The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode 349 with Frederick Dunn, April 3rd 2026

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

Ready for swarms and packages? This is the audio from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/QLbeIaEjLCo

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, April the 3rd of 2026. This is back here to bekeeping questions and answers episode number 349. I'm Frederick Dunn and... So I'm really glad that you're here. Sorry I missed you last Friday. Because let's be honest, the pint can't hold the court. I was going from conference to conference to conference so I was on the road long trips and I'm really grateful for the people that invited me to come and speak to their B clubs and I was even more impressed that people came in the room knowing that there's a good chance I might be right there

to talk to them so that's fantastic and I know that you're wondering what we're going to talk about today so please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and there will be links to take to the places or items or more information related to the topics that we're discussing today. Speaking to that, you might want to know. How do you submit your own topic for my future consideration? Well, you go to the way to be.org. You click on the page that's marked contact. There's a form there. You fill it out. You don't have to put all your personal information on there. I accept anonymous comments, although I'm thankful that people tell me who they are, where they are, what they're doing, and what's on their mind. It's important. And I know you're also

wondering if you're new where am i located northeastern part of the united states northwestern part of the state of pennsylvania what's doing outside right now you probably want to know that too pouring rain but i don't mind because it's pouring rain i have to be inside anyway because i'm doing this i'm talking to you that's why i'm here and it's 70 degrees super nice outside but not as nice as it's going to be so let's talk about that for a minute 72 degrees fahrenheit which is 22 Celsius that is it's also windy. Don't you know the wind comes with it? 11.2 miles per hour, which is 18 kilometers per hour. For those who want to know that, 79% relative humidity, which is wrong. That's because from the time, you know,

I get this information and the time I share it with you things can change. So definitely it's 99 or 100% humidity while it's raining. Ground is soaked. There are puddles everywhere. So, but guess what? You have a good day coming, and when will that be? The best day in the next seven days here in the Northeast is going to be tomorrow, Saturday. 74 degrees Fahrenheit. And 45% chance of rain, but you know what? That means the chances of no rain or higher.

So that's going to be fantastic. Also, this is a podcast. So if you can't be staring at your screen right now, although it helps me because I get the view counts. If you go to the podcast on Podbean, and it's titled the way to be, you know what, I was thinking about that, I don't get any credit for that.

It doesn't count in positive ways for my view count for my YouTube channel, so if you actually like really, really reduce the screen resolution, for example, to 320 by something, or whatever the lowest resolution is, then you won't use up a bunch of data, but you can still listen to the audio

and not, you know, drive your tractor into the barn or something. Okay, so that's good too. And guess what I'm planning to do? I know you want to know that. We have nights below freezing and days that are warm. So this time of year, April 3rd, what would we be doing? Frost seeding. I did this for the first time last year, and it worked really well.

Because we're thinking ahead about plants that we can plant that will have flowers that will provide pollen and nectar for our bees. So what can we plant right? now while it's freezing at night but warm during the day you could be putting out clover seed there's a couple of different varieties of clover depending on where you're going to put it and what your ground situation is like here just as I mentioned it's so wet there's puddles sitting on the surface so we have damp soil here pretty much year-round very rare for things that completely dry out green grass all the time so we could actually plant clover that is now I'm

going to mispronounce it probably some of you will know better but I'll just spell it. I think it's Ladino. It's L-A-D-I-N-O Clover. Now that stuff has bigger blossoms on it. Grows taller, about a foot, maybe more. And if you've got areas that are just generally damp a lot,

you go around at night or the night before, and you know, sprinkle the seed, and then it freezes overnight, and then that causes your soil to open up while it's frosty, and then in the morning, these crevices that are open that have, your frost seeded little seeds in them, they warm up and then the moisture expands the surface of the soil, it closes up and now you've planted your seed without doing a darn thing other than handing

little bags of clover seed to all your grandchildren and having them run around spreading it wherever they want to see clover grow later on. Here's the good news. It's perennial, which means once it starts, it's going to go year after year after year. Now so for the other areas, though, that get mowed semi-frequently. My lawn girl is my sister-in-law, so she mows my yard. I'm thankful for that. Saves me hours and hours. So for that, we plant the white Dutch clover, and I'm going to put links to both of those varieties. And if you want to go find it on your own, the company that I use right now, which is a question I get a lot, outside pride. Last year we bought sacks of it from Ernst Seeds, E-R-N-S-T-seeds. So either

those are good and this is the time as I mentioned the time to do it so the white Dutch clover a little shorter and then because when it starts to turn brown when the blossoms when the bees are done with it and then you mow off the tops very late in the day or very early in the day so you're not mowing your bees along with your clover tops so once you mow it off they come up again and that's what we're looking for we want nectar and pollen sources that your bees can have access to in this neck of the woods right through September so that's fantastic now I can't plant my borage yet there's other things I want to plant and I'll talk probably a little bit about that during the fluff section at the very end of today and you'll know but it's

too early for that can't you know put cosmos out there I'm even planting marigolds I know they're not native but after last year seeing how many bees were on the miracles and that the deer were not eating them because I as you may well know have a big deer problem and I have successfully curbed my deer away from some of my planting so I'm going to continue to use wireless deer fence I did a review of that thing and it's working great so I'm going to use that to try to keep them off of my new plantings this year we'll see how that goes also you're probably wondering what kind of wildlife do we have outside right now there's wood ducks mcanzers and mallards on our pond right now Normally we don't get mallards. They're pretty darn common, but the wood ducks were up there. They're cool. They look hand-painted. They're very interesting.

