The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Frederick Dunn Q&A Episode #361 recorded during LIVE Chat June 26th

Episode Date: June 28, 2026

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Yay, it says I'm live. Okay, so hello and welcome. Happy Friday, everyone. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 361. This is Backyard Bekeeping, and I'm Frederick Dunn. This is the way to be live chat. There are already people here who have comments and questions. We're going to get to those in a minute, but we have to do our normal thing.

If you want to know what we're going to talk about today, you won't see it right away down in the comment section, because this is live, it gets caught up later. So you'll see all the topics posted down there with time links, if you're watching this at a later date. Congratulations to those of you who made it here. We have a bouncer in the house. His name is Keith Spillman, have tracks and honey, if you've never heard of him.

And he says he's like the Maytag repairman with nothing to do. That means nobody ever acts up here. That's because my followers are good people. As far as I know, I mean, he can't see you. Now, I know there's some questions in the chat. We're going to get to those in a minute. But you know, we have to talk about other things. How do you suppose you submit your own topic for future consideration?

You go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, fill out the form, and there you go. You might be on the list. Also, if you've got a question and you want to share a picture, that comes up a lot. You want to show a video of something that's going on in your B-yard. There's a fellowship you can go to. No, I'm not there. but your peers are. And it's called the Way to Be Fellowship.

Go there, check it out, see what's going on. It's on Facebook. For those of you who still use it, and I hope you do. Don't lose faith in Facebook, even though AI is creeping into everything everywhere all the time. Guess what else is going on? You can listen to this as a podcast and just Google it. The Way to Be podcasts, and that way you can listen while you work.

I know some people are listening to this right now as background, while they work, at least they think they're working. So I know what you want to know. Let's get right into it. What's going on outside? There's weather dynamics all over the United States, but you should probably know what part of the United States I'm in, the northeastern part of the United States,

the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. We just missed a major storm system last night. Some of you got nailed, and I'm sorry for those of you who have been wiped out by heavy weather recently, thunderstorms, high winds, tornadoes, and everything else that Mother Nature can throw at us, and it's not over because I know you want to know what's going to happen. It's going to get hot, really hot, as if it's not hot enough already.

Now, I know that's silly for me to complain about that here in Pennsylvania when other parts of the country are just burning up, bubbling asphalt, which, by the way, if you wanted to know, it's called Bitumen, blacktop. So it's going to burn up around here too. It's not going to be too bad. This is why you should invest in trees, by the way, big tall ones. I don't know it's 73 degrees Fahrenheit right now, which is 23 Celsius, 74% relative humidity. And there is a nectar flow on.

The bees are drying it out. They're fanning at their entrances. For those of you logged in early, you got to see the preview of what's going on outside. That was recorded today. So there's a lot of pollen coming in, too. The wind is not an issue, two miles per hour right now. So what's coming, though, Wednesday is the word. stay for the people in my neck of the woods, 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 32 Celsius.

It's going to fry. You might fry. I don't know. So the live chat today, if you want to submit a question, please type it in all caps. For those who already wrote in questions, don't worry, I'm not going to ignore you. I'm going to scroll up and find you and respond to those starting off today. But I would recommend that if you don't do it already, provide a predictable resource of fresh water for your honeybees. There's been a lot of stress testing that has been done on

bees to see what they can handle inside a standard laying straw three-quarter inch pine box under high heat conditions. And as long as there was weather available, they could take pretty extreme conditions. So they tested that out on obsidian on the island of Hawaii. So it was really interesting stuff. Anyway, make sure that you've got water. If you've got high visors, put those on if you haven't put them on already. Some people took them off, you know, put them on for winter, took them off for spring that's backwards. It drops the landing board temperature by 15 degrees.

And it gives your bees that are on the outside of the hive a place to seek shelter. So put hive visors on. Highly recommend it. Let's see. Also, with the high temps that are coming up, this is a great time to test out what? We did some bees wax testing.

And so we ran it through a grater. Low temperature process beeswax right around 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Run through a cheese grater. Put on the landing board outside of the hive, that's key. Because that way we know that they're bringing it in and they need it. They want it. If you dump it inside the hive and it just disappears, you don't know if they ran it out or if they used it or what they did.

So we want to see that. And with the high temps, it makes it easy and the bees should be all over it. So be mindful where you are that it doesn't just melt in a clean. So let's get right into it here. Let's go back to the beginning of this. Welcome to the chat. That's from me. Don Kennedy, it's my first time catching you live.

Well, welcome, Don. I'm glad everybody's here and welcome all of you. I don't want to miss anybody in particular. When do you recommend feeding sugar syrup? I've heard you discuss a dearth period. Has it begun in the Northeast yet? I'm in Western New York. Well, actually, we don't get a dearth here.

You might be wondering, we get a reduced nectar flow, but it's never completely flat because we have things like clover that runs throughout the entire summer. Milkweed is just coming in right now. Should probably mention that, too. Clover, milkweed, linen trees, which are basswood, are also in bloom. Raspberries are just providing a consistent nectar and pollen flow, too. But milkweed is heavy in the air. You can smell it.

But for everyone that's listening, here in the United States, as a website you can go to. And I want you to type it in and put in your address and see what your environmental conditions are, whether you do have a dearth and when to expect that to happen. So the website is called B-Scape, B-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-S-A-P-S-U-D-U. So it's managed by Penn State University, and you can put in your location there.

You can see exactly what's going on. So the question is, when do I feed sugar syrup? First of all, I have dropped way back on sugar syrup as far as its composition, one-to-one or lighter. I never mix up the two-to-one. So what happens is if I have a new swarm, for example, those are comb builders. And by that, I mean they are ready to build infrastructure for a brand-new colony. So they're primed to do beeswax production.

And we can do that with really light sugar syrup, and you may be wondering what that even means. Well, it's one part sugar to one part. water. So if you had eight pounds of sugar, that would be a gallon of water. And you mix it all together and don't heat it up too much and then turn it into liquid and feed that to your bees. Now, one of the things that I find really interesting about that over the past couple of years and I haven't pinned it down, but when I use the hive alive syrup, two teaspoons per gallon, which is what it says on the bottle, and I mix that up with the light sugar syrup and I feed that to the bees, I'm thinking that some of the time all that's in there from the time plant actually gets

infused into the beeswax. Correct me if I'm wrong. Tell me if you're seeing something else along this line. I think it's having an impact on the varroa mites. Can't say it. Don't have a scientific study to prove it. But my mite numbers are so far down that I'm not sad about it. Low mite counts are a good thing. I don't know if it's the genetics, if it's a combination of IPM, extraordinary beekeeper management. I don't know what the reasons are. But I have to think that because they're building new wax while they're being fed sugar syrup that includes hive alive, which has time all in it, that that might somehow be producing a hostile environment for varro distractor mites while giving your bees a sweet treat. What do you think? What's your opinion? So the thing is,

even when I hit a dearth period, I don't like my bees to get out of control. We do have honey soupers on 50% of the hives in the apiary right now. And I should mention today's June the 26th. So this is important to keep a log of everything and when your bees were bringing on nectar. So they're bringing in a lot. They really don't need it. So only new colonies, colonies that I'm using to draw at home. So I have some hives with brand new foundation that has not been drawn at all. Those are the ones that get sugar syrup. And why is that safe? Because later on, I know I'm not going to super those, I'm not going to be drawing honey off of those this year. So the colonies that have super is on, they're done. They don't get sugar syrup anymore until the end of the year. And so that's

the second round. End of the year, here's what we do. And so this helps you plan ahead a little bit, but roughly the third week of September here where I'm located, this can be different where you are. Once we've drawn off the last of the honey, that's when sugar syrup goes on any light colonies. Now, that's a heavy nectar flow for us here, but weather can put a damper on that. So we get golden rod, we get asters. There's a lot of late-season nectar available and pollen. So usually the bees do a great job of backfilling their brood boxes on their own, but just in the off chance. Here's what some keepers do and what I would like you to do different.

Just try it sometime. Try it on half of your eyes. Instead of waiting to see if in mid-October, they have the weight that they need. And if not, people rush in and feed two-to-one sugar syrup, which, by the way, if you've ever mixed that up, that is really dense material. Where if you have been what I consider trickle-feeding them, the minute you took off your honey, and you went in with one-to-one sugar syrup and helped them back fill that way, sure, it's a lot of drying out.

But it's also what they use first. So if they've already stored a bunch of honey, they don't get back in. into it because the light sugar syrup that you provide with them on the colonies that need it, they will use that for daily consumption and not get into their long-term stores. So then what you've done is you've provisioned them in a slow ramp down at the end of the year so they can gain weight, have the carbohydrates they need when the cold winter weather actually hits rather than an emergency fattening up of your colony with two to one. What do you think?

I think it works really well. and it's really easy to do. So again, that's it. Now, if you're putting, keep in mind, because I am putting hive alive sugar syrup in that, in that colony, no honey soup is on because that could make your honey taste like licorice, to be honest. So you don't do that. If you, if there's any chance that, now I'm just going to stick with that.

Don't treat it the same, whether it's got hive live in it or regular sugar. You don't want to have honey supers on at the time. So those colonies are just being rebuilt. So that's what I do. End of the year and only the colonies that need it. Keep in mind there are some colonies that are chocka block with honey at the end of the year. Weather all of a sudden gets really good and they get to take advantage of that late season, late time of the year, nectar flow.

