The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A #370 with Frederick Dunn September 4th

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/uihn0o8zHFM

So hello and welcome. Today's Friday, September the 4th of 2026. This is backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 370. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here. If you want to know we're going to talk about, please look down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order with timestamps. And then that way you won't be wasting your time. You can go directly to exactly what you might be interested in. And we've had rough weather around here. I don't know what's going on where you are, but here in the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. They say it's not a tornado. However, a lot of people are without power. How many?

Thousands of people where I live are without power. I'm one of the lucky ones because I'm right here talking with you with my electricity running. I have backup batteries and things like that. But huge trees went down. It feels personal. When you see a tree that's centuries old, huge, huge, old trees down, when they're laying across roads and stuff like that, that's part of the problem.

That's what's going on. And so what's going on outside right now, though, it looks like it could rain. It might rain. It's going to rain for sure. As soon as I'm done here and I want to get out and work with my honeybees, it's 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 21 Celsius, by the way. And here's what your bees don't like. This is why they're working so hard.

am it's 98% relative humidity so the hives are wearing their bees what do we call that bee bearding so the bees are all over the outside of the hives and it's very difficult for them to dry down their nectar right now to finish the honey that they've started and so the bees are all over i don't know what to tell you how windy is it you might be wondering how about 1.1 miles per hour as in no wind 1.7 kilometers per hour for those that want to know and i'll always I also bet that you're wondering what kind of nectar resources are they getting. Where's the pollen coming from? Goldenrod is it.

Look at the opening sequence. It's golden rod, golden rod with golden rod on top. That's what your honeybees are forging for. Now I'd be interested in knowing what your bees are foraging on. And we were looking at the lower valley areas for here. What's a lower valley? But there's a river bed nearby and there's hundreds of acres of golden rod joey weed iron weed what else is out there asters are starting that makes your honey taste really

strong and smell special so and at night or go buy your beehives right now if you're in the northeast let me know how the air smells the honey is so strong in the air so heavy in the air and the bees are just fanning as hard as they can but because of that high humidity level 98 percent it's a huge challenge for them to dry out honey right now so and i'll be taken honey if i get out there ahead of the rain as soon as i'm done talking with you so i'm appreciative that you are here now if you want to submit a topic of your own for future consideration please go to my website which is the way to be dot org click on the page marked contact fill out the form and there you go we might be talking about something that's interesting to you uh if you also have a question you're watching this later and you

You want to talk to somebody, show a picture. You want to upload a video. I get frequent YouTube questions about, how can I show a photo or a video and ask a question about something? Well, you go to the fellowship. The Facebook Fellowship, which is called the Way to Be fellowship. You can just Google it and you'll find it. If you're not into Facebook, I don't have any alternatives other than just coming right here. And making a comment underneath one of my videos, I respond to every single comment.

It's hard work. It takes a lot of time. So right now you might be wondering too, what's the swarm risk today? The first week of September. Well, very high. Every time you go out there, it just sounds like there's a swarm somewhere. My grandson was here looking to collect another swarm. And if you don't know what I'm talking about,

he was working on his own swarm early this week, and we made a video about it and posted it. Where? Right here on my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn. So if you go there, you're going to see my 10-year-old grandson trying to wrangle a swarm all by himself. Well, he wants to improve. The largest room in the world is the room for improvement. And so he was back yesterday. He was all suited up, ready to go, but I was rendering beeswax

because I had foundation to coat. I had frames to put a coating of beeswax on. And I couldn't go out and work in the B yard with him. So he's walking around with all his gear. So I suited him up. Well, you know, let him suit himself up. Gave him a bunch of equipment and said, go out and collect us warm on your own. See what happens.

Came back in, empty-handed. But there are swarms. The swarms hanging in the trees right now, out of reach. And you're probably sitting there thinking, you could use those bees. Why don't I just go out there and get them? Well, because I don't know if you understand the situation here. I had, I began the year with around 40 colonies of bees, 43. And, you know, my target's 10, beehives. And I think I say that too much.

And we now have 55 going on 57. and the reason I say going on 57 is because I took a big nucleus box. It was made by horizontal bees.com, which has closed their website down. But that's Ricky Rourke and Ruth Rourke who painted on the sides of those. And I just decided to ditch effort. Put them outside, put frames in them, some drawn comb. And I just put them on a high stand, found a place to put them. We hear this huge swarm in the air.

This sounds synthetic, sounds made up. Because my wife was standing there. I was so glad that she was a witness to it because didn't they move right in? Now there's two of them and they're pretty much identical. One is marked Team Frederick. The other is marked Team Annette. Which one did they go into? Team Frederick.