And then Bragansers kind of came and went. So there's a lot of pollen coming in. You saw that in the opening sequences. And I'm going to put up a pollen run that you get to watch for, I think it's about 20 to 25 minutes worth of bees bringing pollen into a hive while I'm giving you this presentation. So you can also see some bees. So willow is finally not full bloom, but it has pollen anthers, and it's got nectar. So the bees are getting that. Skunk cabbage, it's going down. So I was out in the skunk cabbage wetlands yesterday and maybe one or two bees in a pretty large area. So they're finding something else, something better. So we're seeing some forage diversity coming in.

So even some light green and olive green colored pollen coming in on their corbacula. So if you know what that might be, I'd like to hear from you. Put that down in the comment section, let everybody know that you know your pollen. So maple is also quaking aspen, all that stuff. Incoming pollen, steady, everything is great. What else? Don't forget if you've got something on your mind and you want to know right now, you have to show a picture to somebody, you want the opinion of your peers,

and you want to get involved in a fellowship, called the way to be fellowship on Facebook. You just go there, talk to people. There's over 9,000 members, by the way, I was pretty impressed. And it's a lot of fun. So let's jump right into it. The first question of the day, which, by the way, this is how, this is how responsive I am. This question came at 7.56 this morning. And it's from Fred. From Thorn Hill, Tennessee. says I'm installing some packages with a queen excluder cages how long should a queen with one frame be left in the cage and when can I do OAV treatment since she can't just abscond because she's in the cage and if you don't know what OAB is it's like salic acid vaporization it's considered an organic treatment works very good but here's what I'm going to say because I also have a follow-on question similar to this today but what is part of this is the fact that we're going to use it it's actually a queen he's calling the queen excluder cage it's a queen isolation cage that you put a frame in and uh it can prevent absconding because the queen

can't go anywhere of course when you're installing a brand new package uh we don't like to stress them out right away so we do have a window of opportunity here whether the queen is in the cage or not on the frame or not uh just inside your nucleus high If you would just wait until about seven or eight days, that gives some time to get settled because we're not just welcoming a new queen. We are welcoming a package of bees that was dumped into a box in a pretty darn unfriendly way, I'll bet you.

And the queen is just put in there in her cage and then they're shipped off to you. Those bees are in kind of a tough spot. They're still getting accustomed to the queen. They're not from her. That's why, you know, when you get a package of bees, you don't know what the genetics are going to be from the colony for quite a while. And why don't you know?

Because the bees are just dumped in there. They're not from the queen. So the queen, the eggs she lays, the larvae she produces, and then, of course, the adult bees had emerged 21 days after she lays an egg. Those are her progeny. And so then you're going to start to know what the disposition of that colony is. But here's the thing. Give them six or seven days, then give them the treatment,

whether or not you've got a queen in the cage or not. We don't want to drive out this package of bees. We don't want them to go to other colonies or other feral colonies in the woods nearby or a neighboring apiary or something like that because you've given them a hostile environment too soon. Make them make a commitment, get them on board, and have them living there. We'll talk more about this later because there is another question. I think I'll go a little deeper when that comes around.

Question number two, and I can't even name the person. It's hard because it's just MJ-Tack L-S-7-Q-R-8 XP3N. That's a YouTube channel name. And I know some of you don't even have a YouTube. That's why you can't give a thumbs up or you can't leave a comment or something like that because you don't have a YouTube. And most of you think, I don't want a YouTube because I don't want to make any videos. Well, that's right.

But if you make a YouTube channel and have a nonsensical, like this, you can at least add, you can make a playlist, for example. It would be called everything Fred knows that I want to know. And then you would like, every time you see a video, you click add to playlists. And then there you go. And you only save the videos that you want to see again. See what I'm saying? And then you get a chance to vote.

Always give somebody a thumbs up. Don't give thumbs down. That's not nice. That's the opposite of a thumbs up. And people think you don't. don't like them then okay so anyway mj is 7 q r 8 xb says i'm curious about single deeps i'm new to lang's and that's short for long langs roth and i wintered over with two deeps it is an eight frame hive and i was afraid a single wouldn't be enough space they're looking great

i'm still feeding sugar bricks and you mentioned at the end about having a vent at the top with a deep and a median I don't vent any of my hives but I do have a deep and a medium so let's go there I do have a three quarter inch vent on the inner cover we had on seasonally warm weather this week low 70s and I checked the hive and did put the empty bottom deep on top so now we're rotating the empty body because remember two boxes your bees are in the upper box now so what this person has done is pulled the bottom box which is virtually empty now put it on to top and put the brood and everything down below. So and I saw bees on the bottom board at the entrance but right now it's 60 degree Fahrenheit odd. Did I create a problem? Did I have I did have four frames of brood capped and larvae up above so now they're down below so now I have this big open space up above. I don't think it's a huge problem but I don't do it. One of the things I started doing last and it worked out really well. So I hope that you'll just try it out just for kicks. Try it out. I got more queen excluders. Now I know that in the past if you've been watching me, I've said

