The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 363 with Frederick Dunn

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/Gl2W6swtJLE

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, July the 17th, and this is Backyard Peakeeping questions and answers episode number 363. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me and I hope that things are going well for you wherever you happen to be. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order with timestamps so that you can go straight to it. You want to have to waste your time, listen to the entire thing. Also, if you want to know how to submit your own question for future consideration, please go to the main website, which is the wayto-be.org, click on the page marked contact.

There's a form there. You can fill it out and share your thoughts. Ask your question. Make a suggestion of something maybe that you think you'd like to know more about or that I should look into. You never know. Also, if you don't want to look at your source, if you're driving somewhere if you're operating some heavy equipment mowing the yard you want to listen rather than watch you can go to pod bean type in the way to be podcast you can also just google the way to be podcast and you'll probably find it you can just listen see instead of watching so once again glad you're here i'm sure you know what's going on

out in the world today and where in the world are we northeastern part of the united states northwestern part of the Pennsylvania. And we're not even allowed outside. Well, you could go outside, but it's ill-advised. Here's why. The weather is bad. In fact, big parts of Canadian forests are making their way here to the northeastern United States, other parts of the country too. And it's dangerous for everybody. Air quality is a big deal. So what are the temperatures, though? I'm sure you want to know that. Right outside today, 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 26. degrees Celsius and the wind no wind that's not helpful not like it would blow the smoke away but we don't have any wind at all so zero miles per hour what's that kilometers per hour about the same

zero so the good news too the you know the beehives are not wearing their bees right now because it's 50% relative humidity which means it's really nice and the bees can stay inside for a while avoid that smoke. You may be wondering what the smoke may impact the bees. What will it do? Do they treat that like a smoker that's going off on the hive? And do they seek deep shelter and consume honey and stuff like that? No.

But with the reduced visibility, bees forage from a great distance and they forage with vision. They have to see where the sun's located. They follow landmarks really carefully. And if they can't see the landmarks, they can't follow them. And also when they get close to the flowers that they're checking out, they rely on scent. So their olfactory senses kick in. And that's messed up by the smoke and stuff that we have going on here. So that's not good news. But they're coming and going normally.

What they're not doing is bearding a lot because now they can dry their honey down. The problem is the nectar flow is receding a little bit. So what does that mean? What's going on outside? I'll tell you, thanks for asking. Milkweed. They're still on the milkweed. I'm a little disappointed. Milkweed is coming to an end already. There are videos I want to get.

I have a lot of video, but I have a specific thing that I'm trying to document. I don't want to tell you about it and ruin it because I'm going to be given a presentation this coming Sunday. If I get that ahead of time. So check in with Castle Hives. Brian Coper. He's bringing me to Ohio and we're going to talk about stuff.

I'm going to show pictures. But the milkweed is one. waning so that's disappointing in fact some there's milkweed pods already so I think we're gonna be losing that nectar source what's next clover white clover Dutch clover some people like sweet clover but I don't see a lot of it here in my environment and the Ladino or Ladino clover is just now coming in so that's good news what about buckwheat it's still around but the peas aren't on it I don't know why I planted that stuff raspberries so the raspberries

are just prolific right now. We have elder berries but the bees are not on them. We also have mulberries, but the bees are not on those either. The crows are. Borage is growing and flowering and so that's providing a small nectar flow. The problem with the borage is they don't have enough of it to make a significant impact. And buckwheat is up. Buckwheat is doing okay. Bees are not on it. So there you go. That's exciting, isn't it? Let's talk about things and you can share down in the comments section what you're doing if you have to stay inside on a nice hot day what a rob job because it's going to be winter soon and warm days that you don't require a jacket to be outside you know are few and far between so and I know other parts

of the country just burning up we don't seem to have very even distribution of decent weather either you're being flooded out you're being baked by the sun you have no rain or or if you're in some parts of Canada, your forests are burning and they can't even get there to put out the fire. So, super frustrating. But let's jump right in with the very first question, which comes from Laurel Doherty. And she just says that an N95 mask or a P100 respirator are supposed to help you if you need to be outside in wildfire smoke. Now, this is important, and she made this comment on my recent video about the Hive IQ assessment. If you haven't seen it, you should.

