The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeepinig Q&A Episode 355 Swarm Risk is HIGH and getting Higher... May 15, 2026

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/WhPZwoM15j4

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. This is Backyard Bee Keeping Questions and Answers episode number 355. Today is Friday, May the 15th of 2026. I'm Frederick Dunn and... This is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please look down to the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and there's a lot of them today.

So what else is going on? If you want to know how to submit a topic of your own, please go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, fill out the form, and you never know. There you go. If you got a question that you want to ask of your peers, if you want to have a discussion, if you want to show a picture or a video and ask a question about something that's going on with your bees right now, you can go to the Facebook group, the Way to Be Fellowship. And there, you will be welcome, and you can share and learn and even contribute your own ideas. So I know what you want to know too is what's going on outside. It's hard to be inside right now because it's warm out there. How warm you might want to know.

And where are we talking about the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. It's 59 degrees Fahrenheit out there right now, which is 15 Celsius, 4.9 mile per hour wind, which is not bad at all. And then of course 53% relative humidity. If they had a lot of nectar to dehydrate, this would be great. This would be great weather for them to do that, but the humidity is going to change because there's rain in the forecast, of course. And the pollen counts are very high, so you should be seeing lots of pollen on your landing boards if you're in the northeastern part of the United States.

Where you are, it might be different, of course. Pollin counts are high. So swarm potential, what do you think the odds are right now? 99.99%. People are getting swarms already today. I got a call today about a swarm. Couldn't do it. Have a swarm in my own bee yard.

So how about looking ahead? What are the highest potential days for swarming in Pennsylvania and Northeast? It's headed your way. Well, tomorrow's going to be really high. The hottest day is going to be Monday. How hot you might wonder? Well, 87 degrees Fahrenheit, which is going to be about 30 Celsius. So, hot day.

What else is happening? on Monday. What do you think? What's going on? I'm getting inspected. That's right. Department of Agriculture, state of Pennsylvania, the inspector is going to come, see what I'm up to. I don't think I'm allowed to video them though. Got in trouble once for that. So, but I will tell you what we discover, what we find out, what goes on, and see if I get a clean bill of health, and I'm pretty sure that I will. So robbing risk is very high, by the way, and here's why. Populations are way, that's why they're swarming. They're just coming off of the dandelion bloom. The dandelions are already turning into seeds of course. Gold finches are out there eating the seeds. And

what's going to happen then is we have a lot of foragers out and very little forage. So things like, for example, apple trees. I have about 30 apple trees here on my property and half of them are in bloom. And so the bees are on those. It gives them something to do. But it's not exactly a weight gain situation for the hives, which means. they're looking to one another to rob them out. So we want to be aware of that. So don't get ants in your pants is what I'm saying. Don't open up your entrances on your landing boards wide yet. Wait, because there's something else coming. It's going to be a really good nectar source. In fact, very good honey comes from what?

Clover. So we're going to have clover out here. Clover dandelions, violets. But the clover's not blooming, so we're in a fickle right now. they are looking to rob each other strong colonies rob wheat colonies and it's not going to be good so what else well somebody asked me to wear this hat today that's why i'm wearing it i don't normally wear hats you don't see me wearing a baseball hat when i'm giving you my talks i usually don't wear a hat indoors but today's special because people are talking about the bowler

the derby hat so we'll talk about that later so the very first one is coming from ross Wagner says, Fred, if you know the hive that the swarm came from, do you go into that hive ASAP and destroy all but a few swarm cells to prevent additional swarms? That's a good tactic. Everyone seems to want to talk about swarms these days. Why? Because all their stuff is swarming. And you know what's good about that, though? Why is a colony swarming to begin with?

Well, the population's high, the space you've provided them, might be limited, and there are plenty of resources. They swarm when things are good, when the chances of survival are increased. So they leave with a bunch of honey in their stomachs, and off they go. That's why they can build beeswax so quickly when they get to a new location.

But anyway, you can go in and try to destroy all the queen cells. Often people practice that. Here's the thing. And why do we have swarms immediately? Like they broke the rules. They were swarming before 10 a.m. And we know that Swarm Essentials by Steve or Paskey, they don't start swarming until 10 o'clock, 10.01 at the earliest.

But they jumped the gun at 9.30 this morning. They were swarming already. So they don't pay attention. But so you can go in. So there's been a swarm. You sit out there, you watch the swarm leave. Nothing you can do about it. You might as well just watch go.

And then there's your chance to collect them, which is what I'd like to do in their big whack location. But let's say you were ahead of things. Let's say you did an inspection. let's say you were looking at your hives and you had decent weather to do it not the terrible weather that we've had here and by the way when I put up the weather information it was in the 30s this morning and then 59 by 10 think about it that's a big jump so anyway when you come across a queen and you can see that there are multiple queen cells going on in there build an insurance policy please I say this all the time it's worth repeating so by insurance policy I mean collect the frame that the queen is on when you find her so she'll be on a brood frame nine times out of ten and you put that brood frame with the queen and some nurse bees into a nucleus hive box

hopefully it's a wooden one i don't personally like plastic temporary beehives because you know what happens let's say you put it in a plastic hive and uh it's it's designed to be temporary or to sell a nucleus of bees in right but then what happens happens is if you miss a queen and they still reproduce and they still have a fertile queen now and you've got a queen in your resource hive you've got two colonies now so put your resource hive put your bees in there and have that be a wooden resource hive because then later it can become an actual hive and often that happens so but then you go back let's say you're confident you're keen-eyed and you're going to go in there and you're going to find all of those

swarm cells and you're going to smush them. Just smush them with your finger, whatever. So the queen is safe. She has brood frames and comb and she's got a good frame of resources that can continue to feed the brood that's with her. And then you go around and smash all the queen cells you can find. You also need to be looking for eggs. Because if there are eggs in there, they can make another queen cell. Emergency queen cell now. So at first, they're just sling. swarm cells. Those are the ones that are on the edges of the frame. So let's say if this were a frame from a beehive and it is, you would have little vertical cells hanging down, right, along the edges. They tend to build a lot of them too because they're going to be swarming out. Those are replacement queens in progress. Now once you just smash all those up and you remove the queen.

There's some eggs. There's a good chance. There's eggs here in the field. And then so if there's eggs there, then they will make an emergency cell that comes right out of the middle and it's a little tiny peanut that hangs down there. So now you have to come back in and smash those. And you have to make sure that there are no eggs or young larvae. And by that I mean larvae that are less than 24 hours old for the most part. And then they lose their chance to make an emergency queen. And once that happens, then you've done it. And you've created a tiny brood break too.

So you want to kind of keep that going. because that decongests the brood area in the hive where the swarming was about to happen. And then what happens is you need a placeholder. So I hope that you'll put a frame feeder or something in there. Don't just leave a big open space. Put a frame feeder in where you pulled the frame with the queen when you took her out of the hive. And then that way you have a placeholder and you have a place to put them back. So once you successfully hunt out and smush all of those queen cells in production,

now we've got a breed break. We've got some decongestion. And it gave you time to super the hive, by the way. So you should expand. And then we have no lost time. Because remember the queen's in a nucleus hive, and she's still laying, and she's still productive, and she has nurse bees, and everything is going well.