That's right, mine. And I even, I gave Annette the advantage. I aimed her entrance to the south, which is what bees prefer. And mine was facing north because I was trying to, you know, step down. a little and make sure that a net would win and they chose me the bees did huge swarm huge and I don't know yet because they haven't put together at this point my opening sequences but I might here's what I'll do at the very end of

the video I'll show the super slow-mo so we can celebrate every moment of the bees moving into my beehive at the end of today's video so after the credit stick around you're gonna see it it's gonna be fun and then we can all feel sad for in that because I win. All right. So what else is going on? That's pretty much it. Oh, I should probably name some of the things. I already did. What's growing on in your neck of the woods? What's growing on? What are your bees after? What do you like about it? And here's the other thing. Some people don't like Astors and Goldenrod? Who are these people? They think it smells bad, taste bad, don't like it, leave it on the bees. People are highly opinionated about late season

or flows and what they're going to taste like when the bees finish making honey with it. I like it. I like it a lot. Some people claim that it sets or crystallizes too quick. Well, it can crystallize fast. But I don't know where they're getting. And remember this year I planted thousands of buckwheat plants. And strangely enough, our honey tastes like buckwheat.

And it's really dark. So that's interesting. We're going to jump right in with the very first question here, which comes from Hunting Lady. And it says, I did try to buy Bettercombe last month and was hoping they were simply out of stock. Now I'm going to need another box of two pound fondant and I'm not seeing it that anywhere. Just singles sold separately or the five pound blocks it says. Okay, so there's a couple of things going on here.

First of all, I have another question also today about Bettercombe from BetterVee because that was just a surprise. last week when somebody made that comment and they stopped making it better comb. So, and I know I mentioned it before, but I mentioned it again because people are writing about it and it clearly was important to a lot of people, including myself, late season swarms. What about a package of bees? Nobody's going to start, well, not nobody. Some people clearly start bees at the end of the year because it just can't wait. When you're talking to brand new beekeepers, and it's the end of the year, the beekeeping year, should you tell them to go ahead, and buy queen buy a package buy a nucleus hive you get started with bees right now or should they put it off

set things up get their hive stands put in the right place and then wait until spring to get their bees what do you think they should do well some people just don't want to wait so if you bought a package of bees right now for example what are the odds they could draw out the comb on the foundation that you have because a package comes with just a package of bees and the queen that's inside and she's got to her little queen cage and you're going to put them in hopefully a small hive nucleus or maybe an eight frame single deep something like that you put them in there what's the first thing they have to do they have to draw out all the comb if you're a brand new beekeeper you don't have any foundation and this is one of the areas in the time of year when better comb used to help out a lot so here's a

deep they also sold mediums now i'm going to talk about this more but i just wanted to say I'm not happy that they stopped providing this because as was in the video and I hope you watch it where my grandson tried to hive his own swarm. I did use better comb in that hive. I had to put together a brand new hive because I'm out. I'm full. 55 colonies of bees right now. That's too many bees. It could feel like work if you don't watch out. So I put better comb in that hive and within 24 hours they were bringing in pollen. They had a place. to put it and the queen has a place to lay her eggs right away no waiting now could a swarm of bees start building comb right away yes they can but you're good three or four days out before the queen

can start using them and before the bees start to invest resources into that where it was something like better comb they could just seal it all up connected to the edges of the wooden frame that they come in and go straight to work so anyway the other thing is i want to warn you because of last year this happened those of you who thought about emergency feeding for your bees at the end of the year ended up without the nutrition that they wanted and by that i mean uh hive life fonded so uh the other thing was there's liquids there's you know your quickest right now it's not too late so you can be feeding if you've got a colony that you're just hiving up because you just want to experiment late season swarm you want them to draw at home as much as you can and you can and you can you can you

you don't have any around because you're a new beekeeper you're going to feed light sugar syrup one to one one part sugar one part water mixed together and you're going to provide it to your bees so that they can continue to draw a comb even when it's doing what storming raining and the electricity goes out so i think it's really good if you can do that but when it comes to wintertime we transition away from liquid feed because your bees now can't leave the hive they can't eliminate so they don't want to be dealing with a whole bunch of excess moisture that they try to dry down or that they have to get rid of in a cleansing flight so bonnet packs are my number one choice historically i made a drop sugar in there i put rapid rounds with sugar in them we talk about this a lot because this can save

colony of bees it can also kick things off really well in the hive alive a fontnet you hear about it everywhere all the time from everyone it seems and when you go to any conference there's always someone selling it and they have these packets of fonded and when people listen to me sometimes they jump on their computer and they order something to help out their bees and then they find that it's out of stock where the order goes through and nothing ships for several weeks and if you're in a situation where you're trying to be prepared for your bees when the cold weather comes and you don't want them to eat those early winter resources you have to have it on hand so you should be ordering that now.

And they ordered a bunch of different sizes here. It says need another two pounds of fondant. Not seeing that anywhere. So they do. They have the 2.5 pound fondant packs. They started also with the nucleus hive sized packs, but you don't have to buy those. Here's what you should do.

