The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 332 with Frederick Dunn Organic Honey in PA?

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/DphJiy1rFxU

...and... ...you know ...and... ...and... ...and... I'm I'm So hello and welcome, happy Friday.

November the 14th of 2025. This is Backyard Beekeeping Questions and answers episode number 332. I'm John and this is the way to be. And this is the way to be. Hi, I'm Jeff Hyde with Apis Tactical and this is the way to me. and this is the way to be so I'm really glad that you're here if you want to know what we're going to talk about please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and some links to follow up information if you want to

know more and also if you want to know how to submit your own topic for future consideration please go to my website the way to be.org and click on the page marked contact you fill out a form and there you go if you have something on your mind right now and you want to talk to somebody, one of your peers, somewhere where you live, because the membership is all over the world, you go to the way to be fellowship on Facebook. And there you go. You can put in pictures and everything else. There's a lot going on. I know. Outside, right now, 23.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That's minus 4.7 Celsius. It's right. It's frozen out there. It's bad. It's 99% relative humidity. What's that where you?

you are relative of humidity also 99% all over the world and of course what's going on here is not necessarily what's going on where you are and it's just what's going on here in the northeastern part of the united states the northwestern part of the state of pennsylvania and it's not very windy thank goodness 1.6 miles per hour and that's 2.57 kilometers per hour guess what the pollen is right now zero so those who have allergies finally get a break The best day coming up for the state of Pennsylvania, where I live, is going to be Saturday. Tomorrow, that's 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which will be 12.8 Celsius. So if you're going to do exhalic acid or something like that, tomorrow's your day.

It's going to go downhill from there. The worst day is going to be Monday at 33 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the high. So 0.5 degrees Celsius will be our high. We're just in it. I guess you know. Winter is on its way. And I'm launching this early today.

because I'm actually headed out. Where am we going? I'm going to the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Conference. So if you're there, please come over and say hello, or just wave. And it's going to be a really good conference through the weekend. I have a lot of people I'll be talking to because I'm going to get some questions answered from the experts in person while I'm there. So you might be wondering what's going on outside as far as critters go. Let me show what's going on. Well, there's possums. The opossum is everywhere, and it's the only thing that I've noticed that can chase away a skunk and not get sprayed. I don't know what's going on there. They have a rivalry, and it's pretty darn funny. There was a gray fox that showed up last night, which is different than the normal fox that we have around here. I don't know what you know about a gray fox, but they're different. They have retractable claws. They can climb trees. They leave bones of their kills up in trees. I don't even know why they do it. You would think if they're feeding on it, it would be to get the dead animal away from other animals. It would rob them, but they just leave them out there.

It's very strange. Coyotes were everywhere last night. So the deer are running still. They're being pushed around because, of course, it's still mating season. And the buck and the dough and everybody else are running around, and the coyotes were howling in groups last night. This is an interesting fact that you may not know. Coyotes sometimes bark and yelp.

and make all these noises in rapid succession, and one or two coyotes can sound like four or five coyotes. They're like coyote ventriloquist. They change their voices so that other coyotes think there's more coyotes than there are, and then they run away from each other because they're territorial. I don't know what's going on,

but it's pretty darn interesting. And of course, we still have a skunk. No raccoons, no black bears, the black bear I hope. They are going into hibernation really soon, although somebody in my neck of the woods did post they had a bear go through their bee yard and tear things apart so just to remind you i've stopped using electric fences and i use motion detector alarms that are solar powered so they never go down and uh those keep the bear the bear away black bear specifically and i want to give a big

thank you to i got this hive tool as a gift from the empire state honey producers And they had a conference in Syracuse, New York, and I got invited to be there, and I made a bunch of friends. And you know what the best part of that was? There's a huge percentage of people there that never heard of me, and I think that's perfect. And then there was also a sizable collection of people there who never watch YouTube, none of them. And it's because they feel like YouTube is not a good source of dependable information. And so I think, I'm glad, first of all, to have won at least a handful of people over. I'm pretty sure I picked up four or five new subscribers, so I'm happy about that.

And if you're watching and you're from the Empire State, please leave a comment, say hello. And so integrity is an issue with a lot of YouTube channels, not just with beekeepers. But we need to be true and honest and right. And if we've got something wrong, we need to admit that. overall, you know, the perception of social media. So, and that's why I spent a lot of time researching the things that I respond to. And I definitely respond to comments when people have concerns about something I may have said in the past or if I've made changes. So count on updated material. So that's pretty much it. I think we can jump right into today's

Q&A. So the very first question, question number one, comes from Khalid in greater Boston, Massachusetts, right here in the United States. I left a honey super on as I prepared my hive for overwintering. If I add a hive alive or some other fondant as an additional insurance, is there a chance that the bees may store some of the fondant into the honey super? In other words, do the bees only eat or consume the fondant, or may they also? store it as a resource. Now, I've sat in on a lot of meetings and had people get questions similar to this, and I've heard some very interesting answers. So I'm just going to give you my take on it. Let's be purists. I like to fail safe, right? So if you've put something in

your hive and you still have honey superson, whatever you've put in your hive has the potential, however slight, to make it into your stored honey. I've often heard people say, well, if you put on sugar syrup, the bees will only use that when nectar's not coming in and things like that and it won't wind up in your honey super. So that tells me some people are leaving sugar and augmented materials on the hive while honey supers are on. And you may be something there going, what's a honey super? Well, honey super is supposed to be surplus. That's the part that you take off that gets harvested for you or your friends or if you're in a sideline business, people, will be getting the product of your hive from you and it has to be as represented food from

wildflowers so the pollen needs to come for the wildflowers and nectar needs to come from the wildflowers nothing should be coming from inside the hive from you so the risk is there definitely they it can work its way into it and this is one of the things that i've pointed out my wife thought that some of the honey left over from winter this spring so this past spring she thought it was ruined because oh look it's green there's some of the cells are green it's terrible okay well the green by the way is really good for the bees but it also showed that late season sugar syrup feeding was being stored for the long term in the hive not just consumed by the bees because the year was ending in the days were getting shorter and things like that and for