Bring them all back. And then you get to go. But oftentimes people miss them. and then if you bring her back too soon or they still made, you know, you didn't decongest things if you bring her back too soon. So this is a way of helping to remove some of the swarm triggering, which is going to kind of come again. We're spread out. We're in tertiary. We had the prime swarms, the first swarms come out in spring. Now we're in the secondary swarm category, which is why you're seeing so many swarms that are tiny and little clusters everywhere on tree branches and things. That's because those are often unmated queens. They have a tiny following.

and the colony that they came from is losing numbers. So they can't even send out the big numbers that they had before. So you can't do it. You can manage it. And it'll work. So that's the answer for Ross Wagner. Question number two comes from Randall from Shelbyville, Tennessee. Cayman Reynolds State, by the way.

Anyway, just a quick thought there. Cayman Reynolds announced that they already have dates for the North American Honeybee Expo. that's down in Louisville, Kentucky. So if you're looking at that for next January, when there's nothing to do except for go and collaborate with other beekeepers, they already publish this stuff. So anyway, this comes from Randall, Shelbyville, Tennessee,

and it says recently had a swarm move into a stack of unused equipment. This happens a lot. Anyway, I don't have any place to relocate them temporarily, and we'll need to move them in one day, because the area is too crowded to move them slowly. But blocking off the entrance or two or three days after relocating them to a hive stand,

help keep forger bees from collecting on the old location. Do you have a better suggestion for a person without a place to relocate? The three mile three foot rule doesn't work for my situation. So anyway, so here's what's happened. And this happens to a lot of beekeepers, particularly if you've been into beekeeping for a few years and you store your gear in sheds and buildings out buildings that aren't very closed up because scouts find bee equipment why are they looking at it anyway because it smells good because it has brewed comb in it that has been used before for nurseries and the equipment just smells right smells like bees should be in there so what do they do they move in and it's inconvenient for the beekeeper because it's not set up and that's why I've tried to tell people over and over again

take that equipment set it up put it on a hive stand put it out in your apiary and give them a place to move into so now we want to set up a new hive with those bees and move them out into the bee yard can't go the several miles or move it just a couple feet of time just want to set them up that's what i do anyway yeah i do i just set them up i just put that hive wherever i need a hive and uh that's it i don't try to inch them along or anything else because what happens is okay some of the scouts and foragers that are inside this newly set up hive will go back to the previous location what are they going to do when they don't find anything there they're going to hang out for a little while they're going to be kind of upset but there are no orphans you're not just going to find a bunch of dead bees there so they will eventually find another hive to move into so it's not the end of the world and time of day matters so if you're going to pack up a hive that's like that do it either really early in the morning before they get out there and

forging for the day before the scouts are out looking for new resources and then you're going to move them but it's best also at night now when you do it at night you want to make sure close off that entrance completely and make sure they can't fly out on you because when they can't see they just glom all over you and climb up your pant legs and stuff but then by the following morning and it helps to change orientation some people change the entrance you can throw an entrance reducer on there this just happens to be the first one that it grabbed you throw a new entrance reducer on there in the following morning when they leave when they're coming out it's unfamiliar to them this

happens to be a robbing screen but for example if you put this on there and had them going out the top front and top they'll have to reorient and then it makes them come back to this location because it lets them know something's changed because when you keep the configuration the same you just move it to into location they fly out and they zing out of there because they didn't notice anything in their way out that seems different. So they didn't really take their time and do a couple of figure eights there

to check out the entrance and register that it's new, that things are changed. So changing the entrance helps them reorient and they'll find their way back. Question number three. This comes from Susan from Bronson, I want to say Michigan. Need your input. I'm going into my

seventh year's hobby beekeeper and I have been fairly successful and have been able to overwinter more than 90% of my bees during that time. I thought that I had the swarming thing figured out and was very proactive this year. I pulled almost all of the overwintered queens, 8 out of 10 hives. As soon as I saw charged queen cups and I made 5-frame nucleus hives with them. This was around April 22nd, April 25th in southern Michigan. Well, I have had nine swarms in my yard for May 6th,

May 10th. They all seem to be virgin queens and the swarms are average to quite large. Most fit in nucleus boxes but two of them were so big I put them in a 10 frame deep box. My question is why are so many bees leaving with virgin queens and what can I do to cut down on the number of these virgin queen swarms? I thought the first virgin queen to emerge would kill the others. you. This is not a perfect science. This is why this is one of the great appeals by the way to beekeepers. It's because we don't get all the answers nailed down. What we end up with is a bunch of activities, control measures, and behaviors with our bees that overall tend to work. And then there will be exceptions. So the problem is, at least here where I am, and it may be the

same in Michigan. When we get this really bad weather situation, which is what we just had, really bad cold weather rain dark several days on end and what are the bees doing inside the hive well the clock's ticking they're still getting ready to go and uh some colonies aren't good at selecting a replacement queen and helping the newly emerged queens kill off the competition so sometimes they work on them but sometimes they just zing out of there and what happens to and this has happened a lot to me this year as well uh they'll fly out with several queens in a cluster. So they'll spread out on a branch and they really gradually start to glom together.

So there'll be one really prominent queen and the others are tertiary. They're secondary. They're not full strength. But then they join up. And when they do that, they make one big swarm. So if you weren't there to see them get together, they can seem like it came out as just one big swarm. I'm often right there watching them do it.

And so I can see them start spread out, but then they collect together. They did that on the bowler hats on the trees, for example. They spread out all over one side of the tree and they all glom down to the hat. Excuse me. So anyway, these secondary swarms are annoying because they can continue to swarm and you can get a colony that just keeps generating one right after the other. In other words, with each new emerging queen that comes out as soon as she's able to fly and scoot out of there, she tends to do it.

And this is genetic, by the way. And some people have even argued that by working with bees that swarm a lot and reproduce a lot, we're kind of perpetuating that. So bees that don't have a lot of longevity. So they are suggesting that maybe we should even be removing the queens and replacing them with known stock and people can do that but i like my locally adapted stock in queens but some are swarmy so uh the control measures are going to be the same throughout today's talk so um to hunt down your queen cells as much as you possibly can when you come across

your queen during your inspections your inspections should be within at least three weeks max three weeks and I know there are some people that are following some guidance and says to inspect your hives twice a year well when you do that they're just swarming now here's the other thing you don't even know when you're being swarm

I mean you leave in the morning you come back at the end of the day the colony looked good when you left they looked great when you came home everything seems like business as usual but you don't even realize that they've been swarming I know because I'm out there

and they stared them all the time. Plus my wife comes and tells me that they're swarming. And my grandson's come and let me know when a colony is swarming and where they are. Then we have to go get them. And on it goes. So what to do? What to prevent these endless after swarms? You have to be proactive and you have to get in there and you have to smash queen cells. Once you find a queen and she's viable, set her aside, nucleus hive, resource hive, go back and do your best to control all the other queens. You can prevent them from swarming.

You can do desperate measures. Behind me here is an insurance queen excluder, which I've renamed the queen Includer, because once another queen is in there, I keep her in with it. So let's say you don't want multiple swarms to leave. Well, you can keep the queens from leaving. Now, this requires active control measures.