Because this worked so well over the past couple of years. I just get the five pounders. If you can afford them, get them. Delivery people love 35 pound boxes that you carry it in opposite land. I hope you know that I'm making jokes often. So anyway, you take those fondant packs and you can cut them into quarters because once they're enclosed in your feeding dish or enclosure, whatever you have, APA-May has a really cool center feeder thing.

You can also take the fondant pack and just cut the little hole in it. we've been sharing about that and of course that sits right on top this is one of the cutters cuts the hole and you flip this over and push it inside keeps the pack from collapsing and the reason I do the five pounders is because I don't want to get out there in the third week of January when it's snowing and blowing just to see if the fondant pack is being consumed if I should put another one in there so the five pounders that can get through that all the way last winter so those are my go-toes now now you can use the two pound two and a half pound the smaller ones I don't know if they even have a one pound now or something like that but don't get those on

until the first couple of nights when it drops below freezing well you should order them now if you're going to get those so that when you do order they're in stock for some reason the market continues to grow and people get them so they are in stock actually because I checked them out and I sent a link already I responded to that comment And that's it. So this is the next one from Brian Beck, 32, that's a YouTube channel name. Says, do you know why better Combe has been discontinued? I'm just curious, I guess. You've spoken so highly of it, and now they're not making it anymore.

Very odd that they would discontinue a popular product. I thought that was odd too. I thought they were just out of stock. And there was one source for it that brought it to the United States because it is not made in the United States. And it's from a company called Hexa Cell. And I did a little deeper dive. What's up with Hexasel? if we can't get better comb from Better B, then are they just selling it somewhere else through another conduit? Is there another marketing location? No. When the U.S. market shut down, they shut down because we were it. We were kind of the big buyers there. So why has it been

discontinued? I would like to share about what was good about it. First of all, we used to tell people when you get hive equipment, frames, drawn comb, things like that. You have to be aware that there might be diseases there might be pathogens and pesticides built up in the comb and if you're starting with a brand new colony it would be great to start clean so in a perfect world we would be able to have our bees draw out their own comb and then we get really nice white new fresh looking comb and then we find out that it often had pesticides already in it because of the environment that they're in and kuma fos was at the top of the list just shows up so the other thing is we don't want foul brood coming we also don't want nosema and things like that when we share

frames with one another it's best to keep all your stuff in house now once you're established as a beekeeper and once you've had your hives and extracted some honey and uncapped and spun-out frames you've got comb so you have hopefully hive butler toots ready to go to store your spun-out comb so then you've got it cleaned up it's ready to go and then when you get a late season swarm something like that you're in a perfect situation you just pull your frames out that are uncapped and you put those right in and the beads go straight to word and it's been used before it smells good it's also very appealing to a swarm and you can use it as i demonstrated in my uh competition with my wife when i got that swarm to just self-hive it moved it on

its own and it was by the way not 12 feet in the air not out somewhere at the edge of the woods right on my apiary right on a hive stand between two other hives just moved in so but i had the drawn comb so they're going straight to work they're a low risk and i don't have any feed on them so i'm just going to do an assessment i'm going to look at them three weeks in from now and because max of millions are still going to bloom we have a lot of late season forage still yet to come on so they have time they can actually build things up so don't waste your resources unless you're at the bitter end kind of so to speed and so then they'll draw that out but if i didn't have that i would have put better comb in there it would have kicked things off too so and when you do that

it's clean it has no contaminants in it so what's the big difference what's the big gripe about it well can you imagine shipping fully drawn beeswax like beeswax like comb and it gets parked in a box in the sun somewhere in uPS or in a big hot truck So it would only be shipped at different times of the year when you could guarantee it wouldn't sit out in the heat. And because it could droop and sag and melt, it's just like beeswax. So imagine how new beeswax is. It's very delicate. It's malleable. It bends easy. A couple of other problems were sometimes if you bought it pre-installed on the wired frames and stuff,

it showed up and the bees wouldn't use it and then you find out it was installed upside down. Super frustrating. And this is all after the fact, so it doesn't help. You know, sit and talk about all the great things that it offered. And so I have a bunch of it. I found a box of it after I went around searching all over the place to find out exactly what I have. So I'm holding it in reserve now as my emergency resource

for that late season, perfect swarm that you know you just have to have. You just have to put them in the hive. You want to see what they're going to do in spring. You just feel it. You know it's going to be great. So, but the reason they went out is because, because it's not beeswax. So it was the other thing.

