The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode 371 laying workers and so much water in nectar, where does it all go?

Episode Date: September 12, 2026

This is the audio track from YouTube:  https://youtu.be/UuSho4upFRQ?si=13d-4upK0EDlBxYZ

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, September the 11th of 2026. This is back here at beekeeping questions and answers episode number 371. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here. I hope everything is going great wherever you are. I am in the northeast part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please go down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order with timestamps later not immediately but later. Anyway, and if you want to know how to submit a topic for consideration for a future episode,

please go to my website, which is the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact. You'll see a form there. Just fill it out, submit it. It can be a topic, a question that you have personally, and provide as little or as much information as you want. If you want to listen instead of watch, you don't want to use up all your data or whatever. You can go to the podcast. It's called The Way to Be podcast. You Google it, you find it, you listen, and it's going to be fantastic. Okay, above average, maybe.

And so outside, there's a lot going on. Super nice day. I'd rather be in here, of course. I'd rather be here answering your questions instead of being outside in a perfect weather day ahead of the storm, some rain that we might be having in the future here. So I'm right here with you, because things are happening.

The bee yard sounds like ventilators are just blowing all the time. Because they're dehydrating their honey, we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But it's 73 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 23 Celsius, 63% relative humidity. That's good news. Because it was 98% relative humidity at 9 o'clock this morning. And that means that your bees cannot dry down the honey. And there's a lot of drying that has to be done because a lot of honey has come in and it's still coming in. We're going to talk about that too.

So 1.6 mile per hour winds, 2.5 kilometers per hour. It's critical. You need to know that. It's going to be different where you are. Just run outside and feel the air. See what's happening. Guess what's happening tonight? If you like to photograph stars, this is the night to do it, assuming that you don't have a bunch of cloud cover,

and that's because it's a new moon. Darker than dark. Pitch black. The only light is probably coming from the pollution of a nearby city. People cause that. But if you're photographing stars, you do that. time lapse sequence that you want to get your GoPro out there and see what that's going to look like you want to put in your bee yard have it look really neat this is the night for it the moon will not compete

and your stars will be crystal clear so that's good news and i did walk around outside and stare at things before i talked today and uh so right now you just go out in your yard or in the nearby landscape wherever you happen to be and listen for the bees see what they're on see what they're doing and get up close. Look at them. And you can use an iNature app or you can use a plant net app for your phone. You take a picture of whatever it is you're looking at and it'll tell you what it is. It's a lot of fun. You contribute to the database for your area. So golden rod remains number one. It's everywhere. But there's a lot of brown golden rod out there too. And that's where your bees are getting nectar and pollen. Very pale pollen, by the way. It's coming in.

the whole time you're listening to this. If you're watching it on YouTube, up in the corner, you'll see a video of a landing board. I'll explain that more in a minute. But pollen is coming in, nectar is coming in. So what's the tight second right now? Where are they topping off your goldenrod honey with? Aster's.

So the Aster's are kicking in. And that's good news because some people don't like goldenrod. I know. I don't know why. They don't like the smell of it. They say it's like dirty socks or something. Now, I personally don't have dirty socks, so I don't even know. I'm not familiar with that smell, but I heard it's not good.

And for me, though, I like golden rod honey. I like it. It's nice and strong, flavorful. It's good stuff. I don't see any reason to stop it. Astros are really good. Nectar and pollen coming from asters, and my bees are all over them, which is really good news. It shows that they really like them.

You find them in ditches along the woodland edges, and it's a great thing to do. Just go out, sit around, stare at them. Make it your job. Make it a point to go out and do that. Now another thing that's coming in because a lot of people are asking about their honey, is it darker than normal? Does it smell stronger? Does it taste better than it usually does? And yeah, we have a lot of dark honey this year and a very good friend of ours told my wife that that honey's old. That's why it's dark. Oh, no, no. It's not old. It's fresh. It came right out of a honey super that was only put on midsummer.

and it's capped and it's dark and it's flavorful and guess what makes dark honey well buckwheat we know i've planted thousands of buckwheat plants which should better this year than any other year before i've tried it before lots of times but i want you to know that japanese knotweed is producing a dark honey that's very aromatic and very flavorful and dark amber i like to say root beer colored it's good stuff i like it do you even have a preference light honey to dark honey you know because you could have clover everywhere. We have clover. It didn't make my list because they only want to talk about the top four. And they're visiting the clover sporadically. That gives you a very pale honey and it gives you some tan colored pollen by the way, which seems different. And after that comes

napweed. Napweed is number four. Nectar and pollen high protein in the pollen by the way. And I know, I know. Spotted napweed is an invasive and people don't like it. But if you're a beekeeper and you like the honey from it. It's good stuff. So those are the top four. We could go on. There could be others. But where you are, what are they hitting on right now? And by the way, does it bother you? Golden Rod, honey? Do you still eat it? Some people are so strongly opinionated that they say things like, I don't harvest honey once the golden rod blooms because it's so terrible. I just leave it on for the bees. Well, I'm sure the bees are happy, but I like it. I think it's great. and so the video in the corner that if I haven't put it up by now it's going to be put up soon

is a landing board the entrance of a hive that we just put out there because we had an unusually strong swarm season this year twice spring and then of course now and it's alarming to people because they don't want their bees to leave someone I was speaking to recently said they quit beekeeping because they're bees swarm and they just couldn't handle it. They couldn't handle the loss. Well, swarming's not a loss. It's a replacement of the queen and the colony continues. And sometimes the difference from after the queen leaves and the new queen takes over, gets made it and all that stuff, there isn't a lot of time that passes when that happens. And sometimes, unless you're out in your bee yard and notice the swarm leaving, you may not even

know what's going on. But as I've often said, if you've got a hive sitting around that's got nothing in it, you have nothing to lose by having a September swarm. It's not ideal. I get it. So the video that you're watching with the bees going in on the landing board is it was an empty hive. And I don't mean just a space. Okay. 10 frame Langstroth deep hive.