Gorge was getting lighter. I fed them sugar syrup with spirulina in it. I don't have a bag of spirulina, but spirulina is algae, right? And it's a blue-green algae. Really good for the bees. Heavily backed with scientific research from multiple sources around the world. So it's good stuff. And the reason I like it is it serves as a marker, a visual marker of honey that has been tainted with sugar syrup. and that's okay because this is for the bees going through winter. I don't feed sugar syrup on a hive unless the honey supers are off or it's a beginning colony that needs a boost to get started and you're not taking their resources anyway.

So then when we pull it on in the spring, we see, oh, look at that. It's got this blue-green tint to the honey, and that is actually spirulina honey-made-with sugar syrup last fall. So by adding things, it definitely does end up in long-term stored honey. So honey supers should not be on. Question number two. Comes from Rob in Lekanto, Florida, USA. Okay, so this is interesting too.

And it just happens that I'm going to be running into some experts about this this weekend because Penn State heavily represented in the, of course, Pennsylvania State Beach. Keepers Association Conference. So it says this past year I've seen honey labeled as organic from Brazil, which I've read has questionable reliability as whether it's truly organic or not. But this week I saw a U.S. honey labeled organic and certified in quotations he says certified organic by and then named the company. Now I'm not going to name the company because what I'm going to say covers all of it.

So as I know you attend conferences around PA, I was wondering if you had heard about this before, and how can they ensure the bees don't stray into foraging areas that might not be so organic? And what does this actually mean in regards to honey? Okay, so organic and certified organic, and this is something that comes up a lot and has been, ever since I've been keeping bees. Can you call your honey organic here in the United States? You can. You can call it that. It's not certified organic because the certification process involves the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And there has to be a standard for certification. So what's organic mean? Well, it's not synthetic. Nothing is manmade. Everything comes from the natural resources in the environment. This gets messed up in the United States because we have even genetically modified crops that can defeat your organic standard. We also have pesticides that are spread on crops, and those defeat your organic certification.

And so when it comes to the plant and animal industry here in the United States, these certifications are sometimes pretty easily applied when it comes to plants themselves. When it comes to animals, they move around. So getting certified honey, that is USDA organic labeled, you have to be critical thinkers. You have to question everything. I've said that for as long as I can remember. Question and challenge everything you're told no matter who's saying it. So look at the way things are phrased. Certified organic. Did they say grown in Pennsylvania? Did they say harvested this honey from beehives in the state of Pennsylvania? No, they didn't. are a Pennsylvania company. Okay, that becomes a processing center. And if you're going to process organic honey, you have to have certified processing facilities to do it. So they become bottling and processing centers that then cycle out honey under their label. The honey did not

come from the state of Pennsylvania. Now you're probably sitting there thinking, well, where does it come from then? And it just so happens that when you start to do research on certification, for organic. Dr. Margarita Uribe Lopez comes into play. Her name is on that stuff, Dr. Robin Underwood. And the interesting part is both of those PhDs are going to be at our conference this weekend. And we're going to be shooting the breeze, but I already know what the answer is going to be because I looked into the literature. It's not likely that anyone in the United States producing honey is ever going to have a certified organic honey that comes from bees that are an apiary within the continental United States.

There are a couple of exceptions of potentials if they're in national forest areas. Because part of the certification, and by the way, like a lot of government things, they haven't even landed on a final certification of organic honey and what the limitation should be. So right now it's a radius of 1.9 miles or 3 kilometers. That radius means that from the apiary, 1.9 miles in every direction. There can be no GMO crops. There can be no herbicides, pesticides of any kind. And then, of course, there's the honey testing to get the certification. So as of today, right now,

no one has domestically produced honey that has gotten that label. So that's really interesting. So if they're selling U.S. honey and it's labeled as certified organic, is that a lie? No, it's the truth. But it didn't come from the United States. Here's the part. That's interesting. That's frustrating. I went way down the rabbit hole on this. We have three sources, international sources, that ship honey into the United States that gets an organic certification. And let me muddy the waters a little bit. Those honeies that are coming in, as Rob says here from Lacanto, Florida, what are the chances that it's accurate? Each nation that delivers their honey to us and goes directly to these bottling and processing centers,

one of which is in Pennsylvania. So I did look that up. It is one of the certified centers for organic honey processing. So when they send it here, they certify it. The sending nation certifies their honey as organic. And right now there are three that come up in every article and research paper that are looked at. Brazil is the most likely source.