Pushback. If you're wanting just beeswax, only beeswax, nothing but beeswax, something that's been developed by biochemists and been developed in a lab that was approved by hexa-cell. Even, for example, because I look some stuff up, it says even recycled commercial wax foundation frequently contains lipophilic miticide residues such as fluvalinate and cocoanutate. Mephas, Betacombe provided virgin food-grade synthetic wax in an ISO-22,000 certified facility,

completely free of brood pathogens and agricultural chemicals. So you couldn't prove that it would harm the bees or harm you. In fact, it gave you a clean slate to start, but the very fundamental of the core of the argument was it's not bees wax made by bees. therefore it should not be in the beehive because there were concerns about it showing up in bees wax products. So I'd be interested in knowing how you feel about that. I know that it's kind of polarizing. People that are very holistic in beekeeping, I kind of bridge a bunch of different worlds

because sometimes I see where plastic works really good for this. Oh, beeswax is going to be great for that. And of course I was open to better comb because I like to check things out myself, test things myself. And so I even addressed claims that came out early as soon as it was being produced. Because I put it together with toothpicks and everything when it first came out. That didn't work. That was not the way to go.

And ultimately we had to put it on wired frames deep or medium. So I have that. I have that system too, which now is just going to, I'll just have to, I guess, store it. I don't know what. But it had the wires on it so you could hook up a 12-volt battery. like you would start your car with. And then that would generate heat through resistance for the wires. And then you would just press the comb into it.

And when you did it right, it was really nice. So people were installing it wrong. There were just a lot of things that weren't working out too well. And then it would show up of course damaged. And the interesting part is I got a piece that was broken in half because it wasn't instead of being too hot, it was so cold that, when it got knocked around in shipping there was a big breakthrough it and I should have

marked that on the back of the frame because when I put it into the hive the bees repaired that immediately and I could not tell where they fixed it couldn't tell what they did and so that was very interesting so now we're back to foundation foundationless beeswax foundation if you want to use that and like for the lay-in hives that's what we do and then we have heavy waxed acorn foundation top of my list premiere tight second also covered but those are only foundations you can't get the whole frame and so there are discussions too about what about the wooden frame compared to the plastic frames was there any difference at all well for one they never come apart number two there are more cells on these single plastic frames that are heavy waxed

than there are when you take foundation from acorn or premier and install them into a wooden frame because the wooden frame that top bar is thicker so you've lost rows of cells potentially and some people pull apart their wooden frames when they're trying to get their stuff out and it's propolized in heavily and i've never had a one-piece acorn frame come apart never i've had them from other companies come apart i stress test them let's see what they can take see what they can do. And who makes the most rugged frame for your hives ever made that I've come across so far? 21st B. That's it. Check them out too. Very heavy. So another thing I learned about the 21st B frames. If you're extracting honey from those, you want to balance them out if you've got a radial or a tangential

extractor because the weight of the frame itself is pretty high and therefore you want them opposite each other so it balances out. So that worked really well. We had a really good honey extraction process, and it's not over with, but the extractions that we've done so far have worked out really well. Electric extractor, definitely the way to go. So that's why they're not making it anymore. And this, it just can happen.

It shows the power that people have when they push against something and complain about it. They can impact those around them and then say that they just don't want it. So this all happened without me even knowing anything about it. Or I might have said, hey, get out there, buy some. Let's keep this going. Because for me, it's been very valuable through the years. Late season swarms, kicking things off fast. When you want to really outpace what the environment's about to do with your bees.

So the next question comes from Brian Bennett, 4374. That's the YouTube channel name. What do you think about swarms this late? I have a few hives that are very strong. I'm nervous about them. Requeating thoughts on that also strong highs. Okay, my answer is always the same in this case. Late season swarms, when's too late?

When is too late to keep a swarm? So remember, hive 44? Last year, was that last year? The year, that was last year. And people said it's doomed. It's not going to make it's too late. Why bother? Well, what do you have to lose?

If you've got the equipment, you've got the hive equipment. Do you want that stuff sitting inside your shed taking up all kinds of space, or do you want it out in your bee yard, potentially serving as a place to park a swarm if you come across one? And I had to cobble together a bunch of pieces last minute for that hive because all of my stuff is employed. It's all currently attached to being used by a colony in an active beehive. So pre-staging some of your gear I think is worthwhile.

this time of year and what would you in a perfect world what would you have to set out for a late season swarm nucleus hives and the reason we have those and why i like them five frame nucleus wooden hives by the way i like the wooden ones i would like to ooh this is an afterthought bug farmer those apex hives um i got some of those and i like those boxes really well i like a lot of hive configurations, hive boxes, things like that, but I also like to support small business. So I'm going to give a shout out right now to Apex Beehive equipment, bug farmer. He doesn't offer what I want. That's right. He's letting me down. So maybe in the same way that people influence things out of the bee industry, let's put pressure on somebody and influence

something that we all want. I know you want what I want to and you want it for me. I want a really well-made nucleus wooden hive box. I want a series of them. And by the way, the finishes that he puts on things, the joinery and everything else's top drawer, this is a small business. We can support the small business at the same time. Let's start griping about, hey, bug farmer,

