The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 337 with Frederick Dunn 100% Varroa Mite Kill Guaranteed? No way.

Episode Date: December 20, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/zHd9HhbG5ow

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... ... ... ... So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, December the 19th of 2025. This is backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 337. I'm Frederick Dunn, 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. All the topics will be listed in order, and there's a lot of them today. And if you want to know how to submit your own topic for future consideration, please go to the way to be.org and click on the page marked contact. Fill out the form, and there you have it.

If you've got a question right now, you just have to know someone's opinion about something you're seeing, there's a fellowship where you can share your videos and photos and get opinions from your peers, and it's called the Way to Be Fellowship. It's on Facebook. I hope you'll go there, super friendly group of people. And what else is going on?

Well, for the opening sequences, for starters, we've had a really terrible transition here. And where is here? The northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. So I know what you want to know for starters before I get into the opening sequences. How about the weather outside? Right now it's 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 7 Celsius, by the way. 11 mile per hour winds, which is 18 kilometers per hour. What's that in nautical miles?

per hour I don't know it didn't look it up 97% relative humidity and the wind gusts that's the important thing started last night around midnight the really heavy gusts 38 miles per hour that's 61 kilometers per hour so combine the snow the cold the wind everything else together and you've got a mess on your hands by the way the video that I'm putting up right now that shows the weather you'll notice some deer walking through there there deer all over the place out there so everything melted off it was in the high 40s here Fahrenheit yesterday we went around that's what the opening

sequences were I was clearing out the entrances of the beehives and looking at the condition of the bees that were on the landing boards some bees were doing cleansing flights and so on and overall things are looking pretty darn good so we're going to talk a little bit of more about that later but now we're right back to freezing terrible weather terrible conditions we have a lot of questions so we're going to jump right into them today I hope everything's great for you holiday season's coming right up so the first question comes from Aurora Lights Bengals that's the YouTube channel name and it says if outdoor

temps are 40 but inside an insulated hive we can assume it's at least 50 couldn't you then use Formic Pro What do you think I'm going to say? I'm going to say the same thing all the time. We have to go with the label. And the labels for these things, Formic Pro, very effective. Somebody might be sitting there going, what's Formic and what's the Pro version? Well, Formic acid is used to kill Varro destructor mites.

And it has very specific temperature parameters. So just to make a long story short, these temperature parameters are based upon what's going on outside. Not what the hive configuration is. Nothing to do with how insulated. insulated it is or what the potential interior hive climate might be. So I can't say because you have a better insulation situation with your hive that the interior temperatures would be conducive to using Formic Pro

outside of its designated parameters which are on the label. So I'm always going to say follow the label. So insulated, not insulated, it really has to do with their ability to vent that off, not vent that off, how much fanning they're going to have to do. have to do because remember they're engaged in a lot of cooling down when it's a really hot day and a really cool day trying to warm themselves the cluster and keep the brood alive 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit so it's based on outside temperatures not inside the hive good question though question number two comes from uncle junior 67 if it's sunny and 48 degrees Fahrenheit and my bees come

out if it's cloudy they don't come out i might feed right next to the hive but i won't feed too far away in a robbing station they might just stay out and freeze in my opinion okay so i don't know where uncle junior is specifically located but here's the thing feeding right next to the hive is always a bad idea if you're in a warm area where other bees are out looking for resources that could kick off a robbing situation no matter what time a year it is if they're flying and they're finding it, I would not do that right next to your hive. Now, the risk is, of course, as described here, if you set some feed out well away from your hives,

they fly out and they're out there at the feeding station, and then the temperatures drops, which this time of year can happen in a very short amount of time, as we've seen 30-degree drop overnight, by the way. They can be stuck out there during the day even. It gets cloudy, gets dark, gets cold. And so I always say in the wintertime, your best place to feed your bees is targeted feeding inside the individual hives that you know

need it. So I would not feed outside the hive. And not right next to the hive either. I don't want to come out. What's the number one thing that they're coming out of the hive looking for right now? Well, yesterday, not right now. It's too cold and messy and snowy. But they were looking for water, of course. And that's what they need. So that's one thing that you can keep available all over the place and they'll use it question number three crumbs from mike in bulgar pa is it bulger or bulger b-ulg-r anyway i'm about two hours south of you anyway have you heard about pseudo scorpions they eat varroa mites they're in pa so this spring i will go on a hunt for them and add them to my one hive if they make it

Through this winter, what are your thoughts? Okay, pseudoscorpians. Churnitids is another name for the broader family of these things. They're called pseudoscopians because they look like scorpions. They have the little pincers and stuff. What are they missing? The stinger. They don't have a tail with a stinger like a scorpion does. So they're actually pseudo, fake scorpions.

They also sometimes are called book scorpions. Maybe that's because you open the pages of your loose-leaf books and you find them in there. This comes up a lot. this has been around a while and it's something that i like because when you have as i do screens on the bottom of your hives that the varroa mites and other things fall through the screen and get collected in a tray down in the bottom you pull the tray out this is a lot of fun please do it pull the tray out bring the tray that you pulled out into your kitchen table i think it's a great place to have it have your microscope set up right there or magnifying glasses

whatever you want, and look through it to see what's scooting around in there. Pseudoscopians are very cool. Now, I have followed this very thing. This was recommended in the past by people that were pushing something called a bio floor or a natural floor inside your beehive where you'd have a lot of detritus down there. The claim was that it imitates the cavity inside a tree that would have a bunch of remnants of material at the bottom. And little pseudoscoporphins and things like that would scoot around. down there and feed on whatever falls down there so the pseudios scorpions are not a

solution here's why let's say you wanted a bunch of pets of them and I've collected them I videoed them if I have the time I will put up a video of that up in the corner here to show you kind of what they look like I have fed them for destructor mites just to see if they could even eat them and they can when the the pseudoscorpion under ideal conditions in a glass petri dish with varroa mites had to make sure it's hungry too otherwise it wouldn't pay attention to them we get a hold of the varroa mite and feed on it so that looks promising but how long did it take for it to finish off one varroa destructor mite all day long so the other part of this is they're very sensitive little things in fact if you were taking a shower

and you saw this little speck of looks like a little speck of pepper on the wall kind of they are in your shower they like to hang out where you're not looking whatever direction you are looking that's where they are not they're over here while you look over here and then when you notice it you just think it's a little speck of something if you can see it up close under super macro they're impressive looking with their little pincers that they hold on to things and they have mouth parts that they jab into it and they feed on them so we have arachnids feeding on arachnids like the varro distractor mite is not an insect for starters it's in like the tick family they have eight legs so anyway not effective and the other part of that is if they the thinking is that they would go up and hunt the varro distractor mites inside the hive bees don't put up with them uh bees grab them and fly out the front door with them so you can't build a community of them unless they're protected or sequestered in some way away from your bees and then When you set that up, you're reliant exclusively on the bees grooming off the varro-destructor mites, getting them into the tray, so that the pseudoscorpons are waiting down there to catch one and start feeding on it so they can get them.

