don't have to worry about them expanding and using up all that space. While you're in winter, it's only going to get smaller. And that cluster is going to move slowly over the resources that they're left. So leaving too much can cause condensation and ruin the honey that you have. That's why sometimes in spring people open oversized colonies see that the bees, you know, the hive itself, when I say oversized, not the number of bees. And then they see that some of that honey, they're not touching it and it smells off. And you have to remove it. So you could put that out at a robbing station or something. I don't even know what it's good for. Cooking. I don't know what it's good

for but your bees will be leaving it alone too they don't even want to deal with it once it's ruined once the moisture's too high the good news too though is i don't want to be flim flamming all over the place but if it's also really cold the colder it is the less activity there is so it does slow that process but moisture can build up in honey that's already existing and capped that's all i'm saying Heather honey is notorious for higher moisture even when it's capped. So if your bees are gathering from Heather, that is a big deal. So get a refractometer. Always check it.

In fact, it doesn't hurt to uncap a couple of those cells. Use a pipette, draw the honey out of it, and put that right on your refractometer. You can do that right in the field before you do anything. But I suspect most of you are going to. going to pull a whole bunch of honey supers you're going to unkept them all you're going to have a big honey extraction party for the first time ever in your kitchen and everything you touch is going to be sticky and you're going to hear everybody walking across the floor making that sticky foot sound and honey is going to be on everything and everybody and you're going to put it all in one big

extractor that the kids are going to practice hand cranking which we did for years and you're going to put it all together so then when you've got six or seven gallons of honey and you test it for moisture, now you're dealing with all of it. So the other thing I want to tell you is as backyard beekeepers, when you get your honey, when you extract it, bottle it right away. It is much easier to deal with individual quarts and pints and so on than it is to deal with full buckets. If you've got the bucket and it's, you know, 19% moisture,

and you haven't taken it out of the bucket yet you can put that whole bucket in there but when i have it in the jars more surface area all the jars are open in the dehumidifier room with the fans blowing on it and no dust particles or anything get on there because it is a closed system that's why i like the vivo sun grow tent it's never been used for a grow tent it's only used for honey dry and also we use it for warming honey so you can put honey super's in there air, two or three of them. This is not industrial. So you'd have two or three medium 10 frame supers in there with air passing through them. So it's dehumidifying while it's being raised to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which means that it's very easy for us to uncap and extract. So that's the

other thing that you could use a tent like that for. It's super helpful. All right. So the next one, and this ties in. This comes from ACE-E-S-H-H-R-9-4-9. 99 YouTube channel names. This is about the long nangsroth hive that I have. And if you're interested in long lengths, I'll just throw this out there. You can go to my website, which is the way to be.org, and click on the page marked plans and prints. These are 100% free to you. You can download the PDFs, you can look at them, and use it as you can build as is. That whole page shows you what so many people have done when they got the prints, the construction they did, and what their

hives look like how they've placed them how much they love them and all those stuff 100% free get some great ideas and this is the hive that we're talking about in this question so wondering if the top could benefit from styrofoam for cold weather so the top does have styrofoam in it and the way we build these long langstroth hives is they're super heavy they're built stout they're built strong you don't have to move them anywhere um that's why this is the beauty of having a big hive that's going to sit in one spot and never go anywhere and is at the perfect height you talk about how to skunk height this thing when you open it up the frames are at kitchen counter height so imagine walking up to your kitchen counter and instead of of course whatever you have in your kitchen counter

you've got all the frames of your beehive so you can start at the farthest end for the the entrance it only has a single entrance at one end the entrance faces south and is in the southeast corner of the long langstroth hive and then what you do is we start at the far end because we're going to be taking honey from that hive at the end of next week we're going to start at the back we're going to work our way down until we start hitting full capped frames of honey and then we're going to access how many of those are now we don't even have to touch the brood all we're doing is backdooring this hive we're pulling that honey out and we're going to get the bees off of it and then we're going to take those away and we're going to leave them a minimum of seven capped frames of honey the other

thing is I bring with me because we've been doing this for a while we have frames with comb that's already drawn ready to go so when I pull those frames out that have capped honey on them I'm putting frames in they're already drawn ready for the bees go right back to work because at this time when we get to years past, we have pulled honey out that's been capped, only to find 11 days later it's refilled and recapped because they're in max production. They need room to put all the nectar. And by the way, when they're bringing that nectar in and the moisture content is still high, it occupies twice the real estate. So in other words, six frames of honey, uncapped, could actually be condensed

without this. People think they consumed at all. But they're really just dry. it out. So it could be condensed to just three frames of capped honey when it's finished. That is the same stuff that was there when it is spread over six frames. So we need to provide them with more space than they're going to need this time of year for their uncapped resources until they consolidate that. And the bees that are storekeeper bees are the ones moving that stuff around all the time to condense it and make room for the next batch that's coming in for the field during the day. Really interesting stuff. Yes, it benefits from insulation.