let's leave the queen excluders out. We create a honey bridge and then we have the honey up above. And then of course once you have a honey bridge, which means there's a box or a solid area of nothing but capped honey as you get into the spring above your brood. And then you can go ahead and put a super on and the queen is very unlike. likely to lay her eggs up there. Now, I started using queen excluders in this very creative and above average way. I took the upper box if it was the medium and the bees were all up in it this time of year. And if you can find the queen up there and of course in a rapid state of expansion right now,

they are brooding up fast. And remember last year what I said to do is find your queen, get a hold of the queen. put your queen excluder between that second box and the bottom box. Put your queen inside the bottom box in. You can release her right through the entrance after you get everything all back together. She will not be orphaned. She will wander in there. Of course she will try to get up into that second box again because that's where all the brood is.

And she wants to return to producing eggs because we're in a high production, high growth rate time of year for your colony. so what you just did without disrupting the order of things boxes or frames all you've done is taking your queen out of the top box put her under the queen excluder into the bottom box and a bunch of the nurse bees a retinue of bees are going to go with her and so you'll start to get a spread and this time of year that's okay and keep in mind the bulk of the bees are going to stay on the brood as it should be but as those brood emerge in the upper box, they will migrate down through the coin excluder and they will start to settle into that first box without swapping boxes. Now one of the reasons that I do that is because the medium is the super, so I wouldn't want to put a medium as my bottom box. Because when you do that, you're certain to have brood that goes right up into the second box. This is one of the reasons I don't like all mediums. And I understand the need. You know, some people need all mediums because they don't practice picking things up and putting things down and building their bodies up and making them strong

and i understand this is not a shaming thing they just can't lift heavy boxes so all mediums when you do that whenever you swap boxes or twist to open a box and lift it up to see what's going on you are always breaking into the brood pattern somewhere so um we've got two boxes now we want to move the queen down below and then they just migrate eventually down into the lower box and now while the queen's down there the bottom box becomes your brood box and the upper box as they empty those cells that had brood in them and larvae in them when they emerged they turn around and start using it to store nectar and honey so it's kind of like the lazy person's demery because you reverse reduce some of the congestion in the brood area by moving the queen down below and causing them to go down and re-brewed up that bottom

box that's what I recommend doing now the other thing is I do not have as described here it says you have a vent in the top I do not so it's been I haven't put a vent in the top of my hives for 15 years so I know that it comes the inner cover already comes notched out and everything else but remember we've shifted to insulating our inner cover and closing off the top of your hive so there's no venting up there all the ending happens through the bottom box through the entrance that's it and so anyway we did that last year worked very very well so i'm recommending it this year that you try it's got a bunch of hides try it on half of them see what happens rotate boxes split it up do this backyard stuff where you can

just fool around because we have time on our hands take the top box put it on the bottom put the bottom box on the top we've got an area for them to expand especially in both boxes are identical in size easy to do so do that on some of them and on the others get those metal queen excluders a really good ones I recommend the ones from better B and they're very nice and they have the classic I would say nigh perfect 4.2 millimeter gap and your bees go right through them the workers go right through them very easily so I see very little reason not to try them out So do that on one and do the swapping boxes on the other and see which ones do the best.

Which ones are the easiest for you to manage, by the way. You're going to find the queen down there. Things are going to go really well. If you do what I say, you have an above average chance of doing well with backer beekeeping. Let's move on to question number three. This comes from loves purple flowers. I wonder if bees love purple flowers. I like Hissom.

That's some good stuff. That's a purple flower. Anyway, says, I just purchased the bee mindful hive and their feeder to go with it. Did you finally order one for your hive? And there is a natural hive in my garden, and I'm hoping to attract the swarm that is coming soon. I would not even try to attract these bees without a feeder. P.S. did this hive make it through your winter? I'm out here in California in a mild climate, so it's not so bad.

cold good for you out there in California where the client the climate is mild I had one those feeders in here so here's the thing the me be mindful top bar hive that I put in new to my apiary last year and it's all documented so if you want to go to the frederick done YouTube channel and click in the search bar in the top right top bar hive you'll find it because it's a playlist now they didn't have the feeder that goes into the top bar at the time I got mine but I was chit-chatting back and forth with Natalie B who runs Be Mindful and so they do now have a feeder that goes right in and there's the top bar that goes over the top of it and here's where I place it right next to the

follower board so when you have your entrance over here at the end of your top our hive which is by the way a really fun hive to have you the bees go through and you keep adding top bars as they progress very easy to expand and contract just with the population of the bees and then you put that feeder in there which is made out of plywood and put that right up against the follower board so we make it the last board inside and then you have the option now to add feed or not have feed you can even put fondant in it and before that came i did put some packets you could put ziplock baggies i recommend the one gallon size free bags fill it halfway with sugar syrup so that would mean a half gallon in a one gallon capacity bag and you put little holes in the top of it about in a one-inch