And even if you don't like polystyrene hives, here's why I recommend you watch the video because the supervisor showed up. He's 10 years old, pulled on his bee suit, came out after I had the hive all put together because what was that going to do? Occupy it with bees. So they had a swarm, so he showed up to help with that.

And the bees went right into the hive. If you watch it for no other reason, see that behavior. We just opened it up. It made us look like we knew what we were doing. Bees are in it. but I commented on the smoke, the haze, and the fact that we shouldn't even, you know, yesterday we weren't even supposed to be outside no matter what.

So it's not just high risk people. It's anybody that doesn't want to get toxins in their body. So we'll talk about that a little bit because the smoke is really bad news. It has particulates in it that are not just wood fire related. So it's not just trees that combust it and wood. up into the air and we're doing have little trees landing on us here bits and parts they're heavy metals there are toxins in the air that I didn't know anything about and I regret looking into it because these toxins actually can bypass they go

right into your body right into your bloodstream and do terrible things to you some people went outside and were there for just a short amount of time we're getting headaches and stuff already by the time you're showing symptoms you've been out there too long and your body can't get rid of the stuff so if you have to be outside just like laurel says here n95 mask or p-100 respirator don't play games with it it's bad news all the way around question number two comes in this is one-eye hives it says interesting that they use magnets on the entrance reducers i had thought about using them on my swarm traps to make closing up for removal and transport but i thought that magnets affect the bees. And this is again on the Hive Iq assembly video. I'll put a link down in

the description in case you want to scope it out. But they have entrances that are clicked together with little magnets. And this question about magnets comes up quite a lot and this is pretty funny to me. Funny, here's why. Low level magnets like the ones that hold, you know, little doors shut that are using cabinetry and stuff like that, those little magnets that hold the camera a door shut. I don't think your bees react to them at all. I can't find any science that supports that your bees are affected by the near field of the magnetic flux. We've talked about it in the past. But it gets better, and here's one of the ways that I think about electromagnetic energy. In fact, high energy in the air. So we think about things and studies have been done on high power

lines. So these big towers that have high power. People are concerned about having beehives near them, bees flying through them, the impact on wildlife and everything else. So you would think the bees, who are very sensitive, by the way, honeybees, when they're pollinating plants, sense static charge of the plant, for example. They smell the floral scent, so they know what's in there. So they are sensitive to things. They have their own static charge as they fly through the air, because they have branched hairs on their body that create more surface area. And so when they fly, it creates this charge, kind of like rubbing a balloon on your head

and then sticking a balloon on the wall to show the magic of static electricity. And then when they get to a flower, there's exchange of static of energy, right? So that's extremely low level. So it makes perfect sense that if we had a higher energy source nearby, the bees would react to it. Don't even get me started on the early cell phone warning about this. bees and how bees react to cell phones and see that was a one-off it was a study that was being done and when you tracked down the people that did the study the cell phone wasn't even sending and receiving calls

it was to see if the vibration in the cell phone that's what they were wondering would have an impact on the hive and then people took it and decided that it's the energy given off when receiving or sending a call that impacts and negatively impacts your honeybees interesting okay so there's the best part. High voltage lines, they have these transfer stations. There are power panel boxes and circuit boxes and stuff like that. And here's my question. So just because I want you to question absolutely everything.

If bees are sensing something and they're repelled by and they don't want to be around it, they would avoid it. So how many times talk to the people that do cutouts, ripouts, removals of honeybees and other insects? Oftentimes, guess where they are? They're right in service. panels. They're right in transfer boxes. They're right in where the capacitors are. And this is pretty darn interesting because if they're trying to avoid those things or if it's really negative, then there

would be something wrong with the bees that are occupying the space. So we get to look at things and see, is the comb different? Is the colony tiny and not sustaining itself? How is the behavior of the bees? Because some of the arguments are that they just can't orient anymore because electromagnetic mess up their internal compass so my question is if we take the other extremes to look at places that your bees are occupying I don't know it doesn't very well support the fact that they're avoiding that kind of energy now there was a decent study done that show that high voltage lines because I don't know if you ever did this as a kid take a fluorescent tube and you can stand parallel with high

voltage power lines above and it would illuminate the tube right and now that we're into LEDs kids today won't get to do that anymore but it showed that there is an energy field in the air it's real you can feel it right so they demonstrated that the bees accelerated through that area but they couldn't prove a negative impact see what I'm saying so the behavior was that they might avoid foraging in that area or they might speed up and therefore reduce the amount of time spent directly under a high voltage situation So this kind of thing is branched out to our concerns about a lot of other things. And people have tried and made claims about magnetics even being beneficial for your bees