You put that queen excluder on the landing board, Dadeant sells it. Maybe others do. You can look for them. They have them for 8 frame and 10 frame hives. I only use the 10 frame type and they have to sit on a standard entrance, standard landing board. When you put that on there, they'll try to swarm. But who can't get through it? The queen. She gets stuck. So then what happens? The swarm clusters on the front of the hive.

So when the swarm clusters on the front of the hive, what's inside that queen excluder? The queen. So then you can pull it off the front, covered in bees because they'll be there trying to get the queen to go where they want to go. In fact, you can wait around. Let's see you have time on your hands. I mean, I don't know what it's like to have that, but let's say you had time on your hands. And it looks like they're about to swarm. Again, they're going to leave. And you've got that queen excluder on your landing board.

Off they fly. But who can't go with them? The queen. So then you pull it out. She's right there. And then you can grab her and you can sequester her somewhere. And then what'll happen? They'll all come back. And you need to put that queen, landing board queen excluder on again because there may be another queen in there ready to come out and you'll trap her too and see eventually you'll get them all now that's extreme that's active you have to stay on it and then what will you be bringing back after the cycling out of all these queens has passed you just bring your old queen back and reinstall her and then take away the queen landing board excluder and there you go how easy was that you didn't even

have to open the hive you just went through more than a week of this by the way to make sure that all the queens have come out that they have gotten themselves healthy enough to fly and if they're unmated then they haven't even matured sexually which happens about seven to nine days after queen emergence so that kind of gives you your time load you'll have to do this for a couple of weeks unless you want to get in there and actively hunt them out if you've missed the queen's hell smushing stage That's it. There's a lot of people have a lot of different ideas about how to accomplish that. I know Demery is going to come up and people want to talk about that, which is very involved. It involves removing boxes and queen excluder orientation and getting frames of brood up above.

Anyway, the next question, which is number four, it comes from, it's just a word salad here. I don't even know what their name is. K-R-Z-Y-S-Z-T-O-F-D-Z-I-E-R. I'm not going to try. try to pronounce it maybe it was a prank it says I always listen to your videos by but every time I hear you talking about perennials annuals or shrubs which ones you recommend I never write them down what are the top 10 that you would recommend I have a one acre lot okay there's problems with this question first of all you should just go watch the video that I have

titled pollinator plants or plants for pollinators something like that but I will go over some things today of course I always recommend this book I recommend this website it's for the Xerxes society and they have a book that's called the top 100 pollinator plants so the problem of this question is too I don't even know what part of the country you're in because these things are very different so where I am and my personal choices because I do a lot of planting I'm ready to do it it's coming up here in a couple of weeks what do I plant so the top the book that you should go to is the top 100 pollinator plants. You should also go to the Xerxes Society website and see what's hardy for your zone and which pollinators are attracted to the plants that you're looking at.

Because I see people plant huge swaths of flowers that look cool, but they don't do a lot for your bees. So it has to do with whether or not it's going to be good pollen for them, or is there a good nectar resource? And how long does it last? I like my plants to provide resources for my bees throughout the summer and into the fall. and pass the first frost. See what happens? Clover, right up there with that, but then you run into people on the clover thing. If clover's non-native,

or if there's non-native varieties or something like that, or it takes over and acts invasive or is aggressive, then that works for me, though, because it suits my bees. Anyway, sunflowers, that's number one. I plant them every year. I plant a pile of them, all different kinds. You don't look at my field, and see the same sunflower heads throughout the field

and then people are all there getting their senior pictures taken and stuff like that. No, my sunflowers are cool. They're all different heights and shapes and sizes. And I get those from Eden Brothers. They just had a big sale on them, by the way. And the pollen from this, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's come out of the Spivak Lab, University of Minnesota, about the health benefits of the pollen,

even though it may not have a complete, know, acid profile, whatever, you know, that takes care of your baby bees, bees in development. But it had other effects that could impact things like nozema or even impact diseases like brood diseases because what's the brood eating? They're eating the resources that are protein sources from plants, which is pollen, because that's what the nurse bees are consuming and then producing all the nutrients that those bees need to develop and sunflowers. have that power. So like American foul brood even had impacts on that. Max a million sunflowers also. Those are perennial. So I plant those as borders for my property. So my whole western border now

has a 50 foot by 300 foot patch of max a million sunflowers. So it becomes a privacy screen. It comes up every year and you don't have to do anything to it. Mullen or Mulein. I'm not sure what that stuff is called it has the leaves that are really soft and velvety almost like lambs here and those things were 10 feet tall last year i don't know where they came from i never planted them but the honeybees and other pollinators were all over them those were fantastic uh so anyway hyssup and i'm not going to tell you which specific variety of hizup to plant i like hyssup a lot and the blue giant hyssup does fantastic it comes back it acts like a perennial but people say it's good for about three years well it's come back better this year than any year before it's really strong and i don't know if it's anise or a niece nis-e hyssup i like that a lot really strong

uh and what it does by the way is uh adds to your honey it gives your honey a very strong flavor which i happen to like some people don't like it but if you plant these things are in the mint family when the bees of course get that nectar it shows up in your honey and it gives it a nice strong very good rounded flavor in my opinion so in a way obviously plant clover uh cosmos every year now the cosmos see it's good for you because it looks good it's a great cutting plant you can put cosmos on your tables and everything through the year kids can pick them and when they pick the tops of them the plant just grows more so it's fantastic so i always seed the cosmos. Someone's going to sit there and say, what's the soil prep? Well, I covered that in this

discussions too, but all I do is mow it down really tight. I till it and then I spread the seeds and I roll it. And I do that, by the way, when you're spreading your seeds, because most of these seeds don't get planted deep, they're right on top. If the birds see you planting those seeds, then they're all over them. So they're going to eat more than half of what you put out there. So I do it at the end of the day ahead of a guaranteed, see we're counting on our weather people, ahead of a guaranteed series of rainstorms. So we spread the seed out there and then I roll it with a 700 pound roller and then that's it. Then I hope it rains on it to drive the seeds in and get them started. So borage and borage has already been coming up this year but that's a annual which means the seeds

from last year's crop got on the ground and they're coming up again. So I'm going to plant more boreage this year and I wait of course until all risk of frost has passed and service berry we're talking about trees and shrubs service berry trees the deer ate them really heavily even though I was told they wouldn't but they are coming back now so looks good so this will be their third year and the deer were hard on them and but they're growing linden trees that's your long game if you've got small acreage you want to do vertical gardening linden trees but they're the blossoms of the linen trees don't last a long time but if the weather cooperate see that's the big

if when you plant something like a tree that has a short blooming period but a large linen tree will produce enough nectar to max out your colonies so really good stuff and last but not least milkweeds I like all varieties of milkweed showy milkweed that your standard milkweed varieties to swamp milkweed those are hard for me to grow don't know why but I have milkweed all over the place that is a heavy nectar plant for your bees so that's it for question number four question number five we have w true bay fee I don't know what that means says I'm on my first year now I need some advice I have 15 hives after formic pro treatment many of my hives superseded my queens on two of the hives

originally cutouts I noticed a really large drone presence when I say large I mean 30 or more on each frame and in the walls of the hive. I've been inspecting these hives weekly. They had queen cells, then virgin queen's subsequent inspections perroofed. The queens were present eggs larvae brood drones. So in other words drone brood or bullet cells were not present. I'm pretty sure there was not a laying worker and I assume as I have read that they come with the queen from her mating flight still I've never seen so many seen so many what are your thoughts on this also it says should i get rid of them since they consume so many resources from the hive i thought they would leave after a while well the resources and being fed by

your nurse bees they tax them they show up now here's the thing they can come from anywhere and uh roughly 20 percent of a healthy colony of bees at their peak would be represented in drones it can also seem like a drone rush too because when a queen does lay up drone cells and they are larger than your worker cells. When she lays those up, remember that 24 days later, you're going to see adult drones all over the place. And then I can fly out until they're two or three days old.