grid starting an inch and a half to two inches in from the edges this is how you prevent leakage then you can sit that right on the bottom of your top our hive where they have not fully drawn out all the frames and because then that leaves room for it so that would be so at the entrance you would have drawn comb, drawn, comb, drawn, and then when the comb starts getting smaller because they're starting to build it out, you have more space underneath, that's where you park your Ziploc bag in. You can feed them sugar syrup. Zero drowning because it is sugar syrup in a baggie, and you just have little prick holes in it

with a pin. I used a straight pin, little tiny holes. And once they discover how to work their proboscis into that little hole, they teach other bees how to do it too. And then bees are sharers. So once they get it, they go and spread it around to the other bees inside the hive that don't want to get off the comb that they're doing work on. So the wooden frame feeder also works. So it is like a frame feeder. And so the next part of this question is, did mine make it through winter? Yes, it did. Because the video that you're watching in the corner right now of the bees bringing in pollen was recorded yesterday after the rain. And that steady stream of pollen coming in is in fact the top of our hive. now we had two colonies in it a very tiny colony at one end and a decent size colony at the other but they weren't even in the hive all winter long we did not add any additional insulation at all so we took the be mindful top our hive exactly as it came from that company which is in texas and i set it up out there you know i'm so impressed by it that i bought another one and it's here and i have a stand for it and

And when the weather breaks for good, for sure, now I have another top ar hive. So guess what that means? I can split that colony and they're doing so well, they're going to need to be split. Now, it does have a lot of frames in it. You could put an enormous colony of bees in one top ar hive. No doubt about it. It's doing well. So they get my vote.

If you want to try top ar hives, I'm going to recommend that company. Be mindful. Tell them I sent you. send them an email. Say Fred Dunn sent us and we'd like to get that Fred done discount. Always ask for that. There isn't one, but I mean it's always good to ask. We can put pressure on them until they finally grant you some kind of discount. Who knows what it might be. But tell them I sent you. You'll pay the same as everyone else.

Let's move on. Next question comes from John M.C. 200. That's a YouTube channel name. And it says, I'm hoping to get into beekeeping soon. So I have a question, is it worth getting a nuke, which is short for nucleus to start out? And how many beehives should I get to begin with? I've heard two hives is good. But if you got, for example, three or four, would that be too much? These aren't questions I can answer.

Once you get into beekeeping, I will say that's like too much, the question about, is it too much? No, no such thing is too much. I don't know your condition. I don't know the situation. I don't know where the property is located. I don't know what kind of forage there is available for your bees. I don't know what your neighbor's situation is. So asking me how many colonies or hives you can have on your property or that you should have, I'm not going to get in between you and maybe a dispute that's going on with your significant other.

I will not be used to take sides. I will say this, two. Two is one. One is none. Two is one. One is none. There you go. Someone once said that that was a quote from Abraham Lincoln. No, it is not. Abraham Lincoln did not say two is one and one is none. It comes from the United States Navy.

So I'm going to reclaim that. But here's the thing. If you had one colony of bees and you put it out there and you're thinking, I'm just a one colony person, I'm just going to take such good care of them. They're never going to die. Nothing's going to happen. if your queen died and they did not make an emergency queen because they do it if a queen dies or you smash that queen or something while you're doing an inspection because you can't win the game of what is it called operation if you have shaky hands and you smash things or you're in a hurry if you kill the queen and there are eggs in there they will make a replacement queen it's an emergency queen so they can do that now that takes a long time your bees are without production for a long time. So if you had two colonies of bees, then if you lost a queen on one, and it was at a time that you didn't catch it, and they fail to make a replacement queen,

which happens a lot. Only about 75% of the queens that are made in a colony when all is perfect come back maided. So that means 25% of the time you're risking being queenless, and then you have nowhere the colony to pull additional eggs from and resources so that you can get things going. So I do recommend two colonies. It's a lot of fun to have them. Now it's your your call how many colonies you get beyond that I would recommend having a third that's not even occupied. Just be ready because you're going to get swarms and things like that. People know that you have bees. They let you know when there's a swarm somewhere. Why don't get some freebies? So three or four colonies is that too much? I don't know. It depends on

how much you want to work with them. I have to tell you that here in my apiary, which is divided into two smaller apiaries. We lost 10% of our bees this year. So that's 1 in 10, 4 out of 40. And 40 colonies is too many for me. It can feel like work. The supervisor was here yesterday. He was all over me.

The other thing is, he's stealing my hives. He's looking at the colonies at the highest populations, and he's claiming them as his own. He's writing them in his log book as his. He has hive number 10 and he has a flow hive that he claims to own. But anyway, it can turn into work. So it depends on how much you want to work or how much you want to just enjoy the company of your bees. But to minimum, that's my suggestion to everybody starting out.