So it's really not practical. Sorry to say. It'd be cool if they were, but they're not. It didn't work. And it doesn't work. They live for three to four years, by the way. And just for them to mature, so let's see, you're going to breed them because you'll, want a whole bunch of them you're going to pepper them all over your beehives and stuff

they're not even mature for a year so they have a lot of growth and development to do and then you're going to get a fully grown pseudoscorpian that's going to eat one or two mites a day if they're hungry the whole time so it'd be cool if it worked unlikely solution so but it's good you know what I don't want to stop anybody from trying it Because here's the thing, it's harmless, but if you don't have a screen or a bottom board that's away from where your bees travel, it's not going to make it 10 minutes in there. Watch. Introduce one into an observation hive where you can see exactly what goes on, and you're going to lose sight of that little pseudoscorpion right away because one of the cleanup housekeeping bees is going to grab it and run it right out the door. Hopefully not kill it.

Anyway, question number four comes from Alan Quick. optimal shim box so I'm interested in your long Langstroth hive having reviewed the plans and I've noticed that there's an optional shim box now this comes up from time to time so I'm just going to do this quickly people wonder why have the shim because this thing is made out a 2x12 stock and 2x12 is a perfect size to cut out the rabbit joints so that you have your top bar of your langstroth style frame with B-space directly above it before you put the cover boards on that. Where do you get to see plans like this? You go to the way to be.org. How much do they cost? They're free.

So you look at the page marked plans and prints. And in there, if you just do the 2x12, so dimensional lumber, side walls, the bottom frames, they come right near the bottom. In fact, one of the reasons that I added the shim, there are multiple reasons, but one of the big ones is with a side entrance so here's the frames side entrance comes in here they come through the entrance and engage with the frame right away now i like to have the entrance a

little bit off the bottom so that if there's a pile of bottom dead bees down there they don't block the entrance which has been the case here too when i was cleaning all the entrances on my hives the long langstroth hive for example with its entrance up above the bottom floor never gets blocked by dead be so there's an advantage of that but now it hits right into the end of the daggone length roth frames so if i put a shim and the shim is just an additional two by four so two by twelve two by four so the two by four now gives me a space to have an entrance it gives additional space below the long length roth frames what do bees do with that space when they have extra energy and resources to expand they build honeycomb and they usually make drone-sized

cells down there so it works out really well for people that want to harvest beeswax and use drones to control or reduce the numbers of erode structure mice in their hive that's all it's for so and you decide what you want or not and those are my reasons for having it there and i think it would work really well and everybody should build one and if you've built one and you're really proud of your work your craftsmanship if it doesn't look as the teenagers would say janky if it looks really good shoot me some pictures and then we'll post them on the wall where the prints are because you get to see other people's work there it's a place to show off your craftsmanship so what kind of termite are you are you really good at it let's move along

Question number five. Isancho, Esancho, 46. That's a YouTube channel name. How many different types of hives? By the way, this comment was on a video called 30 Minutes of Winter Proof of Life. So I published this past week. Some people wrote me directly to let me know. They did not like that video.

Well, you know what? That was counterbalanced by the people who have cats. Because guess who liked that video? Cats like it. I have several pictures of people's cats, two inches from the screen of their TV at home, listening to 30 minutes of winter. And yes, it was produced and directed by yours truly,

also who produced another highly popular film called Almost 18 Minutes of Rain. Now, they have been viewed by more than 35 people. And I do appreciate it when people let me know why they're unsubscribing. I don't like this, so I'm unsubscribing. Okay, ouch, I'm still going to make movies like that because they're fun for me. And I like them. But anyway, that's what this question comes from.

What type of hives are the tan ones with the yellow and blue discs on the front? And I would like to learn more about the different types of hives to see what's best for me and my bees. Thank you. And so Lori here, I do need to go out and make a video showing all the different hive configurations because there are 11 different hive styles here in the way to be apiary. So I'll just run down the list here really quick. And if you've got a favorite, write a comment, you know, I vote for Long Lang or whatever it is. Anyway, Long Langsrath Hive goes without saying that's in my future because they don't have to lift anything but the frame.

heavy built anyway moving on layens hives if you've got the book beekeeping with a smile they talk about layens hives if you talk to leo shirashkin layens hives all the way they're insulated with sheep's wool and so on then i have an israeli hive called the ivory bee and that thing is bulletproof weatherwise it sits on a porch though and i did make an entrance through the porch railing so the bees could come and go so they would know that i was willing to configure my porch just to accommodate a beehive and the flight path of the bees coming to it and leaving from it ivory be it looks like a barrel on its side apame this is the tan hive that uh lorry is referring to here they are

insulated they're plastic covered the plastic is supposed to be uv resistant i do see some bleaching going on they're insulated they're very well equipped they have they look like play school in your yard but I have to say when it comes to practicality ease of use lands hives are up there pretty high APMA is up there I meant flow hive is another one that we have easiest way to collect honey that I know of top our hive this is my first winter with it by the way when I went out and did the thermal scans very impressed top our hive colony without additional insulation they are right where they should be

in other words they still have lots of resources ahead of them good size cluster nice glow going on and that thing is made out a thick dimensional lumber this isn't three quarter inch pine this is you know your standard two-by stock two by tens i think they're made with so if you want to look that up be mindful endora hives so indoor hives are standard langsroth hives that have a really good weather treatment on them and those come from nature's image farm so if you never want to paint your that would be a hive to look into they also partnered up with apame so apame has the convenience of the hive top feeder the bottom board with the screen and it's got a pollen screen on it so that uh your bees can go through it and trap pollen so it has a lot of configuration setups

all in one hive design so they partnered with them so you can get a hybrid there propola is also part of that so propola comes from premier and And the probala hives are, they're called that because they encourage your bees to propolize. So the interior of the hive. A healthier hive was my suggestion for them as a catchphrase. I don't know if they used it, but it's true. The more propolis that covers the interior surfaces of your hive, it creates an antibacterial climate for them. It's very interesting.