So they have a maturing process to go through as well, so it can all of a sudden seem like, wow, there's a lot of drones in here. And it is a lot. And they're free-loating because they're constantly harassing the nurse bees to get the food and resources that they need. And drones can fly out and land on other hives. but you might be seeing the emergence just the time when they're out and about from that colony because 20% is a lot.

And I've seen a lot of drones this year too and huge drones, big drones. But they go all over the place. There's nothing worry about. The question here too says, should I try to get rid of them or get them out of the hive? Remember they can just come right back in. So there's not a lot you're going to do about it. They are freeloaders. They show up and it just seems like they kind of bully everybody.

and they get a lot of food and it takes uh four times of resources to produce a drum than it does to produce a worker think about that but you just kind of have to put up with them and that's that question number six comes from guise monotie hello fred thank you in advance for your time i have one hive that i would like to split soon i checked it today and found a very healthy colony the brood nest and the honey super two deeps are full of honey brood and pollen there are no swarm cells yet but there is a good drone population since i'm in a nectar flow now and the two deeps are packed should add another honey super or just wait for swarm cells just as a reminder my goal is to split them greetings from prague the check republic so here's the thing um when i want bees to swarm i force to swarm by not expanding

their space. So if you're trying to make splits and you want to build brood and everything else and you want them to do stuff on their own and make their own queen cells which by the way for me is the best. You can get all excited about making your own queen cells and things like that for people that are considering it like the NICO system which is a hands-off no grafting the queen just sets it she lays her eggs in queen cells and then you set them up and you have a finishing hive to do that. But just you can force swarms just by not giving them room for expansion. So double deeps, right?

So that means 20 deep frames and with brood and everything else and then building up, if you super it, you gave them more space. So you took away a swarm trigger. So we're trying to get them to create their own swarm cells in prime condition at a time of year when there's plenty of resources. I just let them build those queen cells and then guess what? You can harvest them. You can just pull the frames that have queen cells on them and leave your. your queen in the original colony and set up your new colonies that way and you can do triples so you can do a frame of brood shake some nurse bees in there and a frame of resources and a frame for expansion and then empty drawn comb beyond that and let them just build out now that's me i'm not in the business of selling bees i'm never offering to sell you queens or nucleus hives or packages i don't do any of that so it's

you're listening to the wrong person when it comes to maximizing income for maximum production to sell nucleus hives to new beekeepers and things like that but if i want swarms to work with that's something i know something about and i just can find them and i don't expand the colony and just keep track of them and they'll start to build their own queen cells and eventually they will push their way out now you can head that off at the very last minute you can hope to but you know the weather doesn't cooperate where i am So let's say I planned I'm going to do a bunch of splits next week or something and then doesn't the weather shift and doesn't it rain and doesn't make the conditions unsuitable for working your bees Now inside the hive progress continues and so the minute the weather breaks are swarming

So active management, but I get my bees to swarm. They're prepping for swarming and everything else. You see those queen cells under production I pull the queen out and now I've got a colony that's going to build a bunch of queen cells I can also put cages in there to isolate them. If I were in production, if I were trying to do that and just turn it into a finishing hive situation, you've got to mark everything on your calendar. You have to track exactly when they emerge from their cells and how long they're in there because now they're getting ready.

You have to turn them loose eventually so that they can mate. But if you had them caged up, then you have multiple cages with queen cells in each cage, queen isolation cages. And that way the queen's, can't mix and go after each other. The workers can show their preferences and they do, but the queens can't kill each other. So then you've kind of got queens in cages that then you can use to make splits from. And you're not to worry about them emerging when you're not seeing them

and then going after each other. And it saves you from having to build a whole bunch of other nucleus hives while you do that. Just I'm not a breeder. Just saying those are things I would do off the cuff. Question number seven comes from Crago for DDS. How often are you refreshing refreshing the swarm commander on your target bivouac branch? So this comes up a lot. Got under fire for my derby slant bowler hat experiment hanging it from my tree that gets the most swarms. Because we sprit Stephen the hats with a little bit of swarm commander at first. And so if People thought, well, of course it went for the hat that had the Swarm Commander on it. Well, we spreads all the branches on that tree to get things going.

And because swarms show up on that tree in a bivouac location, for those you who don't know what it is, it means your bees have temporarily assembled there. They're on their way to their final destination. They're not treating these hats or branches or anything else as their final destination. It's a hangout. And Swarm Commander, we do at the beginning of the year. After that, the bees refresh this pheromone themselves,

real nasenov so swarm commanders is a synthetic nasenov and it attracts bees so I'm not doing it very often now on the flip side of that when a swarm is in the air and they're all over and they're they're not focused yet on what branch you're going to we have successfully run back to the house and got swarm commander run back out spritz a little on a specific branch that we want them on and we've been to very successful while they're on the wing at getting them to think, hey, their own bees are telling them this is the branch and they've collected onto it. And when that happens, it's a really feel good thing because they were about to park themselves really high up and they instead shifted

to the branch we designated. So we don't refresh it through the year only when the swarms are active. And I kicked it off and I tried to encourage people to do this. well before swarm season showed up to go out and designate a couple of branches that you want them to collect on and just a light spritz with swarm commander and it gets embedded because the wood is porous and absorbs that scent and even though we can't smell it anymore you see bees checking it out so scouts will definitely pay attention to that but i have no set schedule of how often to refresh and we did not refresh the first uh bowler hat that was put out there after that and the second one we did add it to see if that was the reason that they went to it it was not the reason because it went back to the boiler hat that had not been refreshed

question number eight comes from Julie from Leavenworth Washington says can the Demery method be used in a top our hive and if so has it done what are the indicators when it should be done. Thank you for helping new beekeepers. Okay, so for Julie, any horizontal hive, the top bore or the long Langstroth hive or the Lance hive, you have to create a queen excluder, which is your follower board that is cut out with a queen excluder in it so that the queen cannot access the entire run of the hive. I hope that makes sense. So when you have a follower board, that's what you've established as the last. So top bars, there's, just here's the entrance top bar top bar top bar top bar top bar and you put a follower board in there

