The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping LIVE Chat Q&A Episode # 295 survival updates, tainted honey, spring feeding...

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/PU6S-p_uTHQ    

So hello and welcome everybody. I'm glad that you're here and took advantage of the waiting room. If you're one of the people that likes to rapid fire your questions, today, it's on a delay. I think it's 10 seconds. So don't be upset if you try to respond to one another in rapid succession, 10 seconds. That's the waiting. That's because last time Keith Spillman's in the house. He is my bouncer. I saw Ross Miller's here also. He's the one that drew up all the great plans for us that we're getting for free that allows you to work on your long langstroth, Langstroth configurations, everything else. So Ross is in the house.

Thank you, everyone, for being here. Let's get started. So today is Friday. No great surprise, February the 28th, the last day of February. That's why we're live. So feel free to ask your questions, but I am going to respond, of course, to those that were submitted ahead of time. And this is the last day of February.

as I just said, this is backguard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 295. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. You already know that. That's why you're here. So by the way, I think the early chat stream that goes on here as part of the waiting room disappears later when this thing goes live. So don't be surprised about that. If you have a question, and please pass us on to people that join us later,

please type it in all caps. It's not yelling in this case. It's just so that I can recognize that you're asking a question rather than just talking to one another and saying maybe, I don't know where you're from, hello to one another. Feel free to talk back and forth, even answer each other's questions. But if it's for me, please put it all in caps. So we also have beekeeping, good to catch you live from Scottish time frame. It's 9 p.m. there. So from Scotland.

See, we're international. So everything is great. I'm going to jump right in. And if you want to know how to submit a question for a future question and answer episode, please go to my website, which is the way to be.org. Click on the page marked the way to be. And you can submit your own subject or question. It doesn't have to be a question, just something that we want to get going on.

Ross Wagner is here already with his all caps question, when and if to use pollen patties for the hobby beekeeping. First of all, I want to clear that up. Hobby, beekeepers, backyard beekeepers, that's my audience. Backyard people. Doesn't mean that you're new. It just means you have a small collection. Well, I can talk about pollen patties, when to use them. And spring is coming up. If you don't know already, I have terrible weather here, 37 degrees Fahrenheit outside. That's 3 Celsius for the rest of the world. And we have wind gusts right now to 20 miles an hour, but it was 8.5. when I looked at things, which is 13 kilometers per hour, wind is really kicking up. Don't worry, Ross, I'm going to jump on that in a second. I just want to do some housekeeping here and tell everybody what's going on where we live. 77% relative humidity. And we have 50s coming up this week in the northeastern United States.

I'm in the state of Pennsylvania, specifically in the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. So anyway, you'll get greater than 10 degrees Celsius here coming up this week. The weather people, they know everything. They're always right. And we're still snow covered. We have a hard-packed snow here. Even with the warm up, it didn't melt things away. You probably want to know if the deer are still eating my trees.

They are. They're eating everything because, again, they can't get through it. We have wild turkeys running around out here, too, and I don't mind them at all. But what else is going on? Just quickly, I want to get into what a lot of people are worried about is the B-Di- So I want to thank those of you who did participate in my survey. And my survey, actually, from backyard perspective, got more responses than those at Operation Apis M.

Is it called Operation Apis M? Let's see. Project ApisM.org is where a lot of information is being consolidated. Anyway, 375 of you responded. So I just want to reduce some of the stress and let you know that those are watching this channel and that have responded to the survey they're posted and it stays live. You can still update that, answer those questions yourself. It's on my main YouTube channel page, which is Frederick Dunn. And you can click on that survey and see and I'll know better what your answers are. But for right

now, 375 responses, 72% of you have the same or better winter survival than previous years. That's really outstanding. Twenty-eight percent of those who are responsible. responded, have more losses than normal. And again, this is the backyard community, but Project APISM will be having updates and they'll give you a lot of new stuff. Let's jump right into, first of all, the question about pollen patties. Pollin patties are different than winter patties. For example, they're going to boost your brood.