And they get so fat and happy that they don't even bother robbing each other. And it's weird too. When the bees rob each other, the colonies that need it the least rob the most. which is really backwards. So if you've got a late season swarm that's barely getting by, struggling along there, often the first ones to get robbed, which is also why we keep that entrance

to reduce or small so they can defend it. Let's see what else we have. We have Suzanne. What material is preferable for bee gloves and why? I seem to recall you mentioning that it is better not to buy those made with cowhide. I use Atlas vinyl,

vinyl love, it says. Malaysia made. Okay, so my number one, if it's going to be made from an animal hide is goat skin. The reason raw hide, cow hide, those are different things. I'm told has to do with the processing. But if you are actually assessing the colony's defensiveness, do you know what they use for that? They rake straps of leather, untreated cow leather, across the tops of the hives and see how many stings they draw and the most defensive colonies deliver the most stings of the straps of leather and they write right on it which colony that was and they assess their defensive nature okay so but what i most often wear are nitrile gloves i wish i had some to show you oh look what happened right here this is a nitrile glove now look how you probably can't see

i can almost see through this right that is your standard hospital grade nitral glove but I want you to compare it to look I just happen to have another one this is also a nitral glove look at the difference this one has a nice long cuff to it it's much tougher these thin ones that you get you can be putting them on and just tear a hole in it so easy it just you know rips right out this one doesn't rip right out it can take a lot of abuse you know why I bet you're wondering what's the thickness of that and not in inches how about mills what do you have i think just guessing that maybe this is an eight mil 8.5 mil glove look at the box these are the ones that i recommend

they're tough they have the big sleeves on them they hold up and by the way i hadn't recommend you don't shelf a whole bunch of nitral gloves let's say there was a sale and you decided that you're going to take advantage of the sale by a whole bunch of them they don't well so you get these older nitrile gloves and next thing you know they're all tearing they're all kind of dry rotted or whatever then ones are kind of garbagey the thicker ones very nice I'll put a link later down in the video description if you want to see the exact ones that I'm using and so you can actually do work with those and they keep my hands clean of course the next

thing after that is no gloves at all and some people do rub their hands and this stuff is sold in the barbecue section of your big box stores, it's liquid smoke. Some people have rubbed that all over their hands like hand lotion. I think it's actually supposed to be for barbecue, but they rub it on their hands and find that the bees ignore their hands then so you can get away with it. I don't want my fingers to be slippery.

So, for example, if you're going to pick up a queen and you're going to mark the queen, so you're going to catch her by her wings and you're going to grab her on the thorax only. If you rub your fingers on beeswax ahead of time, you get this like tacky feeling of bees wax and bees also don't mind that your hands smell like beeswax win win and you pick things up so having dexterity is really really important having clean hands is too but so deer skin and almost all the you know gloves are being sold today are deer skin gloves

the other thing is i want to tell you one of the tricks that i use for those because i want dexterity with deer skin gloves. Now, fair warning, if you have a really defensive colony of bees, you can get a couple stings right through them. They're pretty darn thin. But your bees do not generally react to those gloves. So I get a size a little tight. I get them wet. Then I put them on my hand wet, and I wear them until they're almost completely dry. And then you know what I have? Custom fit deer skin gloves. So you can do this. the same thing with leather, but it's not the same. Leather are super thick, super

tough. If you're going to war, if you're one of those people that deals with Africanized bees and things like that, you're probably going to want the leather. You don't care. They're already hostile and defensive. So that's maximum protection. I have them, I don't wear them. But they're there, just in case. Nitro gloves, bare hands.

If you can do it. So let's move on. What materials peripheral then just did that? Put all questions in caps. Thank you, Keith. That's correct. And I hope I didn't miss a question. If I did, I hope somebody tells me about it.

This is Mark Zener. I still have one-to-one with hive-life mixed up from late last summer. It smells fine. Should I dump it or feed it to the bees? Feed it to the bees. It does not expire. In fact, we did the longevity test. So if you mix up sugar syrup, one-to-one, everything is one-to-one.

same water source, same sugar source, dry, white, processed sugar. And then we put just the sugar syrup mix one to one, sugar syrup with hive alive in it at the recommended dose two teaspoons per gallon. And then we also had honeybee healthy. We had Keepers choice. And I think there was one other. But the one that lasted the longest, in other words, it did not produce mold in the sugar syrup. Sugar syrup itself started show mold at the end of the week.

So within seven days. So if you think you're going to put this on a hive and it's just sugar syrup and the bees are not taking it in because heaven forbid, the minute you put it on, there's a big nectar flow and they start ignoring it. Then it can mold. And the mold, that has been questioned a lot in the past, too. Is it really bad for the bees if they had mold in it, just that little black along the edges? Yes, apparently it's very detrimental to the bees. and it's not that you would notice it, it's that it's a sublethal impact

that can just affect their metabolism. So try to avoid mold. Of all of those, Honeybee Healthy carried it pretty good, about five months. So very few beekeepers are leaving pre-mixed sugar syrup on for five months. But if you did, HoneyBe Healthy

extends it that far. So the one that went a full year is hive-alive-life. So that was pretty, darn impressive. And that's in spray bottles, all just lined up on a rack. So they're also under the exact same environmental conditions when we did that. So it's very interesting to know that. But yeah, definitely you can use it still good.

Nothing to lose. So still have one to one. That's good. Home, steady arms. I took your advice, removed my queen to a small nuke. then I found multiple swarm cells. I charge, one charge, not capped. How long after I smash any new swarm cells?

Can I return the queen? No cage needed. Okay, so here's the thing. This is a very good control. When you remove the queen because there are queen cells, you can restore them after your open brood is sealed up. Once there's no evidence of any queen cells, and you have to smash them all up.

But once there's no more brood, no more chance for them to create another queen. And so that's eggs primarily and really, really young larvae. But they have tried to make these emergency Mambi-pambi queens out of kind of older larvae. So you have to be careful. I just fail safe. No larvae at any age left in the hive because they do weird little tiniest runty peanut things. They're just desperate. they're trying to survive.

So once the brute is all gone and you've smashed all those queen cells, they don't have the means to make another one. You have to be very thorough about that. You can restore her. Now here's why it's really easy and the introduction is direct. Because she is recognized by them. She is their queen. They have the same similar genetics, of course.

And so they will accept her and her progeny. So it's really interesting. You can bring her right back with the brood. It's also why when you pull one out for that, please leave a placeholder. So when you're removing your queen in a cage or even just by herself, putting her in a nucleus hive as a insurance policy, make sure that you've put frame feeders in there. You don't have to fill them with resources. Just put frame feeders in as placeholders so that if and when you bring her back, you have a place to put them to. So that's helpful.

This is from Burton B. Cycle. This is my monster hive, 90 pounds of honey so far. far has slowed way down on laying since I put the wet supers back on three weeks ago. Is this typical? So when you put the wet supers on, that means they've been extracted, for those you who are wondering, and the bees are cleaning them up. It's a lot of extra space. And remember, their ability to store is completely based upon what the demands of the colony are, as far as the resources go, and the amount of resources coming through the entrance.

So they're foraging force, what they're bringing in. There has to be a surplus. Otherwise, they're just kind of consuming as we're bringing it in. Weather plays also. So if we get extended rain or rough weather and things like that, remember, they consume huge resources once they're in full production in a very short amount of time. So when they're not backfilling wet supers, they should be cleaning them up, of course, very quickly.

But remember, they were taken off of that high. so I think it's probably still size right this time of year. So I would just leave them on and wait for them to fill it back up. But it sounds like you put a lot of honey already off of them. Now here's the thing. If when you took it off, let's say you took two or more medium supers off the hive, processed them and now you've brought them back. I don't know if I would put them all on at once.

You could just come back and put one of the medium supers back on that are wet and let them work it. And as they start to backfill that, then add the next one. and then the next one after that, because they do demonstrate that if you expand a hive too quick, and I don't even understand why they do it. If you expand it too quick and they're in a cavity that's too large for the population of the bees that's in it,

they back off on infrastructure and storage. I don't know why. But they pick up that when you have just enough space beyond what they need in the moment. And this is also why years ago when we started, started putting them in nucleus hives, which are supposed to be temporary holding, they build so fast in such a small space that we started stacking five over five over five, so you end up with 15 deep frames. And they build those quicker than if you had put that colony of bees in a standard 10-frame

Langstroth hive brood box. If you start them at the same time and put one in a five frame and then out of five frame, they build faster. So five over five builds faster than, 10 standard in one box. That tall, narrow cavity seems to be what they prefer. It's really interesting stuff. And I wouldn't know it if I didn't just do it for kicks and giggles because people told me for years you need to use nucleus hives. And I always thought, why am I doing that? I don't want to have to fiddle with them later. So I would collect a swarm and put it straight into a eight-frame brood box or a 10-frame deep brood box right away. And they just wait for them to fill it out because I knew the nucleus hive would feel too fast, it would be like work.

You have to go out there and do things to expand it. But then when I started doing that, they were so much quicker, healthier, and robust that now we have nucleus-sized hives all over the place. Resource hives is what we use them for. Let's go back. Oh, my gosh, I skipped some. Let's see. Wow.

How did I miss that? So Don is here. on B3ST. Are bees that are performing orientation flights, ones that have recently emerged, or are they the older bees that are transitioning into the field for foragers? That's a great question.

They're the ones that are transitioning to outside. So for a lot of people that may not know, when your bees are going through, their different job levels, your promotion levels within the hive, they start, of course, after they emerge, as new workers, They have cleanup duty.

They're nurse bees for all the interior bees. Nurse bees, for example, right after they emerge, don't even sting people. That's why you often see people pick up a brood frame and run their fingers through them and move them out of the way. And everybody goes, wow, you're such a bee charmer. But they don't sting you anyway. They can't. They also can't take off and zip away. They're not very strong flyers.

