The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Pre Recorded LIVE Stream Q&A #352 with Frederick Dunn

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

This is the live stream Question and Answer Session YouTube:  https://youtube.com/live/jADhemll-yI?feature=share

So hello and welcome. I'm going to go ahead and start off with my normal blurb before we get into the questions from any viewers. And don't forget to let people know that if they have a question for me in the comment section, please put it in all caps. You're not shouting today. It's just how I'll know the questions for me. And they're not just talking amongst yourselves. So hello and welcome. Happy Friday.

This is back our beekeeping questions and answers episode number 350. Today's Friday, April the 24th of 2006. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm glad that you're here. If you're catching up late here and you want to know what's going on, you probably can look down in the video description below, but generally when it's a live stream, we don't break it down by topics, but we might, you never know.

So look for that. If you have a question in the future that you like to have considered for one of my regular Q&As, please go to the way to be.org, click on the page marked contact, and you'll see the form there. You can fill that out. So, we have a live group here today, and I've got pop-ups. It's for the first time. And for anyone that's curious, if anyone's naughty or out of line, Keith Spellman,

half-tracks and honey is in the house, and he will politely show you the door. So I'm sure you want to know what's going on outside. So I'll tell you, it's sunny, it's hot, and it's super nice. out there. I'm in here just for you because things are going to turn bad tomorrow. And you're probably wondering where I am because it's different from where you are. I'm in the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania, where life is perfect. And the bees are above average. So let's see, Saturday, tomorrow, it's going to rain. So it's time to seed things, probably, depending on where

you are. I'm holding off unless it's the cold, hardy seeds that need to be stratified. stratified. We planted a whole bunch of different clovers and things like that that are definitely already coming up. And the supervisor was here yesterday. And last night, we released the jumping spider. I know you came to a B channel to hear about that.

But she's out there. And so what else is going on? We did a recent interview this past week that I wish you would check out. There's a scientific study performed by Adam Strickland, which dealt with adding chlorox bleach, chlorine bleach, my chlorox, to your sugar syrup. What impact that had on his bee colonies?

So it's a published study, and it was very interesting. You can listen to that interview. And what else is going on? Oh, we like to talk about swarm risk right now. It's high. I know a lot of you have already collected swarms, and that's fantastic. We have not had a swarm here yet. but we're ready for it.

So 90% is what I'm giving it. In the coming week, when it gets really hot, it is going to be swarm days. So 10 and 2, think of that. Hands on the steering wheel. 10 and 2. Between 10 and 2, those are your highest potential times

for a swarm to leave a beehive. So it's time to check things out. So for those of you who are checking in just now, remember all caps, if you have a question for me, and if you don't have a question for me, I'm going to go right into the previously submitted topics. What else should I say?

Oh, it's a podcast also. That'll be delayed, though, because of the live stream, it'll be a podcast at Podbean. Or you can just Google the way to be podcasts, and you'll find that. Also, I think that's it. I think it did everything I'm supposed to. So I'm going to jump right in with my very first question of the day, which was submitted during the past week, and it comes from Hunting Lady. and the question is I've been importing good quality bees since I moved here to southeast New Mexico.

I want to continue keeping bees, but it is like sweeping sand from the beach. Any ideas of how to build an enclosure for bee breeding? So the African-ice honey bees are taking over apparently there. And I don't have a magic method for controlling the breeding of your bees, particularly in an area where the genetics are already heavily loaded with Africanized honeybees. And if you don't know what that is, you get highly defensive stock. And some parts of the United States are really loaded with that. Where I am, here in the northeastern part, we just don't have them.

When we do, they're brought up in packages and spring, things like that. So from southern states. If you want to control the breeding and your backyard beekeeper is very hard. So I'm going to cop out on this one and just say, try to source your queens from someone else who has the mellow stock that you want, the known genetics. Because the options are things like instrumental insemination. And you really can't just turn your queens loose and hope for the best if you're in an area like that. And breeders would have outyards that have drones in them and they would low the areas. So the drone congregation areas have more of their genetics.

but not easy to do as a backyarder. You're kind of stuck with what's going on in your own environment, your own neighborhood. Some people want to control the genetics and put a queen on a string and put her on a balloon and fly her out over near a drone congregation area. This works against genetic selection. By the way, here's why. Queens should be flying high and fast. We want the drones that could catch up to a high, fast-flying queen to be healthy and to compete.

And this is the best way to get the best genetics. And unfortunately, if that means that the African-ized honey bees are outflying, the friendlier, calm, more sedate bees, then it's time to go to something like Bee Weaver in Texas and get some of their stock or get carniolins or go to one of the big sellers and make sure you get stock that you want. That's pretty much the way it's going to be. So I see a lot of people here.

I want to welcome you all. I don't want to name everyone individually because then I'll forget somebody and then you'll be mad at me and you'll unsub and give me a thumbs down and all that stuff. So I'm just going to say hello and welcome to the whole gang that's in the chat section.

And just a friendly reminder, if it's for me, type it in all caps. And I will notice. We'll talk about things. Whatever's on your mind. Okay, so the next question today comes from Darwin, Yugari. It says, thanks for all the information.

How do you do an inspection in a hive with a brood box and two honey deeps? So do you inspect every single box? Thanks. So here's the difference. If I know already pretty much what's going on in the honey supers, but I like to look at them. So I'll crack the top, see what the loading is. See if they need expansion or more importantly, see if we need to remove some capped honey frames. Because as a backyard beekeeper, that's one of the things I like to do. Instead of adding boxes, when I open the super,

and it's got capped honey in it. I like to pull those frames of cap honey and do micro harvesting. This time of year in particular, because it's a lot of fun, and it'll get the supervisor off my back who apparently has clients who are waiting for honey, even though he has honey. He sold all the comb honey. Cut comb honey. It's sold out.

That's pretty amazing. But anyway, I inspect it all. Now, let's say there's a queen exoluter in there. Then I just want to know whether the honey super is almost full because we want to keep up with that. so we don't have a trigger for swarming. And then I go straight to the bottom box. And there is something called the hive super lifter that you can clamp onto your honey super is up to two above your brood box,

assuming you have a deep brood box. And you can actually just tip them out of the way. University of Guelph also has a method where it's almost like a truck cart, you know, for moving furniture and things around. They just put the whole hive. They put it right up against it and tilt the whole thing back. and then they just pull the boxes apart and get directly to the ones that they need to, leaving the rest of them together.

That was pretty interesting. And so there's a lot of ways to do it. But me personally, I look to see if there's enough resources and where their status is. Then I go straight to the brute. Horizontal hide, super easy, wherever it's the hottest. That's where the breed is. Go straight in there and make sure you don't roll a queen when you pull your frames up. So look, we have something in all caps from Home Steady Farm.

When is it okay to bring the queen down to the bottom brood bots? Tempts, amount of bees, resources. For me here in the state of Pennsylvania, next week, it's because we're putting the super zone. So it's kind of in concert with putting honey superts on. Since we're going to get in the hive anyway, this is when you want to do as many of the chores as possible. And so what's being referred to here is finding the queen,

who's in the top of your hives now, likely, because that's what the brood is, and now that things are warming up, they start to move down. If you've got single brood box management, they're already there. And I did that with a bunch of bees this year. Single broodg box management is pretty darn easy, and most of them made it through winter. Some of them died.

So, let's say they're in a medium super, and the brood is up there, and the queen is up there. They're also partially down in the next box below. So with this method, instead of rotating boxes. Taking the top box, moving at the bottom. Bottom box, move it to the top, which some people do. Good for them.

I have started last year, putting the queen excluder in, collecting the queen, put her underneath of it, and then that pushes all the brood down below the queen excluder, and they backfill with honey. And it doesn't even matter that those frames have been used for brood, which turns the frames darker, tougher, they're brown. That's not for honey harvesting. That's for the bees.

to go into winter with. So I'm okay with that. And so next week is the time to do it. In fact, next week here where I am, temperatures are pretty consistently in the high 60s, low 70s, although we're getting a whole bunch of days in the high 50s coming up. It's actually prime, and here's why. It's something I want to do in combination with looking for swarm cells, because if they're already stimulated to swarm, moving the queen down below, decongests the brood area. It also may cause the workers to turn against even the cells that they've already started building, and they've seen them chew them out, chew them away when the stimulus goes away. We have high protein coming in, a lot of pollen, and high nectar.

So this is prime swarm time. So moving the queen down there, also decongest that. Let's see what else is accomplished. They migrate out of the cells as soon as they emerge, and they go right down through the queen excluder. I like the metal queen excluders, 4.2 millimeter space. So depending on where you are, you're just going to have to follow your weather and look at your landing boards. If there's a bunch of bees piled on the front of your hives right now because there's so much nectar going in, it's time to super and it's time to evaluate them and make sure they're not congested and that they're not getting ready to swarm.

