The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 350 with Frederick Dunn, April 10th 2026

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/4uWSBHEMlOs

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, April the 10th of 2026. This is Backyard beekeeping, questions and answers. Episode number 350. 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 today, please go down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and there will be some links for you to follow for different things. If you want to know how to submit your own topic or question for a future episode, please go to the main website, which is the wayto-be.org. Click on the page mark contact, and there you go. Also, if you happen to have a question and you need an answer from a friend, you just want to talk to somebody who's a peer, who's also a beginning beekeeper or something like that,

and you need to know things. You want to share a picture that you took, you want to put up a video that you made, then you can get the opinion of other people. And where do you go to do it? It's called The Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook. This is also a podcast. It's at Podbean.

What do you think it's called? It's called The Way to Be podcast. If you Google that, you'll find it. There's so many different carriers, including Audible, by the way. Iheart radio. Whatever app you happen to have on your phone, very good chance. It's right there. So what else can we talk about the opening sequences today

by the way I shot those this morning and that was really important because what do you think it's doing right now I know you want to know it's raining and where is it raining where I am northeastern part of the United States northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania so everything went bad on us out here 50 degrees Fahrenheit right now which is 10 degrees Celsius and it's windy of course it's not going to be nice and calm the way it was in some of those video sequences in the opening three point four mile per hour winds pretty consistent that's 5.4 kilometers per hour 21.9 mile per hour gusts that's not nice which is 35.2 kilometers per hour 92% relative humidity which of course is right now 100% humidity because it's raining a nice steady even rain if only we had put seeds out it would be really perfect and now what you're wondering in the northeastern part of the united states What are the best days coming up? Well, let me tell you.

First of all, it's going to be decent through the weekend. So Saturday and Sunday are super nice. But Tuesday and Wednesday are the top days, 73 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 23 Celsius. Those are going to be good for you. And I also bet you want to know what's wandering around outside. What have we got on the motion-activated night cameras? Interesting things.

A fisher. You ever heard of that? Is a big weasel. big weasel and they are rugged kind of a step down from a wolverine they can do any they can chase down squirrels and munch them right out of a tree they can outrun a squirrel they eat rabbits see it anything they want because they're pretty much at the top of the list only a bear could deal with it there's also a mink running around the edge of the pond and the usual possums wandering around free range chickens all the good stuff bluebirds are here I knew you wanted to know that

you may not do you set out bird boxes I'd like to know. If you do, what species of bird are you putting out bird boxes for? Out here, we put them out for, even though wrens move in, we put them out for bluebirds, and we also have tree swallows. So those are pretty nice. And we have bat boxes out too, which have historically not been occupied by very many bats. So the opossum, bluebirds, all that. I think that's all the housekeeping stuff. What kind of pollen is coming in? I'll bet you want to know that. I'm not sure.

So we for sure have Salix Discollar, which is the willow, pussy willows, and the bees were bringing in bright yellow pollen. So based on last Friday's response from the pollen video that I put up in one of these corners, people liked it. They liked watching that while I'm talking, and I don't blame you.

Why stare at me when you can look at pollen coming in? So here's what I did. Before the rains came, today. I put that camera in front of another beehive and now you get to see pollen coming in. So, and there is a pollen question coming up later today which I'll bet you wish I would just get on with the questions and I will. I just wanted to explain why I put that up because I'm responding to you because I want you to get what you want. And there is a lot of pollen coming in. So the very first question today comes from truce feud, which is interesting, that's a YouTube channel name.

says you had quite a few black bees in entering the hive and they must be very welcoming to allow for that. So this is in reference to the video last week when we showed the top our hive and all the pollen-bearing bees that are coming in after foraging. And here's what I want you to know. That doesn't mean that those bees were not from that colony. When you look at a beehive and you're looking at the entrance and you're seeing the foragers coming and going, sometimes they can appear very different. Some could be very light colored like Italian-looking bees and some could be darker like carniolins. And you could think, wow, they must be having workers

coming from all over the place, but it's not the case. Here's what's going on. Remember that your bees can look different. They are not all full sisters. This will ring a bell. Their mother, the queen, when she flew out as a virgin and she went to the local drone congregation area where all the singles hang out. She made it with a drone for sure.

That's why she has offspring inside the hive. But then she just kept going. And she made it with another drone. And then another drone after that. Then another drone after that. And even though she had all the drone activity that she needed to produce eggs and workers and drones even in the hive for years to come, she loitered in the drone congregation area.

and was made it several more times. So what happens is you get the genetics of a bunch of different colonies of bees through the queens mating with different drones. So when that happened, of course, we have half sisters and we have full sisters and there have been a lot of studies done on this. The full sisters actually recognize one another,

probably through pheromone inside the hive and they tend to cluster together. And then there are others that might look a little different They come from different fathers and off they go and they know one another two when they find their full sisters. And they don't come out in a series because that's the next question that we get to. And questions I've asked myself when I run into an entomologist who seems to be in the know about things. Now it just kind of mixes up in there in the spermatika. It's just kind of all over the place.

And then so the full sisters are kind of surprises as they show up. But that's what's going on. more likely. Now it doesn't mean there isn't drift. It doesn't mean that some other forger didn't just randomly show up and get invited in. That could happen. But when we see several dark bees in the same hive, those are full sisters. And then we see the lighter ones. Those are full sisters one another. And then we don't know. This is all speculation just by looking at them because you'd have to do actual DNA testing to know for sure. But I just want you to understand that there is some mixing of genetics going on, which is why the workers can

appear to have come from another colony altogether. And it's interesting too. Do you know they take care of their full sisters more than the other? Like if food and resources were low, they would feed one another first. Then if there's leftovers, they go on to the half-sisters. It's true. Question number two comes from Chris from Spencerport, New York. So just what is the lowest temperature you've seen bees foraging?