So real pollen, that's important. And I can just say right now, the global patties, one, you know, outperformed all. other patties for that. You guys are already popping in your questions here really quick. So anyway, it's questionable whether or not that is really going to boost your colonies more than just sucrose alone. So for those of you who put on winter patties or some kind of sugar or fondant, you may find that the pollen addition adds a lot to the price of the pollen patties. It also slows and reduces the shelf life. Then it may not be worth it. it. So it depends on what you really want. What I want to talk to you about, of course, I normally

would save this for the end of my presentation, which would be the fluff section. But be prepared to feed your bees. I don't know where you are, but there's almost no part of the United States right now where strange weather hasn't touched or impacted your colony potential survivor. So those of you have bees alive right now that got them through winter. Good for you. That means they didn't die of any pre-disease exposures or pathogens and things like that, which are what normally kill them off in early winter. Now guess what phase we're in? The starvation phase. So my bees can't fly. So right now where I am, they're not able to do decent cleansing flights. They're just really evicting themselves and going out into the snow and dying, which by the way, that's normal is what bees do. Because remember,

some bees are dying all through the year. So please don't be alarmed. In fact, if you walk out in the snow cover and you see a little shotgun pattern of dead bees in the snow that's a good sign that's a colony that's alive and they're healthy enough to end themselves and you don't have to scrape them out through the entrance so please keep your entrances up too but global patties where do they belong i would put those right on top of my insulated inner cover on top of the high because this late in the year remember we're the end of february marches tomorrow um the bees should be in your top boxes by If you size your colonies and your hive configurations correctly for the number of bees that occupy those boxes, they will be up in that top third, and you can put your pollen patties, you can put your fondant.

Whatever you have is an emergency resource. Don't let your bees starve. If they die now without food, that's 100% under your control. So I'm going to mention these trivets. You don't have to buy these, by the way, but these are cheap. They sit right on top of the inner cover and your pollen patty. over the top of it. Why do you do that? Where I live, I don't have a concern for small high beetles. Some of you have a very different story there. So the small high beetles will be emerging and doing

their thing. I think it's early for them. I'm not from the south, so I don't know. But if you put your pollen patties on trivets or something that elevates them and the bees come up through that entrance, they can feed on your pollen patties. Winter patties, fun. And better to have something than nothing and so the number one performing one blake shug put it out through project apis m because i checked that out before he came here today and at global patties were leading so that's pretty simple let's move on here here's Renee says in i'm moving four hours away what is the safest way to move my four hives so safest way to move the hives well pack them up at night, close them off, keep them vented. And the safest way, I'm not sure about the question. You

need room to have them in your vehicle. There is some question about the orientation of your frames parallel to the direction of travel. So if you had your box in sideways and you slam on your brakes, the frames would slap into each other. If they're parallel with the direction of travel, long axis, then when you hit your brakes, it doesn't do anything. They need to be vented. So that's going to require you to put a screen on there. You can use robbing screens that are also transit screens. Once these are on, you close them up so then your bees can get out. Ventilation is critical.

Your bees can overheat in your car or your truck. So having ventilation is going to be really important that the bees can't get out. There are also bags that are bee bags that go overhives. I don't happen to have any of those, but some people that put them in a pickup truck, for example, put those bags around. and it keeps them from getting out and interfering with other people at stop signs and things like that. What else? Safe way to transport your bees. So shipping straps, they need to be really locked down.

I even take, I make wooden cleats. So those are just wooden. We call it scabbing. You put some plywood pieces on the sides and you put screws in them. And that keeps your boxes from shifting away from the bottom board, from shifting if it's a two, box hive, then you can put those on the side to and just later once they're installed where you want them to be, remove the screws. So that keeps things from falling apart. So that's all I can think of, keeping your bees from getting out, keep them vented, keep the boxes from shifting apart,

orientation in the direction that you're driving. And after that, you should be good to go. So pack them up at night, of course, unless it's so cold that they're still inside just like my bees are now. So I hope that works. And if that didn't answer your question, maybe ask for some more details and I'll try to answer. So here comes from Tritone. How does the thymol kill mites? And does the vapors kill them alone? Does the thymal need to be carried it through the hive or do the bees need to eat thymol, then get bit by the mites?