So they go through all of their cycles. It usually takes them about four weeks. So once you've got a queen, you can almost set your clock. set your calendar by this. Well, you've installed a new queen, or you've got a swarm, and finally, she starts laying. You really know the start of things. So then you can mark that on your calendar. She started laying.

Well, how many eggs is she laying? 1,500 to 2,000 a day. That's what they say. But remember, you have to have that many cells available for her to lay in. But you can set your clock by that, because 21 days after that, what are they doing? They're emerging. So then you can look and mark your calendar. This is great for teaching.

kids and stuff, applied math. So then when it gets to a couple of weeks after that, they're doing in-hive duties, their undertaker bees, they're starting to do guard duty on the landing board. We start to see things pick up. This is really easy to track when it comes to a swarm install, because you know exactly when things start. Then you'll start to see what seems like a swarm, but really they're just maturing and they're finishing up their fourth week as adult bees. and then you'll see many more bees out hovering around, doing their figure eights, orientering, and starting to do flights around. So it really is the older bees are actually moving into outside chores.

So the other thing that you need to think about too is, remember, they haven't even gone outside and eliminated yet. So Undertaker bees, even if you watch them, they're not the ones that fly away with the dead bee. They drag it out, dump it on the landing board, and go back in. and its bees that are capable of flight that are grabbing them and flying them off and bombardering into the ground somewhere and discarding those. So it's very easy and it's a great way to teach bee biology, by the way, because you will start to see that activity as it progressed to that point. This is also why sometimes when you put a swarm in now swarms, keep in mind, they have older bees with them and they have a bunch of different ages mixed in with the swarms. So you're going to see foraging activity. you're just not going to see it in huge numbers.

Because remember, there's a lot of infrastructure being built inside the hive. And sometimes when you make a split, you'll see no activity outside the hive. Because what just happened? When you make a split, you just transferred a bunch of frames within your own apiary. This becomes really obvious. The foragers, those capable of foraging zipped out, went back to the original hive. Because remember, you made the split. They didn't make the split.

So then the bees that you have suddenly seem really quiet to the point where you wonder if there was even a moscond or something, but you have a bunch of nurse bees left there. That's an example of a colony that I would feed sugar syrup to and keep them fortified because they will start to accelerate their jobs because they don't have foragers yet. But you'll also notice that's why they go quiet. They don't have the older bees that are foragers. So you don't see a bunch of orientation flights and things like that too. super interesting stuff. So I hope it if I skipped anything, somebody let me know. We're going to scoot along.

Do to do, monster hive, took your device, remove this. So I have one to one with hive live, answered that. Oh, good. We're caught up. If you have a question, this is your chance, all caps. So I want to start with, there's kind of an announcement that I just read today. I don't know if you've heard of hive hugger, by the way. They make insulated beehive hive huggers that are super insulated.

They have an insert for the top, hive top. Got an email that they're for sale. If you're looking for a bee venture that has an established market, hive hugger is for sale. Oh, son of thunder says, I missed it back up. Let me find it. That should be easy because it's a bright orange or yellow. Oh, do Virgin Swarms Bivouac,

with no intent on returning to the parent hive, leaving them queenless. Do virgin swarms bivouac with no intent on returning to the parent hive, leaving them queenless? I'm not sure I understand the question. Virgin queen swarm or virgin, do virgin swarms bivouac with no intention or returning?

Well, when they swarm, I'm just gonna talk in generalities, I guess. when you're being a swarm with a virgin queen. Let's say that's the question. They have no intention of going back, first of all, but while they're mid-air, while they're moving to their Bivouac location, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, when a swarm leaves the hive, sometimes they leave with a virgin queen.

That means she's not been mated. We refer to those as after swarms. Some scientists refer to those as tertiary swarms. So once they fly out, I've had some very interesting behavior with unmaided queens recently, which is fun to see. But they have no intention of going back so long as the pheromone of that queen is still locatable. So in other words, if they can still find her and she sticks around, some virgin queens are flaky. They zip off on their own and land somewhere by themselves,

and it's up to that following group of bees to locate her and get with her again and stick with her. She can also shed a lot of bees if she finds herself in close proximity to a mated queen and another swarm because swarms tend to happen around the same time from a bunch of different colonies. So we see a bunch of traders. They zip off and can join a mated queen. And you can do that by providing them with a mated queen if you have one handy just to see which one they'll prefer. And then you can feel bad for the unmaided queen that's with them. Now, if you remove the mated queen, catch her in a queen pipe or something, and take her out of the equation completely, you'll find that that cluster gets antsy.

They start squirreling all over the place, looking for the queen. When they can't find her, they all take wing, do a scouring of the area, and then we'll return in the absence of the queen to the hives that they came from. Now another thing that they do in pretty decent numbers too, which is interesting, if during that flight on their way back to the hive that they came from originally, if they fly through a pheromone stream of another queen, they're just as apt to zip over and join her to. This is how you can find multiple swarms on a tree, and they're all separated by a couple of tree branches, and some are small, medium, there'll be one that's really large. if you leave them completely alone, eventually they all kind of join together. And the Virgin Queens that are with those smaller clusters also join the big cluster. And this is why when you're hiving up a swarm, I get pushed back on this quite a bit. I don't know if it's because I just have too much time on my hands or what.

But when I collect swarms, I put them on the outside of the hive in whatever I've collected them in. Most recently, we've collected them in laundry bags. We use buckets, we use trash cans, and we lead them on the outside of the hive, and I want to see what's going on. If you dump them in the hive, which a lot of people want to do, I get it. You don't have time. You open the hive. You dump them in, and you walk away, and the deal is done. But what I have found is when I set it against the side of the hive and I locate the swarm and I locate the queen, the first queen that's got most of the attention, if I collect her and put her in the hive, and there's competition.

watch when you put the queen in the hive using something like i don't know a queen pipe these are super handy you see the queen in that cluster of bees you put this over the top of her she sees light she moves up into here you put this little sponge in here now you've got the queen now i have the entrance of the hive i want the bees that are out in this bucket or whatever they happen to be in i want them in this hive I pull off this little piece here, of course, right at the entrance. I let her go in, and I put a queen include her over the entrance now that she's in. Why do we do that? I don't want her to be able to get away.

What does she change her mind? What if she left? She would mess things up. I want them to do what I want them to do. So anyway, now back out here in my basket, they kind of split in half. A bunch of them do go in. They get all excited. the queen's in there, but there's a small cluster that stays behind.

Sometimes it'll look like a meatball, just like on the side of the hive or something. You scoop that up with your hand and you look through it. You know what you find in that little cluster of bees? Another queen. So now my queen pipe's available. So I take the other queen and I put her in there and I see how much of a draw she really has to a bunch of bees really

because these are badly made, a little crack in here. There's a vent going through it. So if the bees follow her over here, I can see, well, she's kind of popular. But if she doesn't look very popular, I take her away and put her in the way to be Academy building. Then we look at the rest of them. They start searching around. They can't find her. And then they join up.

And then I was looking at a colony that I just did that with. So I removed the queen, the rest of them joined because now the only fair amount left is the one that I installed. There was a virgin queen the next day on the outside of the queen, include her trying to get in really bad, really desperate. it, unmade it, really tiny, truncated abdomen, everything, it was kind of funny, kind of sat at the same time. But she has no chance to go in there because they are settled. They're good. But so the bivouac, if you take away the queen, they also won't remain bivouacked if there's no queen present. So that's another thing that comes up. I know I've seen the videos on YouTube, the viral videos of a cluster of bees that just happened to collect somewhere with.

a queen and then somebody brings a queen and saves the day, they don't bivouac without a queen. If the queen's missing and there's no queen pheromone, they start searching all over for her. So this is a very easy way to control those bees. So no intent, they will go back in the absence of the queen, but you're right, they have given up on their parent colony when they follow a queen out, provided they can stay with her. Let's see. And did I miss anybody else? If I did, let me know.

Oh, here we go. Isancho says, hi, Fred. I have honey left over from last year. They're wrapped and frozen. How and when do I add them to my hives? Thank you, Lori. Okay, so you have honey left over from last year and you want to know when to add it to the hives?

Any colony that needs fortification, can get those. And you can put them in there. You don't even have to thaw them out ahead of time. You can put them right in and let the colony thaw them out. In fact, with all the heat that's coming up, depending on where you are. And I would put them in the number one or number 10 position. I wouldn't try to put them right adjacent to your brood.

Or if it's an eight frame, it would be the number one or number eight position. If it's a long laying, just past the brood by a couple of frames. And they'll have that as an emergency resource. So you do that whenever you have a colony, that needs it. You save them forage time. If they're not foraging for honey, they're doing other work. So you can definitely save them time, and I do that only on a colony that seems to be lacking. So that's the same question twice here. Okay. And which is your favorite bee colony and why? Breed, high, sort, story, please, greetings from the Netherlands, all the way from the Netherlands.

Thank you for being here. Which is my favorite B colony? Oh, by the way, I should answer this. Somebody asked about hive number 44. They did not put it in caps, but I saw it. Hive number 44, those who don't know, was an underdog colony that talk about queens that nobody was paying attention to.

We had a multiple queen swarm. I saw a queen all by herself. I got her in a queen clip. You don't know what that is. This is a queen clip right here. In fact, this is the exact one that was used. to collect the queen for hive 44. See this little hook on it.

We put the queen in the clip, and I just hooked her on a woven wire fence, and then we installed the other swarm. Maybe 60 bees collected on this. After a while, a couple hundred bees collected on this. Now, that's tiny. That's not enough to survive. But I decided anyway to go ahead and put her in a tiny nucleus hive

with a very reduced entrance. So the entrance was the width of this clip, and when I opened it up right against the entrance, just wide enough for the queen to go in, and then we left them on their own to see what they would do. And a bunch of these joined hive number 44. Now, the comment section on that video, and the video is still out there, was pretty active,

and people thought that we doomed that colony. By the way, this was not a spring colony. This was a late-season colony. And so they built up really fast. They also did something very interesting. and build a shroud of propolis and beeswax extending beyond the entrance outside. The only time I've ever seen that happen. So right now they're really great.