and doing things for the hive. But there again needs to be supported. It can't be a one-off. And we need to look at the bees behavior and wonder about that. So for one-eye hives, just putting magnets on that serve a function on the hive to hold components together, open and close, little doors and things like that. and or even if you have a magnet button that's glued on the back of every hive that you can just park your hive tool on so you don't lose it while you're doing inspections convenient magnets are just everywhere

so if you personally have some evidence or some interesting study a real study that shows about magnetism and how it impacts the bees positive or negative i would love to see it if you make a comment and you try to share a link to a video or some kind of published article, that kind of thing. It goes into auto hold and I'll find it. I'll check it. And if it's valid, I'll release it. And other people can see it and read it and know more, just like you.

See? So question number three now comes from Antonio J.A. Smith. Now this is an interesting one because I learned something new. So I like getting questions that I don't have ready answers for. so then I can dig in deeper and know more at the end of it. So this is about, this is on a YouTube video that I did about sounds inside the beehive. So we call this ASMR. And I did more of that recently working on it.

And I've installed my newest and largest observation hive with tempered glass, all the things I wanted. It's a 12 deep Langstroth frame hive body. And it's populated. and you saw some of the video from it in the opening today. That's super clear stuff. It's great. Anyway, so the question comes in

because I posted videos that show the audio, sounds inside the hive, and I have a series of these, Queens Piping, just to be communication inside the hive. So Antonio's concerned because it says, it's amazing, this works, given YouTube,

changes the frequency of all. all videos hosted on its platform. I would love to listen to a pure version of this off YouTube if anyone has a source. Okay, so I responded. But here's the thing, we do know when you post a photo even. Let's say you put a photo on social media like Facebook while you're doing what? You're submitting a picture of your bees or a brood situation.

And you want your peers to give you their opinions about it. Where would you go? Facebook, the way to be. fellowship on Facebook. Go there. See, it's a great tie-in. But a lot of photographers talk about this too. Professional photographers get grouchy when they put up a picture that the nose, a high-resolution image and it's really good quality, probably the best photo ever taken. But Facebook mess it up because it has to go through some kind of filter before it gets posted on your wall. And so they can reduce the quality of the image that you post. So,

the same thing happens with sound. So for Antonio, does YouTube change frequencies of sounds that you post when the whole point of it is to listen to the sound of the frequency inside the hive? And the thing of it is, they don't, actually. They reduce the quality,

but they don't reduce or change the frequency. Because, for example, if they did that, if you're a musician and you share your music on YouTube, then you'd be pretty upset if they change frequencies intonation, things like that. But they don't. But this led me to learn something new. Most of my videos are uploaded in 1080p. I don't want to hurt your brain. If you're not a content creator, you don't care.

But often you'll see a video is posted that is 4K. Now that's a high-resolution video. It's usually wasted because most people's screens that they're watching things on a lot of you are watching on your phones although my number one viewing audience watches on their tv you have to have a 4k tv for that to even measure up but here's what i learned you can fool youtube that's right and i like fooling youtube i think it's fun so anyway let's say you recorded a video on 1080p this is for the content creators out there go ahead and render it as a 4k video when it leaves premier pro or whatever you're using to edit your stuff and i realize that the quality is not going to be awesome because it's artificially

expanded or enhanced but here's how we're fooling youtube because there's what i learned if you load a 4k video for the algorithm for youtube uh there's a advanced coding that comes through that also allows a larger audio file and improved audio quality to come through so videos that are uploaded onto YouTube in 1080p they get somewhat filtered audio quality but if you do it on 4k then they allow an enhanced audio rendering so it's better audio too you're not just seeing better you're hearing better how's that that's pretty great so anyway the frequencies are unchanged so when you're listening to this stuff but if you're going to go to a higher resolution you can get higher resolution audio as well and of course I printed out all the stuff

two K 4k resolutions anyway hope that's helpful how many of you listen to videos that are just sound related that are really focused on that because more coming maybe I get an audience of 10 or something maybe people won't care oh I wanted to talk about this because I'm just putting information out that I want you to have just so you can have it may be worthless information But remember that as people, when we sit here and we listen to things, right, we peek out at 20,000 cycles per second. And beyond 20,000 cycles per second, they refer to that as ultrasound or ultrasonic. We also have a low end threshold that when I was doing audio and video recordings,