If you find swarm cells, you're going to have to take some actions. So the next one is from at DVSMP, how important is an entrance reducer on a fresh package. I'm feeding my three highs, but haven't put a reducer on first time beekeeper. Again, well, congratulations on being a beekeeper for the first time. I keep entrance reducers on. I can't say all the time because some of them right now

don't have entrance reduces on, but they have an entrance that's only three-eighths of an inch high. So this is the magic number for me. Three-eighths of an inch high, three inches wide. That's what I reduce to, and I leave it there. I don't even take it off. In fact, I'm overdue for putting entrance reducers on some hives that have pulled some robbing screens off of. So that's what I do, and it's now.

So Cindy wants to know what hardiness zone am I? I'm in Hardiness Zone 5. If you go, now, we're in what's considered a microclimate, because even north of me, it's actually warmer, which makes no sense. But I'm at 1,300 feet above sea level, drive 10, 15 minutes to the north, and they're at 500 feet above sea level. So we're much cooler up here. And if I want plants to survive, I shop and look for plants that are zone five. North of me, it's actually zone six. And these are ag zones for hardiness. So let me see what else. Do to do to do to do. Well, there's another one. When groved, win-groved best way to introduce a mated queen into a queenless hive. Great question.

Maided queen, queenless hive. We don't want her to get attacked by the bees, and we want her to go into production if we can. There is something called a queen introduction cage, by the way. Since she's already mated, and if you can put some nurse bees on a frame and get her in there, she's protected from being killed by bees that might reject her. You can also just put your mated queen in the queen cage,

one of these candy plug put her right inside and make them eat through the candy while they get acquainted you can also do a lot of interpreting of their behavior towards her if they immediately go to the queen and they're sticking their tongues out they're feeding her if this is an inexpensive queen I practice direct release after I look at the way they're behaving around her if it's a if it's a valuable expensive queen I put her in one of these queen introduction cages. This is a queen introduction cage. It looks like a queen isolation cage, but it's not because these parts are so small, even workers can't get through it. So what do you put in here with the queen that you're introducing to a colony that you're afraid might attack

and kill her? Well, look, the cap comes off. This would be a frame of capped brood. Hopefully you've got that. Now you're putting a queen in there, so it's probably most of the brood is at that stage. You can find a frame that's mostly capped. Shake all the bees off of the frame. Capped brood put in here. Put the queen in here center up this frame. The queen goes down inside.

You have to be very careful about putting this lid on because if the queen is on the top, you can smash your queen. Now, when she's in here, there's nothing but brood and the queen. There will be a percentage of the colony of bees. that will feed this queen through these bars, but they can't get to her. See if they wanted to kill her, they have to grab onto her, and they bite with their mandibles, and they try to chew her apart, they chew her wings off and all that kind of stuff. But now we've got brew that will emerge in here.

That doesn't know any other queen. See, they're brand new. So then they start to attend to her, and as they emerge, she starts actually laying in these cells, and then these nurse bees that are just emerging now, they're still in this cage, are being also fed by other nurse bees in the colony. This is the safest way I know of to introduce an expensive queen into your hive. This takes up two frame spaces. So another thing it lets you do while she's in there,

once they've emerged and they're feeding the queen, she'll develop her own retinue, which are the bees that care for the queen inside this cage also. And you'll be able to see if she starts to lay what the pattern is. And again, they'll be passing resources through these bars for trophylaxis from the other nurse bees in the hive, and they will be feeding and nurturing any brew that starts inside of here. Once you have that, and she has her pheromone,

because remember this physical contact through the bars, they're going to spread her pheromone through, and you don't see aggression towards her anymore. You take the cover off. You leave the queen on the frame that's carefully centered, so you're not rolling here when you take this out, and you take this off, and you put it in the hive, and you're in business. Where can you get a frame like that?

Better be. Mention my name. And you will not get a discount, but it's fun just to say you want the friend done discount, see what happens. But that's it. It's called a queen introduction cage, which is different from a queen isolation cage. So I hope that helps. Next question is from Ross Wagner. Do bees find a home, then swarm, or swarm, then find a home. I was on my yard the second they started to swarm and successfully put them in a dead out.

So here's what they do. It's competition. It is the Honeybee Democracy, which is the title of a book by Dr. Thomas Seeley. And the scouts have already been out inspecting. So if you've got spaces that you're preparing for swarms to move into, they should be prepared and available right now here in the United States. So the scouts check it out and they pick a place. Even before they've left the hive, even before they've bivouacked on a branch,

they have their ideas about where they want to go. that can change. Obviously, it changes when a beekeeper finds them and rehives them into something else. So when that happens, the scouts come back, they get all upset because nobody wanted to do what they wanted to do, but then they ultimately find their colony and join them.

And if you took them somewhere else entirely, those scouts will come back and just go back to the original colony that they emitted from. So, yeah, they already know they've inspected, they're kind of ready to go. I have not seen Queen Introduction Cages sold on Amazon, but I'm sure they could come from a lot of different places. Let's see.

So that's it for the swarms. 21st B is here. Remember if your comment is for me or your question is for me, it needs to be in all caps or I'm going to miss it. Okay. Wingrove says, thank you, Mr. Dunton. You are welcome. Huntington lady says, frame, not cage.

Okay. I don't know what we're talking about. Queen introduction frame? I don't know. There are frames that have queen cages built into them. I have one. I have an experimental version right back here that I've not tested in the B-yard yet.

but anything that keeps the workers away from the queen while she's getting acclimated is good for introduction and you need to monitor them. Homesteady Farms says is doing a OA vape, for those of you don't know, that's excelling acid vaporization treatments every five to seven days for three to four treatments effective this time of year. We're about a month behind you weatherwise here in the mid coast of Maine. When it comes to oxalic acid vaporization treatments, I have my own methods, and they involve isolating the queen, of course. And that's, of course, time consuming.

But you can do the whole thing in three in 21 days and get maximum efficacy in just three treatments. So, but it involves the queen introduction, not queen introduction, but queen isolation cages. and put the queen in there on a frame of drawn comb that doesn't have anything in it. And she starts laying her eggs on that comb, and she's in a cage seven days from that time. Because the seventh day after that, you risk them capping over, and that's the point at which the road instructor might get into the cells under the cappings. We do an OA treatment, so that seven days in, take the queen out, take that frame out, because now it's capped brood.

Put that in the hive. Take another frame of uncapped drawn comb. Put that in the frame. Put the queen in that frame. So that's the second time you transferred the queen into a queen isolation cage. And the workers all freely go through there and she starts laying there again.

So this is brood management. We want to get all of the dispersal phase of road destruction mites that we can. So at the end of the next seven days while she's in that one. So now that's 14 days. Before they cap those, we do an axelic acid vaporization treatment.

So that's number two. Now we can let the queen out when they start capping those cells because no more dispersal phase mites are available to go in there. And other cells in the hive, the rest of the hive, are still have emerging brood

which may have varodistrictor mites. So seven days after that, that's the 21st day. We do another exhalic acid vaporization treatment, and we just got 96% or better, statistically, of all the varod destructor mites in that hive, and everything is going. Plus, you did not do a brood break or a brood stop. We're still in production the whole time. So that's what I do.

And I actually did a whole procedure and wrote it on my website, which is the way to be.org. And I was actually looking for that, because I wanted to spruce it up now that the cages have been improve. Some of the isolation cages are two frame holders. That's what this is. Queen isolation, not queen introduction. See how thick it is. It holds two frames. And this is how we control the brood without shutting it down. And it has to be timed. And that's the best way to knock out your varro destructor mites. Then in Oven, it doesn't require continual every five-day treatments because we've controlled the queen and we know exactly what's capped and not capped. And dispersal phase mites and we're taking them out. It works. It works really well. I have an inspection coming up.

In fact, I got a call from the inspector today for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. And she's coming here to learn about a bunch of different styles of hives and how to manage and get into them for inspection. So it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to that. But I also expect any mite counts and I'm going to invite her to do for a director, Mike counts. And we're going to find out they're extremely low. So, what now? This is Davis Acres, Dancing Bees, Fred. How do I transition from a double deep to single deeps?

I'm in Michigan. Oh, that's an easy one. Double deep to single deeps. We would take the single deep, the bottom one, the one that you want to be your brood box, put a queen excluder on it, find the queen, put her below the queen excluder in that bottom box, and then eventually they,

the remaining brood that's up in that second box, they emerge, they come out of there and they get down below. The only ones that can't get through are the drones. So you do a couple of inspections to get that. But then when you do that, you leave that queen excluder in place over that single brood bottom box.