So we put rigid foam board insulation. One of the things that really vastly improved the horizontal hive is that we just took double bubble and I kind of made a quilt out of it. And I lay that over the backs of all the coverboards. So inside this hive, there are the Langstroth deep frames. That's throughout the length of it. There's a 3 eighths of an inch air gap because that's B space. There's a four inch wide cover board.

on top of that that's made out of oak it can be mad out of any wood that you like and have handy and then so above that because they propolized that so a seal the air is not flowing but it's only you know a piece of oak wood so by adding the double bubble on top of that each layer of double bubble that we put seals it off and that air cavity becomes exponentially higher in our value so when i also put double bubble around all the seams of this long Langsroth hive and closed it up we created a gasket out of the insulation also so there's no air movement through there that doesn't need to be any air movement through it at all the only source of air intake and exhaust on that hive is the

entrance so yeah it could benefit from that and we've done it so this was in that was probably one of the first videos showing how that long Langsroth hive works and since then we've got them really going and someone asked about cladding using wood on the outside and polystyrene on the inside or some other insulation when you're building your hive to sandwich that and I can tell you that that kind of an insulated hive already exists who do you think I'm going to name beersville bees B-E-E-A-R-S-V-I-L-E-B's dot com so Beersville Bs they do terrific work mentoring people and beekeeping they give away hive equipment and stuff to help people out with their starting and beekeeping and they're the ones that are

making a really premium Langstroth, Long Langstroth hive that is insulated between wood and it's like cabinet grade work. It's really fantastic. So if you're building your own, you can follow my prints. If you're having somebody else build one for you and you want to pay for shipping and things like that, they're kind of at the top of my chart for a hive company to go for this building the Long Langstroth. Long Langstroth is cost prohibitive. Here's why. Just imagine shipping it. It's a big thing.

So if you knew, if you're in Ohio or somewhere where you might run into them, West Virginia, Virginia, they seem to be at a lot of conferences I go to, you can pick one up there, save yourself all the shipping, but it is a full-size Langstroth insulated hive. Other than that, you build your own, and it's a two-man carry. you're going to take that out there and set up but once it's set up goes through the biggest storms you don't have to worry about bears anymore i only worry about bears with my vertical langstroth hives i don't care about the horizontal hives they're all bolted down and a bear's not going to tear them apart layens langstroth top bar top bar is probably the most at risk because the bear could get in there and just rake up the top bars because they're not completely enclosed but so far they have not touched those hives but uh impervious to the

the winter storms and weather conditions that we have here. They're all well off the ground. If I were in an area where you might get a foot of flooding or something through there, that's the kind of hive. You have a support system, keeping it well off the ground. And then you don't worry about your hives ending up underwater with the only entrance. You know, if your hives are sitting on the ground and you have an area, you get four inches of water that washed through an area. It has washed out your entire bottom of your hive. Your bottom board is closed up. So those are other reasons for LLL's. elevating whatever kind of hive you have.

So anyway, I talked too long on that. All right, so this is in the fluff section. So I'm just sharing with you stuff I care about that I'm working on right now. I have fields of milkweed. Well, fields. We have a lot of milkweed out here. So I have milkweed on my own property that I let it just propagate year after year after year.

When you consider that I've allowed milkweed to have its way for more than 20 years. it is really not spread that much and one thing I've been trying to grow every year is swamp milkweed I want more swamp milkweed the story about swamp milkweed gets better and better better than what we call common milkweed they're distinctively different so anyway it'll handle wet areas and I've got some wetlands on my property so I've got my whole eastern end is down all the time and so the fringe areas of that I want to grow swamp milkweed this year I got one to grow so one out of all the thousands of plants that I plant that grow I have one swamp milkweed that made it and it's got pods on it so I'm going to harvest my own pods and

stuff so I thought I would just share with you what I'm going to do if you wait too long for your milkweed seed pods to pop open because we see it they have this little split that goes down the pod and then they start to dry out and then when the split opens up because i was concerned those little gold finches they're taking everything there's little gangs of gold finches all over the place making their little tweets and stuff and they are stealing seeds good news they're not stealing the milkweed seeds they don't worry about that so what's going to take my milkweed seeds the wind is going to take it so i just want to share with you if you're trying to get if you found milkweed plants like the one I found this year of all my milkweed plants you can put rubber

bands around the pods so they don't just pop open and release your seeds to the wild on a day that you just happen to not be there so I'm going to collect my own and I'm going to plant them myself next year I'm going to try to keep them going but I also because they have a root system of course that you can propagate from it would be my luck that I try to propagate from the roots and I cut sections out and just kill everything. So I'm going to be trying to start it next year with new milkweed pods. Milkweeds don't eat them. Molden moisture can mess them up.