I failed at videoing something and capturing a critical audio. And it dealt with emus. and the emu was drumming. I don't know what you know about female Australian emus, but they do this drumming, and it's at a very low frequency and can be heard over great distances. And on the last couple of days

that I had my emu here, and there were four of them, I recorded this drumming, so that was the end of my study of the emus. So that was the last thing I had to record, and it went, doom, doom, and did this really low? I know that's a bad imitation,

but that would carry great distances through walls and everything, through dense underbrush and all that stuff. And the camera was limited. And do you know that that low frequency didn't even show up? And the emu were gone. Sold them all. Lesson learned. Couldn't get them back.

Okay, so the other end of that is ultrasound. How does this matter to you? sorry if this is going to bore you a little bit, but I have audio equipment that I can record well into the ultrasonic spectrum. I probably shouldn't even give this away, but I'm telling you, so that when you hear it, you can be impressed. A lot of recording devices, digital recorders, also don't record frequencies higher than 20,000 cycles per second. And the reason is it's wasted data. It uses up space on the instrument. So here's my goal. We may not even be here. hearing everything your bees are doing. We may not be hearing the things that are going on in the

insect world that are into that higher range. And remember your bees are feeling vibrations. So the higher the frequencies, this is kind of how it goes. Low frequency, the emu carries great distances. The higher frequencies attenuate quicker. So they don't carry so far, but there's more information because it's a higher frequency. Now if I record it at a higher frequency, but then I modulate it down later and bring it into our audible range, what are we going to hear? Imagine, for example, the short-tail true which communicates through ultrasonic clicking. Just imagine if we could really hear what that's like. Did you know that rats, Norway rats, communicate with each other ultrasonically as well?

That's right. Bats, we know, locate their prey and are chirping away ultrasonically all the time. echolocating. And so if we could record that modulate it down, how cool would it be to hear that? That's what I'm about. That's what I'm working on right now. So get the instrument that record the higher,

slow it down in post-production, and then you're going to hear some really weird soundtracks in my future videos. And I may or may not even acknowledge that that's what's going on in there. You'll just hear them and think, wow, it sounds otherworldly, to quote Dr. Tom. the ceiling okay moving on question number four I have from Fred Stafford and it says

OA dribble versus vapor so OA is oxalic acid and a lot of people do not want to use the exhalic acid vapor anyway says thank you for all the great information on your podcast I'm a bit wary of applying OA through the vapor system a lot of people are look what we're talking about today the respiratory challenges that people are facing going out when our air quality is so low. We don't want to intentionally inhale something that could harm us. So I understand the resistance to exhalic acid vaporization. So the whole idea makes me uncomfortable. Normally I treat with formic and extended release exhalic acid strips. I purchased the ready to use treatment from BetterB. My question is, would the RTU treatment be better due to no sugar in the solution?

So is the treatment better? So this comes down to what are the benefits of one over the other? So I made a short list of that. And if you want to know more about it and when it came out, better be, of course. And Dr. David Peck was instrumental in bringing that about. And there are differences. So first of all, the exhalic acid.

You have to get exhalic acid that's approved for bees. Ooh, I'm just going to do a quick promotion here. easy ox Mike's bees exhalic acid comes in tablets everything else okay so you can mix up your own sugar syrup so you'd mix up one-to-one sugar syrup you have to follow a recipe somewhere you have to follow an approved method of delivery which includes ratios and so you can even go to better be or someplace like that scientific beekeeping Randy oliver who wouldn't want to go there and you'll find the exact recipe for mixing up the exhalic acid dribble solution, which is with one-to-one sugar syrup. So you follow those

recommendations and the delivery dose. So let's just talk about it. When you do one-to-one sugar syrup and you deliver it to your bees for the dribble method, your bees are going to probably ingest it. And so they're consuming one-to-one sugar syrup with oxalic acid in it, which means you're consuming the exhalic acid, which means, and they've validated that it can be harmful to your bees. So the digestive system of your bees is impacted by that. So in comparison, the apioboaxal RTU, which is the ready to use formula we're talking about, does not have that. There's no sugar syrup in it. Therefore, it does not get ingested by the bees. Therefore, it does not damage