I made a video about it. I'm going to share about it in the coming week. And I just put in heavy waxed foundation in there. So no drawn comb. We're out of that. I'm not going to waste better comb from better bee because we can. can't get any new better comb. So saving that. So how am I going to get the new swarm that I hived to build out and draw a comb? I'm going to keep them loaded with sugar syrup. And I know some people

are against sugar syrup. I know you don't like it, but it's the only way that I'm going to get a decent amount of comb drawn out. And guess what? They're bringing in pollen. And I'll bet you when I do that one week inspection of this colony, I'm going to see a lot of new comb. And I'm also going to see brood in there. And I'm going to keep it going. Because once you hive a swarm, those bees are primed, they're ready to build honeycomb. They're ready to go. But if there's a work stoppage, if they all go home earlier, whatever happens in a beehive when they don't have the resources to continue building, if there's a work stoppage, you have a challenge on your hands to get them going again. However, if they start building the comb and you keep trickling in the

nectar resources, one-to-one sugar syrup, then they'll keep building comb. So it's a lot of fun. You might be wondering what kind of feeder am I using? Well, you're going to have to watch the video to know. Okay, I'll tell you. It's by Better Bee. It's the one gallon tank with the little tiny spud in the bottom with only like, I don't know, eight or nine tiny holes in it. So it's like trickle feeding, which keeps the resource coming at a low rate so the bees utilize it better. So that's it. That's what's going on. That's what you're watching right now in the corner. So we're going to kick off with the very first question. And I already told you how to submit your questions. I hope I didn't forget anything. Oh yeah. If you have something you want to share, you want others

to look at it. You want people to know what's going on in your apiary and you just took a 30 second video or something. You want to upload it. Get the opinion of your peers from all over the world. By the way, you go to the fellowship, the way to be fellowship on Facebook. And there you go. I can get the opinions of people. So right away I have Kurt Bofinger. It says, Can the bees be transferred to a different hive to be transported to an orchard or a field to pollinated crop? Now this comment was on a video that deals with APAVIR, API-V-E-R-T-E, they're with a North American Honeybee Expo, and what it is is compartmentalized beekeeping. So it's like the A-Z hives.

They have these sheds, these little buildings, and the difference is A-Z hives have their own frame designs and things like that. The A-P-V-Var is a similar system. but they use Langstroth frames. So it's very interesting if you don't know about it, it's in my playlist. So you can see what's going on there, but my answer to that is I would not pull apart a building like that that has hives built in modular systems and transport those somewhere else for pollination, but don't give up. Here's something that you could do. I have a friend that does face painting.

I know, it's interesting. What does it have a friend that does face painting? I know. It's interesting. What does it have? to do with beekeeping? Well, the thing is, uh, face painting. She bought a short bus. So kind of like the activities bus from school. And I was surprised how inexpensive the bus was. And she uses it for a mobile face painting thing, but it's a bus. It's designed to carry a lot of weight. That thing was very inexpensive. And sure, it needed some work. But here's what I was thinking about. When I look at things, I think of bees. You could put something like that. A,

of her system in a bus or on a trailer or something that's enclosed, I saw someone at, again, an expo where they had a horse trailer. Now horse trailers and livestock trailers are designed to carry a lot of weight. And they had modified it like an AZ house, and they had all of these entrances to beehives inside the trailer facing through the outer walls. And then the convenience factor was that they hook up their truck to it. Now they were trying to see. sell these, by the way, and asked them how many they had sold. They said done. That's too bad. But I think people were walking around, getting ideas, looking at it, taking measurements, figuring it out and thinking that maybe they'll just do that themselves. They'll get their own

trailer instead of buying the whole system. So then you decide how many hives you're going to have in it, how it's going to be configured, what the best comfort level will be for you to work those hives inside a trailer and critical keep the load balanced. And then guess what we're going to be? what you can do. You can do pollination, small scale, go to orchards and things like that, and it's ready to go, and then you drive it back home. So there's none of this loading and unloading of the beehives and moving frames and things like that, which I think would be highly disruptive for Kurt here. And I like the idea of a trailer. What are your thoughts on that? Build it up. Or a bus like my friend Connie, face painting by Connie. Okay.

So anyway, yeah, that's the first thing that struck me. I would rather have it in that than take them apart. You could. But transportation is always a hassle for people that are not commercial. Sidelineers, by the way, the B-in-Fourn Partnership considers anyone with less than 500 hives a sidelineer. And then commercial is 500 and higher. So if you're on that level, though, you've got big trucks to move your stuff. And so it's a whole different thing.

The logistics are different. small scale think livestock trailers that's my opinion is what I think's going on next question comes from Mark Wensel it says hi Fred have you purchased quality wooden nuke hives and components from laps B supply they're worth checking out they're a good company okay so I was griping about nucleus hives and how I don't have enough and I want a really good one and so I have not checked that out, but if you have sourced a really good nucleus wooden hive,

I think that's great. I recommended that we go and lean on bug farmer to see if he will make a nucleus hive to my specifications, and I got a response from him. He responded to last Friday's Q&A, and I think he might be going to jump on it. But if you know of a company that's making what you consider to be a perfect wooden nucleus hive box, 5 frame deeps is my preference go ahead and put that down in the comment section if there's a link to a company or something like that you're going to find out the comment gets automatically withheld because they have to screen links and then of course we'll do that

and then you can all let me know what you like so i haven't looked at that yet i plan to but if you have experience with that company or others where are you finding your favorite wooden nucleus hive boxes right now i have a lot of pro-nukes and my grandson wants to use those to earn money. He's a capitalist all the way. He wants to sell nukes next year and I asked him what his street credibility was. In other words, why should people buy nucleus colonies from him when he has no reputation? I also asked him if the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has to check him out to make sure that he should even be able to sell nucleus hives because you do have to be inspected. So they don't want you spread

disease it's that simple so he wants to take all my pro nukes and he thinks he's going to make a profit which in beekeeping is quite the challenge these days so the next question comes from nancy nolton 6079 and it says has anyone determined what bees become the laying workers is it some of the last nurse bees or old foragers so if you're sitting there thinking laying worker what are we even talking about well when things go bad when things go wrong inside the beehive now I'd like to say something about laying workers in general you may have laying workers right now it's true they could be out there even with the queen you may have workers laying eggs in the hive what happens to them what kind of eggs what kind of eggs are they well there's diploid and haploidal so there's haploid which means it's unfertil because they're a laying worker

never been mated. They never been on a date with a drone. So what they do is there for some reason their ovaries are activated. They don't have as many ovaries or as big ovaries as the queen does, but they've got them and they can lay eggs. Now sometimes you have a laying worker but you'll never know. And why is that? Because worker bees are going around doing something called policing the eggs. So what they're doing is they're finding eggs that just don't belong in the worker cells, for example. They sniff them. They find out that they're either too closely genetically related to the colony or they don't like them for some other reason that we don't know or they find out their drones and they're just not going to let the drones develop inside those cells while the queen is around so they eat them yep they munch

the eggs so what happens is now it's twofold by the way these laying workers a lot of bees A lot of workers have the potential to turn into a laying worker. But it requires a pheromone shift in the hive. So there's two things that let your bees know that things are kind of okay. And there's no reason to activate your ovaries and go around dropping eggs and cells all over the place, by the way. Because their abdomens aren't even long enough to go all the way to the bottom. So they just kind of stick eggs all over the sides. And if you're looking at your beehive, looking in the cells in the brood area,

and if you've got the vision to where you can really see the eggs in there, you may see little clusters of eggs and that means you also might not have a queen. So the bees that are doing that, they think that there's no queen and they have activated those ovaries, but there also not only needs to be an absence of the queen for that to happen, they also need to have an absence of open brood. Yeah, because those things impact it. So the queen and uncapped brood must be gone because those, all provide pheromones that let your bees know that there's still hope for another queen and no reason to go around activating your ovaries if you're a worker.

