The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode #372 September 18th

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

this is the audio track from today's YouTube video:  https://youtu.be/H_P3AyzBvBo?si=-FCOhA5IyramukMf

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, September the 18th of 2006. And this is back here, beekeeping questions and answers, episode number 372. I'm Frederick Donne, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here. I'm glad that you're taking the time to stare at your screen and watch this. As you know, most of you are watching by television according to the analytics. That's right.

You're sitting at home watching TV as it should be. So if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order with timestamps so you can find them. So you can jump right to whatever interests you. And I'm really glad that you may have submitted a question and others may be wondering, how do you submit a question? You go to my website, the way to be. And you click on the page, mark, contact, and you fill out the form, and there you go.

You can also just make comments on the video, any video, all videos. I look at the comments and I respond to most of the comments. and I respond to most of them. So there you go, that's super easy. But maybe you want to share a photo. You've got some condition, some weird situation with your bees, and you want other people to see it and give you their opinion. You have to go to the Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook for that.

I'm not there. Your peers are there. I set it up so that people could socialize day and night all over the world and have companionship among beekeepers. So there you go. That's pretty decent. And I know speaking of decent, You probably want to know what's going on outside. Well, let me just tell you it's a perfect day. So that shows my commitment to you because I'm here instead of being out there in the perfect day with my bees.

So what is a perfect day? Well, I'll tell you, 71 degrees Fahrenheit. 70% relative humidity. That's okay. That's not great. Your bees are still trying to dry down the honey and there is a lot of it out there. So does the wind help them out? what's our wind speed right now zero miles per hour and some of you are sitting there going well what's the Celsius and stuff like that well I have to admit that I forgot to look that up so you can have to do those conversions yourself and the heavy nectar flow continues this is fantastic so when we get rain and it happens frequently now so I can't even I'm not even bothering to tell you in the northeastern part of the United States northwestern part of the state

Pennsylvania what the weather's going to be like upcoming for the next week you know why because they just don't know every time they tell us the weather it's way off I don't mean off by a little I mean way off so you're just on your own there too check out your local weather apps and see what's happening and when it's good get out there so the nectar flow is on the opening sequences were all video this week and you can see the bees have plenty of choices so they're backing off from some resources and hit others and you might be wondering what about robbing and what about the wasp how's that pressure well it's on the rise there's a lot of unemployed bees out there looking for a free grab of honey that

they don't have to process so your swarm risk is actually going down right now assuming you've kept up with your bees and robbing risk is escalating so what's going on outside asters are number one and the reason I find out or the way I find out is I walk out in the great outdoors and I listen I listen late in the afternoon your prime foraging times by the way if you're really trying to assess what's going on out there it's going to be between 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon and a lot of bees don't even go out to get their pollen and nectar resources until after lunch and why is that well because the heavy dew for example if

you are like we are. When you go outside, everything looks wet like it rained, even if it didn't, but that's because the dew is so heavy because the dew point is so high. What's the dew point? Well, the dew point right now is like 65 degrees or something like that, which means if a surface is at that temperature, while it's 71 degrees outside, it will condensate on it. I'm sure you've walked outside with a cold glass of water and found that it just started sweating. Moisture just came out of the air and collected on the surface of your glass. That's because the dew point was achieved on the glass that you're holding. And the same thing happens inside hives early in the morning.

So we have cold, nights, warm days, and what that translates into is richer nectar for the beets. So it's good news. Aster's number one by far. The bees are all over them. New England Aster's. It doesn't even matter which variety of Aster it is. Golden Rod is taken second place, and the bees are backing off the golden rod late in the afternoon,

and they're favoring other things. like Maximilian sunflowers right now. And I showed a video yesterday that had our lower meadow full of golden blossoms. Maximilian sunflowers are perennial. You grow really tall. Some of them are five feet, some are seven, eight feet. And so if you've got an unused area on your property, I highly recommend, especially if you, now it's not a good curtain all year round. So, But about late summer, into fall, right into frost. It grows so tall and thick that it can be a visual barrier if you don't want to stare at your neighbors. And if you don't want them staring at you.

While you're feeding your bees. While you're decorating the landscape with beautiful yellow blossoms, multiple blossoms on every stem. Look at Maximilians. They're fantastic. The bees are also on regular sunflowers, which did not do that well for me this year because my chickens ate my seeds, the wild birds ate my seeds.

and as we've discussed before, next year I'm going to change up what kind of sunflowers I'm planting. I'm just going to use a black oil sunflower seed that we get as bird seed, and I'm going to spread it. And I'm going to do it in increments so that we get blossoms over a period of time. So they don't just all mature blossom, provide nectar and pollen for the bees, and of course turn into seed, feed the birds, because they don't harvest it. We're just going to feed the birds with whatever it comes out of it. and that would be over with, but if you cascade that, so you do a planting every week or two and spread it out, then you'll have blossoms that continue over a broader period of time over a larger area.

Cosmos interest. Now the cosmos blossoms, they have to plant them. They're annuals, so every single year, the interest by the bees on those is actually pretty low. We were finding multiple honeybees of multiple species on the standard sunflowers, so that was pretty good. cool but it also shows when they're collecting in groups on those that there aren't enough of those blossoms to go around so we actually need way more than those and the white dutch clover right now you can hear some bees on it but it's not as popular as it is at other times of the year so dutch clover though is a constant if they ran out of these other things all the ice cream shops let's call them that so if your bees are going for these high sucrose reward flowers and then they run out of that

then they're going to fall back on the nectar that comes from things like Dutch clover. So that's it. That's good stuff. There's a lot of other things I'm sure that are out there right now. And I hope that you'll just take the time. Please go outside. Please visit your plants and do something called grounding. By the way, have you heard of that? It's where you take off your shoes and you walk barefoot, not on clover and things, where bees might be. You don't want to kill a bee and get stung at the same time. It's not good. But grounding is supposed to be good for you.

Sort of the edge of a river. Remember that when you were little and you stuck your feet in a creek or there'd been a rain and water was running down a culvert or something and you stuck your feet in it so that it could that's called grounding. It's healthy for you. So the other thing is getting out in the wild and just being on the ground. I recommend you do it. And when you're older, people worry.

If you're laying in your yard, they don't know that you're just getting a close-up shot of some clover or something. some self-heel or something like that, they think you fell over. I think you might have fallen down. It could be something wrong with you. Not me, but I mean, it would be like something that people would do for you if they saw you laying in your yard. It's like these people that drove by and they see a dead horse in the front yard of some farm. And then they're going to call somebody and they want to do something about it. And then they come back on the return trip because they're been thinking about it, this dead horse in the yard, come back only to find out it's up again. So there are some

horses just lay down. And then people that drive by that don't know about horses think they're dead. Well, it's the same once you have white hair. People are concerned whenever you're horizontal on the ground. So don't scare people. That can be fun too. They come to talk to you. Don't respond until they're really close and suddenly jump up. Okay, so these questions have been submitted over the past week and I'm going to do my best to address them right now. So here we go. Very first one comes from Lori Brown, 2935, which is a YouTube channel name. It says thanks for your opinions. You're welcome.

And I enjoy your humor. Thank you. And when you catch a swarm or one moves in, when do you do a mite test? So mite tests, we're talking about the Verro Destructor mite. There are other mites, by the way. We'll talk about that later. But the Baro Destructor mite is the worst of all the mites to get into your hives right now, that tropolololapes might get here, but a lot of people are working on that.