their intestines. So with the syrup, the syrup also, once you spritz your bees or dribble it on your bees it dries out pretty darn quick so the whole point of it is to get the vera destructor mites in contact with it so they hurt their feet so they die or at the very least that they fall off and can't function and can't reproduce so if your bees are grooming them off they go but the r t u is not just water for example it has material that cause it to extend and it lasts longer without drying out which means more opportunity for the bees of being in contact with it and therefore more opportunity to distribute that through the hive and then have the varro destructor mites also in contact with it so they mess up their feet they fall down and

they don't feel good and eventually expire and don't feed on your bees anymore that's the goal the other thing is once you mix up your sugar syrup with your exhalic acid you got to use it right away that's a high moisture content with high sucrose and so it's going to mold and it's going to go bad pretty darn quick. So you have to use it right away. Even after you open the RTU aviobioxyl that we're talking about, you got a year that you can still use it. So even after you open it. So what else do we have? Once per season with the gerbil, you can only use it once per season. When it comes to avioloxal, the RTU, you can use it multiple applications, they say. So another comparison, you can mix the stuff yourself if you're doing your own dribble.

The RTU comes free package, ready to go. So you can make it yourself, which means what? It's going to be less expensive. If you just buy approved oxalic acid and you mix it into a solution, you've eliminated this respiratory potential hazard. So much safer. Proven efficacy. You can read all the studies about it. And of course, Aibaba, RtU from Betterby costs more there you go that's the whole thing so what would I do between the two well I already have the RTU because I picked it up at the North American Honeybee Expo in Louisville Kentucky and I still have it haven't haven't used it yet but I have all the stuff and that probably is a pretty

good segue what should we be doing this time of year because here where I am where you are of course your seasonal changes might be different But we need to be assessing our colonies for what? Queen Wright, for one. We also want to know what their mite loads are. We want to know which colonies are doing good and which are doing bad. And then if we get a chance, if you're one of these people that is up to speed and wants to kill Varro-destructor mites, we also have to figure out which organic is just my recommendation.

I don't like synthetics. Just personal preference. So which organic treatment would you use to help your bees? greatly reduce or eliminate pro-destructor mites on their bodies. It's just easy to do. So this is the time of year to do that. That's what I'm saying.

You got a chance. Because remember, what's coming up? We're coming to the end of July. We're going to be into August. What's going to happen in August? We need healthy bees in August. Well, at what point did they become healthy? Well, when they're first hatched out of their eggs,

when the queen lays an egg, third day, egg hatches. It's not hatching like a chicken egg either. It just kind of dissolves and becomes a larva. And then they start feeding them. So the nurse bees that are feeding these bees that are going to develop them need to be as healthy as can be.

And this should always be the case. I don't know why this is kind of an annual cycle where boosts proteins, boosts resources, whatever, healthier bees at this time because we're going to create potentially winter bees. so the bees they're producing will produce the resources that support the winter bee population so you want to take you care of them you want to do that what else so make sure your hives aren't starving by the way too robbing risk is really high right now i did see some attempts at robbing that were thwarted

they were really having a skirmish on the landing board it was kind of funny uh not funny for the defenders but these are the colonies that are most at risk are those that you've let the landing board's wide open entrance reducers are wide open uh colonies that are trying to get a leg up that are just getting started that you might have collected last month and uh as a swarm and now they're trying to establish themselves they brought in a bunch of nectar the nectar is still uncapped which means much easier for robbers to get all you need is a few of them to get in get some get away and they come back with hundreds from their colony so strong strongest colonies are looking at weakest colonies and putting pressure on them it's up to you to help them

defend themselves so question number five comes from wendy in seattle washington is there a colony's size that's too big and queen pheromone gets diluted leading to swarming have 27 frames uh long laying and wondering if i should put two 13 frame colonies in there or let it get to 27 frames. Okay, for me, it's personal. I will talk about the triggers, though, of course, and ways to manage and keep your colony smaller so that you don't risk swarms at the worst possible time. Bees generally are pretty good at picking the right time of year and the right season to swarm. And it's usually during periods when a lot of resources are coming in. But remember that they build building up while the resources are all coming in, but they also build a big population that

consumes a lot and then at a time like right now where whatever is in your environment may be backing down and the bees aren't getting the resources they need you have this enormous hungry surplus of bees and they can actually swarm on you which is something i really don't like at a time when their survival potential is really low so the size of the colony and we'll just talk about it when i see seven frames of brood It doesn't matter if you have an 8 frame box or a 10 frame box, seven frames of brood. And that doesn't mean 50% honey. That might be on the outskirts of that.