See? And it takes time to do that. So, queenless alone. So just the queen gone, but if you still get open brood, that's not enough yet for them to start laying. And this is, of course, skipping over the little renegades that are dropping their eggs around anyway, getting police stopped by other nurse bees. It just won't allow it. So worker policing stops once the brood is gone.

This means all your brute is now capped and has, it's in the pupa state, and your queen is absent. So it's a combination of those two things. And these workers have two to 12 ovaries. Overeals? Anyway, small ovaries. Two to 12. So they're called rebel workers. You ever heard the term before?

So they're in development when things are queenless. So a rebel worker means it is one of these open larvae at a time when a time when a word. the colony is queenless. Their diet might have been shifted. Could have been changed a little bit. Because your piece of know what's going on. They may still try to make some kind of emergency queen or the window of opportunity may have been passed for that

and they just can't do it. But I want to tell you what they are. They're workers that were in their late larval or pre-pupil stages when the queen disappeared. And then they develop into what rechoice. These are entomologists. These are people that are way smart. Researchers term them rebel workers. They're reared on excess royal jelly, intended for emergency

queen cells. And these individuals emerge with larger ovaries than some of the others. And their higher ovarial, ovarial counts are reduced, hypoferangial, brood, food, glands, and an innate physiology bias towards individual reproduction. So these are the ones. Another, words is one more apps to become a laying worker those are the ones that were in development at the time that the queen left so very interesting it doesn't mean others can't do it you just don't do it as well and they don't lay so many eggs so you're ending up with a colony full of drones in the end so that was an interesting question that let me down a tiny rabbit hole so I can find things

out about that and I never heard of the renegade the rebel worker I almost said renegade they're not jeeps Okay, anyway, moving on. The next question comes from Diane Scoss. It says, when you let a laying worker colony live out its life, do you just leave the empty hive in the apiary for the bees to rob out or do you move the remaining resources to your robbing station? Okay, so a lot of people, depending on where you live,

what country you're in, you may not even be allowed to have a robbing station. No open feeding. And a robbing station should be considered open feeding. So yes, that's what I do. So if they died out, dwindled, we call it a dwindling colony laying workers, that's a ditch effort thing. And of course, you end up with nothing but drones until ultimately even the drones aren't being fed because there aren't enough workers even to attend to them. So you end up with cells that are partially open in worker frames in worker brood because that's where you're laying workers do their thing. They're not like queens that lay drone eggs in large cells that are designed for drones.

And so they're nutritionally deficient and everything else. So you end up with some partially emerged drones and they're dying out. So when you just let them run their course, you have to clean it out. So robbing stations help. But before you do that, you have to get all the dead bees out. So I use water pick this year. I use low pressure air with a focused nozzle that's designed just for doing very narrow blasting. Some people warn that you can get yourself.

covered in yellow pollen when you're trying to clean out cells like that so the point is to clean it up and get it ready for next year so I do put if there's some honey open nectar and stuff like that rather than just let the hive get robbed because it ends up making it kind of messy and there's a lot of shoulder-to-shoulder transference of everything going on inside the hive so letting it just sit there and get robbed out is not something I recommend so I've set up an established robbing station that really is a bunch of coat rack supports. So this big thing of those big angled brackets that stick out and then they'd have a big dowel on the end of it to hang your coats on.

I set those out at exactly the right increments so that we can put frames on them. And they're well up off the ground and that's so that skunks, raccoons, possums and everything else doesn't just come and start tearing apart your frames because the beeswax is really valuable. And they mounted it to a chicken coop. We have three. of those here and this is out by our pond and so I also have cameras on it and alarms and the reason I have that is because if a bear or something else comes around number one the cameras I want to know it's there and number two the alarms I want them to scare it away so it lets me see what kind of wildlife is

around so we want them to clean it up and who is doing the cleaning up right now so honey bees can go to frames that have nectar on them and honey still left and residue and And I wish there were bugs that would come and clean out the pollen. There really aren't. We know that small hive beetles and things like that are attracted to pollen and stuff, but they don't like to eat in the open. So there's another reason not to just let a hive get robbed out.

Also, because small high beetles and stuff could scoot right in there. And wax moths could scoot right in there and take advantage of things. Because even wax moths, think about that. They want to raise their larvae on resources. They don't want just wax. They can do it on just wax, but it's not. not healthy enough. They need other resources to consume. So by putting it out at the robbing station, we get rid of those pests, we clean up the frames, and then we can put it all back

together. And because one of the things in here is I'm trying to figure out whether and when to dismantle the hive. So I'm doing something different this year, which is interesting. As long as I've been keeping bees, I do try different things. And you'll find out that when you put all your beehive equipment and everything away. You lose a lot of storage space. So most beekeepers complain about how much storage space you have to have if you're a beekeeper. So here's what I'm doing and it's going to solve some problems, I hope. Every spring we get caught off guard and there are swarms and we have to have hives to put the swarms in. Now I cautioned before that clean your dead outs out, make sure all the resources are out of the hive. Basically what we just

described in getting your hive that dwindled ready for spring. So once they've lived out their lives and the hive is empty, clean everything out that you can. If there are, if there's a tiny cluster of dead drones in the center of a brood area and you feel like, ah, I'm just going to leave that and let the new bees that move in, clean it out. It can deter swarm occupancy. So see where I'm headed. I want you to use that hive. Keep it together. Put it out in your bee yard. And this may not working for you in a warm zone. So I'm talking about the northeastern United States, areas where it gets nice and cold in the wintertime and where we don't have to worry about winter pests other than things like mice. And mice and shrews that might move into a cavity like