We also have the keepers hive, single colony keeper's hive, and the dual colony keepers hive. and they're doing really well and their cluster is right where it should be. So we did thermal scans last week, looking good. We're doing follow-up thermal scans too now that it's cold again. And another type of hive that we have, observation hives. What's the big deal with observation hives? You put them inside a building. You can look at your bees anytime and they're not bothered

because we're not pulling the hive apart to look at them. They have glass plates. I will say this, whatever observation hive you put together, don't put loose height, don't put polycarbon it don't put some kind of plastic material use tempered glass that's all I'm going to say about that when it comes time to clean it up tempered glass is the number one thing for observation hives so for people that want to look at their bees all the time middle of winter that's the hive to have and of course the tiny nucleus hives we

use five frame nucleus deep frame hives here and those two really well and they're more than just generally we made nucleus hives five frames so that you could produce new stock new colonies and then sell them already established in a hive with all stages of growth and development in the hive box so you would sell someone five deep frames in a box and then we get the queen and everything ready to go it's the fastest way to start up a new colony of bees now what that ended up being for me here because i also was using them just as a place to park these after swarms that you get these tiny clusters of bees rather than just get rid of them put them in nucleus hives see how they do they do really well and then you end up with nucleus hives that are stacked two and three boxes tall

which means if you add three had 15 deep frames you can winter bees in it we're wintering them right now so they end up being full-time hives or what some people like to call resource hives if you need resources for another colony you know brood or something you get them from your nucleus hives. So that's all of them. Those are 11 different designs. But you're right. I should go out and tour all of them. If it turns like 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the next couple of weeks, I'll do it. I'll go out there. You have my word. Question number six. I can't even say this name. N-M-B-B-A-G-U-U-M. That's the YouTube channel name. It says, I have my first two nukes, which is short for nucleus hive.

And in spring, I have pretty bad asthma. Says, I appreciate you talking about the smokeless alternatives. I did buy a smoker, and I've tried it a couple of times, but man, it is rough for me. I'm coughing for hours. My research on various forums suggests that everyone thinks that smoke works way better than one-to-one HBH combo. Is that true?

Well first, what's HBH? It's HoneyBee Healthy. HoneyBee Healthy has been around for a long time, and it has its uses when you mix it in with sugar syrup. I also, in the past, have mixed up a light sugar syrup, which is one to one, that's where that one to one comes from. One part sugar, one part water, mix it up, add the recommended teaspoons of Honeybee Healthy, and you've got a sugar syrup that's going to last you all summer long. Now in really hot days, I, early on decided to instead of using smoke when I open a hive I would lightly spritz the bees with honeybee healthy gives them something to do I got a very interesting response from the bees which was when I got out there and I started spritzing

that a little bit bees would rise to the top of those frames and they would immediately stick out their proboscis they are ready to be fed so their olfactory senses were activated as soon as I spritz a little bit of honey be healthy and they had a favorable response to it now that works for and against you because here's the thing they all come up and you do occupy them with those spritzes but now they're in your way you also don't want to get any of that spritzing on the edges of your boxes because they'll be there trying to clean it up when you're trying to put your boxes back together and it's a feel good thing to do by the way you can even go lighter than

one to one i've never done it with just water i don't think they're that excited about just water i think they like the sugar syrup the carbohydrate makes them very happy i've stopped that. I know. Here's why. I use the new Apasolus vape systems. Okay. I used those exclusively all summer long. Just like you, sometimes you get a whiff of the smoke and you start coughing. You don't like it. Beasts don't like it either. It interrupts their communication because you've got the smoke going in there. And they are pheromone based. People smoke themselves. I know it. very famous YouTuber who does not ever wear beekeeping protective clothing. But what this beekeeping YouTuber does is spends a good five minutes smoking, their hair,

their body, their face, their hands, their arms, their legs, everything, heavy, heavy smoke over and over and over, so then when they go and engage with the bees, the bees are not going to interact with them. That's an interesting move. So smoke has its place, but now you smell like smoke. your clothes smell like smoke so with the vape system especially when somebody has bad asthma and these particulates get into your lungs the apisalis stay with me on this is a battery powered system I have two of them now and there's a new formula that now gets the same

reaction that your bees would have when faced with puffs of smoke so without any coughing or reaction from the people around plus you don't have to light it so you just removed heat from that situation you don't have to worry about your smokers starting a fire anywhere so we took away occupational exposure so if you do a lot of smoking and a lot of work with your bees a vape system is favorable so one of the early complaints from beekeepers was yeah but if you got a hot hive and you use the vape system from apisolus by the way you spell it apis t-o-l-is or is it api-s-o-l-l-is i'm going to put a link down in the video description and you can go and look at my review of it

but i used it all through last year so anyway they came out with a new formula that has the same reaction as regular smoke a little stronger doesn't smell stronger to me you can puff people with it. You can give a demo inside a building on how to inspect a beehive, turn one of those on, put some puffs out, and not make anybody in their cough. So, pretty sweet. A lot of research and development went into it. A lot of beekeepers here in the United States don't like it because it didn't come from the United States. Didn't come from a U.S. innovator. Came from France. So, but it's good stuff. So I would recommend, if I had this, someone that was on the fence and especially had health issues.

Apisalus, turn it on, puffs of smoke, do the work, turn it off, get back in your vehicle, go to your next B-yard, whatever you're doing. It's that simple. You'd have to keep it upright all the time. You don't want to make it spill or leak. But it's battery powered. It works. I support it.

I like it. Did I get that second one for free? Got the first one for free so I could review it. and the second one I paid for I bought it used my own hard-earned money on that let's go to question number seven which comes from fain from the Roke Wisconsin do you think I said that right for roque anyway question is in regards to the use of fondant as an emergency backup source for overwintering my basic winter setup southwestern Wisconsin is two deeps and one medium super all four my hives went into winter with a

full super of capped honey in fact one of them has a full deep of capped honey all of my hives have the latest version of the appamea feeder one piece with middle fondant feeder by the way that is my favorite hive top feeder of all time the appame one piece dry or liquid hive top feeder and it fits wooden wear by the way you don't have to buy them okay the whole kit just by the feeder So anyway, I had it full of about four to five pounds of hive alive fondant that was placed on the hives in early December. Today, I checked the fondant and three of the hives, including the hive, with the full deep of honey, had bees in the feeder consuming the fondant.

Did the bees bypass their stored honey in favor of the fondant with a cluster go back to the available honey when the fondant is gone? Am I now in a situation where I'll have to feed? for the rest of winter okay so here's the thing uh when you're looking at your bees in the winter time this is really i realize everybody doesn't have a thermal scanner so seeing bees in a feeder so in this case it's a fondant packet if any of you i should pause here and say hive alive is going to shut down their operations for christmas through new year's so if you think you're about to get into a pickle with not having enough hive alive don't forget to use a discount code Fred 10 and go to hive alive.com and order your

hive alive fondant packs okay I had to say that so here's the thing it doesn't mean that all your bees are not using other resources inside the hive when I do a thermal scan there are always some bees up in the hive alive packet and right now the hive live packet consumption on all my hives is as predicted pretty darn small they ate out the little circle and then they're starting to expand it but the pack is this big get a lot of room yet to go and I went with the five pound packs after last year when I had to swap out the little two 2.2 pounders or whatever they are it's worth it to me not to have to go