These are full frames of brood. When you get, for example, one frame of brood, so that's capped, deep frame Langstroth box. When those all emerge out of there, the adult bees' surface area on the frames would occupy about three times that. So now we've got bee bodies in the way of other. B bodies and they start spreading out and it's up to you the beekeeper to stay ahead of that and you have to stay ahead of that well ahead in other words not waiting until they're at their limit the box is jammed bees are all over the outside you inspect the inside they're also all over the inside there's just too many bees you need to have expanded i realize after the fact that's not very

helpful but we do have a fall nectar flow that comes up here in the northeastern United States and we're getting into the period of time where you want to start looking at expanding colonies and making room for them. So the population of the colony, once they get beyond that, so I take, for example, my five-foot-long, long Langstroth hive.

When we get all those frames, I don't see more than eight or nine frames of brood. Beyond that, it's just the resource buildup that they have, and it's space for bees to be. So what happens is, the queen mandibular pheromone comes from the queen no great surprise she has a retinue of workers that are around her all the time in fact that retinue feeds the queen and removes her waste material so the queen doesn't go outside like the workers do when they hit foraging age they don't go out to

eliminate their waste material is taken away by this retinue and there's a high turnover of the retinue of worker bees so they may only be doing this job around the queen attending her all the time grooming her keeping her clean feeding her taking care of the resources and then a day later there's a whole new collection of bees around her so they're cycling through this growth and development phase so what happens is when they're in contact with the queen these workers that are spreading out are indirect contact with other bees in the colony and they spread physically through physical touch they spread her pheromone throughout the colony now the more bees are are the fewer of them you know think of a pyramid the

queens at the top more people more people more people more bees more bees more bees and then they get down to the end and by the time they're out there passing on the queen's pheromone that bee has been in contact with who knows how many other bees before it got the pheromone and now it's reduced so when this reduction of queen medulla pheromone happens inside the hive they started to make preferable for swarming because the population is just too big and it's only natural that when they have a bunch of surplus bees that they would think about reproducing at the colony level. So that's when the bee inspector, you, gets in your hive and starts looking for evidence for preparations to leave. And so the number one thing is going to be queen cells. If you find a little queen cup, that doesn't mean anything. The little queen cup just looks like the top of an acorn. It does face down. Queen cells are the the only vertical cells in the hive and so as they start building those now we're in a pickle so you can head off the stimulus the trigger for that so one is population the other is food and resources coming in

so if that happens when they also might be getting honeybound which is something maybe you've heard of extra space available to the queen and the workers so we need the workers they have to have a place to be a Otherwise, they have to get outside the hive and hang over the front of it. But inside the hive, we need to have comb available and cells open and available to the queen for laying. Now, I described this early on, but we'll talk about it again. It's no great mystery that the swarm is kind of shaped like a volleyball or a kickball. And in a perfect world with a one queen hive. As the queen lays her eggs today, and let's say stick to the math,

1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day. Let's say she can do that, and she is doing that. That means she's spending two or three days on the face of a frame, filling the cells, if they were all available in a perfect world. Okay, she finishes that, two or three days, other side of that frame. Two or three days, six days right there. And then she just keeps laying and expanding out and filling cells, right? So by the time we hit the 21st day here, where she started, those bees are emerging.

So how much surface area do you need? How many available cells do you need for a queen to produce her eggs over a 21-day period before she can go back and start laying eggs again in the newly vacated cells where new brute came out of? So that's kind of that's the calculus of it. But here's the thing. That story gets told so often, 1,600, 2,000 eggs a day. I've seen queens park themselves and not produce an egg. for five minutes. I've also had other queens lay an egg every 10 seconds, which is phenomenal. And then we also like to tell people facts like the queen lays her body weight in eggs every single day. Well, yes, at peak performance, peak nutrition, peak conditions inside the hive, nurse bees that are attending to her, and all the proper things are aligned. Everything is going

perfectly inside and out and that's when she may hit those peak production markers right so because if we sit there and this is a great thing when you're teaching kids you know my supervisor the grandchildren when they're here you can teach them things like hey let's figure that out how many eggs is let's watch the queen when she shows up on an outside frame on one of the observation hives uh how long does it take her to lay an egg okay so if that's her rate How many eggs could she be laying if she continued at that rate 24 hours a day? And how much space would she need? So my point is often this is overly forecast.