That's what I would always say. You can make comparisons, you can see what's going on, you can use one as a resource hive for the other, and you will find that you are never without bees. So there you go. you go now if you lose them both over winter i don't know what to say there are people with 100 colonies that lose more than 90 percent of their hives over winter that's devastating i can't even imagine cleaning all that out they don't have grandchildren to send out there to clean stuff up which reminds me i forgot to bring my water pick in here which i was going to show to you it's very impressive let's move on

to question number five this is from david dillo 2113 so they have a large hive that is now queenless i can't find anywhere to buy queens yet it's too early people are selling queens even corey stevens probably isn't shipping out his queens yet says i have several packages on order to be picked up on four 10 so that's coming right up can i add one of my packages to the queenless hive i would not do that here's why you get a bunch of packages you have a that you think it's queenless first of all it says it's a large hive that's now queenless does that mean large population wise because they might not actually be queenless you might still have something going on there i do recommend this if you find yourself with a

colony of bees and you suspect that there is no queen there we want to stop the worker bees from becoming laying workers bees are pheromone based therefore the absence of queen mandibular pheromone means that they start to activate their own ovaries so worker bees can in fact become productive layers takes them about 21 days so I recommend that you always have in your freezer a couple of packets of QMP temp queen it's synthetic queen medulla pheromone and when you put that inside your hive as far as your workers are concerned there is a queen somewhere she's just not that amazing however it can serve to suppress their development and activation let's say which wouldn't be development because they have their ovaries they're just not in service

so they would it would reduce the propensity for them to activate their ovaries and produce drone eggs so when they do that that's when we get these feisty laying workers that don't accept any new queens and they're once they start laying it's a pain so on. So get the QMP noodle in there because if you still have a queen in there and you just overlooked it somehow you just didn't notice that she was there, she will still continue to lay and they won't go after her just because you put a QMP noodle in there. So it's kind of a safety net. It's a fail-safe thing. Then we start seeing eggs in there and you realize that you do in fact have a queen

because there's a very good chance you actually do if we're talking about by big colony, a lot of bees in it. Sometimes they just go off lay for a while. It's no big deal. But dumping, you know, a package of bees or bees from your packages to help support that colony is not a good idea, in my opinion. And here's why they have no allegiance whatsoever to the colony you're dumping them in. They are already forage your age. They can all go out and take off and do things.

And they're very likely to drift into other Queen Wright colonies. So when you have a colony of bees that have, no fertile or productive queen in it you are already kind of losing foragers because if there's anything I've learned through the years of observing bees at length it's that they are not loyal to their colony and that they will easily be redirected to another hive just based on pheromones alone and so you just start to lose bees and dumping a package in there will just probably be wasting that you wait a while and of course once you get eggs from one of your new set-up colonies

I know that they're brand new and being challenged but you could take a frame of eggs and early larvae and put it in with your queenless colony and let them raise a queen see how that goes if they remain queenless but do a very careful search to see if you don't already have a queen in there and I look forward to hearing from David to know what else is going on. And don't forget to you, you might have swarms coming in your neighborhood. We are at swarm time. Next week, watch for swarms. Because if you get a swarm, you can install a swarm in what you suspect is a queenless colony and see how things go then. And then you're guaranteed to have a queen there. Spring swarms are the best swarms of the year.

They're called prime swarms for a reason. There are queens that have wintered over and some of the swarms are enormous. We're talking five, six pounds of bees. Ready to go. That's coming right up. And don't forget to register at B-swarmed, B-E-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D dot ORG, so that you can be notified when there's three swarms in your area. There you go. Question number six comes from Michael Remsen, 2002. too. So the comment here says love the reverend and that's because I was down in Ohio and I was at the Lorenzo Langstroth cottage and it was very interesting. Talked with a fellow there and did an interview and posted the interview on my YouTube channel so you can see it. You ever want to see what Lorenzo Langstrass Cottage looked like?

You can see that you can go in there and I walk you all around. I show you the creepy attic stairs everything so anyway great interview and history of the duns that's right because Lorenzo Langstrass mother was a done so just want to let you know and I don't know if you've had this happen but the rigid foam I use in winter on top of the inner cover gets nibbled on by the bees I thought about using the insulation in summer but sure don't want any nibbling I use some wide aluminum tape and cover the foam. It may add some extra insulation too. Happy spring, be keeping from the coast of Maine. Yes, if you have, and while Quinn was here yesterday,

we're walking around, and if they get access to unprotected polystyrene, and I realize some hives are made of polystyrene, so maybe they're tougher, I don't know. But when it comes to the lid they will and can chew it also when it comes to the B-smart designs insulated inner covers it has a plastic casing that faces the hive so it protects that insulated poly insert from the bees and I tape off the whole thing so I tape off the entrance I tape off the holes that they have because the designer from B-smart has made it so that whatever your practice is with your bees you can do it with their ultimate inner covers and so it also has a channel and a hole going through to the

outside you can have an upper vent you can have an upper entrance with it so the first thing i do when i get one of those is i close it all up and i put h vac tape hvacac illuminated tape and i put that over those holes and i make sure they can't get up in there if they can get to that poly insert they will chew it if they can get to a b max or a license cover up in that feeder sham they chew that and they're doing it just one hive is doing it by the way so it doesn't mean all bees do it all the time but you'll go by and it's distinctive you can hear them chewing and I stopped and I made a recording of that chewing sound so I can use it later for teaching people and you can put double bubble right up