out there in weather like this and find out if my bees are consuming all their resources so I think they're doing both plus with the insulated cover the insulated top of the hive and the fact that you've got a good size cluster bees and plenty of honey down below what they do is when i do a thermal scan you'll see kind of a faint scan or a really hot spot so when we got these kind of warm and then kind of hot they're really a hot spot that's where the brood is they're not going to leave the brood so even though we've got other bees kind of internally foraging inside the hive they're going to the resources they also go to the side walls to get condensation so they can bring that water into the cluster as well they all need it so i think it's possible that you have bees up there

getting the fondant while you also have a cluster over your capped honey now the bad part of that would be if you look at it with a thermal scan and you find out the entire cluster there is no other heat signature anywhere else on those combs you find out they're all right up at the top right up underneath that inner cover yep you're in a position where now you're going to be feeding them and keeping your fondant up all winter long. So that's an unfortunate position to be in. Hopefully it'll be cold enough that they'll stay in a state of torpor and that their activity would somewhat reduce

and that they won't consume all of it and put you and themselves in a pickle there. But I think this early on, given that this is Wisconsin, I think they're probably spread out. now if there were no fondant on this is also why we tell people to wait which was the case here before they put the fondant on because we want them to anchor themselves over brood and then when you put the fondant up at the top now they'll as a cluster they move

according to people like dr leo shirachkin one millimeter a day so you can actually forecast where the colony will move up over the capped honey as they go up but just have to keep an eye on it to know. And this is where watching them year after year, when I went with five pounders, I didn't have a single colony, no matter what size it was, completely exhaust a single pack, a five pound pack. When we had the thin ones, we put on two packs through the year. So that balances out. That's about right. Five pounds. So 4.4, five pounds. That's enough. So, but like I said, you better stop right now if you think you're out of fondant. or whatever you need for emergency feed.

By the way, let's say you have a B-Smart Designs insulated in your cover and you don't want to buy any fondant because you don't want to buy any fondant. So this is a wrap-it-round. This is the little one. If you have one of these and I hope you do, then this thing is good for liquid. This is the liquid setting. You take this off. Now it's for feeding solids. This is the easiest, cheapest way to provide insurance. in the wintertime this lid goes over the top this goes over the inner cover on your

insulated inner cover so you can pour a whole bag of dry sugar in here four pounds whatever you know we might be victim of shrinkflation because those bags used to be five pound bags now they're four pound bags we get a 10 pound bags too my wife shops at all these you get good deal sometimes anyway fill this we with dry sugar right on up to the top of this thing just like that and then put this lid on it and then put your insulation over the top that is an emergency resource now your bees can access this and get as many nutrients from it as quickly carbohydrates what we really want to give them they don't metabolize it as quickly as they do fondin but if you don't have fondin but you've got

a bag of dry sugar around or you're confident that you can open up a bag of dry sugar and pour it into something that's all you need to do that's an emergency resource don't wait till your bees are dying to put it in do it ahead of time now spring comes along you look at this thing and the bees did not consume all the dry sugar but it kind of it kind of bricked up so there's condensation in here and the sugar absorbs some of the moisture and turn into a brick now what do you do with it you add water to it you mix it up and you feed it back to your peas as a light sugar syrup see so it's not wasted you can still use it so wrap it around now now you look at this year i'm not buying that

i'm not paying for a rapid round stop trying to make me spend money is probably what you're sitting there thinking it's the holidays you spend all your money on peppa pig stuff for your grandchildren okay so now what do you do same thing inner cover piece of newsprint and when i see a piece of newsprint i mean newsprint that doesn't have ink on it it's not because i'm some kind of purist i know that a lot of newsprint ink is vegetable ink these days so it's kind of okay for your bees but as an art person i buy newsprint to do sketches on so it's plain newsprint anyway put newsprint in there now where do you put the sugar dump it on the newsprint how do the bees get

to it well eventually it dampens up a little bit and the bees will on their own you don't need to make cuts in it i know a lot of people make poke holes make cuts no no no lay the newsprint on there it's called the mountain camp method dump the dry sugar on there not natural sugar not raw sugar ever some people say why can't we use sugar cubes well sugar cubes are expensive you can't use them but sugar cubes are expensive dry sugar pour right on the paper which is right on top of your inner cover and the bees will work their way up into it and they'll get those resources that's like the the cheapest possible way to provide carbohydrates to your bees in where so there you go moving on to question number eight which comes from christie from quebec city

quebec so how many queen bees are on your special edition 300th episode mug i thought i saw too but on inspection maybe just one so by the way I'm so glad that some of you were watching when we did the 300th episode but what I'm showing you here is this mug this is a mug with bees all over it so when I put it in my store I call it mug with bees all over it that's the title of the mug so anyway this is the reason I show this is because that 300th edition special edition mug is this image it just has the overlay of that 300th edition and there is one queen and she is right there might be able to see her so anyway yeah there's only one queen so you're right

and that leads me to something else there's a really cool book especially if you're teaching people are trying to find out do they know what a queen looks like she has a book that's all about that it's by hillary kearney and it's called queen spotting and you open the book up and it leaps out so it's photos of all these brood frames and every single one of those has a queen on it and some are really difficult some are really easy and obvious it's a great game to play with beekeepers who can spot the queen the quickest and you know you would think once you'd been through that book a couple times you would spot them right away no and there's different levels so some are super easy queen is super conspicuous other times it's just her thorax showing or maybe she's laying an egg at the time

and she's got also a bunch of bees in her retinue all around her and you don't necessarily know which one it is. It's a good book to get for people. Queen Spotting. This is not sponsored at all by Hilary Kearney, but it's a good book and it's a lot of fun. But yes, on that mug, there is one queen. Question number nine comes from Brian from Roanoke, Virginia,

and it says, I'm building an insulated workshop and plan to use my beehive inside. and have them exit through the walls. Do you have suggestions on the best method or equipment to use? My thought was drill an inch and a half diameter to two inch diameter hole in the brood box and use the tubing leading to the outside, but I thought with your observation I have experienced you might have some tips or ideas for equipment that would be beneficial.

So what Brian is describing right here is in my future. As soon as I get, I have to get a departure from, I had to get a special building permit. I know you don't care about that. I built my outbuilding too close to my property line. It's within 50 feet of the property line, and that's the limit where I am. So I need to reduce it.