That production estimates are way high. And this may be a momentary thing. So a queen and a colony of bees that are locally adapted are matching the rhythm of what's going on outside the hive as well. So eventually you'll get this expansion and contraction of the brood and you won't be facing a situation like wendy is so if you're concerned about them expanding too far you need to then start to pull frames of brood out of there and share it with colonies that have a reduction in workforce that could use a boost not enough to just remove that we have to

put another frame in now some new beekeepers misunderstand that and just grab a frame of foundation heavy waxed and a wooden frame on that, plop it in, and then they think they've expanded and made room for the bees, room for the queen to lay and everything else. Now you have made an opportunity for your workers inside the hive to draw out comb and make it, which is one of my favorite things to do with swarms and things like that. But we're at a point where we're intervening now. We're trying to head off the potential for them to swarm. So we need to give them drawn comb full depth cells that the queen can immediately go and start laying in so we're relieving congestion we're giving them the sense that the queen can continue to lay her eggs because remember it's the

workers that are going to decide it's too congested there's not enough room for eggs here there's too much honey so all the resources that are there let them know that it's time to reproduce it's time to make another colony it's time to go so now you're messing with that or you can work work with bees that you've kept really good records on that are sized right for the colonies that you're using for the hive bodies that you're using and you're not making swarm generators. So I hope that works. And so we're already on, believe it or not, we're on the fluff section for today. So I want to start right off today because a lot of people, these discussions are endless. I don't think they'll ever stop. Should you use huge vent?

should you open all the hive parts should you because a lot of people will say that congestion that's one of the reasons that they swarm if there's more ventilation then they then they won't swarm so this is where hive top ventilating came into play and all these other ways to move more air through to help them dehydrate than honey quicker and i default to people that live in higher humidity higher heat than i do here feral colonies bees not attended by people what have they demonstrated that they can do so I'm giving a shout out today to somebody you may know it's Randy McCaffrey the YouTube channel name is 628 dirt rooster and the reason I like this particular video just showed up I sat down and watched it because it was really

interested as I always am how big a space of the bees occupy so I want to know how big was the entrance where was it located how much honey and comb and everything else was in it so this is fun I don't want to ruin it for you but I hope you go and watch the video the link will be down in the video description but you can find it yourself too by going to his YouTube channel and it's the wheelbarrel colony and I think the title is something like I never thought they'd be in something like this or you know something to peek your curiosity to make you watch the video but what it was is a regular metal wheelbarrel

the way talking about insulation none flipped over on a board on the ground behind a shed next to a fence so didn't a swarm of honey bees move into that and at first he thought oh man the thing just must be stuck in the ground it must be embedded or something because they had such a hard time lifting it it was early in the year it didn't make sense that there would be a lot of resources and a full colony of bees in it but the thing was chaka block with With drawn comb, the whole wheelbarrel, the whole thing. And full of bees. So here's the thing.

How big do you think that entrance was? It was just the tiny gap where the inverted wheelbarrow on the ground had this little tiny gap on one side in one area. And the bees were going and coming through that tiny opening. And so what do you think their chance of ventilating that would be? Well, apparently really good. This is in Mississippi. And so the thing of it is, bees can circulate the air and evaporate their honey and do all these things if we give them a space to occupy. We don't have to constantly shift and change ventilation options.

And a single ventilation, a single entrance is doable. It is. It's fortified over and over again. I think we think about what we want to do just cases. point what's the humidity outside today 50% relative humidity so hmm do the bees are they're drying out their honey which adds humidity inside the hive right I get that but what humidity are the bees targeting inside the hive what do they need they needed to be at about 65 so if we added more preventing and

allow them or help them get more humidity out of the hive, then you would hit a point where the bees are actually going to have to humidify their hive. And that's a lot more work. So I'm sure down in, you know, Mississippi, Louisiana, Jeff Hortchoff, same thing. And by the way, in the same video, Jeff Horshawf makes an appearance.