So let's just talk about the road instructor might. So when you hive a swarm, say it all the time, it's worth saying again. You have a new colony of bees, and they do not have capped brood right now. So once you put them in there, how long does it take? Let's say the queen is in perfect shape. She did actually have to fly with the swarm, which means she was leaned out nutritionally so that she was able to fly because if she's in full production super heavy, she can't get very far. So she's reduced her productive abilities, right? Reproductive abilities.

And then through nutrition as soon as they get to the next location, the bees that are with her are going to start jamming her up with great diets. So they're going to feed her really well and she's going to go back into production really soon. So let's make the assumption that she can lay an egg as soon as, let's say, 24 hours after being at the new location. Maybe she had a couple of extra eggs hanging around in her ovaries and she's going to get rid of them. And so, and that means also that there was drawn comb inside the hive, a space for them to go ahead and start laying. Now, sometimes when colonies have been in a rush, and let's face it, this time of year, they're in a rush, they should be because time is short before winter comes

here in the northern United States. So I've seen them actually lay eggs while the wax. While the wax workers are drawing out the foundation. So they just have little, you know, 16th of an inch deep cells that are in production and you'll see eggs in the middle of all of those. That's really interesting to me, but it also puts the pressure on those workers because they're actually drawing out the cells while that little larva is going to develop. And so it's going to hatch on the third day. And then after that, it's going to be a larva. The larva gets fed and they're going be finishing off these cells and then by the end of the eighth day we can guess after the egg was laid that they're going to start capping it over and then it becomes a pupa so larvae open

pupa closed and when the pupa state shows up and they're capped that's when you can't get those verodistrictor mites so we want to get them before the eighth day that's it so on the sixth or seventh day now some people don't even want you to push the envelope so don't wait until just just 24 hours before they can because sometimes guess what that Foundress mite does. And a Founder's might by the way is the female because male Verodistractor mites don't go anywhere. They do all their business inside the cell and then they're done. They don't, you won't see a male mite in dispersal phase. So what they do though is that Founders might scoots in there and remember there's a bunch of nutrition pooling in the bottom of that cell.

You know what the Verotistrictor mite does? It's kind of troubling. She scoots into the cell sometimes many hours before it gets capped and ditches right into that soup. And you might think, well, that's going to drown that burrow destructor. They can't breathe. Oh, it's worse than that. They have a little appendage that sticks out. It goes like a little snorkel.

Here's the liquid, the feed. Here's the larva that's about to become a pupa. And this little stem sticks up and they respirate through that. They're protected. And what that means for you is if you put in oxalic acid vapor, which is what I highly recommend at this stage, that might get away. So let's bump it forward.

Let's do it on the sixth day. So six days after you, I have a swarm, get the varodistractor mites with oxalic acid vaporization. Now you can use dribble if you want to be even safer. You can use RTU, which is called ready to use apoboxal, which comes from BetterVee. And if you get that stuff, don't forget to ask, for the discount. The Fred Dunn discount, so you can pay exactly the same as everybody else.

But it's time to get them. Get them mites. You have a chance. You can put them in a great disposition, going into winter. You have a new colony, a new swarm. Why not start them off mite-free? And I have to tell you this. My mite numbers are extremely low. We're going to talk about this a little more at the end of today's discussion, but Cajuswarn moves in, when do you know, that's not my mite, I don't even test for mites, because here's the thing. Normally, once they've been occupying a hive for a long time, we would look for two things. One, if they're developing a lot of drones, drones are our test area, so drone cells. Caps drone cells are number one on your list

to cut them away, open them up, and count for varodistructor mites. Now let's say you don't have a lot of drones because at the end of the year, which it is right now. And then we have a bunch of workers, but they haven't. There's not a bunch of brutes. We don't know where other nurses are concentrated. So doing a mite count right now is going to be probably very inaccurate. So I recommend just going ahead and treating for mites with an organic treatment. none of that synthesized synthetic stuff

organics so and you're not going to use something like formic pro because remember that's for really strong colonies is a small colony just starting out so don't do that just use exhalic acid I highly recommend it dribble method's going to be very effective R to you even more so another dribble method

but it's already it's ready to use ready to go so get it use it kill the mites on a fan take them out mite testing is a lot of fun I highly recommend that you have varodistructure mites for pets. You're going to learn things about them because when you have a pet and you look at it every day all day, okay for most of the day. You're looking at them. You're going to see what they can do what they can't do physically.

And you're also going to see what they respond to, what their needs are, what the environments are that they thrive in. It's good stuff. Once you know what environment they thrive in, it's time to get rid of that environment and introduce an environment they don't thrive in. I'm not going to tell a big, long story about why, single entrances and no venting works not only in favor of your bees but in favor of reducing varroa destruct or mite reproduction through high CO2 levels and everything else. So just saying a lot of things going on. Next question comes from Jane Jana Baker 4058. Says just had a swarm here in the hot Piedmont of North Carolina where rain never happens.

Is it possible for a hive not to leave queen's cells behind? I can't find one where it came or from where it came. It was small and I brought the box to it after going to lots of trouble. Five minutes later, out it came and off they went, never to return. Okay, so this is, I'm not going to criticize Jana Baker here, but they took off never to return. So does that mean a swarm took off and left a residual colony of bees behind? Or do they all just scoot?

Because these are different things. One is a swarm. The other isn't abscond. So based on this, it sounds like they could have absconded and just left the box. Which can happen. You can have a colony of bees and walk up to inspect them one day and find the box completely empty. And sometimes when they don't have a queen, they can do that. While they're getting robbed too, they start to scoot away.

away from there and just go with the robbers. That's right. They get robbed and go with the robbers to that colony if they don't have a queen and you can end up with an empty box that's completely robbed out and empty. By the way, this is not a criticism for Janet Baker here, but robbing doesn't happen overnight. They can't completely empty a hive. And the way I know this, because we gauge it, we do backyard test, backyard basic experiments that anybody can do. Take a full frame of honey, capped on both, sides. Sacrifice it for science. Put it out at your robbing station. Watch that thing get entirely covered with bees. Bees, wasps, everything goes after it. See how long it takes them to empty one of those frames. It takes days. They don't just do it in a single day. And remember they're

only doing it during daylight because when it gets dark and cold outside, they're not on it anymore. So during the day, they're zipping out there. And once they know there's a resource, by the way, they fly earlier and they fly colder. They go straight to it because they know. it's there it's guaranteed payback so the return on their investment is high so they'll take the risk they'll fly out in 50 degree weather they sure will and so then what happens is uh we realize looking at how many bees it takes to clean out a fully capped fully stored honey frame once we know that then we know that if we've come across a beehive that's completely empty like they've robbed it out and took everything then we know that that's actually been getting

rob for an extended period of time and you, the beekeeper, are 100% responsible for the failure of the colony. Unless, of course, there was no queen. They were dwindling anyway. But then you could have taken the resources and benefited from it directly instead of just losing all your bees. Robbing screens could have helped if there was a queen present. Once they get to a certain tipping point, they don't defend it anymore. They just can't. Once all the guards are overwhelmed and everything is taken over, that's just it. But this sounds like unobscone. But part of the question was, do they ever swarm without a queen cell behind? I personally have never seen that. There would be a queen left behind. So the queens usually when they swarm out, the current queen

departs with the swarm, and then there will be a newly emerging queen soon to follow, usually within 24 hours. And so looking for the queen's cell can be hard sometimes if you're new to beekeeper, beekeeping. And because sometimes it's really glomish. up and hidden but you look at thicker sections of the comb and you look for areas that are really built up sometimes as along the edges and it's not always really obvious where the queen's cell was so when you pull it apart and look at it a couple of days later if there's still a residual colony of bees there and it was a swarm instead of when it was gone where they all would leave then you could look around and see if you can't find a queen now something funny also happened

to me this year funny strange because i was just looking at at highs, which is it's my job to do that to stare at things at length. And so I was watching a colony of bees because I was doing the pollen counts. And so I'm looking to see that they're getting more than 10 per minute at a time when other colonies are bringing in plenty of pollen. So if a colony was not doing that, then I'm suspicious of it. It might not have a queen in there. And we're trying to, of course, curb their potential to have laying workers.

and while I was watching the colony, A queen showed up on her own, did a little zippy circle, landed on the face of the hive, did a little figure A and scooted right into the entrance. And I thought, is that an unmated queen from another swarm that may have had multiple queens in it?