that. So you're going to have to protect it from rodents. And shrews are not rodents. Mice are. And we want to keep them both out of your hives. So once it's all set up, put it all back together. It's all clean, ready to go, close up the entrances and stuff. Put it out. out there. At the end of the year, we don't have to worry about wax moths because it gets so cold at night that it's just like putting your frames in a freezer. It's going to kill all their eggs. So I don't worry about wax moth infestation out in the bee-yard through the wintertime. Also, you want to make sure and shipping strap it nice and snug because we don't want any raccoons and things like that, toppling them over. I've never had a raccoon, get a beehive, knocked on its side, and get it

apart, but I've heard people who seem credible who've told me that that happens where they live. So strap it up, keep it locked in place. Now here's the beauty of it in a perfect world, which often happens for beekeepers. When springtime comes and your bees are out of hand, they're trying to swarm, or your colonies are too big too soon and you need to split them and things like that. You don't have to run around and look for hive equipment. It's right there in your apiary. It's ready to go. And it wasn't sitting in your storage. So you do want to pack it down also. So if you've You've got surplus supers, nothing you can really do about that unless you're going to stack them on top of your outer cover of an empty hive. I don't think that's a good idea.

If you have supers that you've pulled off, you should have no more than a deep and a medium maximum for wintering over and having a space that you hope to get occupied by a swarm. You hope to get occupied like the video that you're looking at in the corner right now by a swarm that just moved itself into an empty beehive. That's just it. They picked it. They went in there on their own. That's how desperate they are for places to go. And that's what happens in springtime. Self-hiving swarms are the easiest way to go. I don't put swarm traps up anymore at all, period. Just because they move into hives that are sitting already in the apiary. And if you've got a dead out so long as you clean it and make it appealing to the future residents, they're going to move right in. So my idea is to, you keep your equipment on the sands, on the hives, out in the bee yard, through the winter, and get them occupied again in spring. Don't waste all your space storing them in sheds. Because oftentimes, too, let me make the case even more. Very few sheds are critterproof.

So we're talking outbuildings here. All my outbuildings are off the ground, by the way. They're all trussed up. Do you know why? Because I don't want rats and mice and things like that to move in underneath of them. we set a building on the ground, rodents naturally move in under it. You also provide access for carpenter ants. You provide access for termites and things like that. Direct wood contact facilitates critters moving into your shed. So I raise every single one of them off the ground.

Even the way to be Academy is well off the ground to the point where I can park a wheelbarrel under it. So think about that too. But when you put stuff in storage, rodents find their way in and they're going to be attacking your stuff they're going to chew your woodenware they're going to get after the beeswax and anything that's sweet tasting and they're trying to find nesting sites too so squirrels don't even get me started about the small red squirrels that chew right through two by fours in the soffet chew right through aluminum facing I didn't think squirrels would do that but they do and these are not the really nice fox squirrels really big ones or the gray squirrels that are all social these are the antisophobic

little tiny squirrels that look like babies but they're not and they run at other squirrels and they're out there taking all the nuts right now and they're getting the walnuts and their little faces are all black because they've been peeling the walnut shells off of the walnuts the outer coating so anyway so you might as well have your hive equipment outside on the stands is what I'm saying I think I think I beat that to death there a little bit So your region may not be good for it. Remember, if you've got warm weather, you have a different set of circumstances. But clean them out, store them, and it's great for spring swarms, and you're going to be like a bee genius when you go out there in spring, and you see a swarm occur. They go into a bivouac location, and then you see scouts checking out the hive I told you to clean out and make ready the previous year.

You're going to thank me later. You're going to be so happy. Next question comes from Trish Westberg, 6982. that's a YouTube channel name. It says you overwinter your resource hives or do you distribute the frames to other hives and start over in spring with new resource hives. So the resource hives,

and I'm glad we're calling them that, even though somebody said we should not call them resource hives. They're resources. They provide resources for other colonies, but they're nucleus hives, just like the ones we talked about at the beginning. And I hope bug farmer comes out with exactly what I wanted to make. It's going to be epic.

It's going to be the best nucleus hive you've ever seen of all nucleus hives ever made for beekeepers anywhere in the world. Moving on. So my nucleus hives, slant resource hives, stay exactly where they are. They just become regular bee colonies. Those of you who have watched for a while might know hive 44. It's going strong even today. That was just nucleus hive stacked up. So you can get, think of it, 15 deep frames, laying stroth frames.

So three high. Those are what we call resource nucleus hives. And you get three high. That's 15 deep frames. That's a big colony of bees. So another thing that we'll be doing, you had a discussion with my supervisor who's turning 11. We need more nucleus-sized queen excluders.

The wooden ones with the metal queen-exluter thing in the middle. Now, you can just make a queen-excluder really easy. You get the plastic ones. You cut them to size. go anywhere you need them to go but I don't want those I want metal ones with wooden frames I want exactly what I want because they're going to last the rest of my natural born beekeeping days and so I leave them out and we have videos of them being hit by major storms in fact this is pretty funny not to the bees funny to me and I'm sure I've mentioned it before but I'll mention it

again I had a triple resource hive with a feeder shim on top you might be wondering what that looks like so I'll I'll show you a sketch so this is my configuration and I hope you can see it let me get the light on it a little bit all right so right on the very top you'll see when I do scans of my B yard you'll see that we have those rigid foam caps on them so those are the two-inch thick pink panther rigid foam board I glue those together and sometimes I just use expansion form to glue and I've also used gorilla glue the kind that foams a little bit fills every little gap. And so I make a cap with that. Then the next box on the top there is a feeder shim. So that's just an empty five frame nucleus box. And then I have a board under that with a hole

in the middle of it. And the size of that hole is completely up to you. But I want to be able to feed them fondant going into winter. So that's an empty top box, functions as a feeder shim. And we put fond in it going into winter. The next box down. So the next three boxes down are five frame Langstroth, Nucleus High. Some people do mediums. You can do that. You're going to need more of them. But with the five frame deeps, this has worked perfectly for me. We go all the way down to the bottom. Solid bottom board, although I have some with screened enclosed bottom boards on them. And a three-eighths inch by two-inch wide opening. Keep that entrance really small so they can defend it. Now, Quinn's nucleus hive that looks like this, I think I described everything.

his hide that looks like this wears its bees all the time bees all the way down the front so it's too big it's too full and the fact that we did not put a queen excluter in there was a backfire so whoever his advisor was didn't have him put a queen excluter on it and now we have brood through all tiers so we want to confine the brood to the bottom two boxes that's 10 deep frames that's more than enough and it'll make them use all of those frames for brood Queen of Clued or above that. And then now you have a harvestable super on a nucleus hive. Now last winter, super tall, nucleus hive blew over, fell on the ground, in the snow, terrible temperatures, like down in the 20s at night, well below zero, for those of you who are doing