I need to get a departure or whatever so I can go 40 feet from the property line. Because I want a long access building that faces south, so the broad side of it faces south, and it will have a roof on it, and no skylights because i don't want summer heat pounding into this thing and it will have knee walls and it will have windows above the knee wall in the knee wall will be the entrance to each hive that's inside this building this building is 32 feet long it is 10 feet wide okay so now we

have all of that you can put any kind of hive in it the beauty of having your hives in a building like this and i'm going to have a gravel base not i caught i thought about a concrete slab but i want a gravel base that's been compacted you know the thumper goes through and packs it all down because if i ever get water in there or there's runoff that comes into that building i want it to percolate down through the soil so that's one of the choices the other thing is it's going to have a knee wall that's going to be on a footer so it's going to have stability it's going to be well made it's a space that you want to be in so then you line up all your hives and you you modify the entrances inch and a half diameter is pretty good for that based on the observation

hives we have in the way to be academy building we also want the entrances to angle down the other thing is the hives themselves don't need to be right up against that wall you can have space a setback so that you can see the bees coming and going through the tubes it also gives the bees a decision-making distance so that on their way through the tube they encounter colder and colder air and then they decide oh too cold out there i'm not just going to go check things out and they turn around they go back in the hive however if the thing is doing a cleansing flight or if this bee is at the end of its life and this is something that beekeepers should know in the middle of winter you have bees that are at the end of their life they prefer they instinctively

move themselves out of the hive and expire outside so they try to fly away and they just eye bomb into the snow because it's really cold and there they die. That is normal. So the bee that does a cleansing flight. Now they just might be flying out to eliminate, they want to turn around, they want to get right back in. So anyway, beehives in a building like that are super beneficial for a lot of reasons. Look at the wind conditions we have. We sometimes get 60 plus mile an hour winds here with the snowing and the blowing and the rain and everything else and that doesn't happen inside that building. Think of it from the convenience for the beekeeper. You sit in there in a perfectly calm environment. And the reason I want that 10 feet from the front wall to the back

wall, because it's attached to another building, is we get the shelter and have room for other things. If I want to do some starter plants in there or something, why not do that? It's not ideal. It's really not a greenhouse, but it's a space where we can work on our beehives and we can harvest honey if we want to and we don't have a bunch of bees from outside visiting we don't have to worry about bears we don't have to worry about raccoons we don't have to worry about skunks all of the predator now pressure is gone

with a long entrance tube if there are hornets and wastes that are trying to get into your hive they have to pass through that whole tube they don't like to do that in the onset plus you can sit inside that building and see what's coming in see what's going on now let's say you want to open the hive and you want to look at things and the bees fly out now you've got them in this building this is easy too you block up all the windows so in other words you drape the windows flag the

windows in cinematography they call it block off all light in there turn off light and then you just have one window that's high on your leading wall your south facing wall and it's a hopper style or a double hung window double hung windows you can slide the sash lower one up top one down so you just bring the top one down bees hit that window they're naturally attracted to light they move up they fly out that window and they're back outside and then they come through their entrance again because you've closed up the hive inside now from past experience doing this inside observation hive buildings right once they're flying around there you'll have a few straight bees for several days after you've been inside the hive there'll be two or three still zinging around still kind

of annoying you a little bit but they eventually find their way out but you can also use be vax these little handheld ones and you can use butterfly nets we have those all over the place too just to catch the stragglers and put them right back outside so they can come through the entrance so it's very easy to do that and uh i like the whole thing because you don't have to even paint or put finish on any of these hives that are in that space think about it's totally easy going so i'm all on board for that and those are my tips now once i get the departure i have the green light from my wife that i can build it so we might be looking at 2006 and yes i will include you in the project you're going to see the planning phase and everything that i do to set it up in there

and it's going to be a very interesting building for bees question number 10 this comes from david in cleveland ohio so why is apobioxal different than other axelic acid brands sold for the control of varroamites and honeybee colonies. I know what you're thinking. Because there's a lot of beekeepers. In fact, this always surprised me. By the way, I'm not naming names. But when you're selling exhalic acid vapor systems,

you kind of decide if you're in the wild west here or you're not when you're deciding what to tell people to put into your vape system, or however you're setting up your acylic acid. And some people are very obvious about it. They don't care about the rules. They don't care about the regulations. They don't care about the dose. They don't care about anything.

And they'll find all kinds of interesting ways to deliver it to. And the bottom line is, as long as it kills mites, that's it. Now, I was also looking at that early on because as soon as exhalic acid was approved for treatment here in the United States. We were behind the eight ball. There were other places that did it. And there were groups within the United States that went the extra yard and made sure and got it passed as a miticide. So this is where it came out, apobioxal. And it was from Betterby. So it was an approved exhalic acid. And then you sit down like we just sit down like, you know, like we're friends. Like we're just talking just between ourselves. Well,

if it's like 97% pure OA, you can go on Amazon and they have OA on there that's 99.4% pure and it's 25% of the cost. Wouldn't you just, isn't it the same stuff? No. It's not the same stuff. And so part of this is, and I'm going to go over what's approved and what is not. So we're going to get to that. but uh so the justification is that cost so much wood bleach it's all it is is wood bleach with

another label on it so if you're one of the people that wants to follow the rules let's just start there you have to use something that's a certified miticide that gets approved and uh that has been tested and vetted and a company generates it that is accountable for everything that's in it let's keep in mind that initially when oxalic acid was approved it was not approved with honey suprazon and so i followed that pretty tight because i thought wow there's already oa inside honey doesn't that but you have to wait until it gets approved and then it decided hands off it's approved it's pretty benign in fact the pre-treatment levels of oa in the honey and post-treatment levels of oa and honey that includes capped and uncapped honey cells

we're almost indiscernible so okay uh so what else is in the exhalic acid and that's where because i did some research on it i'm not just sitting here randomly throwing out information about exhalic acid some of the substance marketed as wood bleach you know what their controls are they're making a statement about it being oxalic acid but there might be heavy metals and other things in it they're not accounting for that in the same way because what are they making a product that's designed to do what bleach wood remove rust it's fantastic for removing rust by the way so it's not intended to be exposed to your food which are exhalic acid with honey super zon is being exposed to your food okay apiopioxyl i'm not going to lie that stuff's expensive you can go and price it right now

it's up there so apomboxyl is made by vita b health and by the way they're the ones that just came out dr david pack did that thing where they talked about they have the new four gram dose and so it's efficacy its effectiveness its ability to take out varro destructor mites is now increased it's really good without and keep in mind they have to run it through all these testing parameters to show that it is not detrimental to the brood queen rebrand production and everything else, right? So the vitally held aviobioxyl were the first to receive EPA registration in the United States.

So we really had one player, one source, one treatment for exhalic acid, and then Mike's B's Limited Liability Corporation. I ran into these guys and right on their booth. They had their big certificate to show that they met all the requirements of the EPA for a miticide. And it's called Easy OX, EZ-TAC-OX. And I had a good conversation with them. So I always run into these people at different conferences for beekeeping. I'm sure they're going to be at the North American Honey Bee Expo in Louisville, Kentucky in January.

