The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode 362 with Frederick Dunn July 10th

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

This is the audio track for today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/Wx13WtZJlYc

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, July the 10th of 2006, and this is back here bekeeping questions and answers episode number 362. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here. There's a lot going on. Sorry I missed out on last Friday, but you know, it was a long weekend and everyone was here because we're celebrating our nation's birthday, of course. And there's a lot going on outside. Things have not changed.

It is hot and it is humid everywhere. It's flooding in some parts of the country. If you want to know we're going to talk about today, please go down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order. And later on, there'll be timestamps associated with them so you can go straight to it without having to listen to the entire thing. Speaking of listening to the entire thing,

it's also available as a podcast. Just Google the way to be podcast, and you'll find it, and then you can listen without watching, if that's what you want to do. If you want to submit a topic of your own for future consideration, go to my website, which is the way to be.org. It's got a facelift right now, so I do have to change some pictures on and stuff like that,

but it's me, it's the website. You go to the contact page and you fill out the form, submit the topic, your question, whatever it is, and you never know. You might show up on one of our Fridays. So, what else is going on? to do to do if you want to show a picture and a lot of people are if you want to share something that you're seeing that you don't understand and you want your peers to share

what they think about it you go to the fellowship the way to be fellowship on Facebook you can just Google that too and find it join up hang out get to know things without politics by the way without marketing without charging a single fee just like this YouTube channel it cost you nothing to watch see what happens so how do you pay me hmm thumbs up or maybe a subscription if you wanted to all free all the time our product is information about backyard beekeeping so what else is going on well it's no secret that's not outside right here and where is here the northeastern part of the united states the northwestern part

of the state of pennsylvania 78.3 degrees Fahrenheit now i know a lot of you are in a very hot situation a human situation or rainy situation and on the other end of the spectrum of the fire's so it's not good I hope you're doing well wherever you are but 78.3 degrees Fahrenheit is 26 Celsius that's what's going on outside right now what makes that easier a nice breeze which we don't have zero mile per hour wind right now what's that in kilometers per hour zero 89% relative humidity so a lot of the colonies the hives are wearing their bees those are the unemployed bees the the foragers that are getting out of the way so they can dehydrate that honey dry it down

and so some hives have it some hives don't almost every day my wife and the supervisor are asking me do we get any honey no we didn't there's no surplus right now we're going into what's uh normally our dearth period or at least a lean period we'll talk about that more in the flood section uh air quality here's the good news that's good considering there's forest fires and different places it's not blowing through this area and the pollen is medium so right now if you went out and you're in my neck of the wood see where you are things are different stare at your landing boards to see how much pollen is coming in you may see that it's much reduced and that's because the environment's not providing a lot right now and in the opening sequences you might have noticed that

the bees are on milkweed among other things and they're not bringing in pollen from that so they're eating a lot of nectar but not a lot of protein what are they use of protein for anyway to raise brood. So the bees are building but pollen is low right now. Swarm risk right now also low in concert with the environment backing down on providing nectar and pollen your bees should also be backing down on some of their production although the population is up because we've just come out of a nice spring nectar flow. So robbing risk is high. Here's why. If you've collected a swarm or something like that you're starting them out or maybe you made some splits

maybe you're one of those people that wants to turn your three hive backyard apiary into 30 or 20 or 10 my goal's 10 it's working backwards for me so my goals 10 we have over 40 colonies here and it's looking like work it's feeling like work but if you've started it and you made splits those splits are now at risk of being robbed by your stronger colonies that's why you have to be careful because in the scuttlebutt groups if you don't know what that is a scuttlebut is a drinking fountain in the navy and people stand around and talk about things there and they might be saying that you need to open up your hives completely so they can really dry out that honey and that will reduce the number of bees on the outside well it might but it also opens up that colony if it's a young one if it's a starter it opens them up to robbing

Foragers from other colonies that are now unemployed are looking for easy pickings and easy pickings are low defenses at smaller colonies of bees. So that's all I'm going to say. Robbing's up. I recommend you leave your entrance reducers on. That doesn't mean you constrict them to a really tiny opening. But case by case, colony by colony, try to figure out what their defenses look like to you. If they seem under defended, then you want to keep that smaller entrance. closed up in place you also want to keep robbing screens ready to go but here's the truth of it once you start to see robbing going on usually it's a bunch of detritus on the landing board

bees coming and going really fast bees that are exiting are arranging what they've stolen in their abdomen so they'll be wiggling their abdomens around before they fly away and of course grooming their antenna and everything else those might be robbers so you need to pay close attention to that and you may have facilitated that made it easier for the thieves by having a wide open entrance. I'd like to point out that a lot of beekeepers that live in the deep south where temps are higher and humidities are higher. And they find that there are feral colonies in huge cavities with a lot of honey, with a lot of resources, and very few entrances, usually just one. and the one entrance that they find is usually tiny because it's easy to defend.

But what I want you to consider in your own mind, challenge everything, question everything. How do they dry down their honey there in Louisiana or Mississippi? How do they do it? Well, they can do it with a very small entrance. That's my point. We're thinking like people and we're trying to add as much ventilation and opening the top and shifting boxes and allowing them to have all this extra ventilation that they don't normally have. have when bees by design understand how to move air through their hive and every time you offer

a new vent a new opening a new way for the air to flow your bees have to adapt to you rather than you allowing the bees to control what they've controlled long before people ever touch to be that's all i'm saying small entrances doesn't mean no honey just go in there all right so uh what else we have swarmist robbing sunday july sunday july July the 12th coming up here in the northeastern part of the United States will actually be the best day so that's two days away 80 degrees Fahrenheit 504% relative humidity so that's going to be easier on the bees because now they can dry down the nectar that they brought in and they are still bringing it in I was

kind of sad to go around and look at all the milkweed which is a huge nectar flow right now here I think we're about 50% through it already so when the milkweed falls off and we sell plenty of clover so Dutch clover is good Ladino clover is coming in that's good very good nectar source a lot of people I've heard talking about red clover how great it is for the bees well your bees actually are probably getting pollen for the red clover but most honey bees apis mollifera don't have tongues long enough to access the nectaries of the red clover so on its best day it's going to be reduced nectar