against it and you can use we tried Elmer's new wood glue we also use gorilla glue their latest waterproof version of their wood glue and you can just spread it on the reflect tics or double bubble and stick it right to the polystyrene and it holds really well so now you've added a layer of insulation and protection and because it has an aluminum facing the bees are less likely to start chewing it in the first place because polystyrene depending on its condition sometimes the bees perceive it as pulpy wood and they're trying to chew away the soft parts so they can propolize it because that's the other thing they tend to do with it

but they absolutely can chew it you absolutely have to protect it and keep them off of it I do not know why they don't chew the side walls the inner side walls of the I of IQ of the BMX hives or the license hives or any of the other polyhives that are just poly on the inside it's tough stuff but they definitely have and will chew the covers so Maybe something about location up there because they haven't had them chew the side walls out, but they definitely chew the covers. So easy to do. You can also, if you don't have or don't want to buy reflect X or double bubble, you can just put heavy to the aluminum foil right up against the interior surface so that your bees, they just don't chew the aluminum foil. It's very easy.

So cheaper than HVAC tape. That stuff's kind of expensive. So question number seven comes from Julie from. from Leavenworth, Washington. You have inspired me to start beekeeping and I'm getting my first package of bees in 10 days. I was told in my beginning beekeeping class that I should treat the bees with OA when they arrive. I have a top bar hive and I am starting from scratch, no comb. How can I do a treatment in this situation?

My bees are Saskatras and labeled us having robust hygienic behavior. I live in the 47th latitude and my daytime temps are just hitting the 50s. Thanks. Okay, so I'm going to give similar advice to what I talked about earlier. When you get a package, when you're going to put them in, you do have an option to treat them right away, and there's a drench method too for exhalic acid, so it's not always vaporization. The reason that we want to hit them with exhalic acid vaporization is that your varodistructor mites, if they're on there, there in their dispersal phase which means that they're exposed and they can be killed by a single treatment of exolic acid vapor and you can do that very easily in your top our hive

I'm happy to see that you're doing that and but I'm going to give the same advice don't do it to them straight away you can wait let them get settled there's no reason to fluster them like that just just my opinion and of course when they're being a as a package and you're going to have to draw out all the comb because there's no foundation. And what I did last year and keep in mind, I was new to top bar hives, but I'm not new to be keeping. I took each top bar and I did adhere some existing comb to some of those bars, just heating it up. I also learned that if you have comb, that you've cut off of a foundationless frame, for example, and it's empty, of course, I can just take a heat gun and heat the wood on the inside of the top bar

and then it heats up the wood enough so that then when I just hold the bees wax against it from drawn comb it melts enough to hold itself to the underside of the top bar super easy now that I also have bees wax and so I took the other top bars and I just drizzled bees wax just a single line of it down the center of the top bar and then I set those up that worked really, really well. So super easy to do. So as far as the treatment, again, we want them to settle as much as possible. We don't want to drive out any of those bees. Remember, it's a package. We don't want them to seek a friendlier space to occupy or a better queen or something like that.

Saskatraz, good luck with those. Usually when you get a Saskatraz queen, we don't know the complete genetics of the queen. because they come from the olivaris usually and the bee breeders there and so they're open mating those queens and they may be doing a lot of things to try to control the genetics with really good drone yards and things like that but you don't always know exactly what you're going to get and remember that a hygienic bee is not necessarily varroa resistant so we still want to hit them but another thing i want people to ask is when you're getting a package from somebody What has it been through? Because some of these sellers are doing vaporization treatments before they ever ship the packages out. So they may have already treated them for varro destructive mites. And then so there will be a judgment call

based on the integrity and the reputation of the person selling you the package, whether or not you think the treatment was effective. But you can definitely do another one. Seven days in, after you have them, let them have it. And then check to see if you got mites on the, the floor, which is harder when you have a top bar hive because as soon as the dead might hits the floor, they're going to haul it out the entrance. You won't see it. So it's not the same

as having a screen bottom with a removable tray underneath that then you can check to see if you've got a mite drop after a treatment. So that's pretty much it for that one. But same thing. Wait, don't do it right away. Don't do it. Question number eight comes from David from Houston, Texas. Last year I bought a hybrid queen bred for Mike Control and honey production. The hive was highly defensive. Came out of the winter, huge. This week they stung my neighbor five times in the face for no reason. The neighbor got stung five times in the face.

I have a six foot fence between us, but only a quarter acre lot. I was forced to eliminate the hive and using dry ice and covering the hive in 55 gallons. garbage bag this seemed to me to be the best way this killed about 98% of the bees and those remaining were very docile allowing me to use a shop bag to clean out the hive in one of your videos you had mentioned suffocation using a garbage bag was unsure how well this worked is this the best way to destroy hives that are unsafe for backyard residential h-o-a beekeepers as homeowners associations going back with Italian queen, which of my experience are very docile. Any other thoughts?

So this is something that, I don't know how much, you know, some beginning beekeeper course instructors end up covering the risk and what to do if you have bees that are not reasonable. That sting your neighbor in the face for no reason. So we want to talk about that just a little bit. you do need an emergency kit ready to go. And there are a lot of options. So I in the past have recommended the heavy-duty black 55-gallon garbage bags. That's a rapid response. You can put it right on the hive, close everything up, use shipping tape.