And instead of getting surrounded by a bunch of bees and killed with heat and suffocation, she escaped, found a colony that didn't smell like it had a queen because Queen M. W. Fremone would be reduced. And then she flew up there, sniffed around, decided they're queenless, and I went in to see if she wasn't accepted. And I sat there again for a while to see if they didn't run her back out. And they didn't.

Now, how do I know? That wasn't a queen from that colony doing a mating flight and then returning from a mating flight and entering the hive that she originated from. I'll give you 30 seconds. Okay, less than that. Because when I see a queen go out and get mated, it's local singles, I mean the drone congregation area where all the males hang out, they're all bachelors. The males are also virgins. We know that because they're alive.

And so they're flying around. They mate with the queen. She mates with a bunch of them. She needs three to mate with the fill her spermatheca and then be ready to produce for a colony for the rest of her life, which can be many years. but when she flies back after having mated, a bunch of them follow her back from the drone congregation area, and this little comet of drones shows up on the landing board of the hive that she returns to. And I call that a drone rush. And sometimes you hear it, they're really loud. Drones are loud.

Their motors are bigger. Their wings are bigger. They use more calories. They're just obnoxious. And they all land, and you think it's a swarm until you realize it's not a swarm at all. It's hundreds of drones converging on a single colony. And that's how I know that's a made queen that has returned. And they all dissipate and leave within about an hour.

So they get a meal off of the nursebees that are there and they go. So because this queen that landed on this hive went in all by herself clean, not a single drone around, no bunch of bachelor males chasing her down the street. She went in and by herself. So I think she just found the colony, found a home, and moved in. Have you ever seen it? That's the only time I've ever seen that. All the hours and many tens of minutes that I've spent looking at bees,

that is the only time I've ever seen it. Now another thing that's happened too, which I think is funny and beneficial. There are late season swarms. We know that in September. Here where I am. For some people, they only have a swarm season in spring. Good for you. We have a swarm season that almost doesn't stop.

So we're in another swarm season because we're in another heavy nectar flow, which is why we don't have to drive around a tree. full of syrup totes filling up our hives with sucrose for the bees. So anyway, what I've also seen happen is scouts from swarms, late season swarms. And they're scouting landing boards. They're checking them all out. You know what I think they're doing. They're sniffing and they're checking things out. See where the defenses are, number one. See if it's an occupied box at all.

And if it's low defenses and occupied but queenless, a swarm can show up and move in. and so they sense that it's an available space there's some resources there defenses are low we can move in so swarms often will move in and you suddenly get a queenwright colony with a huge boost in population seemingly overnight if you're not vigilant and staring at your colonies frequently which i recommend that you do as often as you can the family's watching tv you just go out leave your phone unless you're using it as a camera leave your phone and go stare at landing boards and you'll start to get a sense of the more landing boards you'll look at you'll know when there's an anomaly you'll know when something's different something isn't right about this colony i need to get my comfortable chair and sit down here and stare at that and see what

happens so anyway another thing can happen too what if the queen is there but she's weak and she's just not doing well and a swarm shows up and moves in because some beekeeper put that swarm in a bucket and carried it over and parked it right on the landing board of another colony that is not doing well. Would they go in and fight for that space? I don't know. Sometimes they do. And when they do that, the queen's president. What do we call that? We call that usurpation.

So when they usurp the existing queen, there's also a bunch of turncoats in there that all of a sudden join with the incoming sworn. They let them all come in. There can be tiny resistance at the beginning. And you can think of this as kind of what also happens when you're combining hives, when you're stacking boxes, a dwindling colony, healthy colony, and you just combine their resources and put them all together. You can also collect a swarm and park them in front of several different hives and see if they're prone to go into one. And use it on the ones that you suspect are queenless or have problems. And it solves itself.

It's a lot of fun. It's very satisfying, as my grandson would say, very satisfying. we'll move on to the next question which is from kevin smedman and bald-faced hornets because i did that sweet video about the bald-faced hornets in their nests and they didn't even get stung once didn't even get attacked by the way while i made an entire video sequence anyway says your video and narration blah blah it says i was wondering if they have any parasites that prey on them like the brodestructor might So bald-faced hornets, by the way, very interesting because a lot of people are going to be seeing them this time of year. You know, the foliage starts to fall away.

You suddenly see there's a big wasp nest. And by the way, I did not destroy the nest that I did all the sweet videos of. A lot of the stuff was in focus, too. Really good. Plus, I took you visually inside that bald-faced hornet nest. Now, why don't they get diseases like bees? So first of all, let's think about this, because there are some things. things that can happen to them, which I'm going to talk about. Honeybees occupy the same nest every year,

year after year. It's a perennial nest. They make it themselves. Bald-faced hornets make their nest, too. Aerial bald-faced hornets. So they only use their nest for one year, one season, really. So spring to fall and they're done. So toxins and things don't get to be built up in the nest the way they do with beehives. Beehives, the environment is very important. Environmental health, very important for honeybees, because the resources that they get from the environment come from floral sources. And they bring that in. So the nectar and the pollen they bring in, pollen for the brood, nectar for the energy, but they also don't forget, produce their own beeswax. So when they're getting beeswax or making it through their little wax glands,

and they have eight of them on their abdomen. When they're making that, they're doing that based on resources they found outside. Well, if those resources outside of pesticides in them, then where does the pesticide end up being concentrated in the beeswax, which composes their home? So it's a whole another level of possibility for diseases in the beehive. So it's accumulated, which is why really old comb gets rotated out. For me, that means six-year-old comb or the cover, you know, the color of,

color this coffee cup, which by the way is from the village Victorian in Morrisville, Vermont. Anyway, it's about that color. When it gets really dark like that, it's time to swap it out. So you swap at the comb for a lot of reasons. Some people like to leave it until eventually, you know, because with each cycle of brood that goes through it, the, it gets really fibrous, and there are cocoons that build up in it, and they don't do a great cleaning job, after everything and then eventually they say the cells just get so small that they can't reproduce in it I've never seen that that's what I'm told but I do agree that it gets concentrated with pesticides that are from our environment usually

from our agricultural practices and so we want to rotate that out and even fresh stuff wasps do not have that problem because keep in mind first of all they don't metabolize and make their paper nests from their metabolism they go out and they get cellulose. That's why you see them on unprotected wood fences and things like that. Old sheds, anything that's exposed, you'll see was just on it kind of chewing. And then they'll work up a little ball of that. And then they fly back to the nest. And then they mix out with their saliva. So it may have something to do with what they've also got in their metabolism a little bit. But it's all external. So they don't process and have it come out. They have no glands that produce

the cellulose, for example, that their nest gets made out of. So what they do is, they make their nests and they keep working it up because so it's like a paper nest that it's kind of tough though it feels like you could have sprayed it with a hair spray or something like that and so they just keep repairing it and repairing it until at the end of the year they abandon it because they all die out and then the queens take off and they're the ones that continue on the species for the following year so they don't have you know diseases that are coming from chemicals now do they have other diseases is they don't have a mite that attacks them. So there's no varroa mites. That is species specific, apis specific. So now once they, what else do they have that they could get from bees, though?