This morning I had bees out investigating flowers and the air temperature was 38 degrees Fahrenheit and not just a bee or two there were a lot of bees flying and from both hides from everything I've learned They should not be doing that it was sunny so that helps but definitely odd Okay, so here's the thing that's the kind of thing that you could do an experiment about a very easy one and so I want to let you know that I've done an experiment on that very thing. Because we want to see at what time of day do they start foraging. This is knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But because I was told early on they don't forage or fly unless it's 60 degrees Fahrenheit minimum

and they don't fly when it's above 100 degrees Fahrenheit maximum. They don't fly because then they overheat. So the part is when they're taking off and flying from the hive in the morning. Of course they're warm inside the hive. inside the hive, but when they take off and they fly out of the hive, they could be in jeopardy with colder temperatures, and so they sometimes crash land right into snow and ice and things like that and don't make it back. But they engage in risky business. They, if they know that there's a known source, and I've brought this up before, but we'll retread it, they will fly to a known

source that has a high sucrose reward, so high sugar content. And they'll do this. And they'll do that in colder temperatures. Now what's key here in the question is remember it's sunny. So they can park themselves just like people do in sunny spots on cold days so that you can warm up and then off they go again because it aids in their efficiency getting their thorax back up into the 80s so they can fly. So we did the test and I also did the test by changing the temperature of the resource that they were coming to. Did it make a difference? For example, if we had warm sugar syrup, out and cold sugar syrup next to one another did the bees care one way or the other what they cared about was the sugar content so they would land on and drink from a feeder that had very

cold 50 degrees 49 48 degrees that area when they would drink that they would go into a chill coma and plop on the ground and you'll see them all around the feeder just loitering because they can't get up steam they can't get up enough steam and warm to fly home yet. So they're waiting for the sun to come up. And they do fly remarkably cold. So I'm going to put a link for those of you who want to see it. It's a very simple backyard test. But we show video and we show it in time lapse with a clock right there. So we know what the temperatures are. And we know when they started showing up. Now the reason I said they came to a known source, they're less apt to just cruise the countryside looking around to see if they can find something new to then get a

of and bring back to the colony so they can waggle dance and share what it smells like tastes like and the benefit it might have for the colony which could encourage other foragers to take the risk to fly out in less than perfect conditions but that's what's happening so 38 degrees and sunny you get into the 40s they were definitely flying in the 40s and 50s so once again it's just a matter of what the other conditions are and what the reward is going to be so super interesting question number three comes from russell from newberry south carolina says i received seven mated queens today in to go into splits so it sounds like russell's making up some nucleus colonies so i was planning on moving the smaller colonies a couple hundred yards away from the parent colonies as the queens were added but with it getting down to around 39 degrees at night this is this past Wednesday, I decided it best to put them over the parent colonies using a double screened board. My question is would it be okay to move the splits, though Saturday to the desired location

a few hundred yards away or would I risk losing too many back to the parent colonies and I could take them a few miles away if that's best and return them in a couple weeks. So making splits right now and this is South Carolina, so much better off than we are here, you will lose foragers when you're making up packages like that, because really you're just creating a package. You're getting Queens in, you're going to make splits. Hopefully you're going to pull a frame of brood with each split and start those new nucleus colonies,

and you do lose foragers. That's why they kind of go quiet. In other words, you don't see a lot of activity from your newly made packages or splits in your own apiary. And so what then you have to do to keep them going, keep them supplied at a minimum sugar syrup this time of year one to one. And because remember they've lost their forging force because they will just drift right back to wherever they came from. They're already familiar with the area. They already know the colony they came from.

And remember, they didn't willingly leave it the way they do when there's a swarm. When there's a swarm, they leave. They've decided they're gone. They're open up to new situations and new habitation. So when you make them move out, they may resist that, and those that are foragers will go away. Now here's the other part of making a split, by the way. Often we like to shake the nurse bees into the new box. Why do we do that?

Well, they've never been outside. Keep in mind, your average worker bee only lives about six weeks. Some more, some less. It depends on what's going on. So if they're less than four weeks old, then you're, they don't know where they are. So when you dump those in, the foragers leave pretty quick. But those nurseries that you dumped in

will wait until they mature enough to start doing outdoor jobs. So we're shaking those in and letting the foragers fly away. So that helps out. So the other part of this is what if you made this forced split or this manufactured swarm,

whatever you want to call it, and you don't want to lose any? So taking them a few miles away because that's an option here, could take them a few miles away if that's the best and return them in a couple weeks i personally don't do that anymore inconvenient to go and check on them when they're really far away so i keep them right in my own apiary and do what i described before however you take them a couple miles away and you took a bunch of foragers with you they can forge right away when they uh wake up the following day and realize

they've been relocated somewhere they have to memorize the landscape features again and then they have to find new resources. And so you only have to keep them there for a couple of weeks. That's when you will get the bulk of them. The foragers are done and what's replacing them are those bees that went with them. So then you're bringing them back. So here's the only downside to that.