Brazilian rainforest honey. certified organic when it comes here. That doesn't mean it meets our standards within the United States, established by the US Department of Agriculture, but it meets their certifications, and then we decide whether or not, being our Department of Agriculture,

whether we accept their definition of what organic is. So, and then there's Argentina and Uruguay. That's it, three nations right now. So they can ship their certified organic honey to the United States, and it must go through in order to keep the label, it must go through another processing center here in the United States that processes under certified organic parameters,

which includes water, cleanliness of the facility, and everything else. So that's where this labeling comes into play, and I did think it was very clever the way things were written because I checked the website for the company that Rob was asking about, and they're very careful in the way they word things. They don't flat out say, this honey is not produced here. They go in great detail about how they manage the honey that's being processed in their site. So you can get the perception that, wow, is that really coming from

right there? Because I didn't think you could get organic honey certified right here and you can't. You have to buy it in as certified organic and continue that super clean processing to maintain its status as organic honey. So right now within the United States, I could find no company producing domestic honey that met the qualifications and criteria which by the way are not yet firmly established they can't meet the labeling requirements to be domestic honey that is certified organic so it's really interesting there's a lot going on and if I told you some of these details you would just be extremely frustrated because it does seem to provide you know some leeway to those importing. But like a lot of centers, look at, I've walked into stores before and I look at

honey on the shelf and I see raw honey for $3.50 for a whole quart. And I'm just saying raw honey, $3.50, full court. So then I always pick up the bottle and look at the back of it and I see who the processing center was. And I look at the website, I go to the website. And then you'll quickly find out there are a honey processing center, not a producing center. So again, those that's imported honey from somewhere else and so it could be as cheap as a dollar a pound imported raw honey a dollar a pound so it's not hard to see that people could be making money off of that and so that particular store and i'm not going to name the store but they do high volume sales uh they had a lot of raw natural honey that of course was very inexpensive and hovering right around

what would cost them a buck 50 a pound or something like that when they're selling it so their profit margins are very lean so they make up for that by flooding the market with lots of it so look at that stuff as a sweetener i have no idea what's in it i think we have a long way to go as far as honey testing goes too so that's question number two very interesting question and uh yeah you can't you're not going to make any organic honey you can do the best that you can, as far as everything under your control, you know, everything in your hive, everything that you feed your bees if you feed them, and so on. Question number three comes from Alvin in Yonkers, New York.

Hey, friend, I'm thinking about trying the two queen keepers hive next year. The bees need to be added to both sides at the same time. They're going to add one queen hive first, add a split to the other side, a couple of months later. Thanks for your help. Okay. The other good news is, this is the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association Conference. I know that George, the Keepers Hive people, are going to be there. 99.9% sure. So I'm going to ask some follow-up questions, and I'm going to try to do little snippet videos of the interview that we do.

And so it's for those who don't know, aside for the fact that it's a Keepers Hive, it becomes a two-queen system where the boxes are the brood chambers are side-by-side. so we have two separate colonies one box above that there's a queen excluder underneath of that and the next box up is divided so the bees cannot exchange within the hive between each other now once these hives are in production the third box up becomes common ground for the bees that are occupying the lower hive boxes to mix together and store their honey resources in a common box so that's that's where they mix together. So with this question, I'm going to fall back on what I personally would do as far as managing a colony of bees where we have two colonies side-by-side, sharing a common

super later. You could start with one colony on one side. I'm sure you could. Why wait? Go ahead and get them going. The other interesting thing is, which is a little different from other hive designs, the keeper's hive has their bottom box set up so you can access the brood box without lifting any of the upper boxes off and the frames will slide towards you you open the top you slide them towards you because there are special covers on the ends of your frames that prevent the bees from propolizing those together and making it difficult to slide them over so you can do it you can work them the other thing is much like a horizontal hive they have a follower board that's solid which means if you start a small colony in that configuration you can put three or four frames of

brood and resources in that put a follower board there and then the extra frames that you'll use later as the colony builds are just on the other side of the follower board and the bees don't have access to it so it is a very interesting hive design and now would I pull a split from the hive that I build on one side so in other words it's an eight frame potential it's a ten frame box but it has a ten frame or eight frame capacity two of the frame spaces are taken up because there's a central column that supports the upper boxes and makes it part of the system. So what I pull brood from that side and now that they build out, start my colony on the other side of the keeper's two queen system and two colony system. I personally would not unless, because keep in mind

there's going to be a lot of drift, even though one entrance might be on one side and other entrances on the other. Peas follow pheromones heavily. And so one of the things I would think about doing is maybe pulling brood, like if it's filling it up and you've got six out of eight frames that are all brewed and all involved in production and development and it's early spring and things are going good, you could split them but you want to replace the queen. I would not let them or wait for them to produce their own queen. So it introduced a queen from really good either locally adapted stock or go to your favorite queen breeder that you want to support with your financial vote that's what i do um and then you can bring that queen in and to make sure that she

sticks around you can put the frame in a cage with your new queen right in the keeper's hive until you see that she's fully involved that she's laying eggs that she's developing her own brood and then uh this will help them get established plus we have some variation in genetics which means they don't just think it's an extension of themselves because if we did the split and we use a frame of brood with eggs and things in it and let them make their own queen, first of all, that delays things a lot. It's way down the line. And so when we do that, they're genetically very similar to one another because they're going to produce their own queen. She's going to go out and get mated. So the progeny from that queen are still going to be