They're a surviving colony. They made it through winter. They do great things. They're growing. They're robust. So now we'll jump to this. Favorite bee colony and why? Read Hyde Swartz story, please.

Okay. So for those of you who don't know what I do, right now we have too many beehives, but we have a whole bunch of different beehives here. The standard Langstroth, we have Layans hives. We have the ivory bee hive that shaped like a barrel on its side, the thing's going gangbusters. We also have long lengths and top our hives as of last year. So favorites, I have different hives or favorites for different reasons. We also have observation hives.

So if you're learning, observation hives are at the top. of the chart. They're also swarm generators. So the populations build up. It's a small space. They only have 12 full deep length-strough frames in them. So the population is building out they go. But they're number one for learning and observing. So we have multiple observation hives in the same building. We're adding to that. And I'm installing a wall hive. So an observation I've built into the wall so that you can come and look at it as if they had moved into a cavity in some structure. So we can kind of see how they build. There has to be frames in there because we have to be inspected by the Department of Ag.

But so that's what we have. So observation-wise, ease of use, long Langstroth hives. So it's a Langstroth frame, horizontal format, five feet long. A fantastic hive for young people to attend to because they can all, all you have to be able to lift is a frame. And they're easy to follow a board wise. If you want to expand it, you can move. frames built-in storage space. So if you need extra frames, you can just move the follower board

and add them to the cavity that the bees are occupying. Beyond the follower board, that's your storage area. It's all right there. You don't have to bring a lot to it. It's at a standard height. There's no lifting of heavy boxes and reaching up above your head, for example. So horizontal hive configurations are ease of use, top of my chart. If you want to see what bees do naturally. And see, I don't have a solid favorite. That's why I'm going to run down the line here a little bit. The top bar hides, if you want to see what the bees do on their own, because all the comb is naturally drawn by the bees from a simple top bar. And seeing them progress through a space like that is very interesting to me. And we can see their production.

You can see what the bees do on their own. Sometimes they get a little out of control and make cross come, or they even can rarely attach it to the sidewalls of the hive. So it's kind of challenging, but simplicity-wise, there's no standard for it. You know, you have a Langstrass standard. You have a lay-ins standard. With the top bar hive, it's kind of whatever you decide to use. Mine happened to come from Be Mindful out of Texas. And that's a very well-thought-out hive, very simple design. And so it's inexpensive. You get the whole thing for, under $400 or something, ready to go. So it's all a matter of what personally you want to do.

So the second part of this is, if I wanted to produce a bunch of honey, let's say that. Let's say I really wanted to, maybe there's somebody you have to prove it to. Maybe you talk to your partner into buying in on bees and you promise them that produce a lot of honey and then stuff that rhymes with honey, you know, that makes your wallet thick. You're going to need a Langstroth vertical hive because, That's going to be the most productive honey-wise colony out there. If you want to boost that even further, you're not satisfied. You have some 10-year-old running around that says he's got clients

and he has to provide them with honey and you need sales. The two colony systems are top performers. What do I mean by that? You have two colonies, Langstrath hive side by side, joining together through the central riser, they share a honey super. I didn't think that would work, but it does. It's called the Keepers Hive, but the two colony or multiple colony systems are not new the configuration is, and the way you attend to the brood area is what's different about that.

So there again, I can take, I look at things from, what can I get the grandchildren to do for me? While I drink coffee and supervise, because as a grandfather, it's kind of your job. So the Keepers Hive, they can flip open aside and they can pull frames out. out one by one and explain to you what they're seeing with the brood. And it becomes a teaching moment, no lifting involved. However, when it comes time to pull the honey supers off, there's a lot of lifting, a lot of management involved. So that is, if you wanted honey, Langstroth, top of the chart, if you want a lot of honey

from just a couple of colonies, the multiple colony systems that share a common super are also going to lead the field for that. So if you just want to keep bees and see what goes on with them, top bar or long laying are at the top of my list as far as ease of use and everything else. Okay. Now the stock, the bee stock that I use.

When I first started keeping bees, I wanted to be completely holistic. I did not want to have to treat the bees with anything and I tracked down Daniel Weaver, B. Weaver out of Texas. And I got his stock because I listened to a lecture that he was giving. He took his family through the ringer and decided they did not want to treat bees anymore. They wanted to go just with survivor stock.

And he caused a multi-generational beekeeping family to suffer huge losses in stock. Because then, of course, that's what survivor stock is. Just the colonies that make it without treatment would be those that they would produce their breeding stock from and go forward from there. So those are what I started with. And I've experimented with other lines of bees, Saskatras bees from Saskatchewan, Canada, which are open-maided in California. Alivarez does that.

I've tried a lot of different bee lines. But what I've arrived at, because we're backyard beekeepers, I'm not a commercial guy in any way. We just use Survivor locally adapted stock year after year, and just cycle back and work with as far as splits and expansion. We work with the colonies that do the best and look the best coming out of spring here in the northwestern part, Pennsylvania, in the snow belt.

So what we get is the bees are not a magic bullet, by the way, management is going to be key no matter what genetics you get, but they definitely have genetic traits. So for example, let's say I just wanted honey and I had to have it. I don't mind doing a lot of management and treatment, things like that. I'm going to go with Italian bees. So the Italian genetics are their massive brood builders. They build brood at the wrong time of year. They brood up and they should be brooding down.

So you will have to do a lot of management with those, but you do get a lot of honey. And I did that. I got a lot of honey off of those bees. But I also had to feed them about 70 pounds of honey to get them through winter. The stock that I have now goes through about 40 pounds of honey. It doesn't even finish that to get through a winter. So we're coming into spring now with locally adapted muts that end up not even utilizing all of their resources. And we've also added, so to be fair, we've split them, 50-50.

So we're talking about 43 colonies. 50% of those got hive-of-life fondent packs on. 50% of those did not. So we like to see how they make it through winter. So we're also looking at the Hive configurations, insulation, venting, not venting, insulated, not insulated entrances, what direction they face, which is not massive, but these are all micro edges that you give your bees. Screen bottom boards, not screen bottom boards, removable trays, passive erode structure mite collection, things like that. I know I'm saying a lot. But the thing of it is, the stock itself now is just locally adapted stock that I continue to cycle back year after year.

I don't put a lot of effort into stopping my bees from swarming, which means that you're going to do a lot of work. You're going to be collecting your own bees. And so rather than do what I used to do a lot of walkaway splits when I wanted to expand my apiary or produce extra bees for whatever reason, I would look at a strong colony. I would pull resources from that. I would make a new colony from that one large one. And then I would have them produce their own queen, and that's called a walkaway split. And at one point, it didn't even matter which of those two colonies had the queen in it

because the one that was queenless would produce the replacement. We also would reduce brood that way and breed congestion, so it was a type of swarm control. But the thing of it is, I learned later that if I let them do their own swarming, I'm Johnny on the spot. I'm here every day. Then my chances of getting them are very high. And collecting a swarm, that's the existing queen that goes out with the swarm.

But the replacement queen or queens that they produce to replace that queen are on their time. And they're selecting it. And they're not forced to make one in an emergency situation that we create. So I get much better queens this way. and then we get much stronger colonies as a result that are at a time of year when they're being reproduced from winter hardy stock or regionally hardy stock that we know what's going on. So we can do that. It's very interesting. So I hope that answers that question. Let's see.

Honey left you were from last year. Did that. And what are your thoughts on Veroxan? I really, you know, that question comes up a lot. I got Veroxan. For those of you who may not know, it is an extended release. There are Voxan strips. They work okay.

Remember, I'm a backyard beekeeper. I can't give you huge statistical data on that. I will say this. If it comes to extended release, now this is personal preference. I'm not trying to step on any companies, you know, banner, poster, treatment. But I've said it before, I'll say it again. Extended release is a great way to deliver exhalic acid. It reduces your exposure.

It reduces your risk. Excellic acid vaporization is an instant knockdown. If you're using varoxan, my recommendation is that you also have to use exhalic acid vapor to do a strong knockdown. Multiple sources of people because I canvass people all the time. I'm the kind of person that grills you with questions whenever I get a chance to talk. to people. And so Varoxan, most of the people, now this is anecdotal. This can't be quoted as solid science, but they reported that the Varroa numbers pretty much stayed the same. In other words, they weren't expanding, they weren't growing, but they also weren't being significantly

knocked down. So it becomes something that you have to use partnered with something else, depending on your infestation level for Verro destruct your mites. Now, the other thing is, Veroxan, when you put it in, the strips go down between brood frames. So it was blocking cells. It's one of the things that was challenging as far as I saw it because we knocked out the B space there and now the bees had to clean out from under the varoxan strips and get out of the way. So some of the people, their answer to that was just to lay them across the top. And I can pass a buck on that one because Bob Benny down in Georgia there did those tests

and laying strips over the top was not a meaningful way to control or reduce your varroa destructor mites. So you did have to put them down in between the frames. And he partners a lot with the University of Georgia Department of Entomology down there. So I trust them because their numbers are so high. Statistically, they would be a great group to look at. So it's not my favorite. I spent my money for it. I like the extended release sponges that are not yet legal.