So their stuff is much cheaper. also have a tablet form, which is in pre-metered doses. So you can do that in the pan, whatever you need to do. So we have to stick with what their labeling is. So those were the two exhalic acid approved sources recently. Verroxan is also approved. Who makes that? Remember, apoboxal is made by Vitabee Health. Who do you think makes varroxan, the extended release strips for acid, vitamin B health, that's right. So they have to have labels. This is the easy way if you're trying to follow the rules. I realize that sometimes I'm talking to people that don't care about the rules. But this is for people who do care. It has to be labeled as a miticide

for use in honeybee hives. And then somebody else reached out to me. So that's the bottom line. you know, there's accountability for everything that's in that. Consider it food grade. It's going to end up in your food. If you're going to have honey, we're going to have honey super zon. And so varoxen, easyox, apobioxal. Those are the games in town when it comes to exhalic acid. Now, I can't tell if I'm being set up on this other varroa mite treatment

because somebody reached out to me, they fell out the form. You have the option to remain anonymous when you send me stuff. So I always wonder, is there an ongoing argument, is there a forum somewhere, and are they just looking so they can throw my name in there so people can hate me? What's going on? So there is a varroa mite treatment that I've never heard of. And you spray your frames on each side, and the treatment lasts an entire year and kills, according to them, 100% of the varroa destructor mites. I want to know if you've heard of it. and the website is called stop for roa dot com s-o-p-v-a-r-r-r-o-a-com so i reached out to the people that i know i went to that website i checked it out i read all the stuff you know what they do they write a lot and say nothing what's in it they don't say they guarantee a hundred percent efficacy a hundred percent might destruction in one treatment or your money back who are these people i try to find out now they have offices here in the united states can you call somebody talk to them there nope

who owns the website not sure what's the address for the owner of the website not sure don't know so i'm going to ask you now this is not you cannot legally say you have a varroa side, a miticide in the United States, and sell it to beekeepers without being licensed to do so. So who has to give them the license? The EPA? Is the EPA heard of these people? No. It is amazing to me that a company like that can advertise a product in the way that they do without providing any information. There's no university study reference. There's no university affiliate. There are no published studies. They won't tell you what it is. you can't talk to people they have a Facebook page too I went there I found a cool photo of a person on the Facebook page and it didn't look right to me

so I sent it to another Facebook page that is also a bunch of beekeepers and they wrote back to me today and said yeah that's my brother I took that picture in spring this is okay well your brother's advertising a product that has a very kind of difficult to discern background and so right now while we're sitting here they're trying to figure out why their photos are being used on that Facebook page so I'm very suspicious and I think somebody probably bought the stuff and they want somebody else to kind of take up the banner and say hey those guys can't sell that stuff so I'm going to ask you the viewer the listener who's on the podcast the way to be podcast right look into stopverroa.com did you buy that stuff? They have a whole bunch of testimonials that are glowing.

Every question that gets asked kills Varroa. How does the kill of Varroa? Killing Varroa is very important for survival of your bees. Well, what's in the stuff? It's very important to control Varroa. We have 100% guarantee. Are you guys entomologists? You can buy it a discount now.

What do you think about that? I think it doesn't meet any of the other Varroa the Midaside requirements here in the United States yet it's being sold pretty clearly so I don't know if I'm stepping in mud here but that annoyed me the more I looked into them the more annoyed I was now I'm not in competition I don't sell like acid or any other my decide format pro or anything but here's a very interesting company what's your experience with them if you've had any at all so please

not use wood bleach. If I had my choice, the most reasonably priced exhalic acid right now comes from easy ox. So Mike's bees. Check them out. Question number 11 comes from Dennis from Crystal Falls, Michigan. I'm in the upper peninsula of Michigan and I put high-alive fondant on November the 15th as it was cold and they put it on around the same every year. It's been very cold in snow so far. Yesterday was in the 30s. I checked on the fondant. I have 15 highs and 14 of them. It's almost gone. I lifted the hives and they're very heavy. Will they start eating more honey or do we need to put more fondant on? I have no upper entrance. I have around 20 insulation tops on R20 insulation cover and that's pretty much it. So it's the same answer that I gave earlier.

If they start feeding on that fondant, if they become dependent on it and they're all up there, personally, what would I do? I would keep the fondant going. I think as you get these odd days where it warms up a little bit and things like that, they're going to branch out and take advantage of other resources in the hive. The configuration sounds fine to me. This is one of the ways that people like Steve Raspke, who are the author of the book's Worm Essentials,

does single brood management in pretty cold climate and I think they're trying to keep the bees in close proximity to the resources that they have where if we have multiple boxes they tend to form a narrow column up through the boxes and then they arrive at the top pretty darn early and then it's very frustrating for beekeepers in spring to find that a colony would starve out for example right up under the inner cover their bodies are stuck in the cells ever their tongues are out and they didn't get resources and yet two frames over either way they didn't go and access those resources and then you have to realize if i had just put mountain camp on if i just put a rapid round up there if i had just put a fondant pack on they would have had subsistence living they would have just made it right so for me personally if they're using it up i'm just going to keep it there now whether or not they'll move down is anybody's guess so I don't know what's say other than if they use it up I put another pack on there last year I ran out I don't know if you remember last year you

almost couldn't get it there was a run on that stuff and I think it shipped out you know six weeks after people were ordering it and stuff so they underestimated the market but I definitely got a surplus this year and so I I will keep it on for my colonies. I don't like to clean out a debt out. So I would pay the cost of a fondant pack just to not have to clean out a debt out. Remember, my target is about 10 colonies of bees,

not 43 or 44. I only want 10. And so that's how I know I'm going to end up with, probably in spring, I'll have out of 43 colonies, I expect to have about 37, 36 colonies. colonies that are still kicking in spring. I'm being conservative. Let's see what happens.

Question number 12 comes from Brad from Cranesville, Pennsylvania. Do you have or know of anyone who has used three of the flow frames of the four regular deep frames and an eight frame body? Okay, and if so, which frames are filled first, flow frames or regular deep frames? Also, what would be the best frames to use? wax foundation foundation list or a checkerboard of each both sides of the flow frames so anyway the flow hive uh we talked about this before there is a super that is called a hybrid super so it has three of the flow frames in the center and then you have your other outlying frames

that are standard langstroth frames these frames do not just fit in standard langstroth boxes that's why it's a little bit annoying they have to be built that's why that center section for example if you've got the center of three frames that are flow frames you can't just put a langstroth frame in there because the back is open and these frames are designed to come together and provide a viewing window and it also prevents bees from passing through so and just historically just the way the bees work these supers they tend to fill the center frames first and it doesn't matter what they are. Now, you can go foundationless. One of the things that a lot of, I get a lot of questions on flow videos. And people are asking specifically, yeah, well, that's all neat and fine. What are you