So if somebody's talking about, I'm going to see it a whole bunch of red clover and provide for my honeybees. You are providing for pollinators, and that's good optics. You want to provide for butterflies and other pollinators and native bees and things like that that may have longer tongues than our honeybees do. So when you do that, yes, you're an ambassador to wildlife, but you're not helping your own honeybees. That's why I went with Ladino clover, which is the taller stuff. So those are going to be my border clover. and then of course Dutch clover which you can mow and you let it grow up until it blossoms until the bees start to lose interest in it and then you can mow off the tops and then they'll produce more flowers and on you go right through summer but we need rain of course for that to be effective but there's a lot of stuff going on out there that's just what I wanted to share with you so I guess we'll jump right into it with the very first question which comes from Edward 404 says what are the

the chances that the swarm from your grandson's hive would have gone for the bowler hat on the end of the telescoping pole trick okay so here's the thing a lot of people have commented on the bowler hats and by the way i have black felt woolen bowler hats all over the place right now because they're a lot of fun they're a curiosity there's a lot of pushback too because when i first introduced it and hung my bowler hat in the tree which is at the direction of an elder beekeeper from way back in the day who said it was a surefire way to collect swarms so but i did what i do which is sprits it also with swarm commander now i could have said i didn't do anything and wow look at the miracle of all the bees suddenly attracted to the bowler by its shape and texture and just collected onto it magically because it looked right um could have said that

but it wouldn't have been true because here's what i encourage you to do back here testing, validation, verification, repeatability when it comes to the things that we do. So that light spritz of Swarm Commander made a big difference. If we just hang the bowler hats out, we've done several at the same time. And if we spritz one with Swarm Commander and leave one just the way it is, the Swarm Commander definitely works on the bowler hat. The bullet hat by itself, hit and miss, touch and go, maybe 20% of the time. a swarm collects on it so the bowler by itself is not the great magnet that we were hoping that it would be

the bowler stay with me with a light spritz of swarm commander on it is definitely a magnet so now we up it to about 50% of the time so we still have it going and it's a lot of fun so the question is we did this video recently where i took a 30-foot extension pole there was a my sons not my son my grandson's colony swarmed so his hive his flow hive swarmed not a little swarm either a big one where did they go way in the top of a tree so we had to get him down and I couldn't get the queen from up there so we used a basket so the question is instead of the basket what if I just as a bowler spritz that put that up there I didn't try that we could have tried that maybe the next time we have a high swarm will do it but I want to explain some of the drawbacks of the bowler they do seem to climb onto it of course the goal is to get the queen if I can't get the queen out of the cluster in a bivouac and by bivouac I mean they're not at their final resting place it means they left the hive they're assembling somewhere temporary and then from there they're

going to go on and if you watch that video you'll see how quickly they make that decision and once they decide to move, the entire swarm disappears, and there's no evidence that they were even there in less than a minute. So, let's say I put the bowler up there, and let's say a bunch of them climbed onto it, which they did. They climbed into my waistbasket too, the expanded metal waste basket on the end of the pole.

But, and then, of course, you have to transfer them from whatever you collect them on or in into the hive, so we fortified its hive again. So that means we return about half of the bees, which means we also reduce the numbers that went on with the swarm. But since they flew to a neighbor's, I'm guessing, it's okay that the numbers were lower. And we got some of them away. So we installed this.

When I put the bowler hat covered in bees on the front of a hive, if I want them to move in, because people say things like, just shake them off the hat, put them right in there. And you could do that too. But when you shake them, you have, it's woolen. The bees cling to them. it the bees move inside of it they like it in there they're sheltered it's warm it reflects their

heat it's like putting on a wool jacket for the cluster of bees and they don't quickly move out of it you have to find the queen so when i had the bowler that did collect a swarm recently and i made a video about it uh i took my queen pipe that's what this is right here i love these things because they're funny looking they're dirt cheap and highly functional so i had my queen pipe and i was looking which is my job at length at the bowler to see why the bees aren't going into the hive that i put them on well the key is the queen has to go or the rest of them aren't going what happens is when you put them at the front of a hive and if it's suitable for them to move in they start to move in and they fan their nass and off and they convince the rest of them to move in and if the queen

approves once everyone all the worker bees are moving in then she might or might not join them however if you have a plastic queen pipe like this one the queen surfaces in the hat somewhere and there's thousands of bees in there you put this over the top queen moves up in here you pull that out and you move that queen away put her over by the entrance that you want them all to go into and if she's the only queen in that swarm in they go that was the control that was the control that was the control measure that makes it super easy or you could do as many suggest open the top of the hive dump the bees in and be done with it and put the rest of them outside on the hat but i just like to watch them walk in you can do both i also want to see if i have more than one queen the dumping

prevents me from seeing that so anyway the bowler hat is it a magic magnet for bees not without Swarm Commander or some other lure. So I will say that. It's not significant. But it's 50-50, their favorite branch or the bowler hat. And the first time I put it out,

they went straight to the bowler hat, which made it look like pure magic. But it was a one-off. So now it's about 50-50. Although when they do collect on it, it's very easy. Your bowler is on a string or a clip. You take it off.

You put it in a bag. In my case, a laundry bag. to transport it or you can put it a five gallon bucket whatever you want to do they're a lot of fun and it's it's fun to do it's novel so I did not consider putting it all the way up as a way to get the bees and transport them down from a high tree but the next time mark my words I will I'll do it because it's just as much fun to do that as put a trash basket up there question number two comes from Jeff from Roanoke Virginia

have a question about drawing comb my first year beekeeper with three hives and my strongest hive is a double deep with lots of bees i would not recommend a double deep i would recommend i'm just going to stop first part of the question i would recommend a deep root box and then beyond that mediums anyway the upper deep is very heavy probably six or seven frames totally full of honey. So I wanted to put on a medium super to at least get some medium frames drawn out for next year. No matter what I've done, I can't get the bees to draw out any frames in this medium box. However, I've tried. I tried removing the queen excluder, adding additional wax to the foundation, spraying the foundation with honeybee healthy, sugar water, and putting the medium in between the two

deeps, so they have to cross it to get to their stores. I've even tried putting a feeder on with one-to-one on the hive in hopes that that would stimulate them to draw out the box, even though they clearly don't need the food. Any ideas for other things I could try? Okay. And for those of you, what was the one-to-one? One-to-one sugar syrup. One part water, one part dry, white, processed sugar. Okay, so sometimes it just doesn't work. But the first thing I go to is said added wax to the foundations on the medium frames, there is a difference in which frames you use and how easily or quickly the bees will draw out their foundation

on these plastic frames. I have top three. Then I'll just share with you just in case you're thinking of buying frames and haven't done it yet. So if you're getting frames with foundation primed with wax, that's key. If they offer whatever the company is, if they offer heavy wax on their foundation, ask for it.

It's usually 20 cents more, something like that per frame. Pay it, worth it. And the companies that are selling it are not just doing it willy-nilly. They came up with this process, the amount of wax and everything else based on testing, trial, and error. And of course, feedback from the customer. They have to pay attention to that. If what they were doing wasn't working very well, they need to stop doing it.

So not all frames are the same. So I'm just going to rather than name the ones that I've used and tested in my own apiary through the years that did not work well. I'm going to tell you the top three that do work well. Acorn, heavy waxed frames. You can't buy foundation separate. Usually acorn comes as a single piece. So there's acorn. If you can get acorn foundation by itself, just as good.