Deform wing virus. And so I was dissecting, as most people do, a very large yellow jacket nest. So I had it on a bench inside a building, fully yellow jackets. Of course, I'm fully protected. but I set it all up with special lighting and photography equipment and everything else so I can go step by step and take this thing apart. And so while I'm going through it, I found some new brood because they wouldn't be flying around because what kind of virus do you think they had? If they're not flying around, what do you think it is? DWV, deformed wing virus.

And this can be spread from honeybees to other bees and to other even vespidae. So here's the thing. They had to form a wing virus, which is why you didn't see them flying around because they'll say they have it, they can't fly. So that shows that that disease can carry on. And University of Vermont did a study. And they tested to see if this virus was being spread

by commercially managed honeybees onto nearby foliage and flowers. And so where the bees were walking, because they land on flowers to get the pollen and the nectar and the traipsing around, what else is landing on their native bees, bumble bees. And so they started testing, bumble bees too and finding out that they were contracting deformed wing virus from honeybees. So this even pushes things a little further in the responsibility of those managing honeybees have a requirement.

It should be a requirement. You should feel it within yourself that you want to make sure that they don't have diseases because the deformed wing virus most often, not exclusively, but most often comes from what vector? The varodistractor mite. So when you've got varrodestructor mites scooting around in your hives, One of the outward signs of that, non-exclusive, would be deformed wing virus. So when you find deformed wings on your little, even drones sometimes have it, and they just get tossed out, they just don't feed them because they're never going to fly. They're never going to benefit the colony, so why not just let them starve and kick them out on the ground, which is what the females do to those poor males.

And so the thing of it is, it can also happen with other things. But as far as mites go, no, deformed ving virus, yes, which is why we have to be very careful. about whether or not we're deciding to control, reduce, restrict, or get rid of the varro-destructor mites. Might be doing that on their own. It's pretty amazing. Pretty alarming. And by the way, we're going to do even more of that mite testing might counts and stuff.

The supervisor is going to come over. We're going to pull trays. We need a power washer, clean them out. We're going to put new trays in. We're going to see the varro mites drop through the screens on the highs because not all of them are configured the same. But those with removable trays, we're going to be counting on. mites we'll see what their condition is we have lots of fun testing ahead the next

question comes from Julie 3477 says yes please do a segment about the best winter configuration for top our hives so that's the questions you know what did you want to learn what do you want to know about so the winter configuration for top bar hives you know what a top bar hive is that's the first thing that you have to think about is what is it well it's a horizontal hive it is the most user-friendly if you're building a hive yourself and you want to make something and you've got very basic carpentry skills the top our hive is at the top of the list for hives that are easy to put together and i got my original one i met natalie b from be mindful down in texas and i got one of the

b mindful top bar hives shipped in the mail up here they're very inexpensive by the way you can buy the whole thing get shipped in the mail and it's built by amish people which is pretty funny because i didn't think of how much people being in Texas I think of those as Pennsylvania people but I guess they are and we're going to take a look at what the top bar is I just happen to have one here this is the top bar and the thing of it is is 20 inches long which just happens to coincide with the length of a length straw high front to back it is one and five-eighths of an inch tall so this isn't a standard you know if you just had an inner cover or something so this is already really thick and then it is

what's the width on that one and three eighths of an inch wide and then i've got this little starter strip on it which goes down like this and this sits on your top bar hive body that's it it sits on top and the hive body is also made out of full dimensional lumber so it's not three quarter inch stock it is much thicker than that so the stock of the side walls is also going to be this material now i wanted to do it last winter which was a extended cold heavy winter here in northwestern pennsylvania and so i had the top of our hive out there and you know instinctively i wanted to get out there and put insulation over the top of this i know that um hive hugger was doing experiments with this and they were going to encapsulate the whole thing,

but I decided I'm just going to leave it the way it is, like a fallen log with bees in it. And remember, these top bars just sit here and there's nothing above it except there's an airspace, and then there's an open air kind of canopy cover that's hinged that protects it from, you know, downpours and stuff like that. But it doesn't encapsulate it or prevent air from flowing freely over the top. I do have criticisms, by the way, if you look down the length of it, this one is pretty straight. It's pretty good. But it's kind of green lumber when you get it.

So when you get all these pieces lined up because it's all they are stacked side by side, some of them start to warp and twist a little bit, and that leaves little air gaps and things like that. And since that happens during the summer, is that a problem? The little air gaps, you know, when these things don't, don't match up just right? no because the bees are going to propolize that right up they propolize everything I do think it did over winter time did perfect they came out in spring they did just fine on their own because the other thing is I couldn't feed them or anything else so my best winter configuration is to leave it the way it comes and if you want to see the

way it's made you can look at be mindful you can go to their website they're in Texas have schematics plans details all the good stuff there's even a feeder if you want to put one of those in there so it's like a frame feeder and it's all made out of wood and uh that's pretty much it since it worked and it works so well do i need to change anything not really could i change something and if i wanted to let's say i want to let's say i'm committed i want to add some insulation what am i going to do you're going to be shocked i'm going to recommend double bubble just blouse it over the whole top put some flat stones in there just to hold it in place because the wind is just going to whip right through and all we're doing is adding a layer on top of these to make sure that the seams are

closed and you've got some extra coverage that's all i can think about really because i don't think it needs insulation now if you're in a much colder climate than i am then you'd have to consider something like that and i would consider making the tops so it actually encloses the whole thing this is the Wild West when it comes to design and engineering because there are no standard specifications for the top bar hive. Now the one thing I would do is not necessarily make it a lot deeper because I understand. The comb that comes off of this is remember without a frame. So the comb is just hanging out here and they naturally kind of take it to the edge of the interior surface of the hive, which is at an angle. The same angle by the way that they observe in the same.

else. It's where they come up with it. So they've got this angle and they've got a flat bottom. So the comb gets drawn down here, foundationless. And when you pick it up, it has to adhere just to the inner surface of the top bar. So then there's all this discussion about, well, if you want to look at it, you have to flip it on its long axis so that you don't flip it sideways and it, you know, swings down or breaks off when it's full of honey and it's new. The older stuff really tough. But so this is why you don't want to make a really deep top bar cavity because now we have it's only supported at the inner surface comes all the way down here.