And that's an eight or a 10 frame. They seem to function pretty much the same. They seem to succeed pretty much the same. And then above that are all honey supers for the rest of the year. So that's like the easy. easiest way to do it. You can find a frame that the queen is already on and already tending to brood there and swap it out for a center frame that's in the bottom box and just put it right down there and the nurse bees go with her. So it's a lot of fun,

easy to do. And everything above that then is of course honey supers. Now I like to make sure that I have a medium box at least of honey to get them through winter. But last winter, I dragged my feet and abandoned my own method, time-proven method, single deep, medium honey, super, cap full of honey, all through winter. And I took a chance, and I just put them down in the bottom box. And I stopped taking anything from the hive and did that consolidation late September. So there's still time. Goldenrod Astors, plenty of resources still coming in.

It was a gamble. They backfilled all their available space in that single brood. box and then we put an insulated inner cover feeder feeder shim and closed it up and hoped for the best and most of them went through winter that works single box management is very easy okay so now hunting ladies seven fred i had to do a deposition for a wrongful death in the oil fields on tuesday it was awful all day telling lawyers the same thing over and over oil company knew about killer bees, one man dead. When people die as a result of bee stings,

that is a profound loss. And I don't know what to say about that. I know, by the way, that this is an area where a lot of Africanized bees are and is very unfortunate. I don't know what to say about that. Okay. So we did the brood box thing.

But here's the thing. I will say something about it. If you're a beekeeper and you have hives under your control and you know that they're dangerous and you decide to keep those dangerous bees anyway and somebody subsequently loses their life and it's proven that those bees came from you, I'm pretty sure that it's your fault.

So I'll say that. We do not keep dangerous bees here at all. I just wouldn't. Okay, so this is from John. It says it seems that my horizontal hive is less than half used. Can I divide it into two with a divider and cutting in a second entrance? You can. Yep, sometimes the bees will only use half of it.

If it's my design, my boxes are about five feet long for the horizontal long Langstroth hive. And you certainly can, and they do really well. But here's how it backfires. they don't use the whole length of the hive. At least it feels that way, and they're not building up fast enough. So we add another entrance. And I would recommend, you know,

instead of cutting a slat in this case, because my entrances are, you know, the little rectangle-shaped entrances. If you do it at the other end, you could just drill a hole, a three-quarter-inch hole, make sure it's angled down and out. So, you know, rain and stuff runs out.

And if you start a small colony back there, I would do like a nucleus hive in the back and use it as maybe even a resource hive, but you can certainly put them at opposite ends. The entrances can face the same side. South facing entrance is the best, in my opinion. And they do build up pretty darn fast. So the horizontal hives are all venting really heavy right now. They already have a lot of nectar in them.

But also here's what tends to happen once you start to multi-stock those. long hives, then they build up and run out of room on you. So then you could just take out the divider board, the follower board, and merge the two if they got that big. And then, of course, they're going to fight it out and decide which one of the queens are going to keep. So that's it. But it does work because it creates common air, particularly in winter.

It produces a common area that's ambient temperature that doesn't feel like outside air. So they have some communal benefit there. do do do do do do why do p r beekeepers welcome the African gene this is from B more Jose why do PR beekeepers welcome the African gene I don't know I don't know who welcomes it it's oh and John says it's my design that's an excellent design if you're listening and watching right now and you want to know where John got is out Outstanding Long Langstroth Hive plans, you go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark, plans and drawings, and they're right there, free to use.

And not just that. There's a lot of photos there of a lot of other people who have made their Long Langstroth Hives, and you can see what they did, how they innovated, and what kind of craftsmen they are, and how outstanding it is. So they're a lot of fun. But so what else? Let's see. I think that's it.

remember if it's for me, B. Kathy, that better not be for me. It has to be in all caps. Otherwise, I can't respond to you. All right, let me look at it real quick. The UV entrance you showcased a few months ago is on the box that has a tract in my first swarm of the season in southwest Michigan. Thanks for sharing the information on the product. That is good news, B, Kathy. You know what?

I wish I had one of those here that I could showcase right now. Oh, what's this? that just, I don't even know how these got there. This is what we're talking about. These are ultraviolet infused 3D printed entrances. This is part of a study that was done that was published in the American Bee Journal. And you put this over your entrance. And the bees will see it from way off.

And I forget the statistics, there's like 86% more scout visits to entrances that have this on them. and then those that do not. And now you just heard it right here unscripted that they actually work. So there you go. Good stuff. Now I do recommend you don't leave it on. So in other words, after the bees move in,

after this thing works really well, take that off and put it away. Because we don't care about them more scouts coming to it after it's been occupied by a swarm. So once the swarm moves in, take off. That's it. So that's a good one. And so, see, I answered that even though the question was not in all caps, which it should be. Okay, 21st B.

Someone mentioned to me that Fred's long lang design is great. That is a very sharp individual. And that happens to be an opinion that I approve of all the way. And it was not for me if somebody wants to suggest that. Okay. Here we go. This question comes from MC. TG popcorn.

It says two swarms thus far. Today, large swarm exited a hive. Some moved into a high tree limb. The majority in the air returned to the hive with massive numbers on the front and beneath, flapping with rumps in the air. About 30

minutes later, all bees, including those on the branch, were back inside the hive like nothing happened. Any thoughts about what's going on when this happens? Yes. Here's an example of an area where the queen can assert her position on the rest of the swarm. Sometimes the queen just doesn't leave. When you, by the way, when you're looking at a colony that's ready to swarm and you hear them,

and by the way, I get told a couple times a day now, the supervisor or my wife, there's a swarm, sounds like it's warm. It's just bees that are really doing a lot of work. However, when you see the bees hovering outside the hive and they're just hanging and they seem to go in and come back out and go in and come back out. And some of them are flying already to a branch. That tells me that the queen has not left the hive yet. And sometimes you'll see the queen come out on the landing board, act like she's going to leave, and then do a U-turn and go right back inside the hive. And if they can't get her to go, then they all have to eventually just come back to the hive. So maybe she needs more time at Planet Fitness. Maybe she's a little heavy. Sometimes,

a queen that's prematurely pushed out of the hive, flies right off the landing board and lands in the grass, and then you get a big clump of bees in the grass. That's an easy swarm to collect, by the way. But she just was too heavy to fly very far. So that's my number one take on that, is that the queen just wasn't ready to go, or she changed her mind. And that's why they left. Great opportunity to collect the queen, by the way. You control the queen, you control the colony, and swarm manipulation through pheromones,

queen mandibular pheromones is a lot of fun. By the way, for those of you who are trying to collect swarms this year, that you know it's going to happen, please get the Blythwood B Company's swarm commander, wherever you get it, and start to mark your favorite branch that you want them to collect on. Because you'll find that by putting that pheromone on that branch early, that the scouts and when they fly out and they're looking for a bivouac spot and downwind is where your hives are so the smell comes to them then they'll all go and land of that branch more times than not it doesn't work every single time but how nice is it to walk outside and have a swarm on a branch it's five feet off

the ground make sure it's a strong enough branch to support them i have my branches picked out they're already marked uh swarm commander is the heat in the kitchen It just works. I obviously don't get anything for saying that. All right. No more questions for me. Let me move on. This is from Tim.

It says that in Campbellford, Ontario, Canada, I'm building a horizontal hive from your plans, and I added the shim box. I was thinking it would be handy for mic control and possibly feeding. My question is, should I put number eight mesh on top of the shim area, or just leave it open. I currently have my B access at the bottom of the shim box. Or is the idea just to leave that area open for now?

My winter plan would be to put insulation in there for winter. Okay, so we're talking about the Long Langstroth Hive again. And you have the option. The prints show some different configurations there. So one is to have number eight screen at the bottom. And I'd like to see that concentrated at the first third. There's no reason to run screen through the entire length of a horizontal hive. And the reason for that is your brood is mostly towards the entrance.

And that's where using the screen to passively collect Verro Destructor mites that fall through it. And its passive might control. You have nothing to lose. And then you have a little opening in the back below the screen that you can pull your trays out and swap them out. The option is to just leave it open. So what happens is the 2x12 sidewall. The frames will come down near the bottom. If you add the shim, and the shim is nothing but a 2x4 extension to the bottom.

And there's lots of airspace down there. And if your bees decide to build drone comb, they'll do it on the bottom of those deep Langstroth frames. And then we have another means of, of course, controlling for a instructor mites. And if we do that, I would just leave it open. And then when you do your inspections, you'll notice that it's really clean. And that you can harvest beeswax for the drone comb. and you're also collecting drones and noting how many varro-destructor mites were with them. Thanks to Dr. Zachary Llamas for those studies, by the way.