closely related to what's next door. So you might have more drift. towards the queen right colony while you're waiting for this new queen to get maided and finished and things like that you can lose a lot of your workforce so genetically different and bring it a queen and have the queen ready to go made it and everything before you put her in there and of course the best case scenario is putting in two queen right colonies at the same time even if they're small so you could get them started somewhere else in your apiary in nucleus hives and things like that five frame boxes and then just bring them over and install them on the same day at the same time each with their own queen and go from there so it's interesting i'm going to have this conversation

we're going to talk about stuff like that also this idea about them visiting with one another in winter feeding and having a common winter feeder on top of the hive because that's what i'm doing with my two queen uh beehive keeper two queen keeper system keepers hive anyway that's what i'm doing this is there's a fondant pack on top of there right now and it bridges both colonies both sides they're both feeding on it good news is though the clusters are right down in the first box where they belong this time of year and that was a good move because and this doesn't matter if it's a two queen keepers hive system or if it's a standard langstroth hive system remember they were under the queen excluder so they were all kept in the bottom box brood wise second box

wall-to-wall honey and I've seen the demonstrations from George and the gang that came up with the keepers hive and they clean out the second box and use it as a feeder shim thinking that the bottom box has more than adequate resources to get them through winter so for me I left them five frames of capped honey on each side so it's a split ten frame box each side has access to that and then above that so there's a divider keeping them on each side but above that the very top is that APMA plastic feeder system that allows syrup and or fondant at the same time, which is a huge advantage. And that's one of the things I want to talk to them about. Where are we going with a feeder design? Is it going to be divided so we can feed both or separate or favor one and not the other? I think it'll be great. And so I'm looking forward to that conversation also this weekend. But yeah, keeping them divided is your strongest. move let's move on to question number four which comes from miss darwin four says my first year at beekeeping ending with the winterization of my bees but you said the level needs to be back to degrees now

this is regarding the flow hive specifically which i get for the honey flow of the flow hive but what about rain getting inside and cannot flow out the front as the guard does doesn't look like it will do well against heavy weather does that work so I'm not sure what the guard is that looks like it won't do well against heavy weather there is a um a canopy I forget what they call it it is just like my hive visor that attaches to the front of the hive and shelters over the landing board so first of all I want to address the two degree tilt and that's unique to the flow hive because flow frames have to be tilted back when you're harvesting honey and then the discussion is can it just be left in that position all year long and it can

be but it also has adjustable legs so you can screw them and level it up for winter time and so now keep in mind i've done that for nine years so i've had nine winters with that system now when they first came out with it so the first flow hive that came out it didn't even have a regular bottom board it has screen bottom board and a core flute pull out so that was the classic they're calling it now i did not like that because the core flute was would get jammed up and stuck and stuff like that so the new ones all have a bottom board that has a removable tray underneath an aluminum screen and what they're calling an aluminum screen is really a cut-out sheet of aluminum it's not wire so now there's an advantage to that so i'm going to cover multiple parts of this

If there's water that gets in through the entrance, and if you look at the entrance of this particular hive, across the full width of it, it's only three-eighths of an inch high. So for driving rain and stuff like that, not much of an issue, if at all. So the issue comes into play when there is a landing board and we get snow that piles up on it. And so if it's tilted back and the snow's piled up on the landing board over here and it starts to melt off, it can melt, and the water comes up. off the melt could go into the hive the good news is it's not a solid bottom board it's a screen so the water that goes into that hive then would go through

the screen and into the tray underneath and that makes it easy for it to handle now the first tray that they had was this very rigid really squared off edges white plastic insert that thing cracked easily and I didn't like it when water got in the bottom it and we got below freezing which we do easily here like right now for example and the water would freeze in that tray and crack it out and then that solved its own problem can you guess what I'm going to say because when it cracked the tray it created leaks and then so the water that collected in the tray leaked out so you could go the extra distance and let me give you some options let's say you're lazy beekeeper I know they don't exist let's say for some reason

you went to a conference in Pennsylvania, you're going to be gone for three days, you're worried about water getting in your hive. If you just drill tiny wheat holes in the bottom of that tray, then any water that accumulates in there would leak out. Now there's a drawback to that. Sometimes when you're processing, when you're extracting honey from that thing, you can get some drips of honey going down to the bottom board. this year none of it made it to my tray but let's say it did if you had the little weep holes in the tray underneath your hive then that means that now you've got honey dripping out and you kick off a potential robbing frenzy which we don't want so even though it's an option for water if you think you're going to keep up with things uh the other side of that is uh you could just be pulling

your tray out and dumping them which i highly recommend during winter because you know what happens in wintertime this will shock you too some people get bored it's like there's nothing to do this is what your kitchen table is for whatever you know your spouse says so you go out there and you have replacement trays because we don't want to pull a tray and leave a big opening in the bottom so for that particular hive we're talking flow hive now when you pull the tray out it's open then all the way right up to the screen where my other hives my hive bottoms that are completely enclosed even when you pull the tray still completely enclosed, no draft from underneath. But what I want you to do to break up

the winter time is have a replacement tray, go out there, pull the tray out. I really doubt there's going to be much moisture in it, but if there is, bring that into, bring the tray in, replace it with a clean one, and put the grungy one on your kitchen table. In fact, make this a weekly 1R, for those of you who are into 3M maintenance and material management. So you do your weekly one requirement to pull trays and look at those and get your magnifying glasses out get your microscope out another great thing to have out and leave out explain this it needs to be on the kitchen table all the time needs to be ready to look at things and then you'll scoop out what's on the bottom of the tray and start looking at it under a microscope you'd be amazed at what's under there

and not only that i highly recommend petri dishes the glass ones are my favorites but they have very inexpensive plastic ones put that stuff in a petri dish and here's why when it starts to warm up it's going to start moving i 99.9% guarantee it and you're going to be sitting there looking at things in the detritus that you've just drawn out from under your beehive and you're going to think what is that and i have to be honest i don't even know everything that's in there there there's little white things that chase each other around they consume things it's very interesting it's fun to see a varomite down there that kind of reanimates varomites by the way are complete sissies when it comes to cold weather.