what about some nice five-frame deep wooden nucleus hive boxes for us? With, I don't know, a medium feeder shim that could go on top so we could drop our fondant on that thing and then so we could put an insulated cover above that how about you make some of those with a really nice bottom board with a three-eighths inch high entrance so if you the listener could go to his website or to his youtube channel or whatever and just i mean don't let it come from me let it come from you you want it and then i'll be like oh it's cool that you're making those now i'll take a bunch of them and because he does wax dipping he does this really cool finish on it

and i'd like to see that we don't have enough nucleus hive options so also late in the year that's what i would do so swarm late in the year nucleus hives enough of that you want to be able to do because they're five frames each but sometimes let's look at some of these swarms they're too big they're not going to go into that so we need at least 10 frames so that's two levels and then you want extras just in case they all all of a sudden perform really well, and by the way, it can happen. You can have a swarm late in the year, and they can just go gangbusters. You can get perfect weather conditions. And that's kind of what we're looking at ahead, not rain-wise, because that's kind of messing with us, but we have the

temperatures necessary. If it were only 65 degrees out there, then they're going to burn energy that there is just kind of like burning your candle at both ends because they're going to burn a lot of energy to warm the area where they're working on the comb if they even do it and then they're going to consume a lot of carbohydrates to make the comb so they need honey to make beeswax so they have this rapid consumption while they're dividing their labors and some are out foraging bringing back carbohydrates from the nectar sources that they're finding and then it gets consumed rather than stored where if they had their comb and they had all the resources set up they would of course be able to store honey right away which you're going to need so but these nucleus hives when you set them up

you have an insurance policy because part of the question here from brian is what if they don't requeen and that's really shady this time of year because when they're requeening which is what they're doing when they swarm anyway the new queen in a perfect world is going to be mated and productive in less than two weeks. But now that would be the second week going into the third week of September. We run the risk in my neck of the woods of things getting too cold too fast. And when it's cold, they're not going to build comb. If they're not building comb, they don't have storage areas. And we don't have better comb anymore. So what are the options? Feed them heavily. Keep them going. And then let's say they failed to requeen. Now you've got your resource

nucleus hive. We go back to that. We get the queen. We pull individual frames out of there, whichever ones are the most developed, where they start putting stuff, the brood. We make that the center when you go back to that original hive because they've lost her queen. So you bring the brood that she's been producing while that she's been in absence. You bring them back and you put the fully brooded up frames dead center and then you build the resources around that. And now they're reinstated and you haven't lost a colony. So the key is this time. a year we want to figure out which colonies are in absolute on a failure path and we want to work those up and start combining colonies that are queen right things like that and i have another question

about that here too but uh when we worry about them requeenning on their own have that insurance policy the resource hives ready to go and that's going to work and don't forget put pressure on bug farmer let's do that let's make small business people work hard and then let's just throw money at them I think that's a good idea I think it's good next question comes from B Kathy it says that I missed the live if you see this when combining hives is it imperative to have the Queenwright hive on the bottom thank you no it's not however going in this time of year if you're going to combine hives in pile boxes on each other it just tends to normally be that the colony that

that's queen right is the one that you're going to be adding the non-queenright colony two so i prefer to have the queen right frames and the brood and everything else to be the bottom box and keep in mind too that my configurations are single entrance so that's going to be the bottom box that's where the brood is going to be and then so we put the other box on top of that that's not queen right uh then the orientation is good if we swap it the other way and let's say we take a queen right colony we put it on top of the queen less colony uh i kind of don't like to move them over there because they're better off where they are so let's bring those that are in decline and put them on top of the one that's settled and then hopefully the brood will continue down low and they'll

just fortify that when you bring that colony over now i'm going to say something terrible sometimes when you look at a colony and they're clearly uh on the downwards So when you look at the brood areas and you see a bunch of brood so you're like well they kind of look okay and then but you start noticing the brood that's opening up that's being uncaptor that is emerging and you see they all have big eyes even though they're small and you realize that what you've got is a laying worker colony and the only thing they're producing now are drones would you combine that colony with a cream right colony or would you just let them finish out their life

lives. So people say things like let them die, you know, don't invest. You're not just letting them, I want you to have a different way of thinking of that. You're not letting them die. You're letting them finish out their life. Now, what are the odds that these little drones that are being developed from laying workers when they emerge? What are the odds that they get mated that their genetics continue? Not very good. Just not at all. But it doesn't hurt to just let them finish out because they're in a strong dwindling state. Remember, we need a minimum of 5,000 bees to continue and have a use social insect society the way they're intended to be.

So these dwindling colonies, you don't necessarily have to combine them. You don't have to do that. You can put some sugar syrup on if it makes you feel better, but they're going to finish out their lives, and a lot of them are going to drift because there's the other thing that happens, particularly this time of year. When you have a colony of bees, the foragers start to just fade out because they're not inspired to come back. When you have a colony that has no queen, the pheromone bond is compromised.