Get the heavy waxed version. I tested that stuff out years ago when they departed from Pirco. So the engineer left Birko had his own ideas about frames that would not warp and so on, went on with better wax application processes, temperatures, and everything else. All that played and produced a foundation frame that the bees would draw out readily. The next one, Premier. Premier came out with foundation only. They don't offer the one-piece frames.

So they can sell a wooden frame with the Premier Foundation. Get, again, heavy wax. Those get drawn out really well too. In fact, they were neck and neck with acorn when I tested both in the same hive, checkerboarding each frame. 21st B is the newest one on the scene. Very heavy frames, probably expensive, very good wax coating that the bees take to right away. I took a Beersville bees Langstroth hive, the long Langstroth hive. and I started the entire hive with nothing but brand new undrawn frames. So we just inspected it a couple of days ago. The supervisor had a friend out 11 years old,

and we wanted to inspect a beehive. We went into that one, and it was remarkable the progress that they made. So those are my top three. I don't have any beyond that. So when you're looking at your foundations and when you're adding your own bees wax, make sure the beeswax that you've decided to use has been well rendered, not overheated,

and should still smell like beeswax. The more it smells like bees, propolis and beeswax, the more your bees are going to want to work it. Now, once you've done all of that and followed all of the things that Jeff here suggested or has tried, and if they still don't draw the wax, it just may not be in the wax building mood.

What do we need for them build wax we need workers that are of the age to build wax to draw new comb we need proper temperatures so it needs to be in the upper 80s inside the hive in the area where they're working the wax and they need plenty of wax which by the way we've done testing this year which boosted colonies so i have to mention it of course we ran low temperature rendered beeswax which means 160 degrees Fahrenheit I don't know what that is and Celsius right off the top of my head. But we ran it through a cheese grater, different sizes, and put it on the landing board outside the hive to boost wax production. Bees don't like to

waste things. Some people just gathered their capping wax from their uncapping tanks and did not see good results. So this is key. Rendering the bees wax from your cap wax, which is really good stuff and then heat it up to no higher than 160 degrees Fahrenheit it stays more workable it smells better it deforms easier and runs through the cheese greater and actually looks like cheese the bees prefer that if you render at a high temperature to do things fast and run it through a finer filter things like that and your bees wax looks really pale it also can feel a little brittle it doesn't smell as strong and if you can imagine if you can't scratch it easily with your fingernail or push your thumb into it really hard and get a little deformation there if you can't do that

and it's also hard for your bees to work think about it uh i used a zester which is another thing that a lot of people that viewed the video and had suggestions i got that got a really top rated one and what that produces is almost like beeswax and dust like it looks like sawdust but it's beeswax put that on the landing board too so what we do is we let the bees inform us what wax are going to use and they actually stayed with the larger um cheese greater ribbons someone else made a keen observation that she noticed that the bees were going after the segments that were about the length of the bees body a full length so head to tail and so we tried putting that out there too guess what that was true they were before that dragging in long pieces working really hard at it but if we just clip them off as it comes out of the cheese grater just shaving that off and then having little segments that are about a half inch long and put those on the landing board the bees are taking them

so i really appreciate by the way the feedback from all the people that have tried uh providing bees wax back to their bees outside the hive on the landing board so it demonstrates that they're bringing it in and utilizing it rather than just trying to clear it out. Where if you put it inside the hive and it just started disappearing, you could tell yourself, wow, they must really be using it. But if you're not watching that colony all the time, because remember, they work day and night, they can be tossing it right at the front. And then you might say, but I didn't see a bunch in the grass in front of the hive,

but watch your under, not the undertakers, but you're cleaning bees. When they grab a piece, they grab it, they fly it away. They don't always just drop it off the landing board. so looking around in front of your landing board may not be adequate. But I'm saying if you're trying to get your bees to draw comb and you've got a bunch of beeswax loafing around in a bucket somewhere, all your scrapings and things like that, uncapping tanks, if that's all sitting around unused, render it, run it through a cheese grater,

put it on the landing board on a nice hot day like today. Watch your bees take it in. They feel like they discovered something. By the way, because this is fun. the bees that are coming in that discovered on the landing board who's on the landing board guard bees foragers foragers coming and going when they stop go over and look at that sniff it and check it out what they do is they go inside and pretty soon other bees come around the corner those are your wax workers that may have been unemployed for lack of material inside the hive

they discover it they go back in next thing you know three or four of them are out there five or six 10 or 11 and they're dragging it in in a steady stream like little ants it's so much fun i highly recommend that you do it so the things that we're done here as far as drawing out the new comb because that's those are the basics do they have everything they need once they do if they still don't do it they're just not feeling it i don't know what to tell you uh i do know this so those of you who are starting with nucleus hives swarms that have been installed things like that once they start building comb keep them building comb if that's your goal if that's what you want it is the most expensive commodity inside the hive the comb itself they use a lot of resources to do it

takes a lot of labor to do it so once they're building it keep them building it it's a new colony keep that sugar syrup coming the lightweight sugar syrup one-to-one tends to be very good for comb building so because when they get the thicker syrups and people that mix up two to one good for you i don't do it i don't have any plans in my future to mix up two to one sugar syrup for anything the one to one sugar syrup is on par with what they're bringing in and nectar anyway so keep it going if they're drawing that sugar syrup and they're bringing it in they need a place to store it and they'll build their storage area while they're storing it it's pretty funny funny odd because in an observation hive you can see that there's a very shallow cell and it's shiny it's full of nectar it's got honey that's under processing so they actually draw out the cells while they're filling the cells which i think is interesting but uh you can keep them going once there's a stoppage once the resources stop and the production stops it's a little more of a challenge to get them to start making new comb again. So what are your thoughts on that? If you've got some secret method

for getting bees to draw a comb other than what I've already mentioned, share it down in the comments section. Everybody wants to know it's a very common issue. Question number three comes from Becky and Monroe, Washington. Says I'm a third year beekeeper on Monday. I noticed a few bees on the side of my keeper's hive trembling as if they were cold. By Wednesday, I had piles of dead bees in front of the hive. My landing boards are facing the same direction. One side had more than the other, but both had large piles.

So this is large piles of bees on the ground in front of what sounds like a two-colony keeper's hive system where both entrances face the same direction. What are your thoughts? I've encountered this before, so we're going to talk about it. Of course, there is drift. My other two Langstroth hives seem unaffected. This is key. So the keeper's hive with two colonies,

both demonstrating similar symptoms, dead on the ground, yet there's another colony, same apiary, not showing symptoms. Stay with me. Let's see what's going on here. Okay. They are located 20 to 40 feet away of this hive. My best guess is pesticide poisoning. I thought the same thing in the past.