I have not had a varroa mite that I've collected when it's sub-zero attempts from a bottom board because I look at them because they're cool to look at. And for still photography, nothing holds still and holds a pose better than a dead varroa mite. They are perfect posers. And you can look at all their anatomy. You can see what kind of condition they're in. You can see if your bees are still chewing their feet off. It's a sad moment, but they still do it.

You can see how hairy they are. anyway you get my point there's a lot to learn from the bottom board of your hive you do not need to change the angle and i know that's the question you don't need to change that you can leave it tilted back that two degrees because i recommend that you have a hive visor or the flow canopy that they sell for it either way you can make your own or you can buy one it extends over the landing board so unless the angle of the rain and snow and everything is really extreme it's not going to get in there and melting snow limited amounts get in there because you know what happens when the snow's melting it means it's above freezing and what are your bees doing when it's

above freezing they're going out there and they're getting water because they need it even in the middle winter you need a lot of water so and let me know what you find if you got something cool and if you're one of these super nerds that understands what kind of microorganisms are living in the detritus with the cast off you know when they're cleaning out their cells and they're chewing bees, wax, and it just drops to the bottom. And these other little critters are the cleanup crew. There's a whole, you know, tiny world down there. If you know what these things are, that's something that we need a field guide for.

Or just a pamphlet. You know, the bottom of the hive, what's living down there. And I do collect those pseudo-scorpions, but they're not very often in the bottom of hives. But when I find them, I put those in little petri dishes. and take videos and photos of them churnat today c h e r n a t i d a e or churnatid's whatever they're called when you look at those under a microscope call over and get them to look at it and say look what i found in the shower it's amazing scorpion with no stinger make people comfortable with the world around them by enhancing their knowledge of it don't let it just be a tiny pepper-sized speck on the wall let them

let them know that things alive and crawling around at night while you're sleeping moving on to question number five this is from gavin studios let's the youtube channel name how much should i worry about not having enough forage for the bees how much should you worry that's the first part should you worry i don't think you should worry however it is a problem because i remember the good old days and they're not that old but when i had six or seven hives of bees here i get more honey per hive than i get now and i can explain why um because there's 43 colonies out there right now in the same roughly same area that's good for me because i get to see all the different hive configurations get to see how the bees do things it is a tiny miracle that i get

surplus honey from these hives and this was a very good year for that by the way the summer of of 2025 was a fantastic honey yield year for me here in northwestern Pennsylvania. Now imagine if I only had 10 highs, which is the target. They would have had so much honey and had to go not quite so far to get it. Because when I go outside and I'm looking at wildflowers and I look at wildflowers all the time, I highly recommend as a backyard beekeeper that you engage with nature. If you live in an urban environment, go to your neighbor's yards, look things over, get their permission, of course, shame them for killing off all of their weeds. And every time Kim Lawn or whatever company shows up to spray their yards, stand out there with your little picture of dying bees

and look sad until they go away, it'll work. Not at all. Um, so anyway, there's only so much forage. And you're probably wondering, well, how do I know if where I'm about to keep bees, there's adequate forage for bees you get a website that today is managed by pennsylvania state university and it is called beescape.org B-E-E-S-C-A-P-E-C-A-P-E-E-S-C-A-P-E-R-G and you'll find out do you have a dearth what kind of resources you have and the data is increasing therefore the information is getting better and they're filling in all the gaps regarding what resources are in your area at different times of the year and as well as what's working against your bees in the form of pesticide loading it's all

there but I'm troubled when I go out I look at golden rod there's fields of golden rod no great surprise this is what you should find because bees are we won't call them lazy they're efficient they'll go to our resources really close by of course until it's exploited and then they start to branch out and then they go there what were we talking about with the organic certifications 1.9 miles to get organically certified but bees continue to fly farther and farther and they will for a high sucrose content nectar resource so these low sucrose content resources they won't go very far for it be like if you filled your tank to drive to the neighboring town to fill your tank

and then when you got home your tank was empty again that's not worth the trip so then you would just stay home so the bees are like that the bees will go as far as they can to get a resource that still provides a surplus when they get back they burn calories on their way there they burn calories on their way back this is why i suggest as they did this past weekend at the conference if you are setting up beehives near a resource let's say you do pollinator services or something like that and we know that the bees can really load up their max capacity according to those who know more than i do is 90% of their body weight so that's a combination of pollen and nectar so 90% of their body weight so do we want them to fly heavy to the resource or heavy against the wind from or to the resource so when

they go out there and they load up on pollen and nectar we want the win in their favor so if you're setting up your bee yard to make your bees more efficient and let's say there is prevailing wind that you can predict so right here the prevailing winds are out of the west so I would want my bees to fly to a resource to the west and then come back with the wind once they're heavy and then it saves them energy coming back and there they land now in micro amounts that doesn't even matter for the backyard beekeeper who cares but if you're commercial beekeeper with some of the people I were talking that I was talking with Like it's a small operation if they ran three truck loads of bees.