And then we think about it when it has the greatest weight load and when is that when you have full of honey. So that's when you risk because what if it has little attachments at the bottom just little tack welds kind of beeswags? when you go to pull it up you could stretch it pull it rip it honey goes everywhere and it's a mess so I don't have a problem really with the depth I think that's great and who am I to say that they didn't think it out since this is all they do but I would make it longer so right now it's about four feet I would make it you you can make it as long as the stock you can get

10 foot two by tens I'm not saying build a 10 feet long because then you'll have some instability throughout the run so then we would have to put struts and things like that exterior struts so we don't invade the interior space but we would make sure that they remain fixed at that set width when it comes to frames long length or off hives is a big problem because then those hives have frames that set in the hive in a rabbit joint and if that joint flexes in or out then if it goes too far out the frame falls too far in the frame gets stuck or you can't put it back in once you pull it out but the top our hive is not committed to that width unless you start moving your frames up

and down back and forth expanding and contracting along with the colony that's why i say make struts to make sure that there's no bending in and bowing out because we want to make sure that if we move these drawn comb up and down that cavity, that trough, that we want it to match throughout its length. So that's the only reason that you have to do that. So I would make it bigger. And I have two colonies in each of them. So they're divided exactly in the middle right now, full colony on one side with an entrance at the end, full colony on the other side, entrance at the end.

And that's going to even improve wintry. And everything in it, they make themselves. That's interesting. So absolutely not just foundationless, frameless, top bar only. So if you've never heard of it, and if you wanted to, you know, you're a Boy Scout or something, you're looking for a project. Or you want to be a beekeeper and you don't want to do any of the work, but you want the bees in your yard, you reach out to the local Boy Scout troop and you offer it to somebody as an Eagle Scout project. And they make all the stuff, they put it in your yard, and then you just inherit it.

Or you can buy the lumber. because they have to learn to use tools and stuff too. You could pitch it to them. I just hit me right now. You can get yourself some free beehives, get some Eagle Scout programs going. I think that would be fantastic. Moving on.

Next one comes from Jonah Baker. Jana, Jonah. Okay, I have three long hives. I have rapid rounds. How do you feed on these long hives in winter? I have searched everywhere. and can't find the answer. I live in the Piedmont of North Carolina. It's so hot in those long hives. There's the thing. Long hives. Long Langstroth, Layans hive, top our hive. What kind of hive are we talking about? But it won't matter. I'm going to give you fixes.

I gave the bees a few sugar breaks in the rapid rounds since today I found six dead. Now that bothered me a little bit. Sugar bricks in a rapid round six dead bees. there is no reason any honeybee should be dying in sugar breaks unless it just got old or unless they're fighting over sugar because it doesn't have the trapping mechanism that syrup has see if you have heavy sugar syrup in somewhere and then they get into the little trough area and they get stuck and their wings get stuck and their bodies get stuck and their you know the spiracles get plugged with liquid and they suffocate that's understandable I get it that's why they die but when it's dry or it's a brick. I don't understand how that happens. They shouldn't have died there. So this is a puzzle on many fronts. So anyway, I had the sock in there. Sock and wrap it around gives them more traction so that they don't get stuck in syrup again. But these are sugar breaks. It's like a climb on it. I know you're going to talk soon about winter feeding, but I'm trying to get everything together now. I just got the fond in. So by the way, I hope it's the hive alive fondant, which now they made the packs for nucleus hive sized.

And don't forget to use Fred 10, which gets you 10%. And then you go to the website, and they're offering like a 15% discount or something like that. So who's going to use a Fredtown when they can get 15 already right there? Way to go, Hive Alive. Okay, so, then you just pay the same as everybody else. You get the discounts that are at the site. But get that fondant ahead of time. I'm telling you, don't let them run out.

and then you don't have it going into this winter we had a bee breakfast this past wednesday and all my be be breakfast attendees are all set so now that we've got everything we need now you can go and get the stuff that you need so but trying to get everything together so how to feed so the horizontal hives offer all different methods let's say how to lay in's hive it's rare you know fewer people have layens hives this is a frame feeder for a layens hive i got this from dr leo shirashkin who says not to feed but here's your frame feeder and then there's a wooden piece that slides in here and this way it lines up with all your other layans frames now the thing with a layans hive when you put all the frames in there's no opening to the top of it so there is a closed

on it it's insulated if you get your eyes from dr leo then of course they're insulated with sheep's wool and that's really good stuff but now if you're going to feed and this is compartmentalized by the way so you could actually put um fondant in here or you could just fill it up with sugar something if you wanted to and dry sugar going into winter so that's good stuff you could drop some b bites in there from strong microbials you could do all kinds of stuff but here's the thing every high has a frame feeder so the top our hive they have a frame feeder the other is the long langstroth hive it has a frame feeder because they're standard langstroth frames so therefore you can get them other load feeders that go right in there they look like this only they're all black and they

match of course the dimensions of the langstroth frame and you can also get a medium or a deep and that's pretty much it so you have a method now let's say we don't have these and we don't want to spend any money you don't want to buy anything from anybody you already have rapid rounds so now we have to make holes in the coverboards so if we're talking about the long langstroth hive which is my personal favorite horizontal hive so if you have the long langstroth and I've got four-inch cover boards they go all the way down the length of it and we take some of the cover boards and we cut a two-inch diameter hole in it and then we put a plug in the hole which I had sitting around here but let's see you have had a cork. I'm not recommending that this is what you use, but you plug the hole with your cork

or you put a piece of wood over it just as a placeholder. And then when you need to feed, so this is why every third board, every third four inch cover board going down the run would have a hole in it that you have filled and you have a cover for it. So if when you're doing your thermal scans in the middle of winter and you find your colonies over here and your surface, hole to feed through is way down here. We want to get it closer to the cluster. So then you would have a hole there that you can now unplug and you put your rapid round right over the top there without pulling the coverboard without exposing the bees without getting them all upset and now you provide some kind of winter resource adjacent to them. So having these holes

and by the way, accompanied it did a very good job with the early planning of the holes is Beersville bees that makes their own Long Langstroth Hive, which is insulated and mine is not. And so they have cover boards with, I think they're like inch and a quarter holes all the way down, but they put screen in them. So, I mean, the screen is fine. The bees don't get out of it, but that's for some kind of bottle feeder if you're going to get it in there to where they can access the screen. But I recommend you not have screens in them. And so, That way the bees can come to the surface and you can even lay faunette pack straight over the hole. So pull your cork out, your plug, whatever you've done to be a placeholder for these holes,

when the cluster's in that vicinity and you pull it out, you can actually lay a fondant pack right on it with a hole cut in it. And that prevents the bees from getting out into the lid of the long laying straw hive. And what could you put over the fondant? First of all, you have to put one of the little spacers inside the hole that keeps it puffed up so it doesn't collapse on the lid. the bees when they're going inside the fondant pack and feeding and then on top of that what would we put double bubble make a quilt out of double bubble that changed my long langstroth hive through winter it was probably the simplest least expensive biggest payoff change that i did double bubble bigger than the coverboard so that it went out over the edges where the roof meets the baseboard and it provided this

gasket. Bees can't go through it, air doesn't go through it, it adds insulation, and if you wanted to put a pack or something, the bees are confined underneath the double bubble. It works great. It's so easy. If I could just weigh my hand, if I didn't have to explain to people the different hive configurations that I have out here, which is why if I have a favorite hive, you might be sooner going, well then why aren't all your hives, your favorite hive? Why isn't everything a horizontal hive? Well, first of all, if you talk to my wife, her favorite hive is the flow hive because you get honey without a mess, and it's very easy.

So she likes flow hives. If we were going to have one kind of hives throughout the aviary, she would have flow hives. I like the horizontal hives. They're great for teaching. They're great for pulling frames, individual frames, getting comb, you know, expanding and contracting without lifting boxes. They're just fantastic.