So here is Kevin, and he says, my apiary, New York, is next to a pond that is treated with herbicide and algicides. Are these treatments harmful to my apiary in any way? They will not take any water that I leave out for them. That is super annoying. If I had the ability to influence someone not to put herbicides in the pond, so the question is, what's the impact on the bees? Okay, so these are, let's keep it in perspective. These are water, we call them water bees,

because they're not the ones that are wringing nectar, so they're also not feeding other bees, but water's important for all of them. In a perfect world, they wouldn't be using the herbicides on that pond, and you're already doing what I would suggest, which is have alternate water sources around. And you need to find out exactly what the herbicides are that are being used, and you're going to have to do some research to find out if there are known impacts on your honeybees. Because if there are, then you can use that research that you find,

and then, at least for future applications, hope to influence the person that's putting that stuff in pond water. I have a natural earth pond here. I've never treated it with anything, and it's clear. It's good stuff. So there are options, but definitely you want to do that research. And Homesteady Farms gave me $9.99.

Thank you for that. So this one is Riots, 1970. How would you introduce a virgin queen into a hive to replace a failing queen. Thank you. Well, get the failing queen out of there. And holder as an insurance policy, of course, in Nucleasehive. That's what I would do.

And then put the queen that we're hoping to replace her with. You can do that within a couple of hours. You don't have to wait. Now, earlier on in this presentation, I showed a queen introduction cage. If things were iffy at all, I would use the queen introduction cage. Now, here's another way to come in strong. as they say. If you have other hives, other colonies, and you want to introduce a queen

to an existing colony, and you think there might be some pheromone pushback or whatever, you can bring a frame of brood with your new queen and put them in together. This is where resource hives really work well. Because when you bring in the new brood with the new queen, and you can also sprit some all with sugar syrup and honeybee healthy to get everybody happy and that has demonstrated that it aids in queen acceptance that's if you don't want to cage the queen and protect her during a cycle just to make sure that she's safe but uh that's what i would do i know a lot of people want you to wait 24 hours 48 hours they know the queen is gone they get upset pretty quick they start searching all over the place for her and they become willing to accept a new fully

made queen pretty darn quick they're not super faithful although you do need to be able to read their behavior and know whether or not they're accepting and trying to feed and care for her or if they're actually getting angsty. And that's why I think every backyard beekeeper should have at least one queen introduction cage so that you don't lose the queen while she's winning the pharimon battle. That's kind of the best I can recommend. So remember if it's a question for me, Brian's here, a lot of people here. Oh, Brian knows the caps. rule. Fred, when do you start adding boxes to get them started to drawing frames out next week? The end of next week I'm adding boxes. And I think that's going to be swarms next week. I'm telling you.

This is the last Friday of April. And yeah, that's it. First week of May. It's like traditional swarm week. I'm just ready. So we're going to add boxes then. Install swarms, add boxes. I'm also this year, I'm not a good person to follow for this, by the way, because I have a lot of experiments going on. So here's the thing. I'm putting out some interesting B-frames, a lot of different designs and sizes and styles. And so we're also doing micro-honey processing this year. So I need boxes to accommodate those, but that's all starting at the end of the week. And that's because the build-up is strong and they're either going to swing.

warm or I'm going to expand the colonies. So that's why next week is the marker for me, personally, here in Pennsylvania. So things can be different for you there. All right. Trying to go on to another. Let's see. You can talk about yourselves if it's for me, caps. So that's it.

I did that one. This is a good question. This is a tough question. But I'm ready to answer it without doing research. Sean Richardson writes, rookie question, but are we marking queens with white this year? I believe we're back to white. Yes, we are marking our queens with white. And some of you may be wondering, what's the order? Because here's what I like to do. Sometimes I have little magnets, and there are all the colors that

we mark the queens, and of course, how many of them are there? Five. And then what's the order? So it just cycles through. So there's a phrase. How about asking someone, will you raise good bees? So white, yellow, red, green, blue. Will you raise good bees? And that's the order. And then it just repeats. So that's how it works.

Very easy. Keith Spelman says, seeing a lot of brood boxes plugged out with nectar. This is also being reported by folks in my chat. Hives have supers both with and without excluders. Is there a fix? Now, here's the thing about nectar. See, it's a big shell game that your bees play on you. Depending on the moisture content of what they're bringing in,

remember that initially they occupy twice the amount of space that it's ultimately going to occupy while they're drying it down. So then your bees dry it down, and it looks like, whoa, what happened all the nectar that was in here? But really what they did is they dried it down and they moved it around. And they started concentrating it in different honey cells. So when there's a big nectar flow on, they bring it all in really fast and furious. And your hives, those of you have scales on your hives, they gain weight really fast too.

But they're going to dry it off. And through evaporation, you're going to feel like you're losing some weight. And they're also going to occupy less space. So when I see a whole bunch of really wet nectar uncapped and they're fanning like crazy and the humidity in the hive is really high for those of you have humidity sensors in there, you'll find out they're going to dry that down and concentrate it again. But if I see eight out of ten frames full or six out of eight frames full in an eight frame box, I super it.

You got to make sure because it just gives them more surfaces to spread out. Your bees are spreading it out, creating more surface areas, they can dry it down quicker. That's what's happening. And so Brian Bennett gave me $10. Thank you. appreciate generosity. And John says, would you view Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, Annapolis as a similar climate to yours?

Well, having been to Annapolis, I don't think that climate is exactly like ours because there has to be some impact from the ocean being right there. And I don't know. I guess when you got to see what the Ag Zone is, I don't know. know the Agzone rating for Annapolis, Maryland? I don't know what it is. But I would look at what's in bloom, for example, what's growing right now and see if the same things are growing there. I can tell you this, just for a very generic test. If we go out and look right now, we have dandelions in bloom everywhere, and they've really kicked in over the last three days. So in Chesapeake, did it also kick in the last three days,

or have they already been around for over a week, or are they just now opening up? So for me, that would be kind of the finding out where we match up. So if you're in the same, three days, dandelions, I would say we're very similar. And also cold hardy plants and things like that. So there's a lot of indicators.

So I don't know. It would just be a guess because they haven't looked into Maryland very much. I went to school in Maryland, by the way, which we don't have to talk about. So, yeah, so white markers. Here is Block Farm Apiary. When I catch a swarm and don't know how old the queen is, I marker purple. The color of rotality. You mean royalty?

Okay, so they cover purple. Now here's another thing. Check this out. see it caught a swarm and you put it in a hive why did the queen get kicked out we don't know her history why did she get canned she's she's got the boot let's put her in one of those queen isolation cages on a frame of drawn comb and put her in a hive so we have control and so that we can see what kind of eggs she's laying what kind of pattern she's producing not only that are they all workers they look good is a pattern good or is she old and worn out and is she actually producing drones for

example because these things can happen. So I like the idea of a detainative color marking that she was a swarm capture. That's good. But if you also put her in that queen isolation cage on a frame, we can evaluate the queen and see how healthy she is. We can also find out if there's any rude disease potential. So there you go. There's a lot of tools handy there. Okay. Next one comes from Tony Pilate 206. Hi from Southeast Connecticut. Move two cells on shallow frame with capped and open brood to three-frame nuke along with one frame each food, pollen, nectar, insulator box, nights are in the 40s. Sounds okay. Nights in the 40s, that's still pretty darn cold.

Yeah, sounds good to me. Yeah, I think it's good to go. You'll find out. It's going to be great. Okay, moving on. This comes from Brad, who I believe is also in New York. Does there are any easy methods to clean plastic foundation after removing old comb? Easy ways, plastic foundation to clean it. Let me tell you what, heat and agitation. So you heat it up and you call it names.

No, that's the wrong kind of agitation. You heat it up and put it in hot water and you agitate it. You can also use, a lot of people don't think about this. You can use power sprayers in water. So in other words, you can immerse it and then put your power sprayer nozzle in and blasts away. And it makes dirty water, of course, but the spray doesn't go everywhere and the detritus doesn't go everywhere. It's trapped in the water. And so you can really heat up the water. So plastic frames.

A lot of people wonder about this. 21stB is here. And 21st B makes those heavy due to frames that can also handle very high heat. But we're going to talk about frames like acorn. and you don't want those to be heated above 158 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's like the maximum. When you heat it up to that point, it will free up all the detritus that's in there, but you have to have an agitator.

So I like to use nozzles underwater for that. And also this works for those flow super, the flow frames, which is so complicated and intricate. That's really what I come up with that for. And then agitate those and cyclone. put them all in the open position so that air has maximum passage through, and it will melt away, although it leaves some residue from the propolis it's on there, and it melts off all the beeswax. So that works really well. The toughest cell is to get the brood frames cleared out because they're so fibrous and they really stick to things. So you may have to soak them for a period and then agitate them with the same high temperatures.