I've seen this happen. So we're going to talk about it. The county does spray in my area. There is decent activity at the entrance in and out. I don't see pollen coming in, but my other hives aren't bringing in much either. Not all the bees look sick. I'm providing fresh water near the hive. Hopefully, they will avoid the many natural water sources in the area.

At this point, it's wait and see. My question is, what's the plan from here? So I've already answered, of course, because when somebody sends a message like this, I do respond to it. Because time is of the essence. You don't want your bees to die. So I've had this happen before. I've been looking at a colony of bees. And I got an interesting confession from a neighbor out of this. So the bees were trembling like this. It's like they just don't have, they want to fly.

They come out of the entrance. They go across the landing board. They try to fly, but then they just fall onto the ground. another one comes out similar symptoms trembling around they fall on the ground now I'm not saying that if you don't if you find bees on the ground in front of your hive roaming around aimlessly in circles trembling as stuff this can indicate pesticide but what can you do about it so of course I went to social media of course I said my bees are poisoned of course I did and my neighbor felt really bad so bad that he admitted that he was using an insecticide on his plants in his yard right next to me

By right next to me, I mean, you know, 600 feet away. Then I had a thought, hmm, this was an observation hive. So I thought, you know, well, let me look to see what's going on inside the hive too. And I started to look to see if they had resources. And do you know what? All their honey cells were empty. In fact, they had no nectar in there. And they were dying moment by moment.

Bees were just running out and dropping off. so I also noticed that there's no feed on the observation hive which I don't make a practice of feeding a lot of the observation hives unless they're just now setting up or they seem desperate because this changed how I respond to starving colonies. So I mixed up some one-to-one sugar syrup, nothing else in it, just one-to-one sugar syrup. Put that on the hive and now this is an observation hive

so I can see what their response is to it. If it's purely toxins, then I'm still not hurting them. There's a saying that Doc Holcomb in the Navy used to do. He's a medic. He was our radiation health officer. He said dilution is the solution to pollution. So when there's something going on, you just, if you think you drank something bad,

drink a lot of fresh water and replace it, that kind of thing. So by loading them up with sugar syrup, I'm going to try to dilute whatever is in their digestive system and maybe give them a little boost. So then what the bees did is, of course, those are roaming around inside the hive there was some trembling going on inside the hive too there were some bees that just weren't motivated to do anything so when i put these glass jars on with the one-to-one sugar syrup um bees went straight to the jars right away which was very

promising but not a lot of them maybe five or six and then what they did is they came down for the top where the feeders were and they started going b to b and the bees that they came to would stick out their tongues really feeble just kind of barely extend their tongue out and then they were feeding them and then they were like like a water boy at a baseball game they were bringing resources to all the bees throughout the hive and then it started cascading and more and more activity picked up and they were all passing on this boost of energy so what the colony was really doing was starved of carbohydrates they did not have the sugar resource necessary for their metabolism to kick in and burn calories because they'd run out.

This can happen really fast. And it's timely that we have this from Becky because we're going into a dearth in a lot of parts of the country. And when the dearth occurs, they've also just been brooding up at a very high rate, which means when they have a heightened population inside your hive, their demand for resources is also high. And unless they were keeping ahead of it and building a surplus, when that demand increases but the supply drops off in just a matter of days, which is what really happens in some areas, they consume the resources that they have, so they don't have enough to replace it,

and the colony begins to starve out. So they don't swarm in that situation. So they have brood that they would start to cannibalize. They try to eat their resources. Another good sign that your bees are supposed. starving and this happens a lot in spring you'll see a bunch of pollen cells torn open and you'll see the pollen out on the landing board and little bits and pieces all over the place because they're so starved for carbohydrates that they start digging into

the bee bread and consuming the carbs in there not the protein itself but they're after just the residual honey that's in there that's used in the processing of the bee bread so when you put that on and I really hope Becky sees this or can report back and maybe make a comment for everyone to see about how it went what they discovered because what do you have under your control the pesticide is over with so if they've been hit by something but it's key that it's only happening because the two colony system keepers hive their resources are shared so if they've run out of resources both sides would have that problem because colonies even that are right next to each other, may be foraging in completely different areas. Your bees can be foraging all over the place, and this is why if one gets into a pesticide and brings it back, you can have a colony in your apiary that has been affected by a pesticide while the rest of your colonies are not symptomatic. So good to know. What's under your control,

one-to-one sugar syrup. Me personally, I would also add hive-alive syrup to that sugar syrup if honey supers are not on. So if you have honey supers on, which it doesn't sound like there would be because they would have exhausted it if my hunch is correct and I'm pretty confident that this is what was going on.

I think they were starving. What do you think? So I hope it works. That's what you can do. So now here's the thing. Let's say it is toxic. What can you do about it? You can register.

A lot of backyard beekeepers don't like to register with anyone for any reason. They don't want the man in their business. So they don't even register their apiary with the Department of Agriculture, which, by the way, in the state of Pennsylvania is a requirement. I have to say that. But you want to get on a list, you want to know.

Are they going to spray in my area? Because if they are, you can put your screens on the fronts of your hives and just keep your bees from foraging that day. Where would you go? There's a website called Field Watch. It's a nonprofit. That's my shout-out for today. Google it.

field watch for beekeepers and what happens is you can register with them and the Department of Agriculture releases its information to them and they know when farmers are going to be spraying or when there's even weed control done by the highway department things like that so once you register there you can also because Becky's in the state of Washington Washington State Department of Agriculture pesticide compliance program That is a place, a government-run entity that you can reach out to, if you've got a bunch of dead bees and you're darn sure that they have been hit with a pesticide,

if the damage is extensive, then they will inspect and find out if there was illegal use of a pesticide. So there's a lot of cutbacks. The Belsville Lab, for example, you used to be able to collect 100 bees. That was your minimum sample size. and then you would ship them off to the Beltsville lab and you would get testing to see if they had been affected by pesticide. But here's the thing.