And the pheromone that would bind them is usually the queen mandibular pheromone, which is spread by the worker bees in the hive. And this is why we have so much drift. This is why I can put a queen on a stick outside of the bee yard today and get a colony out of thin air. from that because her pheromone is going to draw a bunch of bees from colonies that do not have a strong queen pheromone now so they're drawn to that it also means your forges that go out may fly through the pheromone stream of another colony that is that is queen right and so they can reroute themselves and go right there instead of going home where the culture is fading where the future of the hive it's not guaranteed. So it's insult to injury. The bees that would be flying home and occupying that

hive now go somewhere else and take the resources that they brought with them that they've been collecting all afternoon and they give them to a colony that's much stronger with a much stronger future. And that makes sense genetically. You think about it. Why should they be fortifying a colony that's in decline that's on its way out? So what you may be dealing with in there, there are no new young nurse bees anymore because remember there's there's just drones that come from laying workers so you've been without a queen for a long time so the colony's just going out i would not personally combine that colony with another one i just wouldn't so just let them run out and let them fade and drift and leave and go wherever they want to go and these drones are going to be looking for food and that's the sad end of it too you're going to

look at that and you're going to see drones that are partially emerged and there's just no workers to feed them because remember they're in decline and so they're starved drones can't feed themselves so even if and some people would say well put sugar syrup on there and let the drones get the sugar syrup even if drones drink sugar syrup it can give them a tiny spark but it's not enough to start the motor and they just they fade no other bees are going to feed them because what else is going to happen as the nights get colder the days grow short and the resources get thinner. They're going to stop feeding the drones.

And then you're going to see, and I recommend that you do, go out in the early mornings and look at your landing boards and you will start to see more and more drones. Some of them, they won't even feel like warming anymore, which means they're going to pull them out of their cells and drag them out partially developed as a pupa and leave them outside. And then the reason you don't see it

is because, first of all, you're not getting up early enough, like I tried to tell you to do. tell you to do and you don't see it because where do they go well what else is ramping up this time of year your favorite insect yellow jackets wasps are out there bald face hornets are starting to show up so the yellow jackets though are the highest numbers early in the morning they'll show up and they'll nab those little things and they'll grab that little protein pack and fly away with it so or you'll see them actively chewing them apart on the landing board so you want to see something grisly see the yellow jackets cutting apart drones on a landing board that are starving to death.

And they take them home and they feed they're developing larvae themselves. And then as the season goes on, these yellow jackets that are raiding the cast outs from your undertaker bees are those that have dragged themselves out on the landing board. But we know if it's a pupa, there is a bee inside that dragged it outside and put it on landing board. Otherwise, it would never have left the cell. Because they just can't do that on their own steam. So what's going to happen is these yellow jackets are going to go from protein to nectar.

So they're going to go after sugar resources, which is, again, a problem for your honeybees. Because what are they going to do? Your bees are going to cluster on these cold mornings, and they're not going to spread out. They're not going to be having guards on the landing board and on the entrance. So this is why, and I'm tying this in for you, because I want you to have reduced entrances for this reason alone, if nothing else. your colonies are going to be up for robbing. And if the yellow jackets get through and they show up in numbers, they fly colder, they fly faster,

and they have mandibles that are designed to cut flesh. So they want to get in there and they want to get the honey. So they're going to get that too, because if they stop brooding up, then they all just need nectar. So that's bad news. And let me just pile on more bad news that's ahead. The next thing that's going to happen when the faucet of resources turns off. The honeybees in other colonies in your apiary and adjacent apiaries,

if you've got people nearby, they're going to be in a fever pitch to get resources to satisfy their desire to make it through winter with a surplus. Honeybees are hoarders. That's why they make more honey than they will ever use if it's a big, strong colony, which is why beekeepers can take the surplus. us off and not compromise their ability to overwinter. But let these big, strong colonies show up on these weaker, smaller colonies, and find a wide open entrance undefended or inadequately defended because the beekeeper decided to keep it wide open so they could, I don't know, dry their honey out quicker or something.

And then you find out that these scouts from these other colonies get in, find the honey, and now they go back, get the rest of their colony mates that are also at foraging stage. and they zip over there. Before you know it, you've got hundreds, if not thousands of robbers going into a colony that cannot afford to lose anything. So the goal is to reduce the entrance so the guards of even a smaller colony can defend themselves and defend the colony from being predated upon by honeybees and wasps.