Okay. So by the way, I mispronounced that. clear that up. I said thymol, because that's the way it spelled. It's timal because it comes from the time plant. I have to try to give you guys the best pronunciation. But know that it's not because the bees eat it. It's the vapors themselves. The bees can handle it. Although if you're using, let's say, Formic Pro and you put on the double pack there, and that's enough to get the vapor strong enough to go through the capping so that you get your borough destructor mites that are under the caps of your pupa.

That's very strong. It's the vapors that kill it, and you've put your bees kind of on the edge. Bees can handle it. Mites can't, so they're more sensitive. So it's the vapors that kill the varodistrictor mites. That's also why when you put your thymol on, follow all the instructions on whatever company makes,

whatever you're using. But if it's Formic Pro, you'll be opening up your entrances and things like that. It goes over the brood areas. You want it as close as possible to that. And it's the vapor that kills the mites. So the bees don't eat it. First of all, it's interesting, too, because they couldn't eat it if it were in the Formic Pro packets because the bees don't have access to that.

So it is a vapor. It's a highly volatile vapor. And a lot of people panic if they use Formic Pro pads because they'll see a bunch of dead bees piling out, you know, they'll be piling out and dying in front of your hive. And so it's recommended that you only use it on really strong, highly populated colonies of bees. So if you've got a struggling colony, that's not the treatment to use. But so here's beekeeping. Here's a question.

Best way to do hive records. Okay, now see you're ahead of me because that's from beekeeping, but I have this question in my stack today, but might as well jump right on to it. How to keep records? So first of all, I want to tell everyone. I don't care if you only have two beehives. Keep records. You think I know everything that's going on with my bees. I'm with them all the time. I know what's happening. But until you start writing things down, you may forget. So those of you who have ever written things down, some people write on the hides themselves. I'm sure you've seen a YouTube of somebody showing someone beehives and they've got this scribble all over them. Michael Palmer up in Vermont. He writes on everything and he's got his own shorthand. It is very interesting. But last year, I started to use a voice-activated digital recorder. Now, that sounds complicated.

I know. They're super inexpensive for their capability. The thing goes right in your pocket. It has like a 14-hour battery life. And it only records when conversation is going on. So what's the advantage? But when you're out there and you're doing your hive work by yourself, or let's say you've got a nine-year-old supervisor that just chatters away

and is always causing you to get more involved than you wanted to be. Anytime you're speaking, it's recording. That thing works really well. So you're not going to gum it up. You're not going to get honey on it. You're not going to be trying to write with a pen or something and take your gloves off. I like to use nitrile gloves because it give me a lot of dexterity. The bees don't seem to recognize that as your hand, so it limits the number of stings you might attract.

So that's really good. So then once I've done the digital voice recording And you're finished in your B yard and it's nighttime or it's raining or something like that now you go back through it and I have a three ring binder Where all the documentation takes place. So this is another thing now we're transferring the data which a lot of people are annoyed by that If you've only got one or two highs you can sit down and write it right away, but now you have to get your hands free and sit down and Do that So the digital recording all also has a date and time stamp built into it if you wanted to.

So each recording session has date and time when you transfer this to your computer. So that's interesting too. And it saves you exactly what time was this behavior happening. So it's as detailed as you wanted to be. And that thing works really well. I'm really happy with it. I will put a link down in the video description

to the specific one I have. I just go with whichever one has the best reviews. Last the longest. Now, there were some things I didn't like about this little recorder and it would record when I thought it was off sometimes so that's a little weird and the thing's not networked or anything so it's not like getting all your information and broadcasting it to some kind of server but it would like activate itself at weird times so the good thing is it was getting everything I was saying the bad thing is it was getting things I was saying at times maybe

I didn't necessarily want it to be recording me so and then the other thing is inside our storage shed I have a big whiteboard. Now, I have two whiteboards. One is for her, I have a granddaughter, who's three. She writes on the low one, and so she draws all of her observations through illustration because she doesn't use words like that. And then I have a huge whiteboard that gives us immediate status. So we spotted a queen.