Well, that's over 400 hives per truck. So these numbers get pretty big, pretty fast. So then if you're thinking about all of that and then working with the weather and the prevailing winds and things like that to create a more efficient pollinator service, then I would definitely have all my hives on the downwind side of the resource that I'm contracted to pollinate. That's just what I would do.

so you can over saturate an area with pollinators now the good news is honey bees because here's the other part you always need to be ready for there's people that hate you because you keep bees they hate the bees because they're non they're non native species so there's a growing group of academics in particular in entomology departments that are standing there with their arms crossed and you're not even allowed to come to their meetings and talk to them because you manage honeybees and they're only interested in the native bee species that are here so you are the enemy the way they see it but my point is the native bees are pollinating things and getting resources that your honeybees can't access and don't access this past year this past summer what i saw more than anything else melissa d's which was on the

sunflowers everywhere that's a native bee their numbers were high they were also on the cosmos that i but so there are specialist bees and then there are those that can just go the world is a buffet to them and that's the bumblebees there are lots of different bumblebees some of them are huge some of them are tiny and what they get to do that honeybees do not do is for example you'll see a bunny bumblebee on a clover and then it'll fly right from the clover straight on to another plant of a different species honeybees don't do that now you might say but first I see honeybees in a bunch of different species. Yes, but you need to follow the individual forager. They are floral constant. So when that honeybee gets out there, and if it's doing clover,

that honeybee, that particular one, is going to go just to clover on its way back. And then you may see them on cosmos, and there might be a white cosmos, and a purple cosmos, and so on. And you'll see a honeybee go from one cosmos to the other different colors, but they are all cosmos. And I want you look at the pollen anthers the center of each of those flowers it's the petals that are different colors the center is the same same species honeybees are still being floral constant when they pollinate all of those but your native bees have more opportunity that's what i'm saying they also build new nests in spring so they start over the native bees are cleaner because they don't have a perennial nest your honeybees have more of a challenge when it comes to the quality of the forage that they're

bringing in and that's because whatever toxins they bring into the hive get concentrated in the beeswax year after year after year where if honeybees cleaned everything out and started with all new wax every spring they would be way behind of course because now they have that infrastructure to build but they would be cleaner as far as the environment that they live in goes so when i see one flower and it's got to be visiting it every 15 seconds. That's bad. There's too many bees, honey bees in particular. They were all over the aster's.

They were all. If there was a flower, there were bees on it. You didn't have to look anywhere for it. And that's because of me. That's my fault. I have too many hives here. The last thing I want to see is somebody else come in and bring more hives to create more competition.

So, anyway, yeah, you can do it. Keep just a few hives, see how it goes. And then you'll find out. That's why commercial beekeepers are always looking for places to park their bees. And that would be the end of the world. Somebody shows up with 80 hives and parks them right next to where your backyard apiary is. They would exploit and exhaust resources quickly in that area because now your bees, their bees are all looking for the same resources. Question number six, this is already the last question for the day.

So prepare yourself. Well, I'm thinking about it. says this is Scott the engineer one that's the YouTube channel name well I'm thinking about it the bees cleaned off a lot of the wax on my wax dipped hives do I just put more wax on the clean spots or go with something else so what I wanted to know right away is this wax dipped hive and there are a lot of if you do a Google search or YouTube search dipping your hives that means a lot of different things and they are not all created equal and if the wax is already coming off of it

Hoover Hives is one of the ones that I tested a few years ago definitely the wax on the Hoover Hives is gone on the outside I did not repair it because I just want to see how it's going to go and but there are different treatments Kamen Reynolds has a special hot dipping system and these are not being dipped in beast wax initially it's something else that drives out all the moisture that locks in preservatives into the wood and then maybe there's a final dip of bees wax on the outside but what's going on in the end grain and everything else is something completely different and this isn't something that's cost effective for backyard beekeepers so the reason i bring this up once you have a wax dipped hive box you can't just go out there

and well you could it's just not going to be effective you're not going to paint it with an exterior latex acrylic paint or something because remember it's already been impregnated with something else so the wood grain is occupied and so when you have that you can't just throw another thing on so we need to find out whoever made that box with that exterior coating on it we need to find out what they use and if you really want to try to reconstitute that you can do it there are limits to the temperatures that you can have beeswax at and get it to because here's the catch it has to be enough to drive moisture out of the wood and replace it with paraffin or whatever's going into it. Bees Wax has a very low temperature upper limit to where it could actually

combust and catch fire so they can't have it as hot as they can have other proprietary blends that go into the woodwork. So nothing to put on there. I would just wait it out and see how it goes but I would definitely do a right-up or make a lot of YouTubers that comment on my videos and things like that, you have a YouTube channel. You could get your phone out and make a short video that shows, hey, this is a box I bought,

and this is its condition right now, and look at the surface, you know, it looks like it's got no coating on it anymore. And get the opinion of people. People that view videos love to share their opinions. It's unbelievable but true. They'll even write them in the comment section. you'll be open to all kinds of opinions but so for the close out today after the credits if you keep