And because I don't make them and sell them, I provide the prints and plans online for free. So all you have to do is contact your local scout group and get that Eagle Scout going on a project to build the Long Langstroth hive according to my plans and get that badge, get that achievement. And then you get the hive out of it. So if you don't want to build one, can't build one, don't know people that build and use tools anymore. Where would you go? Go to Beersville Bees. I say that. It sounds like I'm sponsored.

by them. I am not. I'm just sending you where I see really good work. That's it. So the rapid rounds, you're going to have to cut holes in your cover boards. Now, if we're talking about the Layans hive frame feeder and where would you put it all the way in up against your follower board. That's where I highly recommend you put it. It's the farthest in from the entrance. And that's because when we have a frame feeder and if we're filling it with late season syrup or something like that. You don't want that near your entrance because now we have robbing pressure. And I don't know if you've been around honeybees a lot, but once they find a really strong resource, a really beneficial resource, they come back by the hundreds and thousands

and it puts a lot of pressure on a colony, even if they successfully defend their hive, the beekeeper could have helped by moving it further in and having that resource to wear They can't access it right at the entrance. This is why you never see entrance feeders on any of my hives here in the apiary. Just be sure it's convenient. Seas-o-C. Feed right at the front. See right through the tank.

See what's going on. And I just don't do it because the risk of robbing is too high. So we feed inside the hives. And that should do that. So, and it's a puzzle how bees are dying in a break. So the next one comes from Darrell Fleming 1191. That's a YouTube channel name. It says,

So these bees are from one of your other hives. So this is about robbing. I did a video that showed a lot of robbing and how to stop the robbing and how to combine a colony once they lost their queen and so on. And it turns out the colony that was getting robbed, what was their status? They were missing a queen.

So we combined them with another colony, they were very happy to do it. And are these my bees robbing them? How do you know? How do you know if the bees that are robbing one of your colonies are yours or somebody else's? You have a neighbor that's a beekeeper that you think there's bees are robbing your stuff? How would you find out? Well, I'm going to tell you this because it's a lot of fun and this is something you can involve the grandchildren and stuff like that. Bring them out, get them in their bee suits. Let's go look at a robbing event. The other thing is when kids come around,

send them out to inspect everything, tell you if anything's going on that's wrong. My super, supervisor comes in and he informs me about every hive every time. It's the first thing he does when he gets here is he inspects everything. Let's say robbing's going on. Who's doing the robbing? Kind of hard to tell because there's so much activity right now. They're going to all these resources that everything sounds like a swarm. That's how much activity is in the B yard. It just sounds like they're swarming constantly, but what they're really doing is racing the clock every day. Whenever there's a break in the weather, as there is right now, they are out getting nectar and bulimages as fast as they can gather it. So when there's a robbing event going on, you look at the entrance and the entrance

is messy. There's bits and pieces of detritus all over the place, and not only that, you see these little sticky spots all over, because the robbers are coming out with dirty feet, and the little sticky path is everywhere, and they're tearing things apart in there, and it's falling on the bottom, and they're running through it on their way out. So it's a mess, and then you might see some dead bees, and you might see a bunch of detritus and bits and pieces of comb and cappings and all of that, also on the ground right in front of that landing board. Who's doing the robbing? So you get some powdered sugar.

This is kind of fun. And you get the powdered sugar, and you get these little confectioners scoops. It looks like a small ice cream scoop, and you twist the end around. It's got little holes on it, and then like if you were doing donuts or, I don't know, cinnamon toast or something,

you would tap it, and then it would powder sugar the donuts or whatever it is. You need to cover the brownies, let's say. All right. Now you take that to that hive that's being robbed and you dump powder sugar all over those bees. In fact, if you don't have the little sifter thing, skip it. Get a tablespoon, go out there with your bag of powder sugar, scoop a big thing of it and just dump it right on the entrance. It stops the robbing immediately because they hate it. The next thing that happens is you got a bunch of bees that are covered in white fluff and they're flying all over the place. Now, see where they go. You can spot them really easy.

see which hive the robbers return to if it's in your own apiary they're going to come to the entrance where they reside and then you're going to see aha that's a colony and here's the part that's very annoying it's probably the biggest most successful colony you have they have all the resources in the world they have stored all the honey they're all set for winter but they also have this surplus of scouts and foragers and that's why they're checking new areas all the time once they're fattened happy they explore they check every nook and cranny and they're looking for opportunistic resources so they're just going and finding colonies that might be smaller one of your late season swarms that's why your entrances have to be small so they can defend it but now you find out so they fly back now what do you do well you know what i put the robbing screen on the robbers i put a robbing screen on the hive that they

were robbing and i put a robbing screen of a different design because we don't want to teach them anything So let's say we had two different design robbing screens. This one comes from Cirousel. I would put that on the robbers, right? And I would take this one that comes from Beesmart and I would put this on the one that they're robbing. So the one that they're robbing, you pull open the top tab and it reroutes the resident bees.

And look what happens. See how this is solid right here? When robbers come, they follow the scent. So they'll come to the screen and they'll come to the screen and they'll try to get into the hive because they're backdoor robbers too. So the bees that are resident that move up from inside out through the top, they figure it out that this is how they get in and out. Now why don't I want you to put this one on the robbers and the robbed? Because we teach them how to figure it out on one and it's the one that they live in, then they'll also know how to access the target hive that they're robbing. So we want to change it up on them.

so we'd put something like this in and then this has a different entrance design and the bees again go after all this open area but the residents get an open one and out through the top they go and if the robbers are super annoying we know they have lots of resources because they're stealing everybody else's stuff put that right on the front and close it up and then when a whole bunch of bees converge on it and can't get inside then you open it up while they all go in and then you close it one they're in you can sequester them they deserve it they're robbers anyway and then you take care of things that the robbed one and by this is good for eight or ten frame both of them are they have little tabs that get removed serosel be smart designs easy to do and robbing screens are

something you should have with you all the time if you don't have one you can like make one of your own, put it over the entrance again, they're foiled. This is really basic. You can bend these tabs down and create kind of a cage area and then have one of it, one area of it open, stainless steel screen, easy to bend. You could hold it in position with pins and then so that again, robbers are frustrated, they go for the smell. Wasp too. Wasts are really annoying. We can just deflect the wass enough so that the bees that reside there and come up and out and go back in. and then wastes are not good at maze running honeybees are they're very smart the other thing is if you keep it nice and small like the three-eighths inch entrance reduction that I like to have bumble bees

those big bombus bees can't get in so there you go some more information than you probably needed but I think it's good to know all right oh so this one was she said I was told to avoid using oil-based paint pens for marking queens and to use water-based acrylic marking pens instead won't the workers clean that off of the queen so there are people that make comments i notice when we did a discussion where Quinn marked his first queen this year and people said yep and then they just eat off the mark from the thorax then it's going to look like all the queens and you wasted your time It's not necessarily, and here's why we should test different markers, but I learned about this marker from Dr. David Beck of BetterB. The MPD 15. MPD. TAC 15. This is a marker pen company or something. You can find them anywhere, just Google search it.

And the thing of it is, it is an alcohol based. So what that means is when you mark the thorax, it dries really quick. not just that, the pigment itself is it says it's alcohol-based xylene-free formulation. So what it does is once that paint dries, the bees are going to have a very difficult time chewing it off and cleaning it off of her thorax. So it's all I've used because that's the first time I learned about marking queens. I used to not mark them at all. But when I learned to do it, that's where I might be confusing this. It could be better be the demonstrated Dr. David Pick,

or it could be Paul Kelly from University of Guelph. He marks Queens. He also clips their wings on one side. So I'm not sure they both use the same pen. So there you go. Two very credible people in beekeeping using that. So then you could almost trust what I'm saying as being true. It's worked for a long time.