going to do when you want to get beeswax? So, well, you set up something that provides beeswax that you can cut out. So if you're doing a super and a super just means it's above, it's extra, it's surplus. When you put up the flow frame hybrid box up there I would use foundationless frames up there and it's personal preference that's expensive to the bees you're gonna have to build and draw out that comb and if you insulate that box they're gonna be able to do that all the better because they need warmth to do it so and then you'll have cut comb if you want cut comb is really good and foundation list means that you can also extract it uncap extract crush and strain and then harvest

the bees wax that a lot of people feel like they need to make candles and other products with beeswax so it's a great compromise and you fill those three center frames and you're good to go so now personal experience with it i haven't because i just use straight flow supers and that's either six or seven flow frames in it and those are the only things i've ever used and i thought about it is one of the ones that i've not tested yet so probably this coming spring i'm going to have to get my hands on the high flow super just so we can make these comparisons and an easy way to do it is do one side of it one way one side the other so we would have heavy wax foundation on one side and foundationless on the other and see how they do and but I think bees that have a big surplus of honey coming off of them and they want to store it and put it away they store it in all kinds of places they'll even put it in jars so what wax primed jars. They put it in rapid rounds, not rapid rounds. They put in Ross rounds, half hogs, simple comb. Whatever people are using to get bees to leave honeycomb, they tend to just do it.

So when they're building a surplus, they're building a surplus. Now, I did have better luck with shallow boxes on top. So we have to think about what's your goal? So it sounds like with the hybrid, people want the best of both worlds. They want to get the honey out. easy which the flow super does that and but at the same time they also want to get traditional resources from the hive so crush and strain and shallow boxes have worked better for comb honey for me in the past so the shallow supers are great

because the wooden frames in there are perfect cutouts for comb honey for the standard four inch height honeycomb so it just depends on what you personally want but I've not personally used it if you have if you tried the hybrid and you've got good things or bad things to say if you made observations please put those down in the comment section that would be helpful question number 13 comes from Derek from chambersburg Pennsylvania I placed a sensor for humidity and temperature in my hives what are the optimum humidity levels as we make our way through winter I understand the combo of moisture and cold is a killer that's true so anyway I don't have any

sensors this year in the past I have inside the hives and the strongest colonies had a pretty constant 65% relative humidity around the brood area I noticed that when they became broodless that that humidity could fluctuate quite a bit and for example if i had really high humidity in a hive i knew they had very low brood and so i think they're trying to keep it at 65 percent relative humidity 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit in directly in the area where your brood is that was the other thing that 94 to 97 was drop into the 80s and when they did that either they lost their queen or they just did not have a size of amount of brood going on in there but the humidity was a pretty good tell of a healthy colony so it's

hovering in the 60s that was pretty good humidity so if it gets really high that means condensation forming which can happen above your cluster if your hive configuration some of the people that commented today had multiple deep boxes and then a medium super if your bees are all the way in the bottom box and you've got a deep above them and then a medium super above that you can expect to see higher humidity levels above the cluster because that little hot pocket that forms up there when the bees are you know occupying more of the available space there will be condensation in there and then you'll see spikes in humidity so you see the humidity build up and fall off so you would see the humidity increase so we have a really cold night right now let's say it's uh in the 20s so now let's say

tomorrow it hits 35 36 so as it makes that transition from cold to warm that's when these areas that your bees are not occupying that have a lot of stored honey end up with condensation on the surface of the honey because the air starts to warm outside the hive radiates in and the bees don't do anything to cool it down so the condensation then the due points achieved above your bees which is what we don't want and that's when it can happen so we have a really large cavity for a small cluster bees not good excuse me this one comes from gen fm q7j that's a youtube channel name says the keeper's hive looks amazing i think often about hive

number 44 and i wonder how it's doing so this was again in that benchmark showcase of a feature film called 30 minutes of winter proof of life so we went around and video the different hive configurations and I showed this was interesting to me anyway so I had to scrape away snow and ice from the entrances on some of the hives now some of you may not know what we're talking about with hive number 44 hive 44 was an underdog colony of bees it was a queen that was ignored in a in a cluster of multiple queens and a sworn that happened last year I took the queen put her in a clip hung her on a fence she

collected a bunch of bees around her we installed her in this hive but what was unique about hive number 44 is they created a shroud over the entrance that came out and that was made out of propolis and beeswax and it's the most unique configuration I've ever seen in a beehive now just as with today's opening if you look at some of the colonies it's very deceiving hive 44 is in the opening sequences so you can see it what's missing the propolis shroud over the entrance i had to scrape it off in fact it was so tough i had to scrape it away with a metal you know like a demolition tool to scrape it off and then there's zero activity no bees coming out of it at all and it was

iced shut so it had to go it had to take it off initially i thought i'd use a you know zero clearance cut saw and something like that very carefully remove it but when you're out there chipping through ice and everything that kind of loses its you lose your inspiration for something like that so anyway i cut it all away and cleared the entrance out and there i could see a couple of dead bees in there and then nothing now that looks to new beekeepers like something's really wrong they're not doing cleansing flights there's an activity on the landing board why aren't they flying out in the snow because that's supposed to be a good sign that the colony is healthy um They do a thermal scan on it, and they're in there, and it's generating heat.

Why aren't they flying out? They don't need to. They have everything they need. They're not going to waste the energy to do things they don't need to do. So that colony is self-sustained right now. 44 is kicking. How high up are they? They're not even in jeopardy.

They have plenty of honey above them. So they're sitting good. Now, on the flip side of that, I showed another video in the opening sequence, another hive. in fact it's a flow hive and there's lots of activity on the landing board the bees are very active very bright very healthy vibrant looking bee stock is that a good sign a lot of activity signs of life they must be doing well no the colony is starving when you see a colony like that that is really active really looking for things and and more active than the other colonies your apiary on a warm up like that look into it because what had happened is they have a

fondant pack in there and i don't know who put it in there because this is actually the supervisor's hive so i don't know what's going on the fondant pack was slid forward a little bit which meant that there was plastic so there's the little hole that the bees are coming through they weren't able to access the fondant so slide it back light it up make sure that now the fondant pack is over the top of that so they're in a single deep they need that resource they're depending on it if I had not checked on that they would have just died so an overly active entrance on a day like that means you should really take a look at that hive see what's going on so and normal

flyouts and stuff that was the rest of it all the other colonies are good to go so a colony that's not active at all is not necessarily dead a lot of people look at a whole bunch of beehives and there's no activity on that one let's tear it open and see what's going on please don't don't tear it open what do you have to gain by opening up that hive right now if i just looked at hive 44 they look dead zero activity on the landing board they didn't even come out when i chipped away their entrance must be dead maybe it should pop the lid take a look at them no the thermals showed that they're doing really well why challenge them let them be you're not going to change anything anyway you're not going to be doing

anything with dead outs until spring but high 44 looking promising question number 15 this is the last question of the day and this is from james strupe 4552 that's the youtube channel name is it better to plant a variety of wildfire mix or a lot of the same type of plants thank you for the great information so anyway This happens a lot with people that have small plots and they put a bunch of flowers. They'll buy a mix. It sounds good. We like variety.