I'm waiting for them to come out. I'll say it again. Mike's bees. Easy ox. Those pads. When they come out, when they finally get approval, that's going to be my number one choice

for a road instructor mic control. So let's see what else. Favorit, do, do, to do, do to do. Favorit colony Y? I already did that. What are the concerns do you have most with the future of beekeeping? Okay, this is from Carmine,

from New York. Hi, Fred, what concerns do you have the most? with the future of beekeeping trope mites regulations, other issues. My concerns, and by the way, tropymites, tropolaylaps, is that mite that is not here, and I hope it never gets here. Take the fight to the tropymite, is what I say. And I'm really hoping are world's experts, Dr. Samuel Ramsey, people like that are out there figuring out how to deal with the trophy mite.

But do I worry about it? No, because remember, worry about it. the things you have control over. We don't have a lot of control over that individually. Back here, beekeeper-wise, you know, you can sit around and talk about it and gripe. But my concern about beekeeping is people that are keeping bees. So I joke a lot sometimes when I go places is that I really don't want to go there because there's a very good chance it's going to be people there. And so my concern is with beekeepers that getting an opinion, learning some fact about how to keep bees, finding a way to keep bees,

locking into it, guarding it. So there's gatekeeping. There's too much gatekeeping in beekeeping and not enough open-mindedness, not being willing to discuss and have debates and discussions and accepting different ways of keeping bees, getting honey, whatever you're trying to do, trying to get people to continue to do real research and base their decision making on real science is a challenge. So one of my concerns, and it doesn't just deal with just beekeeping, it's across the board. People get polarized and tribal about how they do something. And if you come in and discover that that was not the case, you can be dogpiled and wiped out over it.

So there's a mob mentality, particularly in social media, where someone can be right, but it can be a tiny voice in the wilderness and people can go after that person because they are speaking against an established way of thinking that accepts no challenges. You can't question the way certain things are being done. And so my concern is people are losing their ability to stay objective and be. and being willing to shift and admit that maybe what we were doing now is in the best way, maybe we should shift and do something else. So my concerns with beekeeping are they're not things that we can change, by the way. So we need commercial beekeeping. We absolutely have to have it.

The country's agriculture depends on it. Migratory beekeeping is both necessary and part of the problem, because we're moving, when you move something all over the state and then all over interstate all over the country, you're also moving whatever pathogens, diseases, and potentially pests that they bring with them. So there are countries in the world that don't even allow migratory beekeeping to move on to other areas unless they can prove that they are pest-free and disease-free. So we have a little bit of that here, but it's very, it's very, porous. So we're not good at keeping things from spreading through this country, which is why we

kind of have problems. But my biggest concern overall is people and picking sides, sticking to your side no matter what, and just deciding this is the way it is. Anybody that says anything different is not right and I'm not going to listen to them. If people won't listen to a discussion point, then what they're believing is frail. You should, hold up under other discussion points and other opinions, not just walk away from them or close the door and gatekeep. There are bee clubs that won't even allow other methods of beekeeping to be discussed and they'll shame people out the door. I think that's a threat. So off my soapbox now. Let's see. So that's my concern. People, I want people to be open-minded and stuff.

I want them to question everything and accept new truths when science proves it out. So this is from the great STM8. Okay, Fred, did AJ from the North American honeybee see ever get the flow hive for different floral honeies? Probably lost contact. Oh, AJ. Oh, okay. AJ is the guy that he had all the different floral varieties. He uses straight Langstroth gear.

I don't believe he got a flow hive. Microdosing honey. By the way, I have different ideas about micro honey collection. Hiveminder is one of the ones. Is that called hive minder? I don't know what it is. But micro collections of honey different times. So anyway, is Neroa legal in PA?

Do you plan to try it? So Neroa is, of course, altering the Varroa destructor mites so it can't reproduce. And I'm not personally going to try it because it just don't need it. So I'm just going to leave it at that. It is birth control for Verro Destructor mites. So the adults still scoot around. So again, you need to use that to give the birth control to the founder's mites. And then, of course, you still have.

have to knock down your mites with some other means because they're just not reproducing, they're still there. So me personally, I'm just not going to use it. I do believe it's legal in Pennsylvania, but of course, look up each state. To see what's approved. When you look up in Roa, it says which states allow it, which do not. So I just don't personally, it's $20 a colony is what it works out being when you get all the packs. It's very easy to administer. So if you have 20 bucks a colony and you would like to add that as a way of controlling varroa destructor mites by keeping them from reproducing and expanding. I would say the best time to do it would be in spring and you feed it to your bees. It doesn't have anything to do with your honey or

anything else. Nurse bees feed the queen and the queen of course spreads that around. Also your bees that are fed upon by the founder's mites get birth control. So, That's oversimplification, but that's what it does. Keith Spillman says Sammy Ramsey will be at the North Carolina Beekeepers Conference, July 9th through 11th in Winston, Salem. So that comes from Keith Spilman. It says Sammy Ramsey, that's Dr. Sammy, will be at the North Carolina Beekeepers Conference, July 9th through 11th in Winston, Salem. Let me just say, if you're in that neck of the woods and you can make it to that particular conference, just to meet Dr. Ramsey and hear him speak would be worth the price of admission.

I think you should go there. That's great news. Thank you for that. So Francis Moore, Fred did the Demery on my production hives and made 464 pounds of honey. That's called flexing, by the way. It's bragging about all the honey you're getting. That's good news. That's great.

Fred, the greatest mate, an Aussie. Okay. Platypus, 2012. Will the bees move the bee bread out of the way to make brood like they do with nectar? Now, that's very interesting. It generally happens, and for those of you who don't know what bee bread is, the bees are bringing in pollen. It's one of those things that your foragers brings in on their hind legs, the carbicula.

They go straight in. into the area where brood is being produced. That's where the need is the highest. And they scratch off the little balls of pollen right into the cells. So that's one of the things that a forager brings in and delivers for storage right away. Nurse bees go to work on it straight away. And they start to process it. In about 72 hours, it smells like bee bread because it is fermenting.

So the next thing is, will the bees just move it out of the way? So bees do clean cells out, but most often they consume it. The nurse bees consume it. They're creating the nutrition that's going to be fed to the brood. So after the eggs hatch, you have open larvae and those get fed by your nurse bees. And so it gets used remarkably fast. Just for example, it takes a full face frame of pollen, fermented pollen, bee bread, to feed a full frame of, larvae. So the consumption is really high. So the question is, would they just clean it out and move it to make space? That seems counterproductive to me because they need it to raise the brood. So sometimes, in fact, you can get pollen bound. There is some pollen in the cells that the bees don't use for whatever reason, something they smell or sense about it. And they can actually end up encapsulating it and leaving it there. This is why sometimes you'll see a whole frame of brood, but a few cells of pollen that they just don't seem to want to use.

And that can also happen. But they could clean it out. So physically, could they clean it out? Yes, they could. Do they routinely? Probably not because they are going to use it to metabolize that and then feed back to the brood. So I want to thank Ross Wagner for donating $10.

I really appreciate it. So swarms are the coolest part of beekeeping. I'm not going to lie. You know, it can be the end of the day and I can be tired because my wife makes me do things, but I have been promised food. So I have to do a certain amount of work. And when she says she sees a swarm somewhere, she doesn't mean, oh, cool, what did it look like? What she means is get off your rear end and go and get the swarm of bees.

There's a storm coming and you need to collect them. So I do it so that later I can be fed and let indoors. it's important so Francis Moore hi Fred did the dem did the Demery on my production high oh yeah that's a repeat Fred the great and will the bees move okay so I did all that how is your borage this year I found it you give them support they can get four feet tall okay that's from Ross Wagner borage I'm really unhappy I planted so much of it it. For those of you may not know, I'm also a poultry technician with the Department of Ag,

and I've raised poultry here for 26 years. I haven't learned that I need to wait until the chickens are in their coops. We have three chicken coops here. We're down to two because I pulled one apart. If chickens see you spreading seed somewhere, just ride it off because they're going to run over there, I have sad pictures of chickens eating my seeds. So this is my, you know, if you have chickens and you're going to seed a garden or you're going to spread borage seeds somewhere, borage seed is big. The chickens find it easy. They dig it out and they're going to eat nine out of ten of the seeds that you put down. So my borage is coming up, but it is very light. it isn't gray.

So, and I don't even want to say how many thousands of seeds I put out there, but the chickens went really far and got it. So the key is leave your chickens in the coop. Don't open it up. You see that there's rain coming in the forecast, go out there and spread your seed on the prepared beds. And these beds are hundreds of feet long. So it's no small thing that the chickens go out and eat stuff.

The other thing is I learned that the voles are harvesting seeds too, which that makes my day. Anyway, just a bunch of complaints. Borage is really good stuff. If you don't know what that is, look it up. It's a fantastic resource nectar for your bees. Every couple of minutes, they replenish their nectaries when bees are attending to those flowers.

And they can reseed themselves pretty well. And so borage is just good stuff. It's a great nectar source for your bees. How's your honey flow this year? Well, it hasn't been good. This is from Brian, Brian Bennett. They filled up, and there was a whole bunch of honey in there, and then we got a whole bunch of rain, colder temps, and they consumed it.

So we do have some colonies that are filling up really nice, that we're going to be able to, in fact, this coming week, we're going to pull some honey. And while it's in the 90s, because it makes it really easy to do, easy to work the propolis and everything else, we're going to take a really close look at the Keepers Hive. and see if we can pull some there too. But overall, in fact, throughout our membership from our club,

the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association, people are reporting extremely low honey yields. So we have unseasonably all the gardens, all the growing stuff is bad. So, for example, even local farmers that grow strawberries that a terrible strawberry crop this year. So the weather is impinging on everything. So I hate to be a downer, but my honey flow, I'm not going to be able to brag like some of the other people here who get, you know, 600 pounds of honey from a nucleus hive.