That would cost you money. First of all, it's not available to you anymore because their services have been way cut back and the Beltsville lab is being cannibalized and they're moving things out to all other areas and eliminating, eliminating a number of jobs and positions. But a lot of the scientists that located in Maryland there don't want to move

because once they're shutting down the services and those jobs are going away, they're not willing to move with a job to some new satellite location where those services are supposed to pick up again. But right now, it's not easy to do. So let's say you did. You packed them up, you just got to know, you send it out. There's nobody for you to go after. Because when they identify, if they do,

that your bees were exposed to a pesticide and acute dose that killed them off in the space of 24 hours, you had to prove soul source. exposure and then what are you doing are you seeking damages for a colony of bees or two colonies of bees i understand wipe out an entire apiary and it's your business absolutely you have to do something but if it's just a backyard person you are the mouse that roared you're really not going to get anything going there so do what you can do which is provide the best nutrition that you can fresh water everywhere of course outside which Becky's already doing and the sugar syrup

a really good resource and it can be boosted honey be healthy I don't know that it really boosts them that much hive alive definitely provides a boosts if you're also trying to recover the brood if the colonies compromise and the numbers are down you could also put in it's expensive though but let's say you're one of these people that just wants to do everything you possibly can, then you would also provide pollen patties, something like that made with real pollen, not substitute, because you're trying to resuscitate a colony that's been impacted by something. But the easiest route, the path of least resistance, is to provide sugar syrup for them

and see where they go from there. Because when I did that for that one colony, which changed the way I was looking at it, and I let my neighbor go ahead and feel bad about himself, because after all he was killing things with pesticide. When I saw how quickly they recovered, I decided that any time I see a colony that's got low energy like that, I just go ahead and give him sugar syrup, particularly because it's always going to be a small colony,

a colony low on resources. So there you go. Question number four comes from being natural. That's interesting. What would you do if you didn't want to expand the, apiary and didn't have a need for a queen for your queenless hive so you don't want to expand your apiary this comes up so often it's right up there with how do we keep them from swarming I don't want my bees to swarm they should never swarm here's how to stop it

you're stopping your fighting biology expansion that the bees do on the colony level colony level reproduction of a superorganism is generating more swarms. This is why the bees are still around in spite of our management, by the way. They produce far more colonies of bees, and then the residue is what we end up working with. But so many people do not want them to expand. So this was part of what I did is I collected a swarm of bees. I didn't want to set up another colony. I removed the queen. I sequestered the bees that swarmed until they were profoundly queenless, of course. They gave up hope and then i put them in front of the colony that i wanted to fortify and uh as soon as they smell

the pheromone of a queen in the absence of a queen that was with them when they swarmed then they will go with the next available queen and dupilic pheromone that they sense and they just pile into the hive so the video uh says no queen no problem so what it is i found a queenless colony and i kept the the queen in the swarm and use them to move in and take over a queenless colony. But if the resident colony had a queen and their numbers are low and all you want to do is boost it and you found a swarm but you don't want to expand your apiary, find the queen, remove the queen, let them be queenless, and then we'll follow the pheromone of the queen of the colony that you put them in direct contact with.

Works like a charm. I can say that that is a very successful thing to do. So that keeps it at whatever you want. Now let's see you fail at that. Let's see you can't keep your numbers down. Let's see your bees are too good at reproduction. And you don't want to expand your apiary. Well, that's where you find a mentee.

That's where you contact the bee club. There's always someone that needs a colony of bees and will come and collect them. So if you could hive them up for somebody, you know, I'm stuck with bees in nukes right now that I didn't want because we did experiments with them. My grandson was here. there were bees on the ground we said well we'll take these pro nukes that are inexpensive they're plastic we'll put five frames talk about your undrawn comb we had five frames uh they're wooden frames

with plastic heavy waxed foundation and that was it there's nothing else in there and you can put that in front of a swarm of bees and they moved in and occupied the space now i thought they would abscond after that but they're not they're still in it which now ends up being handy for me because I've just set up a new observation hive the largest observation hive I've ever had and a shout out to Ricky Rourke and Ruth who built that for me so I spiked it out they built it it's installed it's got its entrance it's ready for bees and so I'm going to take that nucleus hive that they moved into from the ground it was a swarm on the ground during a cold night with rain and everything else they were absolutely doomed and exposed and we just let them go

into a pro nuke and now they're going to be part of my best observation i've ever made and yes there's going to be a video about it you're going to see it i'm not going to leave you out you're going to see what goes on so combine your swarms remove the queen the swarm goes back to the original colony supply your mentee and you're really just fighting biology So if you don't want them to expand, you can combine colonies. That ends up being kind of a mess because if they're established colonies, then now you're also combining resources. It's like combining households.

You have all this furniture from multiple households, and now it's all going to jam into one. So you can end up with a giant colony. And so, but combining colonies is, of course, an option. Making one queenless, whichever one is the lowest performing colony, remove the queen, and then combine the rest. after they've all emerged from their cells and let them join up with another colony. So that's it.

A lot of people have methods, means and ways. Question number five comes from Jason from Alpine, Utah. It says, again, thank you for the inside on Formic Pro, and the straight from the horse's mouth on how to use it. So that was, of course, a video interview with Heather Brockard Bell, Dr. Brockert Bell. so if you've done any incorporations to things and even modified stuff for the flow hive that says in the thought of winter preparation i know you use a rapid feeder based on all that i've seen the question i have is about apame feeders i have seen you have and use the appame feeder on

other occasions is there a clear preference on quality over quantity with the feeders or some other reason why you use the rapid feeder over apame my concern when deciding to use the appame is the reviews on their website and other locations show people sharing many bees drowning and not being recommended so i don't know if i have a preference of rapid round over apomai so i did a little side-by-side comparison here that i made just before i came on today and of course it was in my thumbnail this is a ground that of you are made by the way it's 3d printed see they put my name on it this is really good by the way this thing is so well made the little cone on the inside there these come up through to feed um i like this a lot and the person who made it is just one of those

home geniuses engineer types that can come up with things that could solve a lot of problems in beekeeping but since they don't care about monetary success they're not going to share it with anybody so I get one you don't have one I'm sad that I get cool things but you don't anyway I'm gonna explain the rapid round first I started to use this before Appame was out they didn't have feeders didn't have their hides yet nothing was going on so the wrap it around to me was cool this particular one see it doesn't have the center comb that goes below so this would sit right on top of your inner cover on your

Langstroth beehive. Now the key to it is it's set up right now with a centered cone that with others let me shift to another one that let me show you one that you could get if you wanted it. Oh look a yellow one. So this one I like to because completely transparent top when you look inside you pull the cover off of your hive you have to have a shim around this. So there again you're using a medium box usually a shallow would work and then you've got your outer cover on top of that and you insulate the space because this stays on for wintertime too so the advantage is what happens when winter comes around you're not going to put sugar syrup in here in

wintertime no syrup in winter time period okay so we don't want syrup so look this keeps the bees in here so they can access the syrup and you can see them feeding you can also open the top and fill it with syrup while the bees don't fly out at your face which means it's so easy to do maintenance and check for those of you who feed your bees and i feed them i don't let bees starve i don't feed every colony just the ones that need it now if i don't need syrup in here wintertime is here so now what do i do the same feeder pull the cover off leave it inside your feeder shim don't be like me and be hunting all over over for the tops that you pulled out and now you put dry feed in here now you used to just pour dry sugar in there and let the condensation rise through that center hole and then let it drip down from this cover and then the beads would come up and they could access the dry sugar and it becomes a candy board of sorts so for years i did that pretty darn cool it worked spring comes along leftover sugar add water to it mix it up turn