So that's what I like to do. Let's see what else. So that should work. Moving along, Ross Wagner. Did I ever thank Ross? I think I did. Okay. Thanks, Ross, for the fat stacks.

All right. Are there any new traps and tips for dealing with small high beetles? Never had them. Now they're killing highs. Are any of you getting unusual high, small high beetle numbers on your beehives? I don't have them. I was noticing, too, the wild bird population is really high here. And my free-ranging chickens are constantly feeding.

I wonder if that's at an impact on small-high beetles because there's a thing. I don't have small-high beetles in my hives here. But when I go to a bee meeting, which is my own bee club, some of my members have small-hapedal problems. I don't have it. So that's interesting. I did notice Jeff Horschoff. Do you remember last year?

He lifted the top of one of his hives, and it was like an ant farm, but they were all small high beetles just going everywhere. They can't even imagine that. That's why I live in the Northeast. I can't take it down in the warmer weather where these things happen. And by the way, speaking of Jeff Horschoff, Mr. Ed, hopefully you know who that is.

He has a new YouTube channel that I hope you'll all go to and click a like and subscribe and help us. I'm out. His original YouTube channel was stolen, which is just something that goes on in this day and age. And so he got his channel canceled. Now he's working on it. You're going to get it back, I'm told. I talked to him. I talked to Dirt Rooster and to find out what's going on. And he's confident. But in the meantime, he started just in case another channel. And I hope you'll support Mr. Ed Bekeeping. Okay. Yeah. That was. was creepy. I don't want to see a bunch of small hives. Now here's the thing. I'm ready for them.

Like those small hie beetles show up in my hives, I'm getting them. I don't know how I'm going to do it. For example, if we wanted to challenge them, let's say I was facing that challenge. Well, first of all, I go to people that are doing research. You know, departments of entomology, noted universities, higher learning institutions, places like the B-Lab, University of Florida. because they have scented traps, and that's kind of the best thing. Bait in your small-high beetles with pheromones and scents of things they like. Make sure that they can't reproduce if you're putting patties on or little, you know, fondant cakes and things like that. That's what these trivets are for.

You put a trivet in there. You make sure that whatever kind of food you put inside your hive if you're doing that, that your bees have full access, that small high beetles doesn't have anywhere to hide. and then for example let's say I had something like this entrance right here which seems very fundamental. This is a

3 eighths of an inch high hive gate and just in case you're wondering maybe you can read the website on it. Anyway this goes into your hive solid bottom board 3 eighth inch opening

I would not if I had a big small high bottle small high penal problem, I would pay attention to how they move. I was told by people who know things that small high beetles, I have a hard time hovering. So when there's no landing board, so I would get away from landing boards. I would make sure that if this is the entrance of the hive or the face of the hive, that this entrance sticks out beyond the face of the hive. So now small high beetle comes, they got a tool around here. Now let's say a small high beetle makes the landing, gets in here. This is the only entrance to the hive. Now it has to go through this entire channel to get inside where

the bees are. And then here the bees will take apart that small high beetle and make it wish its mother never met its father. That's what's going to happen. And then here's the other thing. People that have upper vents and upper entrances also provide opportunities for small high beetles to get into the hives through other entrances besides the main entrance. So that's something else that I do here, I only have main single entrances. We don't provide a bunch of backdoor opportunities for the small high beetles. And they're traps. I mean, let's say I just had one sitting around. This is a small high beetle trap. Same thing. It takes advantage of the fact that the small high beetle is going to get in here and tool around these little grooves. Everything is designed as a

physical barrier. But I like the idea of an extended entrance, which helps your bees not only small high Beatles but any intruder, it's anything. That's it. Okay, let's see. Amy's Apiary, built long laying and have lots of comb being drawn off bottom of frames. Do you say earlier you cut that off? Okay, I wait because that comb on the bottom of your frames because it extends beyond a normal depth. Because it's drone comb, I wait until the drone comb is capped. And because I like to have pet pet, not drones, yeah, drone comb, I like to have pet varroa destructor mites. So I can see what the capable of.

And so we cut that off and I light them up just like candling chicken eggs. And I like to see if there's any varro destructor mites in the cells. And if they are, I cut them open and I see what the mites are doing. So this is mite control and an opportunity to evaluate the limitations that mites have. And also, you can get some beeswax out of it. So I just cut it off as soon as it's capped, I remove it. So if it stays open or they're using it for honey, I leave it. But if it's capped drone brewed, I take it out.

And I know that it's a genetic stock for your reason. Here's the thing. What did I do first? I candled it. So I shine my light through it. And if I see little shadows of varroa destructormites moving around in there, I don't want those drones because guess what? They're coming from stock that's not good at resisting varodostrctor mites.

Now, if I'm candling through there and I don't see any varro-destructor mites, I can leave it. It's so easy. This is patient beekeeping. It takes a lot of time, but it's fun to do. And it creeps people out to see varroa-mites moving inside a drone cell. Okay, so what else? How long can I keep my queen in an isolation cage during swarm management? So for swarm management, I also, I did the whole thing on swarm.

For swarm management, why are we doing that for swarm management? To de-congest the brood area? I would only keep her in the cage until all the cells are full of brood and capped. And then swap out the frame again. Or it just depends on what people are doing. I don't practice that, by the way, because I like the swarm preps and I expand the colony, expand the size and I don't cage them as part of a control for swarming.

So I don't know, you could leave her in there for seven days because after that, you know, all the cells are laid up and I don't know. It's something I don't practice. So I'm going to maybe leave it to somebody who does do that swarm control, caging the queen. I know a lot of people are experimenting with that and they're trying to make brood breaks which i don't do brood breaks i continue to let the queen produce um swarm control i don't know i'm going to draw a loss there if i had to come up with a method isolating the queen swarm management instead of that i would think of decongesting the brood area so let's let's take a different take instead of putting the cage in there this is just remember there's a bunch of different ways to do the same thing

there are a bunch of successful beatkeepers, none of whom agree with each other. By the way, so keep that in mind, there are a lot of ways to accomplish the same stuff. So let's say I opened up a brood box, and it was full of brood, chaka block, and they were going to still expand, which, by the way, has never happened to me here with the colonies that I have. Because what happens is they eventually fill so many frames, and then by the time they get out to here, the middle brood area that they started with is already emerging. So now the queen can go back to the middle start over. So you ended up filling, contracting, filling, contracting. And the queen just cycles through the same frames over and over. And so we're not necessarily, we don't get a

colony that explodes. But like, let's say you had Italian genetics or something like that, because I used to keep those, and they would fill an entire 10-frame brood box with brute, the whole thing. And so I didn't want them because they're super expensive to keep. And by that I mean going through winter, there were the ones that went through 70 pounds of honey where the beeweaver stock and the Carly Olin stock and all those things that I've worked with here that now are all hybridized. They're all mutts now tend to not expand that big. The colleges don't get that big. But if they were doing that, I could pull frames of brood and insert, of course, push the existing frames together of brood, don't create a big gap in it, but then add drawn comb on the

outboard edges of that and let them continue to build. So I would just decongest rather than caging. That's just what I'm thinking, unless you need to do a treatment or something. And if you want to do a treatment and you weren't here for it, please go to the beginning of this video where we discuss how to do cages and rotate them through it. So you can do three oxalic acid vaporization treatment. and end up with knocking your Varroa destructor mites right out of the game. So here comes Steve Zimmerman, 7355, that's a YouTube channel name. I use hydrogen peroxide in my bird baths to keep the algae and black mold down. Seems to work there.

Wonder if it would work on the beef feeders. Now, this was in response to the interview that I did with Adam Strickland regarding using clothes. chlorine bleach in sugar syrup with beehives. And of course, the overall health and well-being of the beehives was evaluated. So here's the thing. Hydrogen peroxide works, but it's three to four times more expensive than just using chlorine bleach at one teaspoon per gallon. So me personally, especially when it comes to drinkers, outside drinkers and things like that,

because we have mosquitoes here. Sad but true. and by putting those little swimming pool tablets, the chlorinated swimming pool tablets that float, or you can just chuck them in by themselves without the float, put them in the bottom, they keep the mosquitoes from reproducing in stagnant water. And the bees also go straight to it,

just like they do swimming pools everywhere. It's very inexpensive, works very well. So I don't recommend hydrogen peroxide just because of the expense alone, but it is kind of interchangeable. I don't think I would feed it to the bees, but there again, I don't do studies on that. But you could look it up.