Now here's the key. You have to seal up every single hole in that bag. So if it's going around hive sand or something like that, you need to make sure that there isn't even the tiniest air gap in it because if there is your bees can do remarkable things to circulate air from that tiny opening so it must be 100% closed off the other thing is like this time of year it probably wouldn't work very well and here's why i counted it to heat up in the sun

so we need to get them up to a kill temperature so we're not talking 140 some degrees Fahrenheit that would of course melt beeswax we just want to get it up hot enough so that it kills the bees themselves and that can take a day. So depending on the time of day that you do it, what the weather is going to be, if it's going to rain or overcast, things like that, it's not going to heat up very fast.

And it's amazing how long the bees can live in there. So one of the kits that you need, you need to know, too, that one of your best insecticides is going to be Don Ultra Free and Clear. This one says Don Ultra Pure Essentials, which is not damaging to the environment, one tablespoon per gallon you can mix it up and have it as part of your kill kit you can have one of those garden pump sprayers that you can stand a little distance away from it and let them have it because if they're super defensive your guard bees are going to be all over the landing board in areas like that so if you use soapy water that will knock them down right away you wipe them out at the entrance and then you crack the lid on the top and you spray in there and you spray down the whole hive now the difference between that and the dry ice

method that was just described by David here. The dry ice method is just killing them off without damaging comb, honey or anything else. So that is, it's expensive stuff though. And you have to go and get the dry ice. So if you're in an emergency situation, the soapy mix sure is something you can mix up right away. The other thing is I have, so I'm going to give you some others, but once you do it with soapy water, you have to rinse everything then with really good fresh water. it's all done and you have to air dry everything you've got kind of a mess on your hands so the bagging if it's going to be hot is another very clean way to do it and you just blow out all the dead peas later and we want to knock out of course the queen we want to stop any drones from getting away

because if they're from that colony they're also spreading those hot genetics not a fan um so the other thing is i have a 20 pound CO2 extinguisher now when you say a 20 pound CO2 extinguisher you might be thinking yeah i can lift 20 pounds that's pretty good but that's just the CO2 itself so what you end up with is a CO2 tank that weighs 45 to 50 pounds and that's if it's an aluminum tank it's one of the new ones if it's an older steel tank they're even heavier than that and you can get those filled and service at your fire stations usually but here's the thing that's an immediate knockdown and but you have to do some follow-up on that straight away so when you knock them out with CO2 you can leave it closed up with a

to afterwards but they will snap out of it and come around again pretty darn fast once they get air to them again so if you're going to use the CO2 extinguisher and I have that and that's only good for me right here if I had to travel anywhere with it it wouldn't work out but and it has other uses too remember if you invest in CO2 extinguisher and they are expensive several hundred dollars then you can use that when you have an electrical fire or something or your engine catches fire because you decided to do some of your own auto mechanic work or something like that. CO2 works on, you know, Alpha and Charlie fires, by the way.

Bravo fires too, a little bit while we're at it if you want to. So that's an immediate knockdown and then you can do whatever you need to do to get the queen, get the bees under control and kill them off. So but you do have to be prepared. You may never have a situation where you have to kill a colony of bees. however if and when it does happen someday you need to be prepared because you're the beekeeper it's your responsibility neighbors will sue you this is a sue happy society right now so some of the things that we can do i notice that the uPS fedex driver and the mail delivery person

did not get buzzed by bees very much after we put up the way to be academy building line of sight from the landing board of your beehive is very important. That's where your guards are generally located at the entrance on the front of the hive on the landing board. So if you have a visual barrier between them and your neighbor's garden or where people walk on the sidewalk or where people come up the driveway, if there's a visual barrier,

then the guard bees don't see to come out and get them. Try this for kicks. Use a movable barrier. put something up with some saw horses. You've got a, you know, a salty hive that just, the colony of the bees just come out and get you for no, for no reason. Then what happens is once you block that line of sight, you'll find out that until they can see you, they don't come after you anymore. And so block line of sight. This is also why, but it, as mentioned here, there's a stockade fence at six feet tall. They shouldn't have been able to see

through and see the neighbor. So I don't know how they got the, how the neighbor got. How the neighbor got their attention but you have a lot of gains there if you can just block the view of the guard bees the foragers are generally easy going it's the guard bees on the landing board that will come right out they see something about you they don't like and they come right after you so have a kit have an emergency system ready to go those heavy-duty trash bags the 50 to 55 gallon trash bags look at the mill thickness on those two get the thickest ones you can get we never had bees chew them out but are a multi-purpose bag and so when people call me at the end of the year and you know they've got bees in their tree and it's a problem they're stinging everybody then you go there and you find out

their bald-faced hornets this always happens you know at the end of the year then you have one of those big trash bags just walk up there put the bag over the whole nest and the tree branch and everything else and then you clip it off you tie a goose neck into the bag and you take those home with you in the back of your car and you set them out in the sun and you cook them and it's easy so it has other purposes you don't have to just have it there for the just in case you're always going to come across wasp and hornet nests i don't know if it works on those yellow-legged hornets yet those nests are huge but a big bag like that you could get them in that bag and then once you goose neck it and tie it

before they can shoot through it, you could double bag it and do another goose neck and tie those up. I think that would tie them up. And then you have a chance to stuff them in a big freezer or something. Or put them out in the sun and just overheat them. Lots of options. I don't know if that would work. Has anyone encountered or dealt with the yellow egg tornets on here? Let me know what you would do.