watching you're going to see i had a conversation with Greg burns from nature's image farm when i was invited to the ohio beekeepers and so you can see what's involved and he talks a little bit about heat parameters and things like that he also happens to have a very good product because they partnered up and this is not a promotion this is not something he asked me to say or do premier which is partnered with of course dr marilla spivak and the minnesota bee lab and their research on propolis they came out with a hive called propola and it has an interior surface that's distressed in just the right way to get your bees to put their maximum amount of propolis on it and then it gets into it's a regular pine board so

what are we doing to preserve the rest of this hive so now nature's image farm partners with premier has this wax dipped process that you'll see at the end and preserves the wood who knows for how long and i have several of them out in my bee yard i placed an order for them i was not handed them although i did get a free one at the conference what conference the north american honeybee expo they were they had the biggest exhibit when you first walked in there premier did And a lot of people are using their boxes and I pay attention. I'm not hearing complaints about them. So also their joinery is a little different too.

Anyway, long story short, if you want to see how a preserved box should be preserved, that's a pretty good explanation. And the way those boxes are made also pretty darn good. And it's a healthier hive because of the propolis. So it has all these things going for it. So if you want to buy something once and have it last a very long time, I would put my name on that. I would say it's looking good so far.

But I've only had a year and a half with them. So I don't know. You have to check in with me in 10 years. So if you're not subscribing yet, you need to subscribe now. So 10 years from now, when I talk about it, you'll remember this conversation. And you might even have one or two of them in your yard.

You know what I wish they would do if they're listening, if anybody's listening. I want a hive box like that, a propyl hive. That's a five-frame nucleus hive. I think they only make 10 frames right now. So if they're listening or they get the word, I would like to see a 10 frame, no, 5 frame nucleus box out of wood, 3 quarter inch for my nucleus hive triple stacks.

I think that's fantastic. So that's it for today. We're in the fluff section. Checking with that at the end. Tell them I sentia. There is no discount that I know of, but you couldn't do worse. Just tell my sentia. Pay the same as everybody else, but get a great product.

It's all. this is the time all your fondant should be on it is freezing now of course i'm speaking for where i am now but if you're in this climate or worse heaven forbid you need to have any syrups out of there you know what i bought this year i bought a vacuum uh it's a little shark vac it's a portable vacuum it requires a plug-in so it's not battery powered the thing is powerful and tiny what's it for for me personally because it's also translucent i got it at walmart it's a shark just like the one that i used i have the little handheld ones that i used to get bees off of things this is a shark pack it's this big and it's from walmart it has a clear reservoir in it and so what i'm testing right now

and it's a really good move if you had a hive out there that did not consume the sugar syrup that you put on it and there might even be dead bees in there so it has multiple purpose. I haven't made a video about it. I'm probably going to wait till it's warm outside to do it. But you can suck up the sugar syrup and any dead bees that are in there and you have it in this clean reservoir because you didn't use it for anything else. You can pour that for a colander so it cleans out the dead bees and then you have your sugar syrup that was in the hive and you put that in storage until next spring. And that way you didn't waste it and you cleaned it out. So now what can you do with the feeder? You can put a fondant pack in the feeder.

see so you don't have to wait because I did inspect some hives it was at the beginning of last week so the last worm time we had when I shifted everything over to fondant there were a couple of hives that still had half an inch of sugar syrup in them so I couldn't do anything with them I can't just stick hive life fondant in there plus I had to shift it around so that now it's for candy which means the bees can access the whole space you can't do that while there's sugar syrup in there or they'll just die and so having this vacuum to be able to suck all that out super handy i'm to find other uses for it too watch what happens check for leaks on your hives so this is it this is your last chance to close things up before it gets really bad and of course this year i'm

using that hvac tape that aluminum tape it's working fantastic super easy super convenient i have it on a spool on my inspection kit so it's already with me if i see a gap somewhere i just peel off it tears by hand you don't even need scissors sticking on there and everywhere i put it so far it has stayed so hvac tape this coming saturday here in pennsylvania is going to be the best day for oab if you're going to do that one-two punch i think they're early this year in dropping off on brood so i think we have maximum exposed burrow destructor mites so you can get them talk about organic Exalic acid vaporization is considered organic. Some people want to do the dribble method.

It'll be a great day for that too. So if you don't want the organic gas going in there, then the sublimation, you can go straight into the safe method, which doesn't challenge your respiratory system if you breathe it in. You can do the dribble method. Look it up. It's interesting, easy to do. But it requires opening your beehive to do it.

It's going to be, what did I say, 55 degrees or something? yep it's going to be 55 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday that's your chance unless it rains mouse guard should be on right now unless your entrance is down to 3 eighths of an inch and one of the tests i'm going to do this year because mice are moving into buildings right now so if you're trapping mice get up to speed on that too on my youtube channel which is frederick done you go to the top right and look at the little search bar type in mouse trap or box of certain death and you will see my innovations in trapping rodents now i'm not recommend you do that outside because we don't want to kill every mouse we just want to keep them from occupying the space where all

of your valuable bee equipment is being stored and you need to take them out clean if you're going to kill a mouse kill a mouse no poisons ever ever don't let them suffer okay so your mouse guards are on we keep them out of the hives not a huge problem but so one of the things we're doing is setting up beehive that's unoccupied that we get mice to go in and feed on these mice will be preserved because they are acting in a participatory program for determining how long does it take a mouse to chew through a three-quarter inch thick three-eighths inch high entrance reducer what's your bet a mouse that gets habituated to going in and getting black oil sunflower seeds which they love we're going to let them go feed they're going to be zigging in and out of there we're going to

provide them with a little habitat, a little space, and then we're going to block it with a 3 eighth inch entrance reducer. And we're going to see how long does it take an adult deer mouse or even multiple adult deer mice to chew that hole big enough to make entry. So we're going to have cameras on the outside, cameras on the inside. We're going to document the whole thing. What's your bet? What do you think is going on? So insulation in place. So if you're insulating, it needs to be on now. It's time. Time is running. out. And for those of you who are going to be, as I mentioned before, at the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association Conference, our lead speaker, the guy that's going to kick right off,