Celsius. And the bees were exposed for hours in high winds. And when I just put them back together, what do I have to lose? Put them all back together. So, and I didn't look at the weather. board and of course another big blow came through and I was not a good steward of the bees and I did not use a shipping strap to put them all together now they all get shipping straps no matter what that one just had heavy blocks on it so I thought that was enough and it blew over again and stayed out there during heavy rains in March so end of February 1st of March think of that so the boxes didn't just fall over they fell apart they were gaped and open and I didn't even think to check on them because who wants to run out in the pouring rain until like four o'clock the following afternoon

and there they were the same hive and this happens to be the hive that my grandson Quinn claimed as his own because they are the most populated strongest colony of bees out there of all the nucleus hives and they went through all that so healthy bees well populated in a good box i'm not telling you that they should be able to handle flipping out on the ground and falling apart being exposed to rain, snow, sleet and wind and all that stuff but tall narrow columns work really well this you're going to hear it over and over they just do they work really well and if we get this going and I hope bug farmer comes through and I still want to hear you know what your favorite ones are but no I don't store them I don't take the stuff out I leave them the way they are and so we're going to pull hunting

micro draws of honey which is what we've been doing this year instead of pulling the whole super's off although we're getting to the point the the the 14th of this month super's come off and we start packing down and let them backfill going into the end of September and into October so and by backfill I mean that's they're gonna start backfilling honey and resources in there and we're gonna have them in the space they're gonna occupy all the way through winter. So and this can be different where you are because it's all based on how much forage is going on out there and as the forage backs off the populations will start to be reduced.

So what we did is we pulled fully capped frames of honey and because we're not pulling full supers, we're just pulling those frames by themselves. We end up uncapping nothing but full frames and leaving the rest in and then we come out there with drawn comb that we're putting in when we're pulling the full ones out all at the same time one visit one move and that's caused the bees remain calm and they've also remained productive and they will refill those honey frames pretty darn fast and they do it really well in nucleus hives so that's why i mention that good stuff it works we keep them out there highly recommend shipping straps that way if it does fall over in the middle of winter the boxes will stay together and you'll look like you'll look like you know what you're doing as beekeeper

unlike me who runs out there and by the way they were the only highs that fell over so the nucleus hives they're tall they're you know they're tall and they have a high they're proud to the wind as we would say and so a lot of sail area and so they're just going to fall over so you got a probably should think about some way to fasten those down other than shipping straps but anyway that's what happened they work, they're great, keep them out, don't break them apart. Next question comes from Ross Wagner, 9083, YouTube channel name. Has there ever been any research as to why, from the B's perspective, queen cells are placed in different positions?

Why bottom for swarms and middle for supersedure or emergency cells? Sure, there's research on it. There's a lot of people who've looked at it. But let's just describe what happens so that people understand what they're looking at. And when we pulled apart, we were in the layens hives, and the supervisor was with me, and we had a frame in the layens hive that had little teeny tiny queen cells through the middle of the brood area.

Little itty-bitty-like acorn looking, and they were capped, and they were occupied. That was interesting to me because those beings, apparently had no faith in their full queen cells which were also developed they must have had a backup plan so often they'll make a whole bunch of queen cells all at once and you can see them in both places at the same time but the ones that they've invested the most time energy in are the ones that are what are called swarm cells so the swarm cells that means your bees a plan for it who put the egg inside this vertical cell and that's the difference workers, remember, the cells are all horizontal, and the queen, and also drones are horizontal,

and the queen is the only one that's vertical. So we see them, sometimes people will look at a brood area, and they'll see a little, looks like the top of an acorn, just the beginning of a queen's cell. And they look at that and panic a little bit and think, well, are they planted to create a queen? No, it's a placeholder. So your bees are building infrastructure for and when and if, they decide to make a new queen and guess who they make put an egg in that and that's right they lead her around they direct her to the cell the vertical

cell the little queen cup that's around the fringe and the reason it's around the fringe is it's going to take up more space when it's fully developed so if they did that in the center think about brood frames face-to-face what happens between these frames like there's the drawn-out comb there's the cell and this is where brood normally happens that little space there is about three-eighths of an inch if that's B-space and Langstroth is the one that discovered B-space. So anyway, so you've got this little gap in there. If they have to make an emergency cell from a worker, then they're going to have to draw it out and down.

And that's why when we see that it's an emergency or a supersedure or something that they had to do right away because your queen is failing for some reason or she's just gone, or the beekeeper was like if you had comb faces that were like this and somebody just pulled a frame straight up and the queen happened to be in the brood, and she would be rolled and damaged and discarded by the bees later because you were negligent in the way you manage them. So how do you avoid that? You pull your frames to the side first, then lift them up and out, and you start at the end, away from the main brood area. So anyway, there's not a frown. So what the bees have to do if it's an emergency and the queen suddenly is gone, they have to go to brood, open brood, right? So it's an egg that's hatched. And there's a limit to that.

It has to be no more than 72 hours old maximum. So less than, 48 to 72 hours are the max, if they're going to be able to feed it enough and actually produce a queen. So they even produce these little tiny runty queens sometimes, and they'll produce multiple queens, and it's up to them to get rid of them. But the bigger cells, the bigger ones, have generally, of course, bigger queens inside. But they'll come out and then they'll form a 90.

So you know that was an emergency because it started horizontal and then it went vertical. So the ones that are nothing but vertical, those were long-term planning. So the infrastructure was already there. So what caused them to do it, they got the queen to lay that egg. The others were they just found one and made do with it because the larvae, the egg hatches on the third day. And then you've got a larvae. Now right away, after that would be a great time for them to start identifying it and picking. By the way, there's something called on-the-spot queen rearing, where the bekees.

keeper goes around and says, I want one of those cells right here and they take their hive tool and they smush down the adjacent brood and they select that one egg. I don't personally subscribe to that and here's why the workers know better based on the pheromones they're smelling and the sense that they get as soon as that larva hatches, as soon as the egg hatches into a larva, they're going to know that this is the one they want to turn into a queen. So they're better at choosing which one they're going to develop better than we are. So, and I've seen people do the on-the-spot queen rearing, only see them create an emergency cell way over off to the side somewhere anyway and ignore it. So once they start, if it's an emergency cell, they're going to have to chew down the wax around it and sometimes even the wax on the facing comb too.