Often when you do that in another location, you're going to of course move them back at night or you're just going to close them up at night and move them in the morning so they can't fly out, screen over the entrance kind of thing. And then when you bring them back, you have left some foragers behind because they spend the night out and about it always happens that some percentage of your foragers end up not planning well look it's raining right now

that came in pretty quick so that likely grounded some foragers out there that didn't make it back so they hunker down sometimes you find them with their mandibles clipped to a leaf on the underside of the leaf and they're just wading it out and they can wait it out until the following day in some cases so those foragers now you orphaned them so we're what do they have to do they have to find another colony to join so there's several options here's one example of people often say oh beekeepers don't agree they all give you different answers well because all different things work and they work different ways so often what you're being told from different people it isn't that one is wrong and right it's that one might suit what

you want to do more so for me what i like to do i keep them right in the apiary because kind of what we're describing is creating a resource colony although we can easily do this and bring in a queen at a queen which you don't have to buy queens but this is already done so russell spent the money and that's the way it's working so what do you think those are my ideas anyway question number four comes from martin mitchell hunter which is the youtube channel name says i've noticed when a queen goes on a mating flight they bring back a group of bees.

I'm sure some of them found her when she was out and followed her back. So the bunch of bees, I can tell you right now, because it sounds like a swarm when you walk into your apiary and you're looking at your bees and everything sounds like a swarm now because they're all on the go. There's a tizzy of activity. Anyway, so what happens is we see drone rushes, and I video this a lot because I think it's fun.

The reason I think it's funny is what it really does is it shows us that a queen flew out, a virgin queen. She went to the previously mentioned drone congregation area where the singles hang out. Before she even got there, she likely had drones spotting her on the wing and following her, chasing her. They call it the drone comet. They just follow her by the hundreds, if not thousands, depending on the population at the drone congregation area. Then when she's done, when she's had, enough when she's mated and the last drone has died then she flies back and on her way back she still is being chased by drones that spotted her especially if it's a low target environment in other words a very few queens showing up uh this tends to happen at similar times so several colonies may

have sent out queens to be mated in very close proximity timewise to one another so there could be multiple queens out there but the drones follow her home and then when she lands this is the best part and if you can get a video of it it's kind of fun when the queen lands she still has what's called the mating sign on her body what's that that is a reproductive organ of the last male that she mated with she took it home she collects those and so then she has to get inside and then people ask questions well how does she get that off of her well she rakes her body across the cone and it just tends to come off and then of course the cleanup bees just get rid of things but so those drones show up and you get what's called a drone rush I call it that I don't know

what the entomological name is for it and they seem to visit for a while like they get in there and they get fed because let's be honest they spend a lot of energy chasing her home did any of those actually mate with her on the way home no because the minute they mate you know they pass out and they drop to the ground and they expire So they pass on their genetic material and that's the end of their job. That was their only job. So the rest of them get fed and then within a couple of hours if you weren't out there to see it, there's no more activity at the landing board.

They just leave. They just go back to wherever they came from. Now the funny part about drones is they can leapfrog to any colony of bees that they choose to and the nurse bees in there and workers feed them. They'll feed a total stranger. And then they zip out again and, after they're all fueled up and they go back to the congregationary depending on the time of day if there's still an opportunity to meet and so that's what's happening i call it the drone rush

if you want to do some funny things and you know you've got virgin queens for example you can put them in those tiny insect enclosures which is a lot of fun if you happen to have a 25 or 30 foot telescoping pole that we use to um get swarms out of a tree you can put that little netted queen in there at the end of your pole just 25 or 30 feet in the air and start walking her out of your apiary and see how many drones show up trying to get into that net it could be an eye-opener she doesn't get to the drone congregation area drones are interested in queens whenever they're flying somewhere so food for thought experiments to do lots of fun so question number five and i can't even say oh this is the same person that asked a question last week mj l s 7 q r 8 xp 3n youtube channel name so anyway my top bar hive

bees were bearded on the front yesterday 77 degrees Fahrenheit in eugene oregon says uh above normal for sure i have uh uh uh 1.5 inch entrance plus two plus one at the top and one at the end for ventilation I have a follower board with holes on one side of the top of the board at bar 28 also vent holes on either side at opposite ends of the hive and this is a key part that I want you all to pay attention to says here that those had been propalized shut a year ago plus the vent hole on the front the entrance end had also been propolized shot. You'd mentioned in a chat that you'd discuss ventilation in the future. Could you go over that this week on both

lengths? No problem there. And Topper Hives. My top our hive is constructed from 2x10, so it's a tank. So here's the thing. And this is something I learned a while ago. So back in 2019,

when I started making my own feeder shims, and I did a video if you want to check it out. It's called How to Build a Feeder Shim Free Langstroth Hive. So anyway, people instantly started commenting on that saying,

well, you better put vents in there and you need to make sure that there's a screen so that they can vent through your feeder shim, which has an integrated inner cover into it. It's all one unit. They're super heavy. A lot of people ask if we would make sell and ship them.

You just can't. They're made out of heavy material impractical. That's why I made videos on how to make it yourself and then I don't sell you anything. So just to appease some of the people that we're speculating because these are easy tests to do, I put number eight stainless steel screen in one and a half inch diameter holes in the feeder shim. So Erica then pass from the boxes below through the feeder shim and out through the top. And the screen would serve as a restriction so the bees can't get up into the feeder shim area because and they would just build comb everywhere. And what do they do?