I'm going to be in the front row for that presentation. David Burns is going to be there. He's got like three talks. I'm going to sit right there. He's got a talk titled, Bekeeping like a boss. I want to know how to bekeep like a boss. I'm going to sit right there. Maybe he'll even say hi to me. We don't know. But he's going to bekeeping like a boss. I'm going to sit right there. Maybe he's going to be there, I'm going to be there, everybody's going to be there, it's going to be a great time. Thanks for watching. Stay watching, pass their credits, so you can learn a little bit about the purple hive that's been treated with Endura hive treatments with Greg Burns. I almost said David, because I just talked about David Burns. But anyway, see you there. Have a fantastic weekend.

I hope it's great for you and your bees. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this has been The Way to Be. I'm going to be a lot of I'm going to be a lot of I'm going to be able to I'm going to Fytheirc, Fythe,

so, so, So the thing is Greg, you don't need to introduce yourself, I will have done that. So anyway, we're here in the state of Ohio, the Buckeye state, and we're talking about the prople boxes and also you your endura hives. One of the things I get asked all the time is, is that just beeswax? So if you could talk to us about,

let's be a bare piece of wood that you've just put together. What's the process, what kind of temperature parameters we're talking about? So we're talking about a bare piece of wood. The idea is we wanna get all that moisture pulled out of the box or as much as possible. Then we wanna impregnate the wood fiber with the wax,

but not all wax and not all wax if it's created equal. You might think, well, is it? Bees wax, what kind of wax is it? What kind of makes sense? We have a proprietary method and a blend that are getting the temperatures way above the 275, 300 degree threshold that you'll see other folks using for wax. What that means is we have put together a very high heat wax that is stable. That has a branched hydrocarbon. What that means, Fred, is when we use high temp and our blend of microchristolin only, no paraffins, no rosin, no bees wax, what that does is imagine taking a,

schedule 40 piece of smooth pipe and rolling a tennis ball through it. That would be like bees wax or paraffin. It's not very stable and that heats back up again. It can roll and slip out. When we're using our blend of microchrystalin wax, imagine that tennis ball having tentacles that can actually adhere and latch on to the inner cell wall of the fiber itself. It's way more stable when it comes to heat, thermal expansion, contraction. What that means for the box long term is more of that wax is going to stay put for much longer and actually penetrate much deeper into that box. So no, it's not beeswax. It's not rosins. It's a high-temp proprietary blend of microchristin wax at a temperature parameter that works the best for different

species of wood. What's the final coat? The final dip. Is that everything? Everything. And it also is hot enough that it drives all moisture out of the wood too. Right. So you see a lot of bubbling and stuff? You see, it varies. So different times of the year, not all wood is created equal either. There might be boxes that may have just a 0.4% difference in moisture content. They'll behave a little bit differently. They might need a little bit. There is no cookie cutter time or format for wax dipping.

It is very much based on moisture content, species, relative to humidity in the space that you're working. With the ultimate goal is getting as much of that moisture out and then packing those areas, is back in with the microchrystaline. How long have these been out in bee yards? Endura hive has been out in bee yards for probably five years. Wax dipping has been out in bee yards for 50, 60 years. All we've done is take something that's been done for a very long time and refined it with technology and then a little bit more science

and products that are available for high temperature. And my number one pet peeve is the rabbit joint at the corner. That's where they fail first. How are these holding up? Yeah. These are pretty cool because one of the great things specifically about the Propola Endura Hive boxes is the frame rests are actually reinforced here. So look at all the extra meat that you have. This is the first place that is so annoying, whether you're an experienced beekeeper or you're a beginner,

we have a habit of putting a hive tool in at the frame and prying out on a standard box, on a standard rabbit or a finger joint box. This is the first place to break off. And that is so frustrating. What I love about these boxes, it's actually the frame. time rests is actually scooped to give you the meat on the corners so these last a lot longer just physically outside of the protection from moisture or fungal growth so that part is really neat the other really beautiful thing about these boxes which set them apart from a standard finger joint box is the blind dovetail super super strong and yes this is all wax

dipped but there's even less ingrained exposed are vulnerable so if you are painting your own boxes this type of a finger joint um compared to this dovetail here way less end grain exposed a much tighter stronger box it's self-squaring and it's absolutely gorgeous we joke around with you built your own bee equipment you say ah don't get too obsessed with the details because we're not building furniture well guess what now we're literally building furniture into our b boxes so and is a straight pine is that what we're dealing with we like to use yeah eastern white pine and also ponderosa pine okay work out very well all right we're going to close this out give us your website okay

we're going to learn more about endura hive wax if they're all thing nature's image farm you can visit us at natures image farm.com thank you so much thank you fred perfect