I think hydrogen peroxide is not good for your bees to eat. Although here's the thing. Let's think back. Let's argue with ourselves. Sometimes when you have honey in open, you have open surfaces of honey, sometimes you'll look at it and there's this really fine white foam

on the surface of the honey. you know what it is that's hydrogen peroxide honey produces hydrogen peroxide to protect itself at an interface where the honey is getting condensation on it and that's trying to protect itself from fermentation so it is kind of self-sanitizing it's because i'm checking myself because it was about to say probably not good if the bees ate it but there again their honey does produce hydrogen peroxide on the surface and then i wonder if the bees actually end up consuming and ingesting that and what that impact is. And I have to say I don't know,

but I definitely go with the cheaper route just because it's easier on your wallet to use chlorinated bleach. And that was the study focus for that particular bleach in sugar syrup at one teaspoon per gallon. Okay, moving on. If you have a question for me, all caps. Because we're running out of time.

Let's getting to the end of it. So this one comes from Dennis from Crystal Falls, Michigan. This is my question is more on keeping bees on your property. I have between 15 and 20 hives at my home property, my homeowner's insurance, has increased by over $200 called a hazard on my policy. Wondering if it is just an insurance company that I'm with, or is this with all companies? I live out in the country with only a couple of houses over a quarter mile away. Thank you. Well, I think it's case-by-case insurance company by insurance company.

They're out to get you, by the way. Okay. They're out to get you. They're out to make money to make sure. They have something called actuaries. Those are people that assess the risks and benefits, the return on the investment on the part of the insurance company to make sure that they don't ever take a loss. That's their game.

But here, like just for me, for example, I've checked out with my insurance company, which I won't name. And they did not raise my insurance one bit. said my normal household liability coverage takes care of that UPS driver FedEx driver somebody comes on my property to see the flowers they get stung by B they have a medical emergency I'm covered where it changes and becomes unaffordable there's something called agritourism a lot of people because I see it on social media come to our apiary have a special evening with your significant other and get into some beehives.

If I mention that to my insurance company, my insurance for that activity will surpass the insurance on my homeowners policy. It's ridiculous. This is why I can't teach beekeeping here on my property the way I want to. I want to bring groups of 10 people here and I want to teach them how to keep bees. and I want to meet several times a week during very active times of the year and get them through all of these management steps. But when I checked them with the insurance company,

it's cost prohibitive. It's ridiculous. Even if you don't charge money for it, even if you go about you try to get around and go donations only kind of thing. Insurance is ridiculous. So I did find out the top three states, and since this dentist is in Michigan,

California, Florida, and New York, are the most expensive states for that. And it's because of litigation. More people have charged and successfully gotten damages in court against beekeepers. So that's why insurance companies, think about it, the actuaries, sell them. We're in a high-risk state, high-risk venture, and you need to charge more for beekeepers because of that. So it's insurance company by insurance company and, of course, the location.

But Michigan wasn't on the list, so I, I, I might be looking at different insurance companies of how are you. So here is St. John Coleman, 8602. Commercial H202 is 3%. What is the percentage of hydrogen peroxide in honey? Now, it's not in the honey. It's on the surface of the honey. So therefore, it doesn't infuse into it.

So it is topical. So there again, and I don't even begin to have the instrumentation, because remember, all honey does not produce hydrogen peroxide. It only does it when it's uncapped and when water is condensing on the surface of the honey. That's how it protects itself. So there you go. And son of thunder late because working highs. As you should. I'm not even sure you should have walked away from those hives. Probably a lot more could have been doing. And thank you for answering my question. You are very welcome. And we're going to continue on here.

Insurance, man. Don't even get me started. All right. Next question comes from Wendy from Seattle, Washington. Is it ever the case that part of a hive will swarm with only a virgin queen? I have a hive whose temps were running in the high 80s, super packed with these, deep and medium box, that it took the queen and five frame split from last checked April the 19th. There were four queen cells all capped. Within a day or two, Temps dropped to the high 60s, the rest of the hives, temps in the same space, stable, worried that a virgin emerged and left with part of the hive. Don't want to get back in there as it's running low 50s.

I wasn't sure this swarming could happen with an unmeted virgin. Yes, it can happen. In fact, your prime swarms that happen early in the year. Prime swarms are the existing queen. Out she goes. Those are the biggest swarms of the year, which is why we all need to be on alert for that,

which is why I highly recommend that you register with B-S-W-A-R-M-E-D dot org. It's a registration system where you can identify yourself for the area that you're in, how far you're willing to go to get a swarm. These are the best swarms of the year. Now, once a prime swarm happens, sometimes what's called tertiary or after swarms, also occur. So when that happens, another queen goes out and she hasn't even had time to mate, as kind of noted in the question here. They haven't had time to mature sexually and to fly out and get mated. But suddenly they find themselves. And this is where you often get two or three queens

in the same swarm cluster. So these are the after swarm groups. And yes, it can happen. And it's super frustrating because even when you hive up that swarm, which is why if you enclose them and use a queen excluder to keep them in the hive, you need to remove that queen excluder if you're using it to keep them in from absconding in about three days because if it's a virgin queen, she needs to get out and complete her mating flights, which means that also that hive that you just set up is still in jeopardy. Only about 75% of those queens go out and successfully mate. And this is why resource hives, extra queens, things like that are always handed half, but yes, it can do it.

But my advice is to do everything you can to get hold of those prime swarms and make splits before it happens. And what I mean by that is if you're doing your inspections and I hope you all are coming up on this week, the end of next week, we're looking for queen cells

and if they're half developed, right? So queen cell starts out, they're the only vertical cells in the hive. And if they're in production, and you come across your queen, collect that queen, put her together with a couple of frames that don't have queen cells on them, put them in a nucleus hive, set them aside as an insurance policy, and then let the original hive finish what they think they're going to do. They're going to cap those queen cells, the queens are going to emerge, they're going to fly out and mate or not. And then when you

check them in a couple of weeks, and you find out that they're queenless, there's no evidence of eggs or anything else, now we have the insurance policy in your nucleus resource hive to bring the original queen back. And guess what's happened during this period? They went broodless. So, because it's no queen laying. So at that point, you have an opportunity also before you bring that queen back to do an exhalic acid vaporization treatment, organic treatment, and you can kill off mites that are already in the hive, and then you bring the queen back and reinstaller. So, There's a lot that you can do. All right.

So here's Amy. Did you leave Janice's enclosure in case she needs shelter? Okay. So for those of you that don't know, and Amy puts this weird face on there. All right. So if you don't know, because you're probably into bees and you don't care about spiders, but here's the thing. I released my jumping spider in the woods. And so Amy wants to know, did I leave the enclosure out there just in case Janice wants to get back into it?

know because I want her to acclimate to the wild world that's out there. And if you want to see the weirdest spider video you've ever seen, I guarantee. It's the weirdest spider video. I took a jumping spider out, released her, and on some old logs in the woods, she did not want to stay on the logs in the woods, and she tried to follow me. Okay. Now you might think that sounds hokey. I'm telling you it goes so far beyond hokey. It is weird. That spider did not want to stay on the logs and follow me. And it's all on the video. So if you're doubting it, you need to watch. It's pretty amazing. Jumping spider, by the way. They're the super smart ones. Bold jumping spider. So thanks, Amy, for asking and no. I did not leave the cage out there. I wanted her to make it. So we talked about brood breaks for exhalicats of vaporization. Here's another one, MCTG popcorn.

Wait a second, is that person on here? It says, will swarms from your apiary voluntarily move into a swarm trap within your apiary? And if so, how far does a swarm trap need to be from the other colonies? So this is just general bee management in your own backyard apiary. The farther apart you have your colonies, the better. It reduces drift. It helps them orient directly to the hive that they live in, putting them by markers like trees, big rocks, bushes, things like that. Southern exposure, southeast exposure favored. So here's the thing. Even when I make splits, I don't move them to another place. I just put them in a box. I leave them right in the apiary and I just let them drift all over the place as much as they want to.

because you're only getting foragers for about two weeks. So you can have two weeks of low activity from a new split or swarm that you collect inside your own apiary. And that's, let's say, you lost most of the foragers back to the original hive. After two weeks, every emerging, you know, bee that comes to the outside, because the nurses aren't outside, once they started coming out, that's it. now they're all serving the colony in the location where you put them. There's a lot of drift going on in your apiary anyway. I don't haul them out. I don't move them other places.

I don't necessarily put them right next door to each other, although I have combined colonies that way. Colonies side by side, I've just taken them and shifted them all and put them together. But when you're making splits or hiving a swarm, and you know the swarm came for that hive over there, I would try to put it at the other side of your apiary when you're installing that swarm.