They propolized it all 100%. They even propelized the screens on top of their observation hives. So if you want to use them for feeders, you have to poke them open all the time. But what's the message? The message is the bees don't want this venting. This is how I ended up not venting anything.

Today, they're calling this condensing hives. This has been around for a long time. you may not need to have top venting if you've got insulated inner covers on top of your hive and insulated outer covers that's what I did that's what I'm doing today and I carry this over into the long Langstroth hive I closed up all the vents it doesn't have any vents it has only the entrance and when it comes to layens hives they come with hive top vents in them I insulated the covers that's key and then I remove the vents also by plugging them up with expansion phone. Now we have the top bar hives. There is no place to vent those. There's an entrance and there's the top bars and the bees

propalyze those up. So I have no vents in the hive other than the entrance and bees have demonstrated very good efficiency in moving the air around inside the hive once they know where the openings are going to be. This is why I've had discussion. with people that make hives that have multiple entrances all the way down the length of it. So when I ask what do you do with all the entrances, what's going on? Is it because we're going to have multiple nukes being developed in this hive? What's happening there? And they say no, it's so that wherever the brood is, we will open that vent. And then so they'll have ventilation where the brood is.

And so this goes against what the bees do when left off. left on their own and that's something that tom seeley dr thomas seeley frequently says what would the bees be doing if we weren't doing anything and this is an example of that we know that they need an entrance and they would keep their entrance places that we create other entrances in venting openings in the hives the bees tend to close them up and uh that's under their control when it is under their control and this has to do with the size of the opening whether they propolize it or do bees wax or even would occupy the space at all and that's why I've said this in the past too if you're making a swarm trap you know people put out swarm traps and they know well in advance

it should have a single entrance it should be secure it should be dark it should be non-vented and then once the bees get into it and they transferred into another hide that's when they introduce all the venting and stuff and I've said it before I'll say it again if you want to know what the bees want put up swarm traps that have no venting and only a single entrance and then put another swarm trap right next to it with all other features being identical and have venting in that one see which one they occupy on their own that falls under the category of what would the bees do if we did nothing and so we're finding out what their preferences are and their preferences are for sealed spaces that only have a single entrance and they handle this very well and the reason we throw them for a loop when we go down and we're changing changing, adding venting and shifting venting and shifting openings as they progress through the hive. Now they're changing how they manage the air movement inside the hive and they don't really know what to do. This is one of the problems with screened open bottom boards.

I'm a huge fan of screened bottom boards enclosed with trays that you take out, not open to the outside because it affects the way air moves in and out of the hive and their control over pheromones from within the hive too. So, and this is another area where talk to different beekeepers, find out what their preferences are, see which one makes the most sense to you, and then follow suit with that. So this is my discussion about it.

Today they call it the condensing hive. For me, it's just any hive that only has a single entrance, and talk a little bit more about that. And another question today. Question number six comes up here from Isancho 46. When should I use Honeybee Healthy in my sugar syrup versus Hive Alive, I have both? I would also like your opinion on Queen Excluders. So first we'll address the Honeybee Healthy and Hive Alive

since you already have both. When should you use it? Well, and we did this, well we, I did it. We take sugar syrup one to one, which has a high water content, of course. it's one part sugar one part water so if you talk about something that was spoil quickly or ferment quickly the lower the sugar in it and the higher the water percentage then the more quickly it should begin to ferment and if we get really high sugar content like two to one fermentation is of course pushed way back so and then the bees use it more but if we wanted to find out the benefit of using honey be healthy versus hive alive they both have a similar

when it comes to keeping your sugar syrup that you spritz on bees if you carry a spray bottle of sugar syrup The shelf life is profoundly extended if you're doing one-to-one sugar syrup And you put it on a hive let's say to feed them in spring. It's a very common thing to put on a swarm that's been put into a hive And is a great way to keep your colony building new comb when you hive them the minute they run out they tend to stop so Honeybee Healthy versus Hive Alive Alive. The extended keeping that black mold that shows up in the drinker from forming, you get about four months to five months out of the HoneyBe Healthy following their standard mix recommendation.

So you're always going to follow the label on that stuff. And it smells very strongly of lemon grass. So Hive, Honeybee Healthy gets their attention very quickly. And so with hive alive, and you have to evaluate for yourself whether this is practical, because when you put hive alive in your sugar syrup, now it will go eight, ten months without forming any mold in it. So, but the question is, are you going to have a reservoir of sugar syrup that you're going to sit on the shelf and the bees not use it for that extended period of time? I highly recommend that you mix your sugar syrups up as close to end use as possible.

fresher is always better. So when we feed them the sugar syrup with either of these, you get more shelf life out of the hive of life, and that's just because we hung all these bottles up. We can see them through them, and we see when the mold starts. The other part of that is if I start spritzing honeybee healthy in sugar syrup onto a hive that I'm doing an inspection on,

because I like to spritz them and give them kind of a sugar reward, which distracts them. And then I don't, in some cases, I don't, even have to use smoke when I do that other bees that are flying by smell that lemon grass in the air and depending on the time of year this is not something you want to do because now they zip over there and they start robbing out or competing for the resource that you just spritz there and you kind of rang the dinner bell by putting a lemon grass and a sugar syrup out in the open so that's