So platypus, can I just add a frame of eggs and larvae to a laying worker hive every few days until they write themselves? That's an interesting practice. Do you have a queen coming? Because unless you have a queen coming, I don't know that I would try to do that once you have laying workers. You can do it, but I would like to share with people how to keep from getting laying workers if you find that you're queenless. You can, I highly recommend this.

Please put temp queen, which is a synthetic queen mandibular pheromone. I hope every backyard beekeeper has this already in their freezer. It costs like $7 for two of them. Dirt cheap. I get mine from BetterB. In fact, I just got more. If you suspect that your colony is queenless, you don't find any brood,

you can't find evidence of the queen, you don't want them to end up activating the worker ovaries. So from the time they're absent the queen mandibular pheromone to the time that you can have a worker that's producing drone eggs, it's called haploid, haploidal, When they start laying those eggs, now we have a problem.

So your goal is to head that off. So if you fail safe, and I hope you do, you put a queen medivoli pharmon noodle in there, temp queen. Will that keep them from accepting their own queen or from accepting a queen? It won't. What it does is actively suppress that hormone that your workers have that gets their ovaries activated. We don't want to deal with that. So once you have it, I realize war's over, you looked at it, you've got laying workers.

How do you know you have laying workers? You open it up and in the brood frames, in the cells, you see multiple eggs in there. And they don't even go all the way to the bottom of the cell. And you have a bunch of test TVs. They behave in a different way, too. So you can do a hostile takeover. I did it recently. not with a, I had a queenless colony that rather than bring in a queen, I brought a swarm over to them.

And I know it's kind of mean, but all I did was lay the wire basket against the entrance on the landing board and didn't force them to go in. And a few of the bees, the resident bees did try to defend the landing board, but a few of the bees came out of the swarm cluster in the trash can. and they started to rush in. And when they met with some defensiveness, even more of them went in. It was a very impressive takeover. So they fully populated the hive. There were a few dead bees on the landing board,

but they took it over. So they went in strong. So we had probably a five-pound swarm takeover, a colony that was queenless. That is a great way, in my opinion. You're going to do your own thing. But if you've got laying workers, You can.

I don't practice the shaking out of laying workers outside the hive. Because when you shake all your bees outside of the hive, you know what else? Can't make it back. Any young bees. Now, the argument can be made. If you've got laying workers, you haven't had any productive new bees for 21 days or more.

So in theory, they all are capable of flight. So if you want to shake them out on a bed sheet or something like that, and you just let them all fly back, the ones that fly back are foragers, the layers, those workers, I don't know that I'm not firm about a laying worker not being able to fly. So what I would like to do is come in strong. Multiple frames of brood, for example. You can install a swarm on them, do a hostile takeover. You've got a queen.

Once the queen's in, don't let them push her out. you put a queen. It's a queen excluder, but I call it the queen Includer on the landing board. So she can't be pushed out and the bees that are with her will defend her.

So there might be a little conflict in there, but remember, they're laying workers. They're expendable. That's just how I look at it. So there are a lot of ways to do kind of the same thing. And I want to thank Maro

for donating $4.99. Thank you for that. So I'll hire lots of full supers, but they just aren't capping it yet. But ready to just take the refractometer out with me and see if I can pull it uncapped. Okay, now, oh, that's from Peggy. Okay. By the way, your question should have been in all caps. Anyway, when you are looking at your honey supers and you've got a bunch of frames that are full of nectar,

maybe it's not finished honey. I highly recommend every backyard beekeeper have a, a refractometer. Get that thing calibrated too, by the way. I give a luncheon presentation every single month. And at least twice a year, we have everyone bringing in their refractometers. I bring in a calibration standard,

which is honey that I know the exact water content of, and then we calibrate everyone's refractometer. It is often the case that when you look at uncapped honey, now you're all told, this goes both ways, I hate to throw a monkey rent, in every direction. There is capped honey sometimes that is too wet. There's also often uncapped honey that is right down to like 17 or 18 percent.

And so that can work pretty darn good. So having the ability to test it on the spot out in the apiary before you pull it and take it in, let's say you're desperate to get the honey off and it's right at about 21, 22 percent. that is guaranteed to ferment. It absolutely will ferment. That's too much water. But you can take it in to your drape with your dehydrator, and you can run that down roughly at a percentage point,

a water percentage point every 18 to 24 hours by blowing fans on it and having dry heat. You don't want to overheat it. 110 is pretty decent, and that's Fahrenheit. And you can dry it down until it's acceptable. I like to see all honey. It's acceptable if a state inspector came and looked at the honey,

if it's under 19%. They would accept that. Me personally, I highly recommend you take it to 18 or lower. And that's just because we don't want to take any chance. So you get fermentation. Once it starts to ferment,

it's ruined. That's irreversible. So yes, you can often find that your uncapped honey is acceptable. It already has low enough. Likewise, capped honey. Tested anyway. make sure that it's good enough.

And I want to thank Brian Bennett, frequent viewer, commenter. Thank you, Brian, for the financial gains today. I appreciate that. Next time, I have heard of you only had two options to extract honey. Would you pick the garage or the basement? Well, that's an easy one. I'm going to pick the garage to extract honey, not the basement. Here's why.

I don't want to have to lug it up and down the basement stairs. I can do it. I just don't want to. So having an area in your garage is really good. Here's why. Extraction process. I have an extractor. The thing is on wheels.

Putting that extractor on wheels is the smartest thing I ever did. It's something myself and a member of our club, Deke Man Ross. He's an engineer. We talked about, I just want this thing on a tripod with wheels, the heavy duty utility wheels that are good. for like 400 pounds a wheel. And when the extractor is running, it'll just kind of oscillate. So it takes the pressure off of that center axle and the bearings that it's running on.

And you can just let the thing jig around. Now, here's why the garage is better than the basement. When it's done, you're going to have to wash out this big extractor. Isn't it cool if you can just open your garage door, wheel that thing outside, and wash it out next to your driveway? and then let the bees go after what's on the grass, please don't let the bees go and clean out your extractor. It's not that the bees wouldn't do a great job.

Bees don't survive very well. When they hit that broad, sticky surface, you will have a pile of dead bees in there. So just hose it out, fresh water, and it doesn't matter if the water's hot or cold, you'll rinse it out just the same, and then you're just wheeling it back inside and putting a big 55-gallon drum bag over the top of it to protect it from desks and stuff.

So that is my preferred the garage, definitely. That's what I have. I have a 24 by 32-foot garage that is just for all my bee stuff. And it's full, by the way. So no beekeeper ever complained about having too much space. But setting up a corner of that for your honey extraction process, just the utility of being able to clean things up, having access to the out of doors, and everything else.

Now I realize, let's take the other side. Let's argue with ourselves, what's the advantage of using your basement, climate control? So if you're out, that's why we kind of extract and process honey around what the weather's doing. If it's going to be in the high 80s, that as a prime candidate for a day to process honey. Because you don't have to have,

we're not high functioning, you know, facilities for honey processing. We don't have the 120 degree. By the way, Blake shook, almost 130 degree warming room, just so their pumps and everything run really efficient. I don't want to do anything like that. We just go with whatever the temperatures are outside and see what we can do and do it in that space. It's also easiest, keep in mind too. If you're lugging frames and everything you've got boxes medium supers and stuff putting those on a wagon and pulling them into your garage is easy running them down the stairs one box at a time you can have quads like tree trunks what are you doing you're not going to be able to do that as i just talked you out of it use your garage

have a slab do everything it's great uh key says i love uncapped honey so easy to extract also easy to drive you see there you go there it is i have hosea here hi fred if you only had two options attracting oh that's it that's a question i just answered see that by the way we're past an hour i didn't even get through all the questions that people asked people are going to be mad going to have anarchy on my hands since here um since verroa treatments are used on top of langstroth frames how do you treat your top bar and lay in size hives i assume exhal vapor, but do you do anything else? And if so, what methods you use? No, I don't do anything else. When it comes to treating for varroa, destruct your mites, exhalic acid vapor, is the most versatile

implementation of a miticide that you can get. It's an organic acid. It is safe with honey superzone, approved with honey superzone. And you have to wear personal protective equipment because you're vaporizing, but it works on every style of hive, including, by the way, observation hives. In my observation hive building, we put utility fans in the windows, we open the door,

we get an air circulation going through there, and I go outside, and I treat every observation hive with like salic acid vapor. It is efficient. And we also have removable trace underneath every hive, so we can see what the mite drop is.

Very handy. Keep in mind also the highest risk to the beekeeper, but you must wear full eye protection, respiratory protection, hands follow the label. So anyway, I answer that one. Next one comes from Rob from Lekanto, Florida. Finally got my two queenkeepers hive set up, two strong hives. I'm planning on adding my flow hive on top soon.

Just wondering if you might have an update on your two queenkeepers hive. Okay, so here's the thing. yes, the two queen keepers hive is working great. I'm testing something else on it. So I'm doing a microprocessing system that I needed to get the bees to work on. This is also why I started putting shredded or cheese-grated beeswax on the landing board because I needed them to finish up these plastic frames. Some people gave a lot of pushback.

They don't like plastic frames for any reason. I said, that's okay. don't use them. I have to use it because I'm testing a product. Because I'm testing a product, what I did is I rubbed bead wax all over it, which is why I did this backyard study that I wanted my viewers to participate in. If you're rubbing beeswax all over things, do the bees accept it and work it well? And what the bees did is they went up there and cleaned all the beeswax off of it and used it elsewhere in the hive. Super annoying. So then I put beeswax on the landing board, and I've boosted it, and now we're back in business.