it into a syrup go back to syrup feeding and there you have it all in one feeder now is there any advantage first of all these are very inexpensive it's called the rapid round if you do research on the rapid round here's a normal one just haven't have it handy if you do research on the rapid round uh i don't know who came up with it i don't know who invented it i don't know what's going on super handy and it's practical and when you find them that are well made they're worth having I have a whole bin full of them but then doesn't appamee come along so remember inexpensive functional liquid or solid now we'll move on to the appamee the reason I like the appamee first of all they came out with their

little thin ones so when the first app of me came out you had a you know two feeders on top side by side and there were four again liquid or solid now here's the advantage remember with the rapid round you're either feeding a solid or you're feeding a liquid you know what I'm about to say so we have two feeders now they're the long skinny ones they're separated this one over here has a candy setting so the beads can go up and get solids meanwhile during transitional times of the year I can also feed sugar syrup on the other side at the same time pretty handy now could you do that with a

rapid round yes you could but you need two of them so you would take two of these the smaller one not the big one see the size difference you need two small ones you put those on your inner cover now you have a hole in the back and a hole in the front and they sit side by side one could have solids in it the other could have liquid so now you need two feeders but you're still at a price point lower than the apame. Okay. So let's see you wanted to do that.

The thing about the apame is, though, it takes the place of your inner cover, so you no longer need an intercover. The apame feeder becomes the inner cover. Then you put a single layer of reflectex over the top of that, for those who are in northern climates, but I highly recommend it also for those

who are in hot climates. Why? Because insulation protects from heat just as well as it protects your bees from the outside cold. So it's a win-win in both ways. So we put the APMA feeder on. They had the dual system, remember two feeders, but they replaced that. Now there's a 10-frame single feeder that has a fondant or a pollen-pack feeding area dead center. Meanwhile, they've split up the two syrup sides. So now we can feed syrup or solid as well as syrup and solid at the same time.

So case and point, the colony that looked like they were affected by toxins, if it was a dietary issue, and you wanted to boost them back to health, and you wanted to give them pollen patties or something else like that, along with sugar syrup, there you go. It's all set in the APA system. But that's expensive because I looked it up just before I came on. Now this is from the APA website, which, by the way, you should ask for a Fred done discount because they actually have one. so it's called Fred 15 or something and I think it's $15. It's not a percentage, but you should ask for it. Anyway, the feeder by itself is $40.

That's pretty steep. $55 for the cover. You can buy a combo with the feeders and the cover from APMA for $90. So that's the top and the feeder. Their tops are insulated. They're very rugged. They strap down well. I think they're going to last pretty much the rest of my beekeeping existence.

So anyway, but could you get a couple of rapid rounds for the same money and cut holes in your inner cover and put a feeder shimmer around and match that price point and insulate all of that? You can. But the app of me is ready to go out of the box. Now you can also, let's see you have wooden hive equipment. This is just hitting me while I'm talking to right now. Well, we're just visiting here on YouTube.

Nature's Image Farm. So Nature's Image Farm has a setup where you go there and you can get the bottom board, the feeder, and the outer cover. It's a kit that goes for wooden gear. So for those of you don't like the look of an Appamate Plastic hive, you don't want your B yard to look like a play school yard, right? So if you don't want that or you don't want to spend the money for that, get an Indura hive system. That's wooden hive system, which also. has the propola interior surface for propolis and ask them for the fredden discount where none exists and you'll pay the same as everybody else but i want them to know that you went there because of me

so anyway uh you can do that too so it works on wood and wear if you have existing high equipment you don't want to go apamay all the way but you want to take advantage of that feeder and you want that insulated outer cover and you want the utility that's offered and the fact that you no longer need. You don't need a feeder shim. You don't need an intercover. You can just get that unit. How's that sound? So those are my opinions. I also like, for example, if I'm only going to feed sugar syrup and I've already got the rapid round setup, but I want a whole gallon of it and I want to slow feed it. I'm going to use the B-smart feeder. Oh look, I just happen to have a bowler hat over here. Don't know why. All right. So then there's also

this so if you already have your inner cover you already have the hole in the middle and you already have a shim and you have an outer feeder look an outer cover that's insulated the bee smart feeder trickle feeds them so this is something no drowning bees at all none zero and by the way one of the arguments here is that they don't want to see dead bees they don't want them to drown if you're not using a heavy sugar syrup your bees have a much better chance of recovering if they find themselves shoved into the syrup by a bunch of other hungry honey bees. Because when they haven't been fed and they're starving, you know what they do? They rush it.

And they push each other into the syrup. And if the syrup is a two to one heavy syrup, they can't get out of it. They get bogged down and they die in it. And the other bees, because they care so much about each other, they just start feeding off of the bodies of the dead bees that are in the feeder. None of that, with this, because of the way it trickle feeds into. your bees. I also recommend that remember when we talked about putting multiple feeders on having it one in the back one in the front kind of thing that's better

than having it dead center. Why is dead center not good for an inferted feeder? Because if it does let's say we get a really cold night, a really warm day, and this is half full and the air expands it starts pushing the syrup out of it. It's going to go straight down on your brood right down the center. Where if you set this to the back in a corner, or even near the front. The back is preferred over the front. Why do you think it would say that? Because if it's near the front and it expresses syrup out, where's it going, near the entrance? Because you've probably tilted your hive slightly toward the entrance. And that means what?

The potential for robbing. Or if it's in the back, it has to make it all the way down to the bottom without getting eaten by any of the other bees and all the way out to the front without being eaten by any other bees and then cause a robbing frenzy. So this is a good tank for that. set and forget kind of thing no drowning bees at all period okay so i think it covered the ground on question number five question number six is what's up 73 42 that's the youtube channel name how much syrup should you feed in a dearth i have double deeps with frames and have not been they have not been built out so the quantity totally up in the air how much should you feed in a dearth if you know a dearth is coming and you know a colony is

is not stored well in other words they haven't provisioned themselves in preparation for a dearth and the population is up high uh i don't like to wait let's talk about this since we can do some prior planning i don't like to wait till the end of the year to discover that a light colony that i've known has been struggling all year long suddenly needs a lot and then we put heavy two to one sugar syrup on so they can store it and prepare for winter last minute i don't want to do that If I have a colony that's struggling at all that's behind at all, they haven't got a super yet to begin with. We'll put the light sugar syrup on. First of all, it's a lower investment for you too.