They make room for it and then they run that down. So they seem skinny. They're a little bit, of course, it's not planned. So it could be nutritionally deficient and things like that. So when it is planned, nice full, they look like the outside of a planter's peanut with a shell still on, all that dimpling, all that work, all that extra architectures put into it, not to mention the amount of food and resources that your nurse bees have consumed to take care of that. So it's the nurse bees that push the queen around and indicate that they want her to start to put eggs in queen cells for a normal swarm planning.

And those swarms also happen at a time when there's lots of resources coming in and when the population is decent and when the overall health of the colony is good. So that is the difference. And so when the question is about whether or not studies have been done. So two to three centimeters are a normal swarm cell that they develop for the queen when they have planning ahead. That's why you see these other little tiny brunty ones. and I've heard beekeepers talk about letting them go ahead with a little emergency replacement queens and stuff like that. Super seizure cells, she's not doing well or an emergency cell. She's absent altogether.

So when they let those go and they've had very good luck sometimes with some of the emergency queens, you as a beekeeper are in a much better place. If you're inspecting a colony and you've got a colony that's queenless, let's say, and you've got a colony that's queen right but they're constructing a bunch of really big queen cells there and you've got those queen cells on a couple of different frames so you could pull that entire frame of brood with the queen cells on it and put that into the frame into a hive that now is queenless and see if they don't take care of her and you might have a chance to replace it that way so you're not leaving the colony that just came from queenless You can also cut it out and pin that queen cell.

You have to very carefully handle queen cells. It cannot take a lot of rough handling. So you should have a frame ready to go to put them into that and then transport it into a queenless colony. And that's a ditch effort this time of year. It might not even be worth the work because, remember, they're dwindling over there. They don't even have enough workers to,

probably finish out the queen and then of course get replacement workers because once she hatches from her cell the queen cell and there's a lot of discussion about whether you're even allowed to say hatches or emerges but let's say she emerges out of her queen cell and she's an unmaided queen so look at all the time that that colony has been without a queen how many workers do they have you're going to need to bring some brood with her so you're going to have to they're replacing their queen over here anyway they probably have a lot of eggs or brood If you bring one full frame of capped brood with that queen cell, you've got 5,000 bees right there. But you're going to need to do something like that.

You can't just put a queen in a queenless colony that's been queenless for a long time. They're just too few bees to help and keep that colony going. I know that's not part of the question, but that's what's going on. So studies, it's more observations than studies, but that's why they do emergency supersedure and regular swarm cells for queens. Next question comes from Everything the Hard Way with Larry. That's the YouTube channel name.

And it says, Fred, what a quilt box with wood chips in it put on top of a hive right now help the bees dry out the honey. Okay, quilt box, wood chips, dry out honey. No. You can say it helps because that's saying you know, every little bit helps.

And I've seen people do a lot of things, trying to help their bees accelerate, drying out the honey. I've seen people shift their boxes over a little bit. So there's additional vents. I've seen, as I used to do when I first started beekeeping, I used to follow the lift up your inner cover, put nickels or pennies under it. So there's tiny gap through the top, vent it out the top,

help your bees dry things out, get rid of the humid air. And I stopped doing all of that. And what I want you to think about, because a lot of people come up with ideas like that, you know, could I just put wood chips, a quilt box on top? Remember the quilt boxes and filling them with burlap, pine shavings, whatever you've done. That was something that people practiced and something that came about

long before we had real insulation. So it was a way to allow some air to move through the top of the hive, and then of course it would hit the dew point inside the wood chips this was mostly something that people did in the wintertime and then the dew point would be achieved inside the wood chip somewhere and it would start to get damp but that the argument of course is that the dampness is now away from your bees it's not on the inner side of the inner cover or even the outer cover if you don't use inner covers like the migratory lids and then so the condensation would be in the chips and then not inside the hive but even the chips get soaked and then they freeze and thaw and cause water and things like that.

But what I want to talk about is the volume, the capacity that that would have to hold water. How much water? You really have to think about this because it's mind-boggling. How much water your bees are evaporating away? When they bring in nectar, let's talk about that. So when they bring in nectar, most nectar is 70 to 80 percent. water. It's only 20% the actual sucrose that your bees are targeting. So they have to dry all that out. And remember I say you need twice the real estate inside a hive for them to spread out all this nectar in the honey that they're processing. So they can start to dry it down and then they concentrate it later. And this is where this is alarming to a lot of beekeepers that are particularly new or just haven't really thought about the physics of that.

How much weight are they going to have to shed when they get rid of all that water to get it down below 20% moisture? They're going to have to get rid of a lot of it. So, I know that's not a number, 70% water to 30% sucrose. So on average, one hive. Guess what they're going to have to do? They're going to have to evaporate over 60 pounds of honey. Not honey. 60 pounds of water.

So think about that in gallons. These are, this is a lot, this is six to 13 gallons of water you have to remove. So having a, you know, a box on top, even if it had desiccant in it or something like that or damp-a-buckets or something like that, it wouldn't even begin to touch on the amount of moisture that has to be drawn out. And this is why I said that it alarms beekeepers because those who have scales are lifted or weigh it. They feel like, ah, it's losing weight so fast. Yeah, because they're venting it off. Most of the weight of what they bring in it's going to go away as evaporated water and it's going to be concentrated then you get the honey.

So the bees do this incredibly well and they can even do it through very small openings because we do not see a big difference here. Now I keep it the same. I have some hives with full width entrances and I have some hives with very narrow three inch by three eighths. That's my standard entrance reducer. Three-eighths of an inch high, three inches wide. Is there a big difference in the drying down, the amount of honey, the drying down of the honey, the capping of the honey and the honey work that's going on in the hive? When you have full openings, narrow openings, screened open bottoms, closed bottoms, vented through the top, not vented through the top. Is there a huge difference in the drying power that your bees have? There is not. There isn't. Now, is there a difference in insulated hives and not insulated hives?

The insulated hives in the wintertime seem higher moisture, higher humidity than the non-insulated hives. Very interesting. But about this specifically, we can't put in anything really that will absorb the amount of moisture that they need to move out. And the other thing is you don't want a bunch of humidity trapped in a quilt box this time of year. And I don't use quilt boxes myself. All I use are insulated intercovers, insulated. outer covers feeder shims so and I don't vent through the top anymore because it did not pan out did not make a significant difference and so I've stopped doing that upper entrances and things like that

too you have an upper entrance while you're trying to dry out your if you look at an apame hive it has entrance options out the wazoo you can go up and you can open all these little dials and vent the hive all these different places and what you're doing too is your vent venting a scent. You're venting out something that's attractive to small high beetles, is attractive to wastes and hornets, which are going to be a big deal here really soon, and it's attractive to robbing honeybees. So it brings them in. If we concentrate all of that to a reduced entrance that's defendable, then you are not creating problems for your bees, and they're still drying out the honey. All that weight. Think about it. All that weight. It's a lot.