So I hope you do it. Hope you do. And if you've got upper entrances and extra entrances, all over your hive because you're also trying to circulate air, help them throughout the honey in this 90 plus, you know, humidity. You're also opening backdoor opportunities for your colony to get robbed. Just saying, a lot of this is in your control, so please do its best for them. So this is from goal-oriented lifting. That's a YouTube channel name, and it says, does all kinds of smoke work since it blocks pheromones do smokers just light a cigarette and blow it at the nest

so when it comes to smoking your hives this is something that beekeepers love to talk about so talking about smoking fuel and keeping it lit how to light it what to do and a lot of people talk about different fuels and pellets and things like that i was invited to ohio this past week to give a presentation we went out to dinner and we talked about smoker fuels too as part of it and so there were old timers you know that had a pipe in their mouth and they probably just blew pipe smoke some beekeepers i've noticed use it as an opportunity to puff a big cigar and puff cigar smoke at your bees i can't recommend any of that but i've never seen anyone smoking a cigarette while they're inspecting hives so i'm going to have to rely upon viewers to comment

if that's their method do you smoke a pipe you know puff pipe smoke at them or do you smoke your cigarettes and what kind of cigarettes work the best for that but I would think you'd be going through a lot of cigarettes and it's certainly not good for your health so and of course there's a smokeless method by the way you know what it is apisalis so apisalis works really well and it's just a matter of turning it on using it turning it off it's a vape system so that works really well but as far as I just have to ask my viewing audience because I have very sharp cookies out there and people will be able to share what worked or didn't work I always thought it

would be kind of cool if maybe like pipe tobacco I like the smell of pipe smoke but that's because my great-grandfather smoked a pipe when I was little and whenever I smelled pipe tobacco I knew he was around and so today I just like the smell of it I don't care about the smell of cigars nope and cigarettes not even close but if you found that you also already have a habit. You're going to be smoking anyway. And if you're going to let us know that it works, I would like to know how that goes.

So, and the responses are wide and varied based on the smoker fuel that you have. And I probably will put a link down to my video that shows smokers, how long they burn, how to light them. I know it's very popular. Every beekeeper on YouTube has done a video on how to light a, smoker their favorite smoker fuel and it can be everything from burlap to pine needles to pine shavings to pellets that are designed for pellets stoves um and off it goes and when it comes to material that you're burning and i used to do a lot of that and i talked recently about how we scrape away the really

dense grass that's underneath your lawnmower so you've got these big mowing decks and you get under there and you can use your hive tool and your scraker them scraping them out while they're wet and you get these clumps of grass and it's really wet. So I take those and I throw them in a bin and let them dry out. So that's long-term planning for smoker fuel. But it's like think of the cud from cattle or ruminant animals when they're just remashing it over and over. When you've mowed and it's stuck to the inside of your mower, you get really dense stuff. Once it dries out, if you light it, it stays lit for a really long time, really dense smoke.

green you took it while it was wet and green and I should also caution you about that too for those you understand farming and hay gathering if you collect bales of wet hay you can end up with spontaneous combustion in your barn this is why when I collect these things these little globs of grass are still wet I throw them into a bin that's metal metal trash bin so that if there were any kind of combustion were going on in there it would just cancel out because it would consume the oxygen in the bin and then of course it can't burn or melt if it's a plastic bin it could melt and it won't burn because it's galvanized steel so highly recommend it that stuff works really well and if you don't have that and you want to buy something what do you think i'm going to say switch grass smoker pellets

switch grass smoker pellets from the northwest pennsylvania beekeepers association You can Google it. It's made by Ernst Seeds and they come in five pound bags. I'm not sure five or ten pound bags. Anyway, those things when you like them and I'm sure people that are listening or watching right now, a lot of you have used them and they you don't have to rely them. And I mean what we do is we put a cork on the smoker when we're done. So I feel that can. just the little ones. I don't have one of those big tall industrial-looking smokers because we're back our beekeepers. When would you ever burn something that long? But if you get these switchgrass pellets from the Northwest Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association, a nonprofit, the profits from that are used to educate people about beekeeping. So you're helping a group that's designed to teach people about bees while you get a smoker fuel in your smoker that when you light it and it's lit and it's

smoking will stay lit for the rest of your day. Some people have reported that it went for 12 hours. So just to see, just to test it, see how well it works. It's a dense smoke. It's a cool smoke and your bees respond to it really well and you don't have to puff them a lot and you don't have to create the fog of war to make them work. So that's another shout-out. Northwest Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. Smoker pellets. You might be wondering, Fred, are you part of that association? Yes, I am. What do we get for doing this? that nothing I get nothing I'm just telling you that it's something that works is a smoker that works and it's going to help the cause I'm not even on the board of that beekeepers association

just a member just just a guy somebody's running around all right so and there should be a link to that if you can't find it I'll put a link down in this video description so we're in the fluff section if you haven't figured that out today so keep up with your honey supers and I like my harvesting right now. A lot of you back out beekeepers you pull the whole super off and then the bees get really upset. This works really well. When you go out to inspect for capped honey inside your bee hives this time of year, bring the frames that you've already processed recently. It's a real bonus by the way. If it's from frames you've just drawn off and just run through your extraction process during the past four or five days.