So if we leave them out there too long, we get a whole series of rain and stuff, then you'll have bad stuff. So birds don't eat them, do they spoil. Dry seeds and intact pods remain viable for a long time. They only rod have exposed to persistent dampness after the pod cracks open. And the other thing was I always put them in paper bags.

And now I'm told by people who know stuff, the botanists, people that are deep in the science, that plastic bags are a bad idea that I should put it in these plastic sealed cases. I just have a desiccant pack in each case. That makes sense. So that's what I'm going to do. And so the perfect moment,

anyway, we'll check for the seam. I'll put the rubber band. on them and I'm going to collect those paws if you have magic if you know some very special way to make sure that swamp milkweed seeds will grow let me know send me a link I've seen all the I watch all the YouTube's I go to YouTube for everything and I just want to know so this is interesting now during the live feed Timothy was on the chat there so that's last Friday and as if I had heard about, are you ready for this, spider venom being used in the fight against

Varroa destructor mites? And I thought, what are you even talking about spider venom for vera destructor mites? How would you even do that? And so let's say that worked. Let's say spider venom was a thing and that somehow somebody had the idea, this is where academics get weird. It's like who sits down at a meeting and goes, hey, I'll bet if we put, you know what, spiders? Spiders eat bugs. Bugs don't like the venom from the spiders. The venom from the spiders kills the bugs so the spider can ingest the bug, you know, because they dissolve it externally and suck it out like a straw.

We could use that on Varro Destructor mites. Now that's an oversimplification. But you know what? It's actually true. And where else? Where do all the poisonous things in the world hang out? What part of the world has more poisonous snakes than non-poisonous snakes? How about Australia? So of course, Australia is doing this.

They're the ones dealing with the Verotistructer mites now. And they're not playing games. So then I thought, well, let's say it did work. Let's say that Verotistructer mites somehow, if we had a delivery system, would respond and die from spider venom, funnel web spiders. things like that let's say that worked how many funnel web spiders would you have to get in order for that to be viable to work but no now we throw in the scientists the biochemists all the geniuses and what they do is they break down the properties of the venom's that they're using and they replicate the venom oh now it makes sense it's scalable so that man i wish i could

talk to somebody that was involved in this. So I just took a long shot. I just reached out to the people that were doing the research and I found the top professor that's involved in it that's running it. And I said, my name's Fred. I live in a town population 400 people. I keep honeybees. Would you talk to me about your research and so that we could do a podcast about it and share about it? And share about how spider venom is going to be used in this new innovative way that's going to kill the road destructor mite without mercy would you do that got an email back i'm in i'm going to talk about it this interview is going to be shared next week so if you're not a subscriber already you're going to want to subscribe if you want to hear about how venom's going to be used to put the smack down

on a bunch of road destructor mites because it's very promising i looked into it So they have, you know, I don't want to talk about peptides and all this stuff. I mean, I understand it. I'm concerned that you might not understand. I don't understand it. So anyway, we're not going to talk about it that way. We're going to talk about the cool stuff. I'm going to get into how this professor grew up.

Why is he messing with spiders? And I find out he was in snakes and venomous snakes and things like that. And it's not like my nickname was snakes. when I was little because I was into snakes all the time. This is going to be cool. It's going to be great interview. I don't want to waste your time musing about what's going to be, but you're going to want to hear the interview because it's going to be interesting. And aside from wrangling spiders and all kinds of weird stuff, we're going to talk about how it potentially could be one of the very significant tools in the tool box

for accelerating the demise of the Varro Destructor mite in Australia. And if it were there who knows what else is going to happen so i want to thank you for listening to me and i want to thank you for being here and for caring about honeybees and for sending me your questions so once again if you have a question for me go to the way to be dot or click on the page marked comment or contact fill out the form send it to me we'll see what happens next friday so if you have a fantastic weekend you and your honeybees i'm frederick done and this has been the way to be Thank you.