which defines the colony as far as the bees know but you actually have the entire length of your top or hive whatever it is five feet whatever it happens to be and then you're as you need to expand the colony you just move your follower board over and bring more top bars over that hopefully have been primed with beeswax so and i just set one out uh this past week and I just occupied it today. So the thing is the Demery method we can really simplify that. It's just a means of decongesting your brood area so that you're removing a prime swarm trigger which is high population. The queen is running out of areas to lay her eggs and so we bring in drawn comb that's empty. We remove capped

drawn comb and we put it on the other side of a queen excluder so that then those bees will emerge but the queen thinks she's got a lot of extra space and the workers also nurse bees in particular realize that there's plenty of room for expansion so more brood and then she lays her eggs and they don't start preparing swarm cells because remember it's not the queen that decides it's the nurse bees and the workers in the hive that decide hey we're too congested we're going to have to swarm well we can't swarm until we make replacements that's why they start to make queen cells and then the queen will lay eggs in the queen cell now is the egg different from any other worker egg that the queen lays nope it just gets treated

differently by the nurse bees and how does it get treated differently well first of all the cell that it's in is bigger the food that they give the queen in the queen in production is richer and they used to just flat out call it royal jelly but let me tell you it's way more complex than that don't know that we're going to figure that out but they're constantly feeding because also remember the queen that they make uh is going to emerge much earlier than a worker would be so you end up changing the cast of a bee just by the diet that it's being fed so uh the workers are all in charge of it so what we're trying to do is remove the trigger and by decongesting the brood you removed a trigger now let me tell you something else you can do all this work you can rotate up

them out of there and they can still make a queen cell they can still push for replacing their queen uh so another thing to do instead of the Demery method is just to expand your brood area because ultimately this is the goal we want enough frames of brood so that as the queen is building out she's laying eggs laying eggs laying eggs laying eggs and they're just building out and out and out and then ultimately the first eggs that she laid hit a point where they're emerging. So that's 21 days from the time the eggs were laid. So if now they're emerging out of those cells,

it's the center of this cluster where the queen started. Then what happens is now the cells are available again for the queen to move from these outer frames back to the middle, and then she starts laying those cells up again, and you end up with this cycling that happens, building, building, building, and then she starts over,

build, build, starts over. So we're looking at, you know, 21 days worth of egg laying. So once you've established how many frames it takes to do that, we really don't need to demuriam. You have established a brood area that just gets repeated over and over. And this is something that people practice when it comes to single brood management. If they do a 10-frame length drop deep, for example, they found that they can hit the sweet spot where she's just filling those frames.

and then ultimately it starts over again without needing expansion. So in a perfect world, that's what happens. But there are always, you know, loopholes there. But so rather than going into making a queen excluder into a follower board so the queen can't go to the other side, and now we pull these frames out, decongedst the brood area, and replace them with drawn combs so she can continue to lay.

Maybe you can just expand your brood area until you hit kind of the peak of how much she could lay and then they're cycling back to bees that are emerging from their cells and those cells are then available again because one of the reasons I don't like pulling the frames out and putting them over in my honey area is because those were brood frames brood cells brood cells get grungy looking in fact it's pretty well illustrated here if we look at this frame we have what would be honey over here on the edges but in the middle see how brown and dense that looks that was used for brood so i would like to personally uh keep the queen and her eggs and all this brood production away from the frames that are

used exclusively for honey but if we're demuraying them ultimately those become honey frames out there and they've got this dense dark structure in the cells that feels like paper eventually and it's not good for straight honey. So that's another thing to consider. That's another monkey ranch. So I like the idea of establishing a brood area, seeing the queen use that, and then go beyond that for nothing but honey,

because this is a normal progression in an unattended cavity that bees live in. They have the root area, and then they eventually have nothing but honey in another part of the hive. And so that's what they do on their own. And so you can provide that by a, single entrance keep the entrance small do not have a venting area or another entrance further down the

line because now that encourages them to have brood down there so they tend to have their brood near the entrance and then it's a mix of brood and pollen and honey and then it eventually becomes nothing but honey and they keep the brood over here because this is where they have control over ventilation and everything else not only that it's a natural organization that your bees have set up that reduces robbing because what are the honey bees looking for they want the honey that they're bringing in they don't come in there and steal the pollen they don't come in there and steal the brood so having that stuff fronted near the entrance means it's uninteresting to scouts that are looking for a place to rob but if they show up and there's honey right there

because somebody open another entrance and there's honey over there now the robbers are incentivized to get in there and get that honey and get out of there so you are again going against the organization that the bees set up on their own that protects them from robbers and the worst robbers out there really are other honeybees so but you can do it the question is is it worth it personally for me i don't think so question number nine this is from uh edwin from connersville indiana i'm a bit puzzled i had a swarm move into my long layens hive and it has been there for three days and a large part of the swarm will not go in the hive i'm guessing that the queen doesn't want to go in do you have any ideas on how to get them to move in properly okay so we're talking about the layans hive so we don't have to say long lans it's a

horizontal hive lanes and those are the bigger frames they're not compatible with any of the langstroth hives but here's the thing this happens a lot so you've got to put them in you've put them at the entrance if you're doing what I do because I do patient beekeeping I don't dump them in I set them at the front and I like to see them walk in so and then this frustration happens they seem to get excited they go in they're fanning their nas and often a big portion of your swore moves into the hive and the rest of them abstain and they sit out there and you're wondering what's going on well you've got nine times out of ten see I can't

see anything's 100% but nine times out of ten there's another queen in your bucket or whatever you're using to carry these bees that you've collected as a swarm or they just went on the outside of the hive and you've got bees coming and going through the entrance so something did move in because if you don't have more than one queen you know what they do they end up all moving back out so let's say we had a swarm with one queen in it we tried to get them to go in a hive and they got excited they started going in and you wrote it off you went to get your capuchino you went out to dinner because you said yes i have a swarm and you come back and they're all outside something in there they did not like there's a dead bee in there there's dead bees on the bottom there is comb that doesn't smell right anymore there's really old comb things that you need to get rid of to make it more appealing but let's go with half of them moved in half of them stayed out you have a second queen i'm very confident you have a second queen so because it's a layans hive let's pretend it's one of dr leo sherashkin's layens hive from or is horizontal hive.com. Anyway, it has multiple entrances down the front of it. So what you can do is you can set up the follower board to accommodate the part of the swarm that already moved in. So you got the front of the hive. What if I had a drawing? It would look like this. So then you put the follower board in. You have an entrance at the other end. Move your swarm that won't go in down to the other entrance.

and get them to go in there. You can do a little tiny dab of swarm commander inside the hive, which makes them go check it out. And then you can see if you have another queen, and you have to get the queen inside. And once you get the queen inside, they'll all go. So now you've got a lands hive with a follower board and two colonies, one at each end.

Now, you don't want two colonies. You just want one. but they were stubborn and they were on the outside. Now that we have them inside, now that we own them, we can close up that other entrance at the other end where the second half of the swarm went in. Now you can pull out the follower board.

Now they have to join forces in the middle. And just see what happens. Just let them get together. And they will decide amongst themselves which queen they want the most. And the other queen will say, simply be discarded. So it's one way to bring them all together.