another thing to think about we do not get the same attraction the same sudden interest when you're using the hive alive it smells more licoricey it has time oil in it so it has that smell and it's not that appetizing to the bees so they don't come zipping over what's that we want some kind of thing where they do with honeybee healthy so what do your bees want the most and this is another area of backyard science if you mix up one-to-one sugar syrup the same water the same processed sugar and the only variable then is whether you add honeybee healthy hive alive or nothing what will the bees go for everything else being the same they go for the sugar syrup with nothing in it that's it number one it's what your bees want

so the differences are the other part is um hive alive has been uh scientifically proven to take down your nozema spore numbers so nozima is something a lot of people aren't even talking about but it's a gut bacteria issue where these things live in the gut of the bee and they compete for resources so you don't necessarily see a bunch of dead bees you see bees that look normal but they may not be remembering things as well they may not be living as long and they may not be orienting or as active as those without nozima are so then it's easy to count nozema spores a lot of people don't want to kill bees to do that very easy very simple I could give a shout out right now to the University of Florida Bee Lab. Dr. Jamie Ellis gave a very nice presentation on how to count nozema spores in your bees. I'm calling them spores. They're living organisms.

I don't know what they're doing. So anyway, they compete with your bees. They attack the gut lining of your worker bees. So by putting in, so it's another difference. So hive alive has an impact on that. And that's more of a problem in early spring when your bees are just starting to fly. And they have a lot of concentrations of solids in their gut because they haven't been able to fly out and dispense with it yet, what we call cleansing flights.

So there you go. I hope that that helped make a difference here. And the second part here is I have the two queen keeper-keeper hive. And I'm questioning whether I should use the queen excluder. I've heard in, I've heard it Knox Pollen. wax off the bees body and hind legs your thoughts are appreciated okay so queen excluders in general when we talk about the two queen or two colony keepers hive which i only have one of those um it's a very strong colony it does extremely well i am going to say yes please put that

queen excluder in there um if it is if the queen excluder is holding them back then i don't know what to say because I can't hold them back. And what I'm going to say or what I mean by that is they produce more honey than any of my other colonies. They build wax quicker. We have two colonies working on a common, you know, super area. So I removed the queen excluder going into winter because then we have just the two nucleus hive size boxes

on either side with a divider between them. And there's honey in there. So it was while the wall to wall. all capped honey and they moved up into that and then I had the insulated cover on top so now I have to go back the other way I have to pull that box off put the queen excluder on and by the way the queen excluder comes from that company for the keeper's hive it's different it has a thinner wooden trim it's designed to integrate and to keep your queens separate without a space that they can go up and over and get into the other side although I have to say I don't know why the queen would get up and go over but it definitely keeps the brood out of the upper boxes so you definitely want to use your queen excluder and and that's the way they intended it to work so that's it for question number six moving on to question number seven

this is from chrra s o it says any idea what the conversion rate of pollen to brood is in other words how many of those giant pollen baskets does it take to provide the protein via brood food to turn one egg into an adult worker bee. That's what I was wondering is I watched my bees in western New York bringing in similar loads a few days ago. Now we're back in a cold, rainy, snowy for the next few days. It's a good thing they found those resources whatever they are. So this is something that comes up from time to time. When you're assessing a colony of bees and you're looking at that to see if they're set for raising the brood that they have. They need, remember I've said before, you need a face frame of bee bread or pollen, which bee bread is just finished pollen after the nurse bees have worked it up.

And then the other side, you need that much to feed an equal size surface frame of brood. So it's really one to one. So when we're looking at cells of bee bread, one cell of bee bread packed to the top, we'll feed one larvae from the point of hatching from an egg to when it gets capped as a pupa. At that point, they're not fed anymore. So it takes one. So this helps you estimate, do I have enough pollen, have the bees brought in enough pollen to feed the brood that's inside the hive?

Because if you just see a very thin ring of pollen or bee bread, around the outside edge of your brood area and you don't see it anywhere else they're pollen efficient and then what's going to happen is the queen is going to back off on her egg production because the nurse bees are going to convey to the queen via her diet that they don't have enough resources to continue feeding the brood so she has to slow down so the other end of that is too there should be an abundance of pollen before the queen is even laying eggs so the pollen the high rate of pollen coming in does indicate every time I've ever inspected a hive if it has been coming at a rate of 10 or more per minute then

there is a queen in there who's productive and all of these foragers are trying to keep up with the nurse be demand for the resources to feed the brood so that's just like the video you're watching right now up in the corner they're coming in at a rapid rate but look at what happened it started raining and now they can no longer bring it in in so the next question you may wonder is how many trips do they have to make to collect enough pollen which later becomes bee bread for the bees and the bees that eat the bee bread are the nurse bees that then use their hypoferengal glands to produce the food necessary for open larvae feeding it takes about 10 so that means 10 foragers coming in on average scraping off the pollen from their corbicula into the cell. They do this directly. And then nurse bees go around and they push their heads in there and they pack it down and then they amend it. So they're actually regurgitating material into that to help it

ferment and help make bee bread. Now whether or not a real full-blown fermentation process happens, something happens to turn it into bee bread. And that's why you can smell it and something's going on when you have a whole bunch of pollen going on in there. So we need one full cell roughly 10 loads. That means that's 20 legs so of pollen going into that before it's enough to feed one larvae start to finish. Now there is one larva that takes more than that to grow and that's the drone. Drones get fed more. They're bigger. They're heavier and they consume more. And they also consume more after they emerge from their cells. They eat more because they have a big engine and they require a lot of calories to power it. So anyway, and all pollen is not created equal. So there are variables,