So we get a wildflower mix or a perennial mix or a northeastern mix. And then we put all the seeds out and they all come up and then we see local stock. We see native bees coming to it. I'm a big fan of native bees, by the way. So when you put that out, you know, how come the honeybees aren't coming to it the way I thought they were? So what we have to think about is you have to get the attention of your honeybees. If you go to the hive and they're flying out, they're getting resources, they're coming back, and they just happen to be bypassing your plants.

You just don't have enough of them. Remember that honeybees differ from native bees, like the mason bees or the bumblebees and things like that. Some mason bees, for example, they are specialists. They only pollinate a specific variety of flowers. right but bumblebees for example go all over anything that's got nectar and they go after everything it doesn't matter which makes them a very diverse pollinator honeybees are floral constant so what that means is the honeybee comes out it goes after dandelions so the forages that are on the dandy lions do nothing but dandelions they fly right past clover and everything else they only pollinate and

collect nectar from dandelions so If you want to attract honeybees specifically to a single variety of plant, then you have to plant a lot of it. So that's why when you're looking at these plants, I look at the ones that are going to bloom the longest. One of the reasons I plant Cosmos, once they start blooming, they bloom right into the first frost and the first snow. Maximilian sunflowers, once they start blooming,

they bloom right until snow and ice hits. so we look for flowers that are going to start flowering and continue flowering for a long period of time I'm giving up a bunch of land for it flowering trees sometimes only have a couple of weeks that they're in blossom and then they're done so we try to come up with a cascade so if you have a small area under your control plant something that is in the Xerxes society's list of top 100 pollinator plants and pick something and try to plant thousands of them if you can and so if you're on a quarter acre or something like that you live in town suburban America trees are actually much better because when they are in bloom then they generate a lot of resources over a short period of time look into linden trees and basswood trees

and see what a mature basswood tree can put into the as far as nectar goes it's impressive and you couldn't match it in just ground cover so you have to consider the climate you're in the space that you have available and what kind of flowers you want to grow that are going to give you the longest return and get the bees attention so because often you know hits up you plant a whole patch of hiss up and all the bumblebees are on it but honey bees aren't then a week later the honeybees are all over it so Hissop is another thing that blue giant hyssop.

That stuff flowers for a long time. The bees are all over it and it's perennial so it's going to keep coming back. So there are things like that that have a lot of flowers on a vertical stem and your bees can really make use of it. Sunflowers are very beneficial to your bees for the pollen and things like that. Not all varieties of sunflowers are the same. So some people make the mistake of planting sunflowers. that have genetically been modified to where they don't even produce pollen well the pollen is the

biggest benefit for your bees even though there are you know all these amino acid profiles and everything and nutritional profiles for pollen for flowers then um the effects a positive effects of some of these uh pollens carries into even impacting american fowl prude for example so they can become powerful medicinals but you need to plant a significant amount because i've seen people plant 30 flowers and say i'm going to get the best honey out of that you'll get maybe an eighth of a teaspoon of honey out of that so if you planted a huge a quarter acre of borage you're going to get really good nectar from that if you can do a half an acre of milkweed you can get a lot of nectar out of that that's going to be really good and so for those who like butterflies

and things like that and i get a combo pack but the bees are the very best at getting the resources from milkweed so we have a big expanse of milkweed which if you're if you're a cattle rancher you don't want that stuff around it's not good for ruminant animals so i also think about things that the deer are not going to much i've never had deer show up and eat a whole milkweed patch so other things that you try to plant and get going they will take them right out so that's just it i want you to think about blooms for a long time provides nectar and pollen or whatever if nectar is most valuable looking for top nectar producers and then try to get a good block of that resource and the bees will come to it because it's worth their time because remember they're only going

to pollinate that species of flower so we're in the fluff section we'll just do this really quick because I know this has been long today. I can't stress this enough. Keep your entrances clear. When I cleared out some of the ice, the ice pack was really significant. And we did have bees waiting to fly out and there were piles of dead bees in there

that had to be pulled out. Check on your feed. We covered that. Hive visors. These are the visors that go in the front of your hive. Please keep those on. They keep the snow and ice from collecting on the landing board. The hives had had hive visors on them.

If you look at the opening sequences, their entrances were clear. I didn't have to chip anything away from them. So hive visors, very good. Keep an eye out for rodent activity. That means anything that's chewing at the front of your hives, chewing entrances, and stored equipment,

look for mouse droppings. They've already moved into your sheds and storage areas. If you're finding droppings, you need to start thinking about mitigating the damage that they are going to do because they will be setting up their nest if you've got three or four hive boxes, and stuff sometimes you'll find a mouse nest you know six feet off the ground somewhere

or in the rafters and they're all over your stuff so just be aware of that sale prices right now if in fact if you know of some good seeds that are on sale borage or something and you found a really good place for it please post that down in the comment section i'd like to follow up on it myself often people will post a link to somebody say hey what happened the link and it disappeared or whatever your links anytime it's a link to another video or anything outside of just a normal comment on any of my videos it gets automatically held and then I have to come in and manually release it once I realize you're not just spamming about something that's ridiculous and I'm not always immediately at my YouTube channel so I can't always release it

I do lots of other things anyway so share sale prices if you've got them I will release that stuff or just write it out you know just spell out the name of the website and just put a space then the dot then the space then the com and that way it's not an actual link but people can read it and they know where to go so that avoids the filter uh the other thing is wear a veil data winter you go out there you're doing them a favor you're cleaning out the entrance you've got your battery powered heat gun out there so you can melt off some ice and help clear the way you don't have a veil on a b can make its first order business to fly out and sting you so don't think just because it's cold you're not going to get stung always have a veil handy

protect your eyes at a minimum and i just want to wish you all merry christmas happy holidays i'll be talking to you after christmas i'm sure you're going to get everything you ever wanted and there is uh there's a prank you can play on on school kids if you wanted to um like let's say the supervisor because he's in elementary school and he doesn't get to look at his phone why even has a phone i don't know i don't need to see short videos of bees twerking and whatever's exciting to him but um so you can write him knowing that he's in school and can't get to his phone and you just say something like uh hey if you text a response within the next five minutes i'll get you anything for christmas that you can name and of course that's that new

and he doesn't get home until 3 o'clock and then he gets his phone and he realizes that he missed this great opportunity and he will write you and say is it too late now grandfather i said clearly you didn't meet the five-minute window no great opportunity failed right there so how to prank your kids at christmas thanks for watching i hope you have a fantastic weekend Thank you.