He talks about trees and stuff. So that's Mr. Ed. For those you who don't know, they both do an incredible amount of ripouts and so they're an extraordinary resource for looking and seeing what are feral colonies of bees occupying so recently up here apparently circuit panels and transfer cases but down there they're in wheelbarrows and old houses that don't have insulation in the walls and things like that so always look at what's happening with colonies that are not managed by people yet that occupy a lot of space, produce a lot of honey, and maintain their own infrastructure. That's where we would take our cues. That's where we should try to start understanding that healthy bees in a space under their control can really do remarkable things with very little ventilation. Keep in mind, that was right on the ground.

Not only that, you know, it was on the other side of the wheelbarrow was a fire ant mound. He didn't say if the fire ants were still there. but that's a bee colony right up against a fire ant mound because that's the other thing I think about here another animal could just come along and dig him out and eat the bees unless they're inside a metal wheel barrel think of that okay so got that chance for case talked about that robin risk is high make sure that you have fresh water you just can't have too much of it what's important to the bees is that it's always there that it's predictable and dependable, just like their beekeepers should be. You don't have to get into your hives all the time. If it's a colony that's doing well, there's no reason to get in and mess with them. If you want to know

if their resources are heavy, lift the hive, things like that. But we can make sure that they have water resources, and that should have been established way back in spring, but just in the off chance that you haven't thought about it. Or with the extended lack of rain, wherever you are, predictable, previous sources of water may have dried up if it's a natural pond or something like that. So making sure that you have that around. I'm taking big bowls and inverting them on the ground and putting a plastic trash bag over it. And you know what I'm going to put on that? Concrete and make my own kind of bird bath watering station for bees.

Because one of the reasons that we don't have really good water stations for bees that come through the mail is because what? They have to come through the mail. So making your own a bag of concrete you would be surprised how inexpensive that is So if you just look up how to form your own concrete and the reason you put the plastic bag down is because you don't want it to pick up all the sand and dirt or the plate or the bowl or whatever you can use to get your form from and then you get a 50 60 pound bag of concrete for like seven dollars Come on. We could have stuff everywhere and then let moss grow on it. It'll look good That's all I'm saying. So anyway, know your queen status. A lot of people seem to have queen problems right now.

But oftentimes they're looking to buy a queen only to find out that the minute they get the queen, their queen showed up. The other thing, we've had interesting discussions about queens that just show up at hives that didn't have one. I think that's interesting and I don't know how often we're missing it. So what do you think I'm going to recommend for you that a lot of you do not do? I want you to mark your queens. So and you can mark it with your own color. It doesn't have to be the five-colored system. So you pick a color that you can see really well.

In fact, if you can do it, get a color that's unique to every hive that you own. You're just a backyard beekeeper. You probably only have a few. And that way, when you come across a queen in your hive, you'll know, is that the one that belonged here? Is this a new one? Because I've been sitting in front of a hive and I've seen a queen show up at the hive and try to get through my queen include her.

And where did she come from? I have no idea, but these queens are agile, especially these unmated ones. And they'll just show up at a colony. Now, this is the other fun part. A colony that's queenless can often just receive a random queen, for starters, or they can also just get a swarum that moves right in

because they put out a scent that's missing what? The queen mandibular pheromone. So, what you do, don't want to happen, I might as well mention this before I sign off today. You do not want them to be queenless for more than 21 days. You do not want your workers to become laying workers because then they will no longer be receptive to a replacement queen and that queen will have a fight on her hands. So you can use a synthetic queen mandibular pheromone called temp queen. And if you're sure that you're colony is without a queen you put that in the hive follow the instructions they're all

right there you can get it from Betterby probably get it from other places too but that's the place I go to and when you put that in there it suppresses their reproductive pheromones so that then the workers do not activate their ovaries and start laying drone eggs that's what the laying worker is you can stop that but you have to get out there and get into it not today though because the you know the air quality so bad you should stay inside next to the hepa filter so i want to thank you for being here today if i left something out if you have further questions about something i've talked about please put it down in the comment section below and i do answer i respond

to every single comment so i want to thank you for being here i hope you have a fantastic week ahead and uh the best day for me is going to be tomorrow because it's going to rain and it's going to knock some of these particulates out of the air and make the air suitable for people and other things. So thanks for watching. I'm Frederick Dunn. This has been The Way to Be.