But once they've decided, something happens to their little brains, once they've decided to leave with the swarm, they tend not to go back. So the swarming activity alone changes something in the bees. So those foragers commit to the new location overall. There, of course, are exceptions. So if anybody has questions for me,

you need to type them in all caps. and I'll do my best to answer them. We are 15 minutes over time, but I'm willing to stick around just for you. So this question comes from Kenneth. Thank you for the updated video. The ones that died were the standard winter configuration and single brood boxes.

Okay, so this is it. For deadouts for me here in my apiary. We had, I guess it would count as 10%, four hives, four deadouts out of 43 colonies. So what we look for are, of course, correlations. What configurations work in the best? Did all the insulated colonies make it? No.

One of the APMA, 7-frame, nuke boxes that was really strong going into fall, they died out in winter. So you cannot find solid, consistent styles, thicknesses, insulations, not insulation, configuration, that guarantees survival and winter. We had triple nuke, so that's 5 over 5 over 5. That's 15 deep frames. One died, two came through perfect.

We went to a lot of late season, single brood box management. Most of them made it. Two of them died. And that's the extent of the deadouts. So Thinwall did just, as well and is just as vigorous as thick, insulated wild hives. And we had an extended, hard, cold winter here,

which actually, in my opinion, kind of works in favor of the bees. They stay in torpor. They stay in a tight cluster. And even the hide that fell apart twice in storms. Made it. It is doing fantastic. So I guess the bottom line story is you should get the best bee equipment that you can afford. Don't get me wrong.

Your equipment should fit together well. There are ways to configure it that improve your chances statistically. Insulated intercovers, no top benting for me here in my neck of the woods. Single entrances. And there isn't even a solid correlation with the amount of bees going through winter. tiny clusters in a five-frame nuke that I just rode off left on there, end of the year, tiny swarm. Just fed them with hive-alive fondant.

As soon as it started to get cold before that, sugar syrup on one-to-one, never did the two-to-one sugar syrup. Of course, they're flying. They're alive. They're doing what they're supposed to do. So finding things beyond the fact that bees need to be healthy. They need to have a good queen with them, and they need to be in a good fitted box with an insulated cover.

There was a distinctive difference in survivability overall when we made the shift to removing top vents, insulated inner cover, having a feeder shim on top that gave us options to emergency feed a colony that midwinter or January and February, March, when you find out that they've used all their resources, if you don't have a system set up, that allows you to give them some kind of emergency resource,

there's nothing you're going to do about it other than watch them expire. And the other thing is cause of death, right? Queen loss, for one, for sure. And others are kind of unknown. There's no obvious disease or anything. Dead bees in the bottom. One had a mouse in it. It did a video about that.

So that was kind of interesting. But the mouse was not the reason that they died out. It's something that moved in. after the colony died. So keeping records is very important, but the problem is, even after all the years that have kept bees, I can't give you a solid statement about

the best configuration to get, although whatever's good for you should play. If you have a long Langstroth hive, if you have troubles lifting things, horizontal hive configurations are absolutely the best choice for people that are getting older that aren't very strong, or you want to work with the youth, Or people are even handicapped.

I can work with those hives. They have a static height. And you can work frame by frame and get into your hives. So the horizontal hives for people tend to work out really well, zero lifting. So that's kind of where I leave that. And B-TVPTZ gave me $20. Thank you so much for that bonus money. All right.

So happy grandma, 5589. says, hi, Fred, when you move the box, the swarm landed in. What happens to the few bees that are left behind? I've heard they go back to the original hive. Yes. So when you take, when you set a box somewhere else, which I don't even do this anymore, but when you put out swarm traps and swarm boxes, and you get a swarm in it and you take them home. And sure, there's a whole bunch of scouts out there. even if you've collected that box at nighttime because a lot of scouts and foragers, depending on how long they've been there, are out and about in the environment. So they come back and they find an empty space.

Certainly they can find their way to the original hive they left. They also just tend to drift and join up with other colonies. The first colony that they fly to the pheromone stream of, they move right in. This is drift. There's huge amounts of drift going on. So that just works. Yeah, there's no orphans. out there and they're not very faithful, to be honest.

So I wish I could give you a solid, absolute, use this kind of hive, configure this way, and it guarantees you no deadouts. That's not possible because it really boils down to health and vigor of the colony, the queen, the conditions of the bees, and the stock that you're keeping. This is very important. Locally adapted bees, that's why swarms are so valuable.

locally adapted bees that you collect this time of year. These have wintered. The queens that are with them have winter. They survive. They've worked through whatever the cycles are here. You're way ahead. And I'm sorry for the people that sell bees, sell packages, sell queens and all the other stuff. And I know I like to support queen genetics, right?

But you really don't need them. You can cycle your own stock back. You can create your own splits. You can collect your spring swarms and stay right in the middle of keeping bees. that way, and they perform extremely well. And I want to thank EL 1303. Also, I don't know what's going on. I don't remember getting this many donations in a live stream,

but I really do appreciate it. This is from Kyle Neis, 3685. I just installed a package that had a good amount of dead bees that ended up in hive. I took out what I could Should I worry about getting the rest of the dead out? Okay, so here's the thing Packages with dead bees in them

If you dump the bees into the hive That you're dumping the dead bees in there with them This is why I don't dump bees into the hives But don't worry, they'll clean those out themselves But I like to put the package in front of the entrance I take the queen and put her inside the hive, leave her inner cage inside the hive, use the queen and her pheromone to draw those bees out of that package and into the hive.

That way, which you have leftover outside the hive are the dead bees, and they don't even have to deal with them. So it's a very, it's time consuming. This is why a lot of people don't do it. I've had people watch what I do and say, can't do it. I just like to get things done. I can't sit and stare at bees the way you do. Well, you know what?

I enjoy sitting and staring at the bees, and I like comfortable chairs. And if I were installing a package, it would be outside the hive, and I would use the queen to lure them into the hive and watch them go. Because I also want to look them over on their way in. And so that's it. So the fact that I know the, you know, cats out of the bag, so to speak, or the whatever, toothpaste is out of the tube. The dead bees are already in there.

They'll clean them up. So that's it. There are BVACs and things like that. But really, the best thing you can do when you've installed a new package is to button them up, make sure that the queen, of course, in two or three days, is out of that cage and get the cage out of there. Otherwise, I'll just encase it in beeswax. And just make sure that she's released and that things are good to go. And then leave them alone for as long as possible.

I highly recommend it. So, and I want to thank Mara Broski, 2286. always generous 999 thank you for that for that donation also so oh here we go so this is from diane warren new jersey it says you mentioned the great opportunity to do a single oab mite treatment about a week after they've moved in that's true i was warm install a package whatever you do wait a week seventh day oa v maximum hit so the question is could I use new apobioxal RTU? So what that is, apobioxal is just oxalic acid crystal form.

And RTU is the dribble instead of OAV. So BetterB came out with this. They had it at the North American Honeybee Expo. RTU stands for ready to use. So it's a premixed dose. It's in a bottle. It's got a delivery system. And could you dribble that on instead of doing the oxalic acid vapor?

Absolutely. You can do that. And again, it works just like acylic acid vapor in the way that it won't treat for burrowdestructor mites that are under cappings. So for the barid that's covered, you would need to, of course, do another treatment to make sure that you span every point where the varomites are in the dispersal phase. But yeah, you can do it. Plus, that's super safe. Exalic acid vapor, of course, risks your eyes, your lungs. You have to protect everything when you use it.

And for some people that worked in very hot locations, having all that respiratory protective equipment and eye protection is just a huge bear. So having something R2, the dribble method. And I'm really waiting for Easy Oaks, Mike's Bs, to get their final approval for their extended release, exhalic acid pads. That was held up. It was supposed to be out in May.

They're not going to meet that deadline. but I would shift everything over to that. When those come available, that's what I'm using. So easy-peasy, you can leave it on, extend or release, everything else. Enough said about that. Okay. Craig. Craig-O for DDS.