I think it's open season on those things down in Georgia and wherever else they are. people are looking to kill them right and left so I suppose this is going to be the summer of YouTube videos about yellow leg tornets that people are encountering and what they're doing about them. Question number nine this comes from Keith from Connersville Indiana so well it sounded like such a good idea so I took my water pick

and started to clean the comb from a dead out now my question is will the yellow stains ever come off my water pick which used to be a white, but it's now yellow. So the other question is the cheerleader bees you speak of. If they can't get a bee to get moving, do they become undertaker bees? I appreciate the humor of that. If you don't know, cheerleader bees are also the motivator bees. When you assume inside the hive and a bee's just sitting around, maybe at the grooming station for a long time, getting groomed,

and another bee comes along, grabs it and shakes it and moves along. They're trying to shake them back into action. You see a lot of these, what I call cheerleader bees, uh, running around and shaking. Dormant bees when it's time to move when it's time to get going when things are happening. Maybe there's a brand new food resource that's come in and we need more foragers to go out and take advantage of that right now before a storm comes They get cheerleader bees grabbing them and vibrating their thoraxe and getting them to swing into action So do they become undertaker bees? Yeah, they just go around and keep harassing people or bees until they get going So the thing about the water pick the water pick is fun. Come on and of course it turned yellow because when you start sprissing out the old pollen from those cells it's going to get on all your stuff that's why you need to

wear face protection too and wear a shirt you don't care about because it might spritz right back on you now the water pick that i got that i talked about last time is battery powered has a very forceful stream on it in fact you don't have to get that water pick right up to the cell to clean it out it'll clean dead bees out of a cell from a foot away 10 inches away and And we were trying that out and my wife was impressed with my purchase there too. Mine did not turn yellow. So I don't know what's going on and I don't know if it needs to be clean, but here's my thing. Once I pick a tool like that and I'm using it for bees, it's all I'm going to use it for.

So if you try it, it, it's going to work. You're going to love it. It's going to be great. And if it turned yellow, I'm sorry, don't know what to do for Keith. Usually they give you a whole bunch of tips, just get a new tip or sew it in bleach or something. I don't know what's going on. But we're in the fluff section right now. So I'm going to talk about some things that we talk about all the time because it's important.

And I know some of you haven't done it. I've said it over and over. I've asked you to clean your dead outs out, but I know you haven't done it. Because who wants to clean dead outs? But we just mentioned Keith here, the water pick that turns yellow. So get one of those. Battery powered, easy to go. And you're using low pressure air first.

And you're using the water pick only to go after the areas that wouldn't clean out with the low. pressure air and then once you've cleaned it with your water pick then you come back and you have to hit it with low pressure air again to blow out the water from the cells you just blew in there so clean your dead outs this is your best hive for collecting swarms they can move in on their own a very good friend of ours just did what i said and down in louisville and had bees move right into her hive there you go it made it look like i knew what i was talking about because it works do it don't wait don't wait until you have a swarm and then try to clean it up there's a video coming up that i show a new thermo grade beehives so pay attention to that when it comes

out uh plan your plantings remember we talked about frost seeding at the open up today and i'll just tell you the rest of the things i'm planting this year which most of them i do every year but borage clover as we mentioned for frost eating marigolds. I'm getting the African marigolds that were like three and four feet tall. Fantastic last year and they make good cut flowers and stuff and I like the smell of them. So cosmos, again, we always do a lot of cosmos. Milkweed comes up on its own every year. Fantastic nectar for your bees. And then sunflowers. The pollen from sunflowers, all the different varieties. Make sure you're getting sunflowers that are not genetically modified not to produce pollen.

because they say they're doing that to keep you from getting pollen all over your table when you use them for cut flowers we want the pollen the spitback lab up in minnesota did some studies on pollen and it may have had an impact on um american foul brood for example beneficial for your bees so even though these things are not fantastic maybe as a protein source for raising brood there are other nutritional benefits that we just don't know about So that's what I'm doing. I also want to thank the Chester County beekeepers for having me out there. That was a lot of fun, huge auditorium, awesome time. And also the Butler County beekeepers in Ohio that had me just before that. We did three conferences in less than two weeks.

So that's why I missed last Friday. That's why I wasn't here. And so getting down there and getting into Langstroth Cottage, that was super interesting, just a good time all the way around. Everybody was great. and I have an interview coming up this week on Thursday. That's going to be something you're going to want to see because it's not like any other interview I've ever done before.

And that's all I'm going to tell you. I'm going to leave you hanging on that. So I want to thank you for being here today. I hope that you're able to take advantage of the good weather that's coming our way between rainstorms and that you are ready for spring swarm season. I want to thank you for watching. I'm Frederick Don, and this has been The Way to Be.