I can't say it's going to go perfectly like that, but I can say that that's one of the things that I would do. The other thing is, if you don't want to do that, or if they're literally on the front of the hive, you don't have any way to move them down to the other entrance, you can lay down a cloth like an old sheet, emphasis on old sheet. Don't just run down to the laundry room

and grab someone's sheet and run it out there. Anyway, you put it on the ground under the hive, you sweep them off onto it but you have to spray them with cold fresh water that makes them glom together and then you dump them onto the sheet and you spread them out eventually you will see if there's a queen if there is you can nab her if you collect that queen off of that sheet that would not go into the hive she's not the favorite queen in the first place because they didn't move her in and she won't go in but she has enough of a following to keep them for moving into the hive so you have to find her you have to collect her you have to remove her they're going to find out very quickly that they're missing a queen

and you know what they do these unfaithful workers as soon as they no longer have the queen mandibular pheromone for the queen that they were faithful to and clustered outside the hive with when she's gone they'll take any queen so any queen pheromone that they come across they'll move in so now they'll move into the hive that you wanted them to move into and you just remove the queen and the reason that they were not going in how's that sound It works. They're unfaithful. The next one is. Question number 10 comes from Diane from Warren, New Jersey. So I think I read in Steve Rapasky's book on Swarms.

It's called Swarm Essentials, by the way, that you can use a metal cone funnel to get swarms off a large fence post. Have you ever tried using a chicken kill cone to collect a swarm off a post? Do you think that would work? No, it won't work. I know I haven't done it. So anyway, if you don't know what we're talking about, killing cones are for slaughtering chickens and they're sheet metal and their funnel shaped and you invert the chicken and pull its head through the bottom and then you dispatch the chicken.

Sorry for the graphic description. Now, those cones are set up. They're solid. So here's the thing. I don't recall what Steve Rapasky would be setting up a cone on a fence post doesn't sound right. to me because we use screens that are shaped into long funnels screens very important and then that gets attached when you're trying to do a trap out so when bees are in a dwelling and we need to get them out without cutting the dwelling apart you close off their entrance with a cone really long one too by the way we're talking like a foot so the cone gets stable to the front of the building or whatever it is and there's the crevice which is their entrance so they come out of the long cone and they leave the tiny entrance which is usually about an inch in diameter so out they go and they fly around

doing their thing and they come back and they try to go straight into the entrance and because it's a screen their pheromones are everywhere see so the difference is if you add a sheet metal cone it does not work because now the pheromones from the hive are going out through the tip and they follow that so they can also follow that back in. So we want to frustrate them and make it so they can't get back in. That's the point of the trap out. And then what you do is you'll provide them an alternate space right nearby a nucleus hive or something like that that has frames in it that smells right. And then the bees that can't get back in end up going into this alternative location,

this nucleus hive box, which once again I'd like to say is preferred that's made out of a nice thick wood. And then it's a space that they would ultimately feel comfortable living in forever. So the trap out works because the bees that are departing the hive, what you do is you start to accelerate their jobs inside the hive. So in other words, bees are still doing cleanup or undertaker duty and things like that, end up having to go out and be water scouts or forage for resources for the hive. And when they do that, they can't come back. So then you start to exhaust the entire workforce. Eventually they all end up into this box in a perfect world. And the queen,

eventually will come out and then she will join them because she's lost all her brood she can't feed anything she's not getting the feed she wants she's starving because the nurse bees aren't being replenished and they're exhausting the resources that are in the building in the form of honey and pollen and then that's what a trap out is so that's what i think we're talking about sheet metal doesn't work because it's not vented we want the airflow we want them to smell it and be frustrated and not find their way back in. If they do that, they're done. It doesn't work. Question number 11 comes from B. Cathy. UV entrance swarm totes have caught both my swarms this spring. So UV entrances, we're talking about those things over there. We did a video about that. The feedback on that is pretty good,

and I just put those out also on nucleus hives that are in double stacks. So that's 10 frames, five over five with those on the front. We'll see how they go. So anyway, it says, next up is my bowler hat experiment as you posted. Thanks for all your advice. Yes, get used bowler hats. eBay sells them. Do your search for used ones. They're 100% woolen.

They're really nice. I don't think I'm going to be wearing this thing out in town unless I want people to pick on me. But I'm wearing it today. Okay. But I'm also glad that the UV entrances are working. for people. You get more scout activity for sure and here we do here we have that they worked. Question number 12. This is from Mary 4 2250. Could the swarm commander be causing swarms? So swarm commander, the Nazanoff imitation. This is what it looks like. I know I show this all the

time. By the way, I need a whole packet of these little capsules. But would it cause a swarm? No, it doesn't cause swarms. Now, when you put that swarm commander out, it's really supposed to be a lure for a swarm trap, the final destination. It's not supposed to be used as a attractant to get them to temporarily bivouck somewhere. Because the Nazanof pheromone that they spread out is whenever your worker bees are trying to get one another back together. So when they fly out, like when they go to a bivouac location and they're swarming their headed somewhere, they release their nascentph pheromone through their nasanoff glands and that's how they get one another to collect over here in the meantime and you'll also see that once the swarm has happened and departed from the colony that they were in the hives that they were in you'll see a bunch of them on the landing board with their abominens in the air fanning their nascentov glands to get a bunch of workers to come back

they're also making sure that foragers that are returning they're trying to recruit as many of those as they can back to the original colony even though a swarm has departed. So you also find this when you have a bunch of bees in a box, if you've collected a swarm somewhere, anytime you agitate them or move them around or dump up somewhere, Nassanoff comes out and you'll smell it right away. So it smells like lemongrass oil, but that is not what it is. So for people that often just go on Amazon or something

and they buy lemongrass oil and they use that to attract swarms, it can create some interest. for your bees, but it is not the same as the actual Nazanov itself. And Swarm Commander imitates that better than anything else on the market. I get nothing for saying that. It simply is true. So, but it won't cause your bees to just go out and create a false swarm, for example. It won't trigger a swarm because the pheromone itself does not trigger them to, hey, let's get out of here. It's time to swarm.

so it doesn't work like that there's something called QMP which is the queen mandibular pheromone a synthetic that imitates the queen mandibular pheromone and is sold as temp queen now when you put that on a branch you can end up with a bunch of bees on it because they think there's an actual queen there and I don't want you to feel bad for those bees first of all they glommed on to a queen they don't know that queen all they're doing is collecting on a branch on a tree that smells like a queen they left their own hive to forage and instead of going home with the groceries that they collected they stop off at some random queen whose pheromone they just flew through so that's what's known as drift and again it doesn't trigger a swarm but it can't create a false collection of bees on a branch that looks like a swarm when it isn't so there's interesting stuff going on there too but that's it And question number 13 comes from Julie from Leavenworth, Washington. This is an episode 183.

Thanks for going all the way back to a Q&A number 183. You mentioned that you wash the bees off after completing a sugar roll test, but I wasn't quite clear how to do that. Please explain with a little more detail. You also said you used on Ultra free and clear, because it's less expensive. Well, not just because it's less expensive. Don Ultra, what is this right here?

This is Don Ultra Pure Essentials. The thing of it is, it is less expensive than using alcohol, isopropanol, for washing it for mice. And the way this came up was we were talking about, because this is now several years old, we were talking about doing sugar shakes. In fact, when the state inspector, comes out here. I'm really excited because they always ask, do you want us to do my counts?