So the two queenkeepers hive is robust. Both sides are balanced. Both sides swarmed, by the way, because I did not practice the Demoree method, but the recovery rate is alarmingly fast. They are producing surplus honey right now. So that's even with swarms after swarming. That's great.

So Kevin here says, Hi Fred, I uncapped a large run. right queen's cell to watch the queen walk out, but it was empty. Why cap an empty cell? That, you just got pranked by those nurse bees. They're always up to something. But they do, in fact, sometimes they will even work on a cell, by the way, that it's already uncapped. I'm not sure that it wasn't already kind of like a little hinge, you know, on the bottom of it, that it just looked closed up. They do sometimes seal things up, but they will also rewax with a queen in it. So they even go the opposite way. We've seen multiple queen cells,

and they're all on one of the queen cells. They want that queen out of her cell. It's obvious, and they're vibrating on it and shaking it to communicate to make sure the queen knows it's time to come out kind of. I don't know what kind of communications are going on there, but it's physical. You can see them actively kind of cheerleading the queen to come out. Meanwhile, over here is a queen chewing out of her cell, and there are workers right there. You see the head wobble. When you see that head wobble, they're working wax. They're sealing it back up while the queen is trying to come out of the cell. So bees do weird things. They don't want that queen to come out. They want that queen over there to come out. They're not stopping her at all. So not surprising that

to prank you. That was right up there with somebody that used to hand you the Wrigley's gum. You want a piece of gum. And all it was was the wrapper stuck back together and there was no gum. That's what they did because nurse bees are pranksters. That's what they do. This is being natural. Okay, I am late, but I sent an email so you may have answered, but how did you treat your layans, top our hives? Most treatments are, I just answered it. You're too late. I'm not going to say it again. I do the, so lay in size, keep in mind the frames themselves in a layens hive, seal the top.

There's no coverboard, no intercover. That's it. So this becomes a challenge when you want to feed. It also becomes a challenge if you have a treatment method that requires access to the brood. So, exhalic acid vapor is my number one choice. Now, you can also do. say you don't want to do the vapor. There's something called R-TU, ready to use axelic acid dribble. It comes premixed. Better be launched that at the North American Honeybee Expo.

I had a really nice conversation with Dr. Beck about it. I bought some with my own money. They didn't even give me the Fred doesn't discount. Anyway, so what you can do is pull apart where your brood is and dribble on the seams and push those back together. That works with top our hives. That works with lay-house. hives. And so you can do that. So as a mite treatment, the dribble method. So it saves you from being exposed to potentially hazardous vapor. You can also mix your own axelic acid dribble. One of the reasons that the RTU is going to be appealing to people is because it does not use sugar syrup. Therefore, you're not gumming up your bees. And it all, it's all premixed. So for those that are iffy and kind of nervous about mixing the correct proportions and getting the chemistry just right

R-TU satisfies that. So making your own exhalic acid sugar syrup dribble is the other option. I think it's like five grams per seam. You are going to, and by seam, I mean occupied by bees. So that's something that you would be doing. You want to get it on the nurse bees in the brood area. So, and I think it's, yeah, the dose is on the label. I'm always going to tell. to read the label but the dribble method is very easy to use and then of course you just push the frames back together so that's an alternative other than the vapor system vapor is the quickest easiest move it along and go let's see also applied grated wax had very little love for it used a small zest grater i used the small zest grater too by the way and the bees did not pay attention to it not only that some of them did get the little

zested, we're back on grading your beeswax. So the thing of it is, too, did they take it in any form? Because it is very important that the beeswax that you're trying to give back to your bees and getting them to reuse, it must have been rendered at a low rendering temperature. If you took it way about, if you're boiling water and you're throwing wax in the boiling water to create your rendered bees wax, it is exponentially less appealing to the bees to use it later. If you're only going, see, we've set up a fryer, myself and my supervisor, who's 10. we set up a friar with tight parameters so it doesn't go above 160 degrees Fahrenheit and the beeswax that produces is very aromatic. It's also fairly soft. So if you're making things out of beeswax, it would not be appealing because it won't be rigid.

If you made candles out of that on a warm day, the candles will probably bend over. But as far as using it back for the bees, for foundation, for rubbing it on things that the bees are going to use, this low-temper-endered wax is very important. So if you're trying to work out grading it, using a zester, all these different methods, first you have to establish that the bees are accepting the wax source that you're using even before you go on to all the different iterations of the size and shape of it. And the regular small cheese grater has been the most popular with the bees so far. Same wax, the only variation was using a zester or the micrograder or the actual regular cheese grater.

So you have to try that out. Fred, why not? Let's see. This is from Schuller. It says, Fred, why don't they make a commercially available aerosol spray version of varroa mite exalic acid treatments? something like that, which is simple, instead of all these complex contraptions. Well, I think right out of the gate, getting the exhalic acid to be aerosolized, sublimation is the most effective way to do that.

Aerosol needs a propellant, and it also would have to not settle or not, yeah, I'm just spitballing. I don't know. I'm not a chemist. but an aerosol can adds another level to that or an aerosol system. So I think they're trying to keep it as pure as possible because when you're using a vape system with exhalic acid, nothing is added.

It is just the exhalic acid. So when you aerosolize something, I think you have to add a propellant, you're probably going to have to add other things to keep it from just becoming solid material. but that's it. And of course I'm not part of that. There are experts,

you know, national scale experts that would be more than happy to answer those questions. And I'm sure it's something that has been considered. So, but right now the contraptions are kind of what we're stuck with just so that we can get it airborne to where it relands on all the surfaces. The point of the exhalic acid vapor is to get the particulates, airborne long enough, so it settles on as many surfaces as possible, and hopefully the

varro-destructor mites end up walking on it and getting it on their feet. They don't fully even understand how the exhalic acid is damaging the varodistructor mite and making it so that they fall off and expire. So, yep, Kevin says, thanks for Ed, the Queen of Sail was cap tight. I was pranked. Not the first time, probably not the lesson. That's right, bees are on to us. Something's happening. Your rationale seems sound. Thank you.

Yes, good. I love it when I say rational, good, helpful things. So let me get through this quick. It's too late to be quick now because it's already hour and a half in. All right, why is this worm not surviving without help? Okay, so I had a video. Oh, this was about Hive 44 when they rejected the quick. and I said that if we don't collect and hide these swarms, their chances of survival are

incredibly low. Some people just let their swarms fly. So you know the poem. The swarm in June is worth a silver spoon. Swarm in May is worth a load of hay. Swarm in July, just let them fly. I don't just let them fly. I've had good luck with late season swarm, so I don't give up on them. But anyway, what are their chances? And this can vary depending on. where you are. So loss of habitat. So here in the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania, five percent of swarms are lost initially due to weather alone. I've seen swarms stick to a tree and not budge for days on end, especially when they used to go way high and I did not yet have my 30-foot extension pole to get up there and get them with a trash can, which by the way, I just got one of

those tree top swarms a few days ago was a lot of fun. Yes, I videoed it. I hope I can get that out for you guys to see this weekend. So anyway, 5% just get lost weather and predators. So there again, we've also seen the swarms that are low to the ground or on a fence post or something like that. You know what eats them? Raccoons get them if they're on, raccoons get them if they can reach them anywhere. Raccoons will just show up and eat them. Now, raccoons more like the brood, skunks will eat all the bees that they can get their mouths on. Skunks are the worst, but thank goodness, skunks can't climb the way raccoons can.

Raccoons will take out yellow jackets out of the wazoo. It's amazing. I videoed that, too. It was a lot of fun. So predators take them out. Some of them, when they're stuck and they can't find a place to live, so habitat, places for the bees to live. So I did a little checking on this, too, by the way.

What's the chance that a swarm has? When you look at beescape. PSU.edu, it also tells about feral habitat. In other words, if a swarm takes off without a beekeeper, how much habitat exists in your area that the bees could occupy. You know what the best trees used to be for the bees here in the state of Pennsylvania? Beechwood trees.

And we don't have a lot of them anymore. And the thing of it was, beechwood trees, the tree would stay healthy but also could rot through the center so it created these cavities so bees could move in. and we've got apparently larger stands of trees now than existed back in 1970. The difference is the kinds of trees that are large are not prone to have big open spaces in them that a swarm could occupy.

So the bees, when they're not managed by a beekeeper and they're trying to go feral somewhere, they do not have a lot of options to live, and this is why the chances are so low. 77% of swarms out on their own fail in the first winter. 23% of feral colonies. This is a scientific estimate. 23% survival rating. That's the potential. Because we've also seen sometimes a swarm that collects on a tree branch,

never finds a place to live, and then they end up building comb. And then people take pictures of the comb. Oh, look at this. At the end of the year, you find just the comb on the tree. Because as soon as it starts freezing at night, they just die from exposure. So, yeah, the chances are not good.

And so you are actually rescuing bees when you collect a swarm. Their chances of getting a 40-liter cavity and surviving winter are very low. Worse at the end of the year. Late season swarms are just the worst. You can write them off. But I also don't follow the let them fly in July. I still collect them and hide them because I want to be fed food when I come back in the house. I don't want my wife mad at me.

Okay, so next one is, speaking of honey harvesting, what do you do to fill your jars? Is a backyard beekeeper with an average of 50 to 80 gallons of honey a year? I can't justify that. This is from W3BKY tax 73. All right, you won't be impressed because my honey extraction and bottling process is not sophisticated. So this is why I recommend backer beekeepers

as soon as you collect honey, micro, even as half a super, process it right away. Now, the easiest processing of honey that I have is, of course, a lot of people don't want to hear about it, but the flow supers, flow hives, it's unavoidable. It comes right on the hive into the jar, honey processing is done. It's finished. End of the year, if you've got flow hive supers on any Langstroth, 10 frame, or 8 frame hive, flow supers at the end of the year can be harvested just like other supers.