but you could say 10 loads per cell, which is 20 leg loads. And then, of course, one cell, one brood, start to finish on average with variables. Question number eight comes here. This is Michael Moore. Do you have a video showing the bridge that you made to stop the queen from coming in the honey super without using a queen excluder okay I didn't build a bridge so the setup is a deep brood box whether that's eight or ten frame and we let the bees build that up that's what's going on right now so we're getting the build up and then when they get most of their frames involved they're going to move up into the next box now that's why we hold back on supering until they're really filling the brood box first because we want to keep them down there and we use the brood to anchor them so this is a

discussion about using and setting up a colony without using a queen excluder so the deep brood box this is my personal practice then I put the medium on which by the way looking at the activity right now and the weather conditions that we have ahead and the pollen loads that are coming in and their commitment to their brood in that bottom box next week is looking at like the time to start to put medium supers on your hives one so then i put the next box on and i've said in the past that i like to have them fill that box up in spring and so it ends up being full of capped honey this acts as a honey bridge so there's no physical bridge that we build it is something that happens inside a hive for example if we followed uh jeff or chaff which is mr ed or we follow randy mcalf

which is dirt rooster and you go down to the south and you see the buildings that they tear apart and they look at colonies of bees all they want to know how many holes were there how many entrances were there how big was the entrance where was the entrance located what was the space like underneath those bee comb right that's in there so what happens is they establish on a bridge there too because guess what there's only one entrance the entrance is often remarkably small. And so they build up. Where's the brood? The brood is always near the entrance, because that's where they have the air circulation and everything else. Where is their protected long-term storage up above and past the brood? So if it's in a horizontal situation, there is the entrance.

Horizontal vertical makes no difference. There's the entrance. There's some comb there, and there's brood and then the brood shifts until it becomes nothing but comb honey and then that continues on through and then you get these huge expanses of comb honey where was the queen excluder nowhere so what they do is once you get to the edge of the brood area it transitions into nothing but capped honey so this is what i refer to as the honey bridge and they call it a bridge because the queen doesn't wander over, cross a bunch of honey in order to find a spot to lay her eggs to continue to produce more stock inside that hive. So with a vertical box, the brood box, medium super, full of capped honey, then the next box above that is nothing but capped honey and I can relax about the potential for the queen

to lay her eggs up there because she tends not to do it. It's very successful. Now, have there ever been circumstances where the queen went up there and she actually started laying eggs above this honey bridge yes there have been circumstances where that happened was it a lot no was it a problem no here's why where do they want the brood down below why because that's where the entrance is that's where the ventilation source is that's also they'll protect that area and if any robbers want to show up and visit the hive they have to pass through the brood area to get to the long-term honey stores, which is their winter's survival. So that was the other flip, the other end of it, the medium box, about 45, 40 pounds of capped honey, 10 frame. That gets them through winter. So it's guaranteed earth protection.

If we get a weird weather situation and all of a sudden they can't bring any forage in, we at least have the carbohydrates already there because I don't take that. That's for the bees. And then above, above and beyond that, that's where I'll take it. Now because I want to experiment with different things, I added a bunch of queen excluders because I like the new queen excluders and by new past few years that better be is selling. They're very good. The bees go right through them. They also didn't bees wax them up and propylize them and stuff like that. But the bees will actually with some of the plastic queen excluders that I started off with many years ago, I had bees actually close up the entire queen excluter.

Just propalyze it until every opening was sealed. It was interesting, which is one of the things that got me thinking, do I really need this thing anyway? And why did I stop using queen excluders? Because those that I tested by setting up an outdoor feeder so I could get a look at everything and see the foragers try to squeeze through these bars to get into the sugar syrup that I had put out for them. Bumblebees, obviously not making it.

But even worker bees had such a struggle getting through those openings of these plastic queen excluders. The videos are still on my channel and you can look at them. So some of them just gave up, couldn't even go in. And so this led me to find alternate methods of management. So no queen excluders were what I started to use. And so now better queen excluders, you can do either way. That's what the bridge is. I know I took a long time to explain it,

but I don't want you sitting there with question marks over your head, wondering about the details of that. I arrived at it. Now we're on to question number nine, and I have Khalid from Greater Boston, Massachusetts. Have a couple of questions on the hive-alive fondant that I placed in my hives as insurance this winter. I cut an opening as suggested by the manufacturer,

and in the plastic bag, it looks like the bees could not reach the fondant. on the sides and in the corners of the bag where there is no opening. How can I fix this for next time? I thought I brought a piece down here. Oh yeah, it sure did. I've shown this before. And some people look at it and say, where did you get that?

What is that about? Well, this comes from Hive Alive. And by the way, if you go shopping there, ask for the Fred Dun discount. A lot of different places are giving Fred done discounts and Hive Live is one of them. So I think it's Fred 10. Anyway, this has the cutter on one side. You cut the hole Flip it over push these teeth in there. So it's kind of like that thing that sits in your pizza box for those of you buy pizza and it keeps the box from crushing down on your pizza Then it goes like this so the hole is underneath. This by the way goes very well right on top of the

B-smart Designs, insulated intercover central riser column. Pull that black cap off. Now the bees go up in there and because it's puffed up like this, now the bees go to all the corners that doesn't collapse down on itself. And you use these over and over and over again. So I had to go out in the B yard and get this one. So I could share with you to show this during this question. But you can do other things because before those came out,