And I'll say, yes, I do. And so what they do is they do these sugar shakes. So they use confectioner's sugar, powdered sugar, and there's a whole method for that. It's very well established. And you do sugar shakes to count mice. Now, then we have other people come in, scientists all conflicting with each other, saying, why do the sugar, shake you're killing the bees anyway and it's not as effective and so instead of actually killing the bees from the sugar shake you may have limited their life they may only live four more days well a forger's life is two weeks a honeybee workers life is six on average so if they still get four or five more days doing what they would do after a sugar shake i'm okay with that but then the question was efficacy in other words

how many mites how effective was it how many mites actually dropped off with a sugar shape compared to doing a isopropinol wash which kills the bees right away or don ultra free and clear which is something that randy oliver did on scientific beekeeping he has the formula out there and what happened was the mite release was more effective than with the isopropanol so with the don ultra free and clear in your uh sugar shake water because what I wanted to do was did the sugar shake do the mite count now the only way to know if that was effective is to take that same bunch of bees that got the sugar shake and now do a mite wash with isopropanol and Don to see if we get any more mites because if we don't get any more mites then it was not more effective at counting mites on bees than the sugar shake see that's why we we did that so in theory if you do a sugar shake on your bees to see if you have a road

structure mites on them and to free them up because the process is longer too by the way we need the bees to heat up to groom themselves and all that other stuff and we shake to dislodge mites if you don't get any more mites when you kill the bees then we could have sugar shaked them and left them for several more days to live right so there you go and just to let you know, there was not a significant difference or advantage to killing the bees over shaking them with sugar. But then, of course, we have another scientist who says you're killing them anyway. You've just delayed it. Why not kill them all at once and get your might counts and be done with it and move on.

So now it's up to you what you want to do. But the Don Ultra free and clear in water, I believe it was a table. tablespoon per gallon. Don't quote me. You'll have to look it up to get the exact formula. But that caused a mite release even without agitation. So in other words, the road destructor mites were coming off the bees and sinking to the bottom. Because keep in mind, anything that has a cuticle on its body that protects it from getting wet, getting soaked and sinking, when you break that surface tension with dish soap like Don, because remember the whole point of this stuff is to break down grease, right, and act as a detergent. And the reason we're using

ultra-free and clear is it's safe for the environment. I almost said good for the environment rather than say it's good for it, it's safe. So it's not like other stuff. One of the things that was interesting about the studies that were done is if you used isopropanol and you did a mite wash, the mites actually recovered afterwards. If you put them on a, because I pour them through a coffee filter after that paper coffee filter. And that's how we see the mites. So we wash them off through the coffee filter and then we have them there and it dries out and you can see what's up. And so when they dry out with the Don Ultra free and clear, the mites were dead. When they dried out with the isopropanol, they started crawling away. So those things were durable,

but dish soap kills them. That's what that comes from. And that's what the wash is. And if you want to do it and find out, if you have somebody telling you sugar shakes are not a effective way to count for mites are ag inspectors that's what they're doing there might be something new now because my inspection is coming up we'll see what's going on but uh they were getting good might counts out of that so it has to do i think with the way it's implemented as much as anything else question number 14 this is from g u i a r t 4728 this is one swarm of bees two bowler hat surprising results that was a video and the comment is i want to see you wearing that hat on friday i said i would i'm wearing it there you go and i will not be wearing this everywhere it's not going to become a

trademark for me i know some people wear different things that become their trademark and i don't want me to be the beekeeper that wears a bowler hat or a derby if you're in england or wherever question number 15 last question of the day this comes from Heather from North Kingsville Ohio hey Fred I only have two hives I don't want to split and keep making more could I make a resource hive and when the bees swarm can I take the queen from the resource hive and replace it to the large hive that way I would not have a big gap in time and their productivity. I like to end up with more honey

at the end of the season if possible with this word. Thank you. Okay. When they swarm, they have a replacement queen. Bringing the old queen back without doing anything else won't work. Because now there's going to be a conflict. You have to hunt out and kill the queens

that's trying to replace with. So by stopping, swarming, by killing the queens, this is, let me just give my opinion. That's all this is anyway. My opinion, if I was trying to keep my bees and I don't want them to swarm. They won't swarm without a queen. So we take the queen, as I mentioned before. Hunt down and smush all queen cells. You could do that. That works. If in doubt, smush the cell. Sometimes you'll smush some drone cells because they look big and people often mistake.

Drone cells for queen cells. And they'll cluster a bunch of drone cells around the queen cells. And they'll cluster a bunch of drone cells around a queen cell. cell sometimes so we're looking for the cell that's vertical it's the only one that's going to go down so you have to do a very thorough inspection we're going to remove the queen long enough to create a brood break to decongest that brood area and then when all risk of swarming has passed when they have lost their ability as i described in the very first couple of questions today um they can't swarm without a queen So once we remove that competition, create a brood break, we just decongested that. And then we bring the queen back and reinstall her. Remember, you need a placeholder, frame feeder, something like that,

because you're bringing frames back. And we haven't lost a lot of production. All we're trying to do is get them past prime swarm season. So we're in that right now. In fact, we have entered tertiary swarm season, which are after swarms. So prime swarm season is kicked off. and now we're in the after swarm phase, which is when colonies can dwindle down to nothing in some cases, depending on their genetic predisposition to create a bunch of continuous replacement queens.

So you have to get in there and actively hunt them out. And then restore them, and by June, you should be in track to just continue to expand your hives and not lose your entire workforce. So I've given you a lot of tools today. I hope some of them will, you know, just sound true to some people and make you think it's something that you could do. We've talked about different methods and queen excluders to separate them. Demeray method, pull frames of brood, put them up above, let those emerge out, but you've messed up your honey frames. And because now we have brood frames that we're using for honey.

And so I like the idea of inspections looking for quick. queen cells, sequestering the queen if you need to keep her from going. A lot of ways to do it. If you don't want to build a nucleus hive, you can cage your queen isolation cage. And a new queen can emerge and not kill her, but it doesn't mean the workers won't go after her because I've seen that before too. So we really need to go after those replacements. And while your queen is caged or in a nucleus resource hive, you can see what her performance is. You can see why they're getting rid of her. She's still a prime queen producing a great pattern and very consistent.

We want her. We want to keep her and bring her back. If you don't want to make splits, then she comes back after you've guaranteed that you've pushed them past the swarm triggers. So I hope that was helpful. And we're in the fluff section for today. So as I mentioned, I have a swarm that I just installed today.

Got stung on the finger, darn it. I actually had, okay, we're in fluff, so we can just shoot the breeze. I set up the brand new top our hive. When you have a brand new hive, it smells like, you know, a lumber mill. It doesn't smell like anything bees want to move into. So you have to do some monkey business there. The good news is this is not my first top our hive.

So I pulled frames. My top our hive that I set up last year, I divided two colonies. So I had a small colony at one end, big colony at the other end. Big colony at the other end. The western end is doing fantastic. They even swarmed. So the other end, they died out over winter. So I have a bunch of frames in there, a bunch of drawn comb on top bars.