So I'll call it. As far as using the watercolor or acrylics, I don't think I personally would. Maybe that's what's getting choose. off of people's queens that have the thorax painted. So this one came today from Holly Hawk and it was about the extractor that I have and the wheels that it's on so I went out and did a short video and but I also decided I would just go ahead and make a drawing of it and that's what today's thumbnail is because it is about first of all there's a discussion now when you are using your extractor and this is

This is for power extractors, but you can also do this if you've got a hand crank extractor, but really it comes into play with these bigger extractors, and I don't have a huge one. Mine will hold if I'm doing tangential extractions, so that means the frames are straight out, tangential is the face is straight out, and radial is the top bar is the furthest out from it. Okay, so like spokes on a wheel, radial, flat out is tangential, tangential, tangential gets more honey out of the cells in my extractor but here's the thing sometimes you load it up you've got thick you know full frames on one side and thinner frames on another and blah blah blah and next thing you know the thing is out of whack and people like to hold on to it and keep it from

moving around so I'm looking at that and I'm thinking it's talking to a member of our beekeeping club and I was talking about we need to put that thing on wheels and let it observe the energy and not put all the stress on the legs, the poles, the central axle, the gears on the motor, and everything else, right? So if we put that on a stand that has wheels, we absorb all that energy. And I was talking to Hilko about that at a conference. I said, why don't you make, this is years ago. I said, why don't you make a stand to put your extractors on that has wheels? and then it would just absorb that energy, and then I noticed they came out with springs.

So what I want to talk about is, this is engineering, this is straight up physics. So if I gave you an assignment as a mechanical engineer, and I said, let's set up our extractor, which, by the way, while you're extracting, where is all the force acting on this? Let's think of it as a small barrel, right? Stainless steel barrel.

The weight is up high on the barrel, and the motor's on top. So when you're extracting and that thing is spinning around doing centrifugal force and it starts to strain on the bolts that are in the floor, which is also why this is backyard beekeeping, this is not large-scale commercial beekeeping. I don't care if my extractor walks around a little bit. Now here's the thing. If you had springs under it, then what's it going to do? It's going to tip as it goes. Now what's happening to the honey that's inside?

So while it's tipping around on the springs, the honey starts. to slosh around. So that becomes a dynamic that exaggerates these forces acting on it, right? That's not good. What if you, because now it's tilting, it's like a tilt-a-whirl, it's going around. And I understand. So then you wanted it to be stationary. So maybe that's your only way to absorb some of that energy if it's stationary, but I think it's a problem. If you're on wheels, then if it's off balance, it takes the load completely off of it. removes the stresses from the legs and the bolts and the way it's fast and everything else because it travels around like a little etch of sketch and i've made a video about it i showed that and it wasn't clear enough so i made a drawing today with a magic marker so you can see it nice and clear this is my configuration wheels are best the physics of it the mechanical engineering aspects if you can roll your extractor around this is a The best. I'm telling you. You make an A frame. See this A right here? And then there's a shred that goes across that makes that A. That's so that we have a space here for what? For our bucket. For our seven gallon bucket, because that's the tallest one. So that's the space you want. From the floor to under the barrel, we want space for a seven gallon bucket. So putting nice, large, castor style free moving wheels under it.

That means they swivel in every direction. Think of the wheels on the back of the grocery cart that swivel around. That's what you want underneath your extractor. And we want three of them, not four of them. Why? Because if the floor is at all uneven, three is better than four. See, it adapts to all surfaces. So now you have that.

We also want the wheels to be locking. And they are. So you get them from Home Depot, Amazon. Get the heavy-duty ones. They're not very expensive. So I got wheels that are good for 1,200 pounds apiece. It's never going to be that heavy. But we're talking about a dynamic load.

This isn't just a static, filling it with honey, letting it sit there. This thing is moving around. So now we're accepting that energy in every direction, and it's very easy to control. You can control it with one finger. While it's sliding around, even if you had it way on balance, it takes away those forces that are acting on your extractor. So there's a thing.

And then we have little plates, right? So we've got the A frame. Think of that as a single level. And mine is made out of red oak. I recommend you make this out of two by sixes. I think they have wrote that on here. So every piece here is cut from two by six stock. This is scalable.

So any size, whatever your extractor happens to be, this will be the size that you make it. Okay. And then so you double pad these corners. So see there's a another block of two by six on top and a block of two by six underneath it for every corner and of course for the top of the a The cross piece up here on top and an identical cross piece underneath and that brings the other pieces together like that and there's a vertical cut So you've got this a this is very Straightforward and then the wheels that you get they have little they have a plate

That you can turn the wheel so you can access it to put a screw jarver to screw them in usually to give you big wheel wood screws or something with it. I recommend you replace those wood screws, drill it all the way through, and use quarter 20 bolts or something like that instead with a locking washer. So bolts are better than screws when it comes to something like that. So now the good news is, and I'll just let you look at it, but what are other advantages for the backyard beekeeper? You can't afford, all right, maybe you don't want a full-blown honey house. Maybe you can afford it. You just don't want it. So why do we want to have, and by the way, I have the electrical wiring coming down from the overhead, because I use my garage for this. So everything is connected from up above. So while it's

rolling around, it's not rolling over the electrical wires. There's no trip hazard and stuff like that. And when I've done with it, what do I want to do? I have to clean it out. So now it's on wheels are ready and they're lockable wheels. So it has lock and then unlocked. Lockable wheels. So once I have it where I need it to be. I can unlock the wheels and roll it outside, roll it over in the grass, tip it over, hose it out, whatever I need to do, let bees clean it up. But letting bees clean it up is hard because you end up with a bunch of stuck dead bees, potentially. And then when it's done, you roll it back in, roll it into a corner, lock the leg so it doesn't get bumped around. And you put a 55-gallon clear trash bag over the top of it. And you're good to go

until you need to extract from it again. It's the way to go. All engineering principles will tell you that's the way to go. Get the biggest wheels you can afford, by the way. So, and so we need to work that into it. Like, let's say the wheels weren't big enough. It didn't give you enough space for your seven gallon. The reason I use seven gallon as my standard for the bucket height clearance, because you have to remember, too, that when you get to the end of it, and you've extracted your honey out of the drum, you're going to be tipping it. So then I put a four by six underneath the back wheel, so I put it in the lock position, and I lock the front wheels because the extraction cycles over. So now we don't want it to move, so lock them down, tip it up, have the four by six on the back, and now the honey that's in the back,

moves towards the honey gate. And this is also why when you're factoring in your height, you have that seven gallon honey bucket there and you want to leave room for it to tip and not hit against the bucket. So easy peasy. Good stuff. So that was my response to that question from Holly. And I hope and if I didn't answer it and if you got questions about engineering principles and stuff like that, just look it up because I actually did a comparison and worked at all. all out transactional, translational freedom, minimal bending moment, low friction transmission, no tipping resonance. All of these things are benefits of having wheels instead of an immovable centripical extractor. So that's it. We're at the fluff section already. Can you believe it?