I was putting in smoothie straws. know if you've seen those smoothie straws are a pretty big diameter straw i think they're like three-eighths or bigger which just happens to be bee space you clip them so they're about two and a half inches long and you go through the hole that you've cut and you stuff them towards the corners and then the bees can travel through them and clean out all of your hive alive so that works too so that's how you fix it for next time the other thing was i thought about cutting the corners off but smoothie straws or that they seem to work equally anything that will puff it up and allow the bees passage in there if you've got ideas on how you've puffed yours up and made them work better please put that down in the comment section I'm sure other people would love to see that or know more about it let's go to question number 10 from Mickey Carvalo says hi Fred do you think a vacuum could be used for deadouts sure it can

but try not to here's why so i have these bevaks that i set aside just for vacuuming live bees and i have used them in the past for dead bees but that's before i figured out that i can blow them out with air so i'm going to go over this again and somebody wrote me remember last week about the water picking out turned yellow this is not a wolf box but this is a blower has that long nozzle on it it's battery powered i bought this before i got the wolf box units has a little USB connection on it and uh it blows air so so anyway uh the first step i like the fact that you don't have to make contact with it because here's what happens they tend to get sticky and wet and gooey and when you use your vacuum hose they're going to get your hose sticky and gooey and all the

residue is going to be parking itself on the interior surfaces of your vacuum nozzle, your vacuum hose, and maybe even get up into your filter system. I don't know what you have, but you can use a vacuum and I have another vacuum this year that haven't even demonstrated yet, but it's not for what you think. It's a wet dry vac, and I'm going to use it to remove sugar syrup from feeders that are still full that the bees aren't touching. So you know that happens sometimes when you have a feeder on top of your hive and you put sugar syrup in it but the bees are finding everything they need outside so now they're not going to use a sugar syrup so if this is like a frame feeder or something like that that can be messy plus there can be dead bees in it depending on how

much open surface area there is so there's this wet dry vac that i got i don't remember the name of it but that's coming up and i use that to suck out the existing sugar syrup that has bees in it here's why because now we can filter the bees out of it and then go ahead and reuse that sugar syrup somewhere else different time of year starting nucleus hives or something like that but anyway air first blow them out if you've got an air compressor and you've got those nozzles for cleaning out the shop blowing down dust and stuff like that then you can also use that to blow out the frames of your beehives and blow out the hive itself bottom board everything else then what is this that's that portable water pick thing which I didn't even know existed

until I was thinking about it how to clean out the leftover bee bread and tough bees and residue and things like that in a healthy hive should be healthy let's not do this anything that we suspect might have foul buried in it and I'm not going to turn this on because by the way it's really strong and even a foot or two away it sprits and hits your hand really hard so you do not have to get it right up in the cells and i'll put a link to this this is fun and you'll find that there's a lot of uses for it like cleaning out your weather station rain gauge which gets gummed up you know it teeter totters back and forth stick this in there and spritz it you'll find all kinds of ways to use forest water but anyway so we clean out all

the cells of it the ones that need it has its own water really reservoir and of course it's battery powered rechargeable and then it's wet and the cells now are full of water so now you come back with your blower I prefer the wolf box I'll put a link to that if you want to look those up and this will then blow the water out of the holes and blow it all over you while you're standing there doing it because even though you turn the frames upside down and you shake it you do all this stuff there's a lot of surface tension to the water something about the shape and size of those cells it holds Now your option is too of course to just let it dry out which by the way it takes a long time So just by blowing all the water out of the cells now you can put that frame right back in service right away

So good to go air water pick followed by air and if you've got an LPR hose you've got unlimited air and you can do it and I found that In some cases just the air alone can even blow out if you've got little bits of pollen there stuck in the cells that have haven't been really worked in or glazed over which they tend to do sometimes with fallen that they have no intention to use that's where the water pit comes in that thing is really strong and air dry back in service here we are last question of the day question number 11 which comes from i can't even say it abi el ha u s a anyway can you do a tour of your studio i was so curious about the books you have in the background i tried to

zoom in but couldn't okay so the tour of the studio you're seeing it this is this is all there is what bc we have the heart of the hive by hillary kearney and abc at xyz of b culture and i think that's from the 1870s it's an old old book and uh by the way how do those books end up there i pick them based on the color that looks good in the background so if you have a favorite B book that you think should be in this background see I don't like the bright colors there been some really good books that came out you're not going to see Kamen Reynolds and Blake Shook's book back here it's bright yellow takes all the attention so it draws too much to it what we call visually gravitational it's made it up

too much visual gravity so I don't you know there's Tom Sely's books are super nice but they have white covers they draw too much attention so I have these starker books and stuff that's why they're there and so that's the background we're on to fluff for today so let's get into it clean your dead out same old story people still haven't done it and they haven't done it you have to do it clean the dead outs you're going to have a swarm before you know it you're going to be upset you're not ready swarm traps out put them out right now and this is also when you can start and of course I'm talking about northeastern part of the United States where you are I know that somebody in the south is going to chime in and say I've already

got five swarms i've done two cutouts i know it's going okay i'm just telling people that may be procrastinating here in the northeastern or colder climates uh we have super strong hives um i don't know why i wrote that super strong hives you have to think about supering some of these hives right now i know it seems early but look at all the activity of the bees bringing in pollen and resources they are growing fast their numbers are They sound like swarms. They're building up now. This seems ahead of time considering how bad everything is. And with the weather that's coming up, by the way, we've got a two or three-day window when you can get out there and actually do some good physical inspections. Hopefully you'll do that and assess how much brood, how much pollen, how much space of the using up and what do they need? Because this is your opportunity. You can't wait. This is your opportunity to decongest your colony a little bit by adding a super.

one super at a time don't like go nuts and put three boxes on all at once because they tend not to use it as well as they do when they have smaller spaces and they do it incrementally the other thing is for those you have troubles lifting things you can do micro honey harvesting what i mean by that well instead of lifting the whole box off i want you to grab some 35 pound dumbbells walk around with them because that's a 70-pound box right there. You get a dumbbell in each hand that's 35 pounds. Do you want to lift that? Do you want to tote that around?