And I put it on to keep them functioning. And if we start seeing that they are filling their cells, they're starting to backfill things, no more feeding. So the question about how much is really not a quantity. It's how long do you continue to feed until they're demonstrating that they're recovering, that they're building a surplus on their own once they start doing that time to stop feeding does that make sense and the other thing is we just mentioned rapid rounds app ame the B smart feeder you can leave those things in place you should not be scurrying around going into your B shed looking for gear there's nothing wrong with leaving it out in the apiary on your inner cover with a feeder shim on even if you're not feeding so that when the time comes when you're you observe something in your hive that requires your attention and some kind of food resource, it's already there. All you have to do is bring the resource with you. The feeder is in place. Some of these rapid rounds, for example, not this one in particular, but the bees will

build honeycomb up through the center of this. And I probably should pull one and just have it for training but because they'll run the honeycomb right up through the top here and the bees use that as a latticework that they climb up and down and there's nothing wrong with leaving that in place and that's what happens when you leave a feeder like this on your hive you definitely want to put that cover on there because they can even in some cases attach the cover with some brace comb in there and if they do that that's not the end of the world. What if you needed to clean it? If you needed to clean it, then you would use bleach water, you'd remove it, bleach water, immerse the whole thing, flood the whole thing, get a really good dwell time, and then rinse it completely with fresh water after

that and restore it to duty because all you'd be doing is getting any mold out of it. Or if you're using a supplement, like Honeybee Healthy, Bee Keeper's Choice, Pro Health, hive alive, all of that will deter black mold from starting. So how much should you feed is just to keep your bees at the level that you want them to be at? You don't want them to starve and get desperate, and we don't want to do a knee-jerk response at the end of the year, so we want to trickle feed and supplement them going forward. The other thing is, if all your other colonies are doing well and you've just got one that just struggles and doesn't do well, maybe time to compare.

buying colonies or remove a queen. That's all I'm saying. And if you want to know what the resources should be where you live, there's a website for that. What do you think it is? It's called bescape.psu. Dot, psu.edu. And that will help you prepare. If you've got an area that doesn't see a heavy dearth, like we really don't. We have an area where the resources are not as heavy as they are at other times of the year, but we don't have a complete dearth. There are a lot of beekeepers that have trucks with huge totes that hold a thousand pounds of sugar syrup and they go hive to hive and they feed and fill every single hive that's commercial i don't do that don't have to we're back here beekeepers so what i like my bees to do i don't want to have to work with them i mean it's not

because they don't like them let's be honest it's because uh if they naturally reduce their brood population of the hive in response to resources out in the environment that's what bees are supposed to do and then when the next heavy nectar flow kicks in the golden rod the asters and all the stuff that people talk about in the fall then they'll boost up and on their own respond to that and that's when for me they build a huge surplus so I actually hate to say it but I like it when things lean out a little bit and the populations drop down a little bit in my colonies because it's a backyard operation. I don't have any commitment to make grade and bring my bees to pollination services and things like that. So I want to see which bees are naturally responding

to the seasons in my area. And every year it feels like this year is so much hotter, this year is so much worse, the dirt is so much longer and so severe. I don't know that it is. You need to keep records for as long as you're going to keep bees, have records to look back on and see how did they do last year? What time of year do they do specific things or require help, if at all? In a perfect world, they never need help. So colonies are very adaptable. So it's completely up to you.

Hate to cop out on that. Question number seven, we're getting near the end. Don't worry. this is from Matt Roberts 9569 says how many quart jars a year do you fill and this is a question I get so often now this question was posted on the flow high video and the flow high video when they when they have it if you don't know what it is they have a special super with special frames when they fill these frames and they're huge each frame produces a half a gallon of finished honey. And there are seven frames which match the 10 frame Langstroth base. There's also a smaller one that has six frames that matches an eight frame Langstroth base.

When those frames are full and they're capped, each frame, half a gallon, half a gallon, two quarts. So how many quart jars a year do you fill? So do they build up strong in spring? this is why it's all regional the colony of bees that you have doesn't do better or worse because of the configuration that they're in they do better or worse because of the kind of bees you have the environment what it's providing and how healthy they are unhealthy bees low productive bees don't do well in any setup so if you are thinking about a flow hive and a flow super they are huge the super of course you need to have a strong really you know kicking colony of bees if you notice when we look at my bee yard i don't have a flow hive

and a flow super on every hive out there it only goes on the strongest most robust most productive colonies i was going to put it on my two colony keepers hive system and still might for the fall neck or flow but i'm needing those bees for something else right now which i can't tell you about but when it succeeds and it will i'm going to share it with you it's going to be cool but anyway that's impossible to predict and it's something that when you go out somewhere you go to a nature center and environmental center which i will be going to also this year the tom ridge environmental center it's kind of an opener question that people that are pondering or thinking about keeping bees like to ask, how much money can I get from keeping bees? If I start beekeeping, how much honey will I get my first year every year?

How much honey can I sell? And so those are not my people. You know, I answer those questions. Of course, I'm there as an ambassador for my bee club, the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. I'm going to be nice to everybody. But I kind of sink a little bit when that's, That's the reason somebody wants to keep bees, is they want to know how much profit they can make from it.

I get it. Some people have to have a return on their investment. Honey becomes secondary for me. The bees produce it. I don't like getting everything in the world sticky. The flow hive becomes an easy way to extract honey. And what I'm working on right now, a little side hint with the two colony keepers hive system also does not make a mess. when we extract honey and it's not from flow hive.

So I'm going to wait and see what that's about. But anyway, let's say seven frames, half a gallon per frame, 14 quarts. 14 quarts right now, according to the American Bee Journal, goes for $24 a quart in my area. So that's $336 for a single harvest. You'll get two harvests a year, one in spring, one in fall,

if it's on a strong colony apiece. if they only feel half of it don't feel don't get mad at me it's because your bees your bees didn't do it it's not my fault um so yeah you end up and if you consider the cost of the hive and the equipment if you had two harvests out of a flow super in one year you would pay for the flow super now if you sprung for the entire hive you probably don't even break even until your third harvest so that's stuff to think about If you're a number cruncher, maybe flow hive isn't what you're after. Maybe you should just go with standard colonies.

See what happens. Go to traditional normal extraction. That's what could happen. Completely unpredictable like any livestock. It's like if I had 50 chickens, how many eggs would I have to sell every year? Well, some of them molt and they go off lay and some of them got scared and they're not laying. And some of them are bullies. and some of them are, you know, not big egg producers.

So, and they're not eating well and things like that. So the variables are just something that come along with agriculture. Okay, question number eight. Last question of the day comes from Ross Wagner, 9083. I think I witnessed my first false swarm event. So today I was looking at my hives and a swarm kicked off and landed on a tree nearby. and I watched them collect and the swarm was small about the size of a package of bees. About an hour later I came back to the bee yard and they flew back to the front of the hive

and covered the boxes but were inside in minutes. I did a quick inspection and found five-capped, dark-tipped swarm cells ready to pop. Why do they do false swarm events? I'm assuming the queen didn't leave them, leave with them for some reason. Okay, swarms are my favorite thing, which is why there are so many swarm videos on my YouTube channel. And if you haven't checked them out, the YouTube channel is Frederick Dunn. And you go there and you look at the top right and there's a little space there with a magnifying glass next to it. And just type in Swarms.