Is there a best time to start or establish a five-frame nuke resource hive? Have a couple of older queens that want to be moved. Semi-retirement. So whenever I find, like if they're building queen cells, during an inspection, I find the queen, that's when I'm over. So it's all a matter of, because here's why. You could, when you're doing an inspection and seeing that everything else is good, you say there's plenty of eggs there, plenty of resources, they're in prime condition,

and you come across the queen, and you say, yeah, it's a good time to make a split. I'm just going to take the queen out of there. Okay, so when you do that and you migrate some resources with her and you create that nucleus hive, because we didn't wait until they were already produced, queen cells. Now they have to make an emergency queen cell right then. So now there's a big delay, right? Because the cell has to, the queen, the egg has to hatch that turns into a larva, it has to be fed. And on it goes, a complete cycle has to be done. So if you're waiting and doing your inspections and knowing that, well, there's queen cells now that are three quarters done,

I realize this is kind of roulette because you can skip a week or forget to do it and they can just re-queen and you're done. But I like to wait until there's queen cells present. And the reason is the queen that's there is continuing production right up until they're almost capping those queen cells. So then when you take her at that point and create your resource hive, these are no longer emergency cells. These are swarm cells, which they have treated differently, which they did because there's an abundance of nutrition. Remember, nutrition quality is critical when they're developing in. queen. So if you do it that way, and it's not an emergency, we have less of a gap in Brood,

and we also have a better queen in theory. And then, of course, we still have the insurance policy in the nuke over here, which for me has always taken. And then it's very rare that I've ever had to bring her back as an insurance policy. Now, the other thing is the frames that we pulled out, we need to put something in like feeder frames. So those, black mother load feeder frames. If you put that in there as a placeholder, then you don't have to worry about, you know, them working up new frames and then you want to bring her back. You have nowhere to put her. So then you just pull those out after the grace period where you made sure that the colony was going to have a good viable queen. So that is based on inspection. So there's no

calendar time that I look for. It's based on what I see inside the hive. And when I see that they're making queen cells, I take their queen. I don't even play around with that at all. This is Panneubert. It says more of a comment. Rather than a question, I did a dribble on a package after seven days. So a drop of 150 mites. I'm not even going to ask who sold the package, but a package of bees, three pound package is pretty much the standard. 150 mites. I think it's great that the dribble worked, but I'm more concerned about the stock that you just got. So that doesn't make my day at all.

All right. Let's see what else. I don't want to let my people down that submitted their questions. Okay, here's another question. This is from Sue, Northern Indiana. It says, how can I stop black ants from getting into my hive? I think they're carpenter ants. I think I need to mask ant trail somehow.

Okay. Stopping ants. Oh, man, I already had test tubes that have a queen yellow jacket in it, and I have a queen carpenter ant. She's huge with wings. They're all moving this time of year right now. So the other thing is, I think people get a little bit alarmed because you can see them on the landing board of your beehives. They're scooting around.

They're trying to get anything sweet, too, the workers are. And this is another vote. Remember, not just for small high beetle deterrence, but this is another. other reason why I don't like top fending and upper entrances. We don't want to provide access routes for other pests like ants. Now overall, I've never had a colony of bees overrun by ants. I have a really funny video. You can look at it. It's on my channel, Frederick Dunn. I went to install a swarm into a hive that was already occupied and I didn't know it by Carboner ants. you would think because the carpenter ants put up a really good scrap

they met the ants it's funny the ants met ants it's funny the ants met the bees and they're both hymenoptera so this is kind of fine they met up at the entrance the ants were attacking the bees now you would think the bees would say well fred's got us parked at the landing board see because they had them in a net right on the landing board so they would move in on their own and when the ants came out the ants got all antsy and started attacking the bees. You would think the bees would go, whoa, and back off. No, the bees, when they started getting attacked by the ants, summoned the other bees. And they were all just like rushing in. And it was this big melee, as they used to say in the maritime days,

ants versus bees. And the bees just poured in there and displaced all the ants and ants were running out, carrying eggs and everything else. But anyway, I know I'm, I'm off to the side here. But the ants, again, just don't provide them access into your beehive other than through the main entrance where your bees are likely to defend themselves. So I've never had even a little sugar ants. And I realize different parts of the world, different ant species. I'm very interested in ants.

My grandsons and I are studying ants this summer. We have ant observation things set up in the fields. It's really interesting. but they generally do not take over a healthy colony of bees. And well-fitted, good close-up hives are pretty much all you need. If you've got any kind of wrap on your hive, the ants are going to move between it. They're survivalists. They just want to move in.

And keep in mind, ants can move to a whole different location on a whim. That's why they're all marching and single file. They're all carrying eggs. They take everything with them. just set up a new colony somewhere. So beehives are just an attractive thing to the ants. It's not that big a deal. But let's say we want to make sure they don't even get started.

So depending on your hive stand configuration, T-posts, pipes, whatever kind of hive stand you have, remember ants just like these, pheromone trails, very important to them. So I like to rub super minty toothpaste on the legs of the stands that we don't want ants to go up and down. Now, if they're already up in there, you're going to have to vacuum them out and then establish a barrier. People like to use ant moats. So I see people setting, you know, coffee cans that are cut in half, setting each leg in a coffee can, filling that with water. But keep in mind, that's something now that you have to keep up with. You also need to trim grasses and everything away from your hives, because then the ants will bypass whatever moats you've set up,

ant moats and then they'll just go on to the side of the hive. So this happened actually Cedar Anderson was given a presentation. Ants were all over his flow hive, which has the little ant moats on the legs, but you could see that the greenery had grown up against the hive all around it and provided them access. So they were in the inner cover area, but not down in the hive itself.

But still, easier just to keep them out. So that's it. Loves purple flowers. $1.99 twice. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay, so what's it say? Blighwood Bee Company, Swarm Commander, Super Lure. All right. Yes, B. Company. I definitely asked for the Fred done discount there.

He's a friend. He might give me one. I don't know. So have you used these to attract swarms? Oh, the Blythwood Swarm Commander? Yes, but your best, yeah, to attract swarms, to swarm trap. I did a video recently on how to set up a hive box to use it as your swarm lure. And I did use a swarm commander inside a box that had a bunch of new equipment. So, and it does work. That stuff is not just lemongrass oil.

It is synthetic nascentoff, which is exactly what the bees use to get other bees to come and pay attention to what they're dealing with. So gets my vote all the way. It's fantastic. Now you still have to have a box that's suitable to them, 10 frame, 10 deep frames, pretty standard. If you've got old brood comb and things like that, no dead bees, no food, no old encapsulated bee bread, stuff like that. Just drawn comb is your number one attracting to the scouts.

So, Chris-o-6-884, do you have a video of that Swarm versus Ant event? I do. Yes. It's in the title. Bees versus ants are. something. I'll try to find it and I'll put it down in the video description. Ant video link. There. I'll do that. Okay. Ooh, here's the last question. So we're wrapping it up. Let's see. Loves for flowers. I purchased an actual hanging lure that looks

like solidified gelatin. Very interesting. Yeah, Swarm Commander makes a hanging solid lure. I've never used it, but I trust it. If they make it, it's, you know, probably good to go. They also make these. I like these. If anybody's looking for something to get me for Christmas, Swarm Commander, these little capsules, because you can snap this little capsule,

touch it on the front of the hive as a lure, and then just put the rest of the capsule all the way in the back inside a Ziploc baggie with the corners cut off. Right inside the hive, good to go. All right. Last question. De Sancho, which is Lorry. I wish I wasn't working so I could watch live.

I inspected my new hives and it prompted robbing. I thought I was careful. I pulled two frames and I put them in a quiet box. Then the remaining, I inspected and returned my question. I noticed what I believe are queen cups. What do I do? The queen is laying. There is pollen and honey.

And so queen cups, if you look into your hive and you find that they look like the cap on a little acorn. right and they're made out of beeswax and people look at those and go whoa they're making preparations to swarm they're not they make these little uh queen cups and what's the difference between the queen cup and a queen cell whether or not she's got an egg in it and there's a developing larvae so um the queen cups are just there it's like infrastructure just in case and there's no point and even bothering to smash them up and things like that in fact if you know where the queen cup sits that's a great opportunity for you to take a grease pencil and mark the frame QC so that later, when you're doing another inspection, because it's there, if they later decide to prepare to swarm,

you can inspect that and find that they're developing it and that there is, in fact, an egg, and then that becomes a queen cell. So when they do that, I would leave it and mark it because it's kind of an indicator for you, what your bees are planning to do. Because just by smashing them and things like that, let's say you did that, they'll just make another one somewhere else in the hive, if that's where they headed.

So let's see, I just saw Swarm. Commander has a gel. You lay down a line of the gel. My favorite is the spray. I mean, it's all same company, same stuff, different form factors, kind of whatever you want. Maybe does it say that the gel,

last you have to freshen it like weekly maybe some of those things last a couple of weeks how long does this thing last two-year shelf life on these so yes we're committed you know however you use it it works let's see and notice to the queen cups that's it we're done that's it for today for this friday question and answers if anybody has the last minute question I'll give you 15 seconds to type it out. Otherwise, we're going to wrap up episode number 352 of backyard beatkeeping questions and answers. And I want to thank you all for being here. And I hope that you have a fantastic weekend ahead and that your swarms are not going to get away from you.

You are going to prevail. If you just do everything I've said, well, everything I've said that works. Use that, do that, and you will succeed. If you do not have success, I didn't have any part. of it. However, if you are successful, I'm happy to take the credit for that. I want to thank you for being here. Have a fantastic weekend. And how do I end my stream? In stream. Goodbye. Take care.