So I took that out. I cleaned it with my water pick today. Blew it off. Put them in the new hive. And so I set up, so I have five or six frames of comb in there. And then I set that up and then I had primer strips, little wooden strips that I glued on for the rest of it. and I collected a swarm, a big one, and I put it at the entrance. They did not want to go in. So for the longest time.

And they did start going in, but it was half-baked. So I had to find the queen. So this video is going to release. I'm just telling you what I did. Okay, somebody else wants to try it out. You're trying to stock a new hive. It's not easy to do. And so I collected the queen in one of those queen pipes.

If you don't know what that is, I just put a video out about that. And those queen pipes are absolutely transparent. So you see the queen, you see everything that's in there. So I collected the swarm in a seven-gallon translucent bucket. I put the bucket with a queen excluder on top, wooden frame, queen excluder, I put them in the garage, that was yesterday. So it dropped into the 30s overnight, wicked cold, and it rained. So the swarm would have had a real challenge out there.

So by having them in inside and they all collect it up against my queen exluter at the top of the bucket. Now I took it out 9.30 in the morning, set them up against the front of the hive. I have to find the queen because I'm going to use her to get them in there. So one of the ways that I get the bees to move out of the bucket and into this top bar hives is brand new that smells brand new and they're hesitant to go in. Maybe there are 40 or 50 workers going in and coming back out and going in. that kind of thing. So I went into the kitchen. I got a tissue, Kleenex tissue, let's say. And I spritzed it with one little spritz of Swarm Commander. I put it in a Ziploc baggie. I cut the corners off of the Ziploc baggie to diffuse,

you know, how much of that pheromone goes out. So it is Nazanof pherom we're talking about. And I went to the top bar that's farthest away from the entrance. And I lifted that. and I drop the baggie inside and they close that up. Okay. Sit outside, stare at the entrance. Remember, we've got a queen excluded on the bucket. The queen can't get away so they won't swarm and leave us. We're going to make them go into the stop-ar hive.

So then the workers started to smell a little bit of that swarm commander in there and they started going in. And instead of 50 going in, 60, 300, 400, lots of them are going in. Aha. But a lot of them are also staying in the bucket. because this is a big swarm they weren't buying it so all the influencers waving their abdomen spreading their nas and off and not getting the rest of the bees out of the bucket so then you carefully lift up the queen excluder which has a wooden frame on it

and I flip it over and I set that back down on the bucket and there was little bee on the end which stung my finger which is why this finger is bigger than that finger anyway flip it over and no queen See, it doesn't work every time. So then I take that, but I looked at it really careful. I was pretty sure based on their behavior, there's no queen on the queen excluder. So now I carefully take that now and put it on end and lean it against the bucket.

Now I pay attention to the bees inside the bucket. Who shows up near the edge of the bucket? The queen. What did I have to get her with? Queen pipe. Put that over her. She goes up inside. Now I've got the queen.

Put the sponge in. And now what am I going to do? I'm going to get the bees out of the bucket into this top our hive. Well the top bar hive just has two little holes on it. So I'm using one of these queen includeers that I have over here. And I, because I have the queen in the queen pipe, I put the queen includeer over the entrance. Make sure that's close up.

I have a bar clamp to hold it on the front. Now I go around to the back and I lift up the lid to the top bar hive, which this is so easy. and what jumps right on my hand the key word there is jumped right on my hand because the pipe is transparent I got these bees in a pipe a jumping spider a bold jumping spider jumped right on my hand and right on the pipe and tried to get those bees through the pipe that was impressive I thought that was cool anyway I took a video of it so it's going to be in the final video too that jumping spider was right on it. Couldn't have been better because also people have questioned me how do we know it's a female

jambas bear how I know it's a male jump is a barrel. This is a male. They have the big long monkey hands sticking up. So very distinctive. Definitely a male. Anyway, so then I just lift the top bar hive that is at the last run next to the follower board, which creates the cavity that these bees are going to occupy. I take the plug out of the end of the queen pipe. I lifted that top bar. and dipped it in there the queen went right in close it down queen's out of the pipe in the hive she can't leave the hive because the queen includeers on the front on the entrance and now we go around to the front and what's going on all the bees are coming out of the bucket going into the hive which is continuing while i'm talking to you right now so i'm going to release that video tomorrow see and you're going to get to see exactly how i did it it's just going to seem kind of boring because the things i do are just so good and they works so well I mean it just it just seems like everything looks staged that's how that's how good it works I'm giving a presentation on Sunday at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center really happy to be there and because people want to know

where I'm going to go and I'm going to be in I'm in the big theater so I'm going to show people stuff about bees there and there's no more tickets it's all sold out so sorry about that beekeepers breakfast for those of you know what that is it's coming up I'm there on Wednesday this coming Wednesday, May the 20th. That will be there, given that presentation, as we do. The bowl of results. So again, let's talk about the elephant in the room,

the hat on my head. Swarm Commander, if you do a light spritz of one of these, woolen hats, the Swarm Commander, it is a powerful lure. Because, remember, it's woolen. That scent gets into that fabric and it attracts swarms. It doesn't cause swarms. Now if you hang other hats up that do not have that smell or this shape, this shape for some reason is preferred by bees looking for a swarm to join. And when you spritz it with the Nazanoff, not yeah, Nazanoff, Swarm Commander,

the lightest bit, the lightest bit, they go check it out. Okay, so that made it work. Now we have three of these hats when we hang three of them and we are not adding swarm commander to the hat does it draw the bees more or less it's about 50 percent so it's not a huge it's not a hundred percent hang a hat just because it looks like a bowler which looks like a swarm of bees hanging from a tree and we'll get other bees to come and join it without the swarm commander being added to it, it is about 50-50. I know they're seeing it because they go and they collect on another tree and unless you're going to freshen it up with some swarm commander,

because remember we had lots of rain too and I left those hats out there in the rain. So that might have washed it down a little bit. And so one hat did get a tiny swarm in it, but there were big swarms paying no attention. So actually the most expensive derby, hat that I put out there got nothing absolutely nothing but the hat is a little flatter and the brim is is bigger I think it might have even been a woman's hat I'm not sure and I'm not bringing it in the house either because it is a really old hat that I bought from eBay and for all I know there's a

ghost that comes with it and I don't want that inside my house so it's staying out but let me know what your experiences have been those of you who bought used hats I hope you did not spend a lot of money I didn't spend more than $20.22 for the most expensive hat. It was expensive new, but as a used hat, dirt cheap. But it's about 50-50, but here's the good news. I just want to, you know, the bonus of it. If it's on the hat, which is on a clip, it's the easiest move ever with a swarm because they're clustered in the hat.

You can drop the whole thing right in an empty hive box. you know put it right take the lid off if there's no frames in there put it right in your feet or shimmer whatever and close it up and their only way out is down into the hive it is the easiest transport of a swarm ever easy and they don't fly off it they stay you know bunched up right in there anyway spend a lot of time that's it don't forget super hot the whole weekend is a swarm weekend monday it's going to max out you are going to lose bees if you're not out in your bee yard getting on top of it. I want to thank you for being here with me today and for listening to another Q&A. I'm Frederick Dunn and this has been The Way to Be.