The next question comes from Joy Irwin, and that's her YouTube channel name, the bald-faced hornets, and by the way, recently posted a video about a bald-faced hornet nest nearby. I think that as beekeepers, we should know as much as we can about the animals that are sharing the space and environment where our honeybees are also. The more we know, the more we can help our bees prepare to function in that environment. So anyway, ball-faced hornets look almost mechanical because of their coloring. The hornets you called gentle giants are causing me an issue in my bee yard. Gentle giants are the European hornets, by the way. The yellow-legged hornet is not as visible here on the Cumberland Plateau, at least not at my house.

I have out traps, but I am mostly catching yellow jackets. And the reason I wanted to bring this up is this is another reason, while you don't want multiple entrances on your hive this time of year, and you want an entrance reduced to help your bees defend themselves. Now let's say let's compromise. Let's say that you want a full width entrance, but you also want your bees to still be able to defend their hive. So this is something we've done for years,

and that's get aluminum screen, window screen. And you just take two or three inch long pieces and you roll them up and you tuck them in on either side and then you leave the center area as your entrance and egress area for your bees that are in the brood box. Now what that does is it lets the beast fan anywhere they want to, but at the same time does not let predators of any size get through that screen. And then later when the threat is over with, you can pull those screens out. They propelize them a little bit.

And I even took a hot wire anemometer and I went across the front of the hive to see if they were actively venting through the screen as well. and they were right about six miles an hour that was pretty interesting that's some fast-moving air and that's right at the entrance so it seemed pretty consistent across now your bees line up with one another and wherever the humidity is the highest they line up and they fan away from wherever that humidity is high and other bees graft on one another and they fan them right out until they stand just inside the entrance and fan towards it and they're standing just outside the entrance and fanning away. So they keep in the air really moving through there. So there are bees drawing air in while other bees are drawing air out so that 60 some percent relative humidity air is going into the hive

and then they're heating it too. So the warm interior environment also wherever the bees are, especially over the brood, that's where the honey's going to dry the quickest or your nectar is going to dry the quickest because it's 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit there and your bees are actively fanning to control the climate right on that brood. So they move it really efficiently, which is why I make this argument, this point all the time, that we don't need to have a bunch of extra holes, that then we close at different times of the year and open it other times of the year. If you leave it the same, your bees organize their hive, resources, and everything else, knowing the airflow patterns inside the hive that's under their control through a single entrance.

But so that's the compromise. You want the full width and you just want them to still be able to defend a narrow corridor, rolled screen. And the rolled screen also frustrates would-be robbers because they're following assent. So they go right up against the screen. When you see a colony that is being scouted by would-be robbers, whether it's wasps or other honeybees, you see them at the side of the hive, at the back of the hive, going around the back side of the cover the hive. Those are robbers. Those are not the residents. The residents know the entrance is on the front. The entrance is on the front at the bottom. So that's just how it is.

And the Hornets and Wasse, it's bad news because, again, they fly when it's cold. They fly early. They're out there and they're trying to get in when your bees are still clustered. It was down in the 50s last night. So that's cluster temperature, loose cluster. But your bee activity is not, you don't have a bunch of guards on the landing board that you do an hour. hour later when it warms up. So as your bees get going, they can defend themselves. But early on, we're trying to help them have a colony in a configuration that will allow them to intercept robbers that fly cold like European hornet, very rare to see them going into a beehive. A bald-faced hornets, also very rare to see them at the beehive. But we do see yellow jackets and there's going to be a lot of

them. So those are really the things that we're preparing for. And there's no screen that you can make that will allow your honeybees to come and go, but will stop yellow jackets, because the yellow jacket physically can go through any hole that your honeybees can go through. So it's just something we need to facilitate them being able to guard and defend it. And this is the last question of the day,

and this comes from the great STM-8. So it says, I fred, can you enlighten the photographers on your channel as to the camera lens, F-stop, and how you got into the nest, I suspect an endoscopic setup, fantastic photography, and so on. So the reason I wanted to mention this, this is again, if you want to see kind of pretty above average video,

look at the recent video that I posted that shows the bald face hornet nest. And the reason I bring this up is I do get a handful of questions. This is not a lot of questions, but people do ask about the photography. What kind of camera did you use? What kind of lens did you do? How did you get that sequence? So I'd you get the shot. So this is a good news. You ready? Going to have a workshop. My very first photography workshop. So for those of you who are shutterbugs, those of you want to know,

what are my secrets? How do I do it? How do we get the lighting like that? How do I get the shot like that? How do they go inside a bald-faced hornet nest and get you a look at the eggs in the cells and not make all those hornets come after you? How did you do it? what's going on there's going to be a conference where i'm going to give a workshop where's the conference are you ready it's the midwest honeybee expo dot com Midwest honeybee expo dot com and so that's going to be January the 29th and 30th so we're planning ahead 2007 and i'm going to give a workshop there on photography and in that workshop i'm going to tell you all my tips and tricks and i'm going to teach you i know some of you're thinking, yeah, but the stuff's going to cost a whole lot of money. No, I'm starting with

the basics. I'm starting with stuff that you might have with you. How to make the most of very basic equipment. Likewise, I am also going to touch upon advanced lighting and things like that. But this is targeted towards people who are not obviously professional photographers. This is for people that just want to do a little better in documenting what's going on in around the rehives. And this will help you when photographing anything that's small, anything that's alive, anything that's potentially dangerous. I'm going to show you how to light it, how to video it, photograph it, capture it, and it's going to be again at the Midwestern Honeybee Expo, January 29th to 30th, 2007, you might be wondering where is it going to be because the Midwest is a big area.

It's Madison, Wisconsin. So, look it up. And the reason I'm telling you is because you're my listeners. therefore you should hear it first because there's only going to be 30 people in the workshop 30 that's it that's the max because I want to be able to talk to everybody so and show you stuff now it's a workshop but it's kind of you know we're not all going to get hands on and everybody's going to take pictures or we're going to edit the pictures we're going to go out and photograph a b or something we're not doing that I'm going to explain and present and show you equipment

and talk you through some of the practices that I've developed through the years as I'm a professional photographer. So, going to help you out. Going to improve whatever it is you're doing. Watch. I hope to see you there. So we're in the fluff section right now. So you need to, of course, assess colonies. We talked about that a little bit today.