Maybe it's a version, queen sells, things like that, stuff that really requires action, right? We need to monitor that hive. So we have color coded, too. So red, take over it right away. green general observations and of course the most critical thing too even again if you only have a couple of hives put numbers on them i use these brass valve tags that i got off of amazon and just because they look cool and they have a hole in them so they can have that stainless steel wire that holds them on to the stem of a valve but instead i just use that hole to put a screw through it and attach it right to the front

or side of the hive and you can stick those on plastic hives wooden hives whatever you have Those are fantastic and you get them all the way up to, you know, I think one to 60 and so on. So you can even pick your numbers. And my grandson picked his own numbers. But so that's the other part of it. You need to identify the hive. Now there are, and I've reviewed them in the past, there is software that as your operation grows might be helpful and it's an app that goes on your phone.

And that keeps track of your inventory. So for tax season, if this is a. sideline business for you, every time you buy a component or feed or sugar or, you know, a pollen patty or something like that, you enter that and also you enter which hive it gets used on. So that's much more detail than a lot of people want, but it lets you know the history of your hive. Where did I buy it? How much should I spend on that? How much should I spend if you bought bees instead of collecting swarms, although I highly recommend you collect swarms instead if you can do it. If you bought bees in, then the cost of your livestock is in there.

If you had to replace a queen and bought a queen, that's in there. So this all becomes history of the hive. And they're very detailed. So for tax purposes, which can come in handy too. But the digital recorder, simple, fast, pop it in your pocket. You don't worry about it. And you just talk to yourself while you're doing your hives. Who cares if you're talking to yourself?

People think you're talking to the bees. You know, tell it to the bees, as they say. So how to someone kill, keeping records? Let's go right on down the line here. Let's see. Thanks for no question, answer. Got a digital recorder now to learn the best way to use that too. So yes, digital recorder.

Super handy. I recommend that for a lot of uses. They're just good. And Renee says that answered the question. Yes, I'm batting a thousand. Okay, moving along. And for those of you who are just now joining us, If you have a question for me, it should be in all caps.

Otherwise, I may not notice it. So the very first question today, oh, let's go through the stats. I talked about the stats of the people that reported here what their losses were. So that's really good. The state average for Pennsylvania, where I live, is 50% loss. So just about all the people that I know and work with, and my mentees, by the way, are well above that as far as survival goes. So they're doing really well.

But, and please write this down because for those that get questions, a lot of people may come to you and ask, you know, what's going on with all the bees? Why are the dying? Project ApisM.org is the site to go to. They also put out a video today and they're describing. So Dr. Zachary Llamas is somebody that I've interviewed about varamites on drones, for example. He's heading up the testing program for that. So you'll find out how comprehensive that is, how much information is coming in, and also what's important and why you need this information is I really want you to go and report your losses when they happen. People like me, these early loss reports don't matter because we're covered in snow. My bees are barely flying. My wife goes out there and thinks colonies are dead when they're not because they're just inside.

They're humming away in there. So we have to wait until later to know what our real losses are. So I believe the next reporting cycle begins on April 1st. Interesting choice of dates there. But so I want, you know, people, backyard keepers. This is one of the first times so far. Remember, the data is still coming in. Even the almond growths, the reports are not in because it's actively happening.

They are pollinating almonds right now. So people are not getting the answers they're seeking regarding whether or not pollination was 100% effective. Do they have enough bees and everything? else and how many have died. So we're going to get more from the second batch, the second round, but backyard beekeepers for the first time in their surveys are outperforming survival-wise commercial beekeepers. So very interesting. They're getting into treatment, treatment-free, what the treatments are. They're connecting all the dots and we should get a better picture when by near the end of the year. These reports