It's a playlist. And it's a long playlist. There's over 1,400 videos on that channel. You're going to find something fun. Anyway, queens are, they can be really annoying. Let's just be honest. The queen flies out. We had a sworn that started in one of our hives when we had guests here.

So we went over to look at the landing board, and then I got my trusty queen pipe out because I carried in my pocket everywhere I go. Well, you know, everywhere I go in the bee yard. I don't mean if I'm going out to eat or something, I don't have my queen pipe. But anyway, I was looking at them leaving the hive because the queen is going to come out. And she's not the first one out the door. See, the entrance of the hive, when they start to swarm, They all head out, but you'll also see all these impatient bees just zigging and zagging in front of the hive facing the hive.

Not doing orientation flights, nervously anticipating the departure of the queen and they're going to fly with her and make sure she goes where the rest of them went. Because they'll already be assembling on a branch somewhere or a post or something like that before the queen even leaves the hive. and there have been several times where I just ran my video camera at the entrance and got the departure of the queen. It's a lot of fun to see that happen. So anyway, if I was sitting there with my queen pipe, why? Because when the queen comes out, she often doesn't just fly straight out from the entrance. She scoots around on the landing board a little bit, getting her bearings, and that's when she's vulnerable to capture by a beekeeper.

So then what would I do? Well, I'd control the whole swarm that way. I can make them go anywhere I want. put them in any hive i want put them in any configuration i want it's a perfect world but sometimes the queen comes out and you know what the queen does she turns around and goes right back in sometimes she'll stand at the landing board and flap her wings really hard and she can't fly so she's not lean enough yet and she's in jeopardy because keep in mind cap cells already the queen that is about to replace her we want her gone before the replacement queens emerge why because it could be a

fight. We don't want there to be a fight. We don't want a brand new emerged queen to fight with the old established queen. First of all, she doesn't always do her own fighting. It's true. Some of the workers who favor her will attack a competing queen, and they'll even in some cases kill that queen for her. Queens fight dirty. I don't know if you've ever seen it. When queens are fighting other queens, this is something you may or may not know, but I think it's dirty pool. A queen that's very experienced and has a full stomach, if you know what I mean, can discharge the contents of her stomach on the queen that she thought was about to pick a fight with her. And it is a sticky substance that bees all of a sudden mob whatever it goes on to.

So what she's done is thrown something on the queen through her abdomen, the exit, onto the queen that she doesn't like, and then the bees go all over that queen because now she has some desirable liquid. on her. So yes, they eliminate on their competition to make them sticky and also the bees go after the sticky stuff. It's weirdness. So anyway, then when she's ready, she will leave. The point is to avoid a fight like that. We don't want queens to squirt their waste material onto other queens as a, you know, a dirty fighting technique. And so, yeah, but then they're gone. They're going to go. There's another thing I want people to think about because Ross did not observe the actual departure of the swarm and assumes that they were all just coming back. Because what swarms do,

when they take off, you'll also notice once the swarm is departed with their resident queen that a bunch of bees line up on the landing board and start fending their Nazanov glands right away and they appear to be recalling or helping the other bees orient back to the hive. So what you could have, is part of a swarm that actually took off successfully and then the rest of them are just returning there's a percentage that splits and so we did a video that showed an observation hive from the inside you could see that the entire population of the hive is just going everywhere none of them were sitting around like nothing was happening so they all appeared to be leaving it looked really bad if you had that bees eye view inside the hive

So, but they didn't all leave. They acted like they were and then half of them returned. So worst case scenario, 70% of the population departs. Best case scenario, less than half of them actually leave and the rest come right back. Particularly if the queen leaving is a tertiary swarm or an after swarm, then a smaller group feels committed to that queen and so they don't leave with a full complement. Remember, Ross observed a small colony of, bees on the tree about the size of a package so if that's an unmated queen then a bunch of them might have changed our minds and decided to just stay home rather than risk themselves in a queen that hasn't

even found a mate yet and cannot guarantee the success of the future of that colony if and when they even find a cavity to occupy so but it is fun and i installed a swarm this year a couple of weeks ago and I had a queen Includer. It's back here. That's what these are. Those are my Queen Includers that I put on the entrance. Once I've installed the Queen, I see her go in and I want to keep her there and I don't want to abscond.

And then while I was sitting there watching the following day, do you know a Queen showed up, landed on that landing board and tried to get in through the entrance. So then I got my Queen pipe out and I was going to catch her off the front of that because she was blocked and couldn't go in and guess what happened? She squeezed through.

she got right through the queen the queen include her and she included herself in that colony so that was a virgin queen likely and she was really squirly and she went in there so i don't know what happened the colony didn't seem upset or anything else i didn't find her dead the following day did i just pick up a two queen system sister queens i don't know what's going on but queens are remarkably agile when they're out flying around on their own particularly these virgin queens are lightweight they and fly fast. So that's it for today. That was the last question of the day. So the fluff section, don't forget, robbing risk is on the rise. We're hitting into a dearth or at least a low resource time for your bees, which means strong colonies, rob weak colonies, just what they do.

You're going to have to be vigilant, very difficult to stop once it starts. It's time to treat. For those of you who are doing, for a road instructor might count. this is the time to do it. They're building fast, and when you have a lot of reproduction in a colony, you also have a lot of mite reproduction. So if you don't know your mite counts, you don't know which colonies are handling them well. Whether your treatment, treatment free, whatever IPM you use, integrated pest management, that's IPM.

Whatever you use, you want to know which colonies are handling the mites the best, have the lowest mite counts on them, and if you're going to treat this is the time. Don't wait till the next nectar flow to do it. It's a mite-rich environment right now and you can target them. Be ready to feed if they need it. Water on, there's a water demand escalation right now. So we have fresh water out for the bees all the time. We've got a pond that's for the bees.

You hear the bees before you see the pond. They are all getting water. Now we also have little satellite feeders out. and we put salt water in those. Now this is very key. What percentage of salt should you have in the water? One teaspoon of Morton sea salt. That's what the bees prefer, by the way.

Morton sea salt. One teaspoon per quart. Mix that up and put it out there for your bees. A higher concentration of sea salt has been proven not to be good for them, and I understand if evaporation takes place, of course, then it has a higher concentration of salts too. What they do with it, I don't know, but there's a demand for it. It's not that every water bee that goes out goes for a high saline content solution.

They don't. But there's enough of them that do that putting it out for them is worth it. So they're after salts and minerals. And I just want to thank you for spending time with me today. I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead. And if you've got questions, don't forget, while it's fresh on your mind, go ahead and go to the way to be.org, click on the contact page, fill out the form, and send me the topic that's on your mind, the question that you have. And you never know. Next Friday, it might be something that we talk about. Thanks for being here. I'm Frederick Down, and this is Ben, The Way to Be.