You have to put a queen, not a queen. You have to put a bee escape underneath of it. Cereo cell makes my favorite ones. Put that under the flow super, evacuate all the bees out of it, take the whole thing inside, open all the cells at once, all the frames at once. And you can train it because at the end of the year, we're not getting the separation of the different flavors

because at the end of the year it's all Aster's and Goldenrod. So that's the final one. And so having them all inside on a rack dripping, and I just decided for kicks, just let it drip for days afterwards in that space. I got another quart of honey out of a flow super just by letting the little slow drips keep going. So I was wasting all that. But anyway, my process is extract the honey, put in the honey extractor, run it into through a filter. I use the 600 filter, and I run it through that into these five-gallon buckets,

bring the five-gallon buckets inside, warn them up in my dehydrator, which is 20 feet from where I'm sitting right here. And while it's at 110 degrees Fahrenheit, I run it out of that honeygate in the bucket after I've tested with what, a refractometer. I like to get it nice and dry, but while it's hot, run it right into the air. jars and I'm done. So here's my method. I take that five gallon bucket. I take it in the kitchen. I set it on the kitchen island. I tip it up on a piece of wood that I made and sit there with a stool and I put it one jar after another because we just like to do that. That's my system.

There's no automated anything other than the extractor, which is electric. For years, I didn't have an electric extractor i just hand cranked it that's what i thought you know nephews and stuff before just to crank the honey extractor for you but now it's all electric but that's it it's very unsophisticated so that's it we're trying to wrap it up here okay demery question my bees backfilled the upper deep box as the brood emerged not capped yet and i want to use the frames to do a SWSWC on the round of Demery. Any suggestions to not waste their work? So for those who don't know what the Demery is,

you're pulling brood frames out. When your bees are down in your Langstrath deep, eight or ten frame, and you have a queen excluder above it, that's important. You're going to pull, because they're getting congested, and you run the risk of that being a trigger for them to swarm. So you're going to decongest the brood area. You're going to pull frames of cap brood up above and let them emerge from that.

Workers, of course, can go back down through the queen excluter and on you go. George, who came up with the Keepers Hive, they have a utility box above the brood box, and then your other box is even above that. So now we have three boxes for the Dermarie split because they want to even move the pheromone even further away. you don't want to move eggs up there you want capped brood preferably so you're decongesting you have to bring another frame down so we have in this case uh they have backfilled the upper deep box as the brood emerged so it's back filled with honey i would put that honey right down into because you're doing demery so you've satisfied their need for a reduction in brood uh and then of course

they'll consume the honey that's right next to the brood and then they'll start to use those cells for brood again so having the ready honey right there is okay i think i don't think that's the end of the world and if it's uncapped they use uncapped cells first capsules of honey last are we talking about swarm collections okay francis freda had a swarm this past week no reason for them to do this password I said was because they had the genetics of and not hear your thoughts please their nectar flow is over you cannot always stop a swarm hate to be the one to say it but the only way it's the problem is with swarm management swarm reduction swarm control it requires frequent inspections during a

period where your visa for bringing the swarm and if they start to make queen cells. If they're already making queen cells, they've made a decision and you can sequester your queen by pulling a frame of brood with a queen on it and another frame of resources and put that in a nucleus hyps and insurance policy until you fight the fight and prevent them from swarming because they won't swarm without the queen. You've already removed the queen and you have to be joining on the spot to do it. When the queen is gone, of course, they're going to try to make another one and you're going to hunt out all the queen's cells until they've lost the means to make a replacement queen. This is very hands-on beekeeping. It can be very challenging, and if you're not super

careful, you can miss a queen cell and off they can go. But while the queen is out of there, you're also creating a brood break and you're going to get some reduction in brood but hopefully avoid swarming there are so many methods that people try to implement to stop swarming they can't do it without a queen so um that's the best that you can do here's a question nodding caps but i'll answer it anyway this is from atlas 4225 read any info on aged honey last year or better having enhanced flavor i can't imagine why the flavor of the honey would change or be enhanced after being on the shelf for a while. Honey on the shelf does undergo change.

By the way, the only way to 100% stop honey from change is to put in the freezer. It doesn't freeze, but it arrests all degradation. Alice says again last year's honey rotates like liquid flour, whereas it was just sweet and tasty last year. So I don't know. If it tastes good, it tastes good. I don't know. I am the worst.

I'm not a honey, so I'm all ye. I don't know one honey from another. I was never thinking that honey was super awesome until every once in a while. Sometimes we have a lot of hyss up out here. And sometimes you can taste the hyssup in the honey. And I think that tastes really good. But if your honey is tasting better, I don't think it improves. proves with age like, you know, alcohol and stuff like that.

I think it actually degrades. So the freshest honey is to me the best. But if it's better after a year, I don't know why that happens other than it does undergo change. Honey does not lighten with age. It darkens with age. And it does go through changes. But I can't say.

If it tastes really good, you're lucky. That's good to go. Okay. So, man, Luke, you know what? trying to get out here. Okay, so I will answer Luke's question. Any ideas on the real value of intercovers or not? Seems like a lot of YouTube beekeepers at least just don't use them.

Well, so you have to think of it this way. Intercover, outer cover. What's the purpose? So if you're a commercial beekeeper, you're going to find the intercover's gone away. It is just a migratory cover. You're just one. So it's on the outside.

Some people like I've noticed, Ian Stepler, Canadian Beatkeeper's vlog, he uses double bubble or reflect text. He'll put a sheet of that down and then the outer cover on top of that. The purpose of your inner cover is so that your outer cover doesn't stick down. And the reason that you need the inner cover in general, when it initially came out, so that's what we're talking about, the inner cover was there and it has an oval opening. in the middle of it. A lot of people thought that was for feeding your bees. It's not that inner cover was a Johnny on the spot tool. It had a bee escape that fit into that.

So when you needed to clear out a super or something, you took that inner cover off, you lifted up the super, the honey super, you put the inner cover under it and it had the bee escape built in and then they escaped through it. So it had some utility aspect there. The other part of it is the intercover

get sealed with propolis, the outer cover does not. So you're not going to pull up an outer cover and have a problem prying it up because remember it's telescoping, which meant it would overlay your top box. So you didn't have a way to get your tool up under that to pry it up. So you had to have something to keep it from sticking down and the inner cover provides that. For me personally, the inner cover provides insulation opportunity. and it provides a feeding opportunity. There are a bunch of different ways to keep bees that shocks people.

If you use an inverted jar to feed your bees. Without an intercover, you can have to set that directly on the frames to feed them. I would much prefer the control that an inner cover offers for that. So we can also just close it off. So it can be insulation, creates a barrier, provides feed opportunity, let's put another box around it so that now I can offer fondant in winter or a rapid round. Or I can take one of these. This is a gallon feeder that would sit right over the little hole on the inner cover.

If I didn't have an inner cover there, the bees would be all over the space and they could make, you know, burr comb everywhere. But this would have a medium box around it. and of course an insulated outer cover. So as far as for me personally, so that's all it's going to be is a personal choice of what equipment you like to use and why. And the intercover just provides me with an opportunity

to create a utility space where I can feed the bees if I want to, insulation from outside temperatures. So if we only have just the outer cover, the outer cover better be insulated because where I live, just an outer cover is going to get as cold as the outside. The interior is going to hit the dew point. Condensation is going to form on that inner cover, on the inside of the outer cover, and you're going to have ice and condensation on your cluster.

You need to be able to insulate that, in my opinion, and not ventilate. So that's another polarizing thing among beekeepers is to ventilate through the top of the hive, in wintertime to evacuate some moisture or to seal it up, much as they would any cavity that they choose and control on their own, which is key, and have no condensation or ventilation directly above your bees in wintertime. And this happens through year after year after year of practice.

And so it is an extra piece of gear. So if you're a commercial beekeeper, If you don't need intercovers, why do you want them? You don't want a bunch of stock that you have to haul around, store, and things like that. So for me, the insulated intercovers, they say on year-round, it doesn't go into storage. The outer cover, again, is just protection, and it keeps things from getting glued down and provides the utility space. So that's just personally why I do it. Every beekeeper is going to have their own answer as to why they want one or don't want one.

So that's pretty much it. Lambrick Farm, does Basswood Honey crystallize fast or slow? Slow. It's light. He likes particulates. By the way, the darker the honey, the more particulates are in it. So if you've got buckwheat, honey, it's a dark amber. It has a lot of particulates in it.

And the potential of more particulates, the more particles for crystals to form on and for your honey to set or become crystallized. So like probably the longest lasting is clover honey with no particulates in it. And bass was right up there. Last a long time. So that's Lended. So I think you guys, I'm going to have to wrap it up here. I think I've answered just about everybody's questions. I want to thank you for being with me today.

And I know a lot of us are facing high heat next week. Don't forget. Lots of water for your bees. hive visors if you've got them find ways to shade your bees that are in direct sunlight and we're going to be getting into the highs because with all that heat it's going to make everything easy to work so this is a time to inspect them also and so i want to thank you and i hope you have a great weekend thanks for being here and joining us live and if you have other questions that strike you later just write them down the comment section and just in closing closing i want to

say that you can always go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, leave a comment, give me information, and see what you'd like me to be talking about next Friday. There are swarm videos coming out this week. I have a lot to share with you. So a lot of options, very inexpensive ways to manage swarms and get them into hives. And I'll share those observations in the coming days. So thanks again. Now if I can just see how to stop this in the stream. Take care.