You put those, I'm also going to say high Butler Toots all the time. There is a discount for those if you use my, it's Fred 5 or Fred 10 and you might be wondering if we use that discode, is that an affiliate link? Are you getting, you getting paid for that, Fred, no, I'm not.

It's just a discount that they offered if you're my viewer. See, that's how nice it is. I get zero kickback from that. So anyway, the high Butler Toats are super handy. I put it on the back of my golf court. You can put it in your wagon. and you're bringing frames are already drawn so that when you open up a hive you're doing an inspection of the honey super and you see whoa you've got three that are really well capped and this is where a compromise

compromise kicks in and people go yeah the rest of them are about 60% I'm gonna pull the whole thing anyway please don't do that pull the frames that are maxed out that are capped and put your extractive frame right back in right away and you know what happens if you stay calm because what did you just do You provided them with an extracted frame that still has residual honey on it. It smells good. It tastes great. It's a treat. And they don't even know what you just did. You pull the switch of roo on them.

You pull the cap-thoney out. You put the drawn cone frame right back in. And they stay calm. This is the first year that I've done that, this micro-gathering practice. And you know what? The result has been? We don't have bees on the warpath flying around the driveway, trying to sting FedEx, UPS, everybody else, which they used to.

We used to think ahead. Like if I'm pulling honey today, we can't have anybody coming up here for the next three days because the bees are going to be zinging around trying to get vengeance because somebody stole their honey. Let's see. We're giving them a gift of an empty drawn frame while we pull out the cap stuff. It's a perfect world. And then we're going to go and extract that. This is I'm done talking to you right now.

I'm going to go to look at another hive. and see if I can't pull some frames off of that double colony keeper's side system. Because I have special frames in there. I think I figured it out and we might have something else coming down the pike. So a plan for a winter emergency feed. I already said that. If you're going to order that stuff, order it now. If not, learn to make fondant.

It is the best move ever. Reduce your entrances. The rise of the wasp is happening right now under your nose. If you walk out there and you see this big melee going on already, you might think your bees are defending themselves admirably. The wasser attacking, but there's a big fight going on, and the bees seem to be holding their own. If it's at that level, you're in trouble.

I've videoed that. I put endoscopes inside a hive, so I can see the conflict continuing inside the hive. I saw all the way everything was working, and you want to prevent that from starting in the first place. you want your bees to be able to stop scouts in their place wots or honey peas so and process your honey right away i notice that i see people like to post pictures of you know how much honey they got how amazing it is and they'll i'll see five gallon buckets stacked in a row and then a second tier five gallon

buckets stacked in a row look at all the honey we have uh cautionary tail please process that bottle it right away it's much easier to really liquefy a jar of honey that you know crystallizes that it is to try to deal with these five or seven gallon honey buckets so I highly I always say that try to do it right away and also always test the moisture content if it starts to ferment you're you're done it's not going to work for stored honey so you need to know the moisture content right away so process honey favorite wax rendering system I have a lot of ideas I've done solar wax melters and put whole frames in there because I used the solar wax

melter just to see what the frames could take. And by the way, there's a frame that can take really high heat, which I was really impressed by. What's it going to be? 21st beat. What do I get for saying that? Nothing. So you can put that in really hot water, melt everything off of it, and come out clean and ready to use it. But if you can get away with it, you put that in wax melt.

it can actually get too hot, whelped it and melt away the wax, but the honey that's still on it and stuff like that can also just become a big mess. But I want to know what you have found for backyard scale. I know there's commercial operations that are massive, I know they have all these great things. But just as a backyard beekeeper, what is your go-to when it comes to rendering honey, rendering wax? I'm sorry. So I'm looking, you know, friars are dirt cheap. If you go to thrift stores, Everyone seems to be selling a friar at yard sales and stuff like that and get one for a dollar or two. But what's your favorite method? And there's still plenty of forage left. We're not starving out now.

This is not the end. We have a lot still to do. We're going to go right through historically, right through the end of September, before the weather got really bad and before the floral faucet turned off. So, and if you're going to feed, I had a question on Wednesday night about open. feeding and I prefer not to open feed right now. So what we want to do is target feed. So if you've got a small colony you're trying to kick off, try to do the feeding inside on top. There are entrance feeders. It's called the Boardman feeder and stuff like that.

I highly recommend not doing that. Remember the wasps can find that right at the entrance. Your honeybees from other colonies can find that right at the entrance and if they get a taste of it, it's getting over for the colony that has that feeder and we already know it's a weaker colony because you're feeding it so please feed on top of your hive and do not have an upper entrance for that let the bees come through the hive and let them have an area they can defend and get resources from regardless of what the weather is doing so that's it for today I want to thank you for being here and also if you have a question please write in the comments section or you can go to the way

to be.org pick the page marked contact fill out the form and let me know what's on your mind i'm frederick done and this has been the way to be