So anyway, this is a lot of fun. I hope you can do it. If you've been installing screen bottom boards, with removable trays or if you have any hive configurations that have removable trays in them This is the time My grandson's been really fantastic about it and having pulled trays he hoses them out and we're gonna be power washing trays and we have multiple of the trays So in other words if you have just one You don't want to you know have to take it clean it and then bring it back if you pull it out We have another one to replace right away if you don't leave a bunch of material in there because there are lots of critters that will accumulate in the tray underneath your screen so why have the

screen anyway it's all closed up what's the point of the screen the screen is it creates a separation things that fall through it some of the stuff you see that fall through you think well they could have used that well what you find down there often they'll they would collect like we find little wax shingles from the bees that have clearly fallen down while they were trying to work the wax and they would if that was a solid bottom board they'd recover those and bring those and bring them up and reapply them to wherever they're working and freshening the wax and the hive. But things like pollen that falls down and falls through or get scraped off, they don't pick up and reuse pollen. So the things that accumulate down there also attract other little critters,

which makes examining your bottom boards and your trays really interesting. So some people have the removable core flute inserts. That's okay. The trays are like lunchroom trays are better because they have a lip that goes around the whole side. If moisture and stuff accumulates in there and it often does, then it won't be spilling out when you're trying to pull the tray out. So what we're doing is we're cleaning them up, putting in brand clean trays in all of the bottom boards that have that capability.

And then we're going to look at them again in two or three days, and we're going to see what accumulates on the bottom. We're going to see if they're chewing brood up. We're going to see if because we have hygienic bees. If they're doing that, They're going to be dismantling some affected or impacted bees that might not be doing well. And we can look at that. We also find the vera destructor mites down there still alive.

And when we find mites that are still alive in these trays, this is a great time to test them. So I will share that some of the testing that we're doing is we're finding out what varodistructor mites can climb up on. So if they're little feet, don't get enough grip to get them up the sides of a tray that's been treated with micro mist, which is a type of silicone spray, an industrial silicone spray. And so once that dries and micromisc has been treated on the surface, I find that they can't get their footing and they can't climb up the edge of the tray. Now, a lot of cafeteria-style trays have a texture on the bottom. That's okay, because when it gets to the rim and the sides, it's just as smooth as ever.

So finding something to make that surface really slick prevents rotostectromites once they fall through the screen, and it's number eight screen. for it they can't climb up and out of the tray so they stay stuck in there and that lets us look at them so then those become your pet mites that now you can find out what their other abilities are and how long you can get them to live and stuff like that but it also tells us how many colonies are having larger mites that are falling through the screens that are being groomed off that have then a bunch of mites now they're a candidate for counting the mites if we have a tray in for

three days to a week and we get one mite on it, I'm going to call that colony good to go. So, and that's just based on past experience, when a colony has a lot of roadistrictor mites in it, you find a lot of mites in those trays. But you need to check them periodically because if you don't, there are other things that are scooting in there because these are not airtight, they're closed up, but there are little gaps because you find other little critters in there, even ants and things like that. And for all I know, ants could be removing. Verota striker mites. So unless you're setting up specific start time and a stop time for this observation and counting practice, you don't really know what's being removed. Plus, once all the detritus gets

built up in there, very hard to spot and find exactly how many mites you might have. So that's a lot of fun. If you have that capability, it's a great time to do it. So again, as I mentioned last week, feed light colonies. So in high feeding, open feeding is not great this time of year. Too many bees and we could kick off robbing and stuff like that but target feed the colonies that need it only and if you're still pulling frames of honey you shouldn't be open feeding at all so reduce entrances i'll say this all the time uh three eighth of an inch entrance uh remember that these cold nights that we're having in the northeast and other northern areas then you're going to find that the wass are out there very early before the sun is even fully out there are wasp checking and testing land

landing boards. Now sometimes they're just doing cleanup and that's fine with me. I see was on landing boards. Your bees have thrown out dead bees at night. Sometimes they've dragged partially developed larvae or pupae and they'll leave them on the landing boards and then your wass will come and take those and run away to feed their babies. I don't see a problem with that. We don't want them scooting inside the hive and take an advantage of a tighter cluster when it's a cold overnight before the temperature warms up and your bees can then defend. So smaller entrances help with that. Also, if you've extracted honey,

a lot of people are sharing pictures of all their honey in five-gallon jugs and buckets. Try to get that stuff in your jars as quick as possible. If it crystallizes, and late season honey tends to, if it crystallizes in the big buckets, you've got a real chore on your hands as far as relinquify, that so then you can process or filter it or whatever you do if you put it right in your jars right away first of all it's a good way to do honey testing

for moisture also before you're going to storage less than 18% I highly recommend less than 18% water and once it's in all the jars then you can individually warm jars as needed this is also a time that even if you only have a few hives create a history of the hive for the year so you need to have a log I highly recommend a three-ring binder and there are lots of sources online you can Google search beehive inspection sheet and you'll find there's a whole bunch of PDFs out there they're available from lots of educational institutions departments of entomology they've all got sheets ready to go you can print those and make your log

with a three-ring binder and assign a hive number to every hive that you have and start to keep a history on it. If you're just in beekeeping for the last couple of years, you think that it's easy to track everything and you're going to remember all of that. But all of these things play. When you harvested honey, how much honey did they produce? And when you set up the hive, also remember we're keeping track of how old our brood frame is and stuff like that. So this is all stuff that would be in your logs. And then you can create a material and maintenance management sheet from that. So this hive was set up on this date.

we take out 20% of the comb, whatever, whatever thing costs you too. You should track all the costs to see how much you're really earning from your bees. You can feel like when you're selling honey and things like that, that you're earning a lot, but once you stack up and tally up all of the resources, time spent.

A lot of beekeepers never document the amount of time they spend in their apiary or doing processing and things like that. So it can seem like honey is kind of a free thing. Now, on the other hand, if it gets you out of a gym membership because you're getting all the fitness activities you need from your apiary, that's tradeoffs, that's a benefit. And then the resources that you sell, but even jars and lids and labels and things like that cut into your profits when it comes to selling honey. So keep logs, expenses and everything else, because remember, it's deductible, it's farm deductible. And next Friday, next Friday is the last Friday of the month.

So it's going to be a live chat from four to five Eastern standard time. So if you want to join me for a live chat and shoot me your questions on the spot just in time just as you're thinking about it next Friday's the time to do it. Now it's also time to go outside and harvest the seeds from your favorite plants. The plants that you think that your bees are getting resources off of that you see this time of year that did really well you can get the seeds and collect them and bank them for next year and you can replant also a lot of companies that sell seeds. aren't seeds Eden Brothers all these different places and probably your local hardware stores and stuff like that are discounting their seeds so now you can get them for half of what they cost or something like that

you can even just go in and ask the manager what's happening of your seed display when you're going to get rid of all those cosmos seeds I can take them off your hand anyway it's the time to barter to get those off of their hands and into your gardens and fields and you can start to create

gorilla gardening seed bombs where you just throw them in clods of dirt and grow plants that you want for your bees. So rats and mice are also showing up in sheds. I have cameras. That's right. I put cameras on the floors in the sheds and they face the walls and doorways and things like that. And so they have mice already moving in. You need to know what's going on where they are. And if it's where your gear is being stored, we don't want rodents in your bees, wax, your combs, and stored equipment and stuff like that. So it's time to be aware of that. And so it's also time to look for points of entry and put stainless steel brillo pads and things like that in holes and checks offits and all of that, because it's about to happen. So that's it. That's the end for today. So again, if you have a question

for me, please go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, fill out the form, and tell me what your thoughts are, and we might include that in one of the Friday Q&As. So I'm Frederick Down. I want to thank you for being here, and this has been The Way to Be. Have a great weekend.