Tip your hive, see how heavy they are. If you've got light colonies, please don't wait until the very end. And then ditch effort, try to backload them with a whole bunch of heavy sugar syrup to get them to store it and go into winter. You're way ahead. if you can trickle feed them to get them going a little bit now. And we're also, you have to think about if you've got a bunch of empty space, this is the time to start tapering that back and also concentrating resources.

So that means like you've got full frames of honey next to you, partial frames. We start back filling full frames where partial ones exist and just get that out of way, get them ready for coming cold weather. And of course, horizontal hives, that's super easy. You're just adjusting follower boards. So you size it for the colony and the resources that they're going to need going into winter. We'll talk more about that. We're not in a big rush because we are just now in the second week of September.

But I want you to plan ahead. If there's equipment that you need or something like that, you should start staging and planning now. So pollen intake observations, if you want to look to see what's going on with your bee colonies between 10 and noon, so 10 in the morning until noon, you want to be looking to see if there's not much going on in that landing board. and you don't see very much pollen coming in at a time when other colonies in your apiary are bringing in a lot of pollen It's worth checking you need to inspect and find out what's going on in that hive This is also your chance time coming up to wrap up your mite treatments if you're doing that I know this treatment free people I'm just telling you that if you're treating for mites

This is the time to close it up finish take care of that because your fat-bodied winter bees are probably already well into production And you want to make sure your colony is healthy and you don't want a bunch of mites going through winter with them. Also, for those of you who have used, sometimes we take deep boxes. And a couple of the frames in the brood box will be medium frames. And what happens is your bees build comb down under that and that's drone comb. So this is a time to also cut away some of the drone comb and evaluate those drones that are developing in the pupa state. See how many of veromites you have in there. This is also a meaningful non-treatment method of removing varodistructer mites from your colony.

You've been told, you've been warned. Okay, so reduce entrances, just as I mentioned before, robbing risk is going to increase rapidly. As the nectar flow starts to taper off outside, the robbing is going to increase because you've got these huge colonies with a whole bunch of foragers that soon have nothing to do. And so they're going to start exploring the backside, top, underside of the colonies, And if you've got these small late season colonies that you're building up, your prime targets. So we want entrances small enough so they can defend themselves.

Consolidate your frames. Already mentioned that. Robbing station. Open your robbing station the third week. So again, we want to make sure if we're doing a robbing station or some people do open feed, that's very inefficient. Open feeding, it seems like an easy way to do it. I mean, why feed each individual hive when we can just put out?

sugar syrup or something like that, let your bees open feed. And a lot of people with a lot of beekeeping experience, even use 55 gallon drums to open feed their colonies. That's inefficient because we want to target the colonies that are actually behind. I don't want to open feed a colony that is going gangbusters. It has all kinds of resources, and they don't need it. So I'm going to put that on only targeted. hives. The other thing is you don't want to feed your neighbors. But that I mean your neighbor's bees.

Because they can fly a long way to get your resources. So what's the fix? We don't want bees coming from a mile away to your open feeding station if that's what you decide to do. If they come from a mile away, we want to make sure that the sucrose level, the sugar level, in the syrup that we're providing is not enough to get them home with a big surplus. They'll travel great distances to get honey. But what we want them to do, if we do a light sugar syrup, we're occupying foragers and we're only going to feed the local ones. Because when the sucrose is low, the percentage of water to sugar, when the sugar content is really low, then bees from far away won't be taken that home because too much energy is consumed getting to and from the resource.

But your colonies are on your property will get it. And of course, there's a bunch of drying that hasn't been done because it's a higher water content. But remember, we're just occupying them. And by giving them that resource, it means that's ready for consumption. So they're going to create invert sugars. They're going to create the glucose and fructose from that. And then they're going to consume that as a ready resource inside the hive, which means they're not delving into their stored honey. So that's, if you're open feeding, that's one of the benefits of doing a light sugar syrup to make sure that we're not feeding neighbors' bees. Because we don't know. no they may not even like sugar syrup going into their hives at all and we want to target as I

mentioned only feed the ones that absolutely need it so and of course as temperatures get colder you can start to put feed inside the hive on top of a feeder shim and you don't have to worry about them building a bunch of comb up in your feeder shim if they had access up there if you use something like a trivet so you could lay things like this is a tribut if you're putting you know a brick or if you're putting a fondant pack or something like that up in there but you want your beasts have access to all sides of it so they come up through a hole and then this little it has feet on it so there's they can move freely so the holes underneath uh then they move all around and the concern if we did that early in the year is that as things warm up they'll build bur comb everywhere

they'll have honeycomb up in there but as the temperatures are dropping they won't do that so then you can use something like this and you can have winter patties and fondant packs or whatever you want to do but this just keeps it from closing off the hole and it gives your bees access all the way around and what are the reasons and i don't feed i'm just giving you this information in case it's something that you do some people do still put pollen patties and uh rocket fuel and things like that up in their hives inside that feeder shim and what we want to do is keep critters from feeding on it so if you've got pollen paddies up there you might have a small high beetle situation so by having a trivet with your pollen paddy on top of that pollen paddies you have edges available

if the bees can police the entire pollen paddy and keep the small high beetles out then that's what the trivets for so instead of just concentrating underneath you want it accessible you want your policing force to be able to get up there okay so have feeder shims on hand ready to go I personally leave my feeder shims on the hives all year round, just like I leave insulation on the hives all year round. I don't want to take it off and put it on at different times of the year. So you can leave it on all the time and then just plug the hole that leads up into it if they don't need to be fed.

And just an update on my swarm traps that Ricky and Ruth Rourke made for us. They're sitting out there side by side. I showed in the previous week that mine got voluntarily occupied, and they're marked Team Frederick, Team Annette for my wife, and hers got occupied this week too. So for those of you who are worried about that, Annette has her own bees, I have my bees. I made a video about it, haven't shared it yet,

but both of those are occupied. And they're nice big, we're going to treat them like regular hives. So that's the way that's going to go. So hers is done. And my closing concern for you today is some, make sure that you're ready to block rodents. Do not let them get into all your spaces. And there again, I want to thank you for watching me and listening.

And if you have questions, you can write them right down in the comment section. Otherwise, go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, fill out the form. And we'll see what happens next Friday. So I want to thank you for being here. Some of you who are members of the Northwest Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. I will see you on Wednesday. Thanks a lot. you have a fantastic weekend.