I recommend you do. If you can do it, get strong. And the guys can do it too, not just talking to the women. So what you can do, though, is lift out just the frames. So you go out there with your high butler toad or whatever you have,

and don't forget they have a discount too, Fred 10 or 5 or whatever. Anyway, you find a, frame that's already capped with spring honey grab that out of there put that in your high butler tote it weighs about seven pounds and then uh you put in a replacement frame of drawn comb right then now you're decongesting your honey super we are not commercial beekeepers we don't have to wait until the whole crew is together and use vehicles and lift booms and bobcats and all the other stuff that people have the rich people that they have uh you just have yourself

or your spouse and so or a grandchild send them out there to get the best capped honey and by the way you can use these to blow the bees off of it cap honey blow it off put it in your high belt or tote put the replacement in get another one spritz a little sugar syrup on the replacement one so they get the reward the sense that you're doing them a favor by taking away some of the honey and you blow off the next ones with your portable battery powered wolf box And now you've got honey now. And spring honey is really, really good, in my opinion.

So anyway, Strong Hives, super those things up. Inspect from anywhere, you know, your prime inspection times are noon to two. Why do I say that? Well, the sun's going to be the highest. You're going to see things the best. Most of your foragers are going to be out of your way because you try to do this at the end of the day. It's too much activity.

You don't have the golden hour for beekeeping. You don't want to go out there at sunset when all the forages are in and you're going through, you can't even see the frames. You have to clear them off. It doesn't work. It doesn't work as well, let me say that. And by the way, you have this few frosty nights still ahead

for those of you who are putting off frost seating. If I had only seated before all this rain came today, a nice, steady, even, long-lasting rain. That is such a good thing if you put your clover, and I want to know what you plant because I get some pushback on. Why are you telling people to use clover? It's invasive. Okay.

Well, I don't know how invasive it is, but I do know that the bees benefit from it a lot. Clover honey, huge in demand. Do they get pollen from it? You bet they do. That tan pollen that you see to light brown, that is clover pollen. They get a lot from it. So do you. So, but what are you planning?

Like, what are my options? don't just tell me not to plant something. You have to give me something to put out there in instead. And I said that I'm doing two varieties of clover this year because I like the taller clover because I'm using areas to get muddy and wet and that are damp all the time, but yet get full sun. I have ground like that. And it's just begging for clover. Anyway, so frost seating. That's what you want to take advantage of that. You get a hard frost overnight like we had. We had 14 degrees Fahrenheit this past week. That's a hard freeze. And that's your time run out there at sunrise and sprinkle your clover seed around the other thing is what's your best clover

seed spreader or any small seed spreader that you hand carry not some big bag over your shoulder that looks like bagpipes i mean like a little hand spreader you got one of those that works really well shoot the name of it out there put it down the comment section i'm looking for one of those that you have really good controls on because they have a lot to seed this year as always anyway so that's my favorite hand heads for it and bad breath david h i don't know if i should say his whole name gave me a message or about 1130 today just ahead of doing this and says bad breath

do bees really get bothered by bad breath from people and what should we do about it so i don't know who's been telling david that he has bad breath but the bees will let you know let's think about it Why do bees not like it when we blow at them? I've seen people looking at frames blow them out of the way, but you know they really get flustered about it. They're not happy, depending on who's doing that. What are you?

You're a mammal. You're a big mammal. What do bears and things like that do when they're sniffing something to see if it's something they want? They huff at it and they sniff and they bother it. And then they smell the breath of a large mammal. So they don't like it. Bees naturally should be defunders. when that happens because they have to get ready something is about to eat them they don't know that you're not going to eat them maybe some of you do eat bees I don't know

what you do but your breath has CO2 in it so they associate that of course with a mammal and you have other smells that come with you could you do anything to mitigate that yes you could because if you think for a minute I didn't look into this and I did you could chew gum I don't know is gum chewing really good for us anyway but if you use spearmint or winter green particularly spearmint or winter green it's very good at masking the scent in your breath which could calm the bees so when you've got a bee that's showing a little attitude towards you don't blow the bee away some people do that i hate that baby they blow with them so if you do that you're just going to antagonize them even more unless you've been chewing spearmine or winter green gum

It says you can use mouthwash and stuff like that too. I think you should always have fresh breath anyway. Nobody wants to smell your bad breath. Some people compensate for that by smoking themselves silly. They just puff, puff, puff, puff, until they're so masked, it really doesn't matter. But bees do not like it when we blow on them. And that's why that association is not good.

So I want to thank you for watching this Friday. And I hope you have a fantastic weekend. and if you've thought of something that you think I should know about or you'd like me to address in a future episode please go to the way to be.org click on the page mark contact and let me know it's on your mind and you never know might lead to something really interesting for everyone so thank you for being here i'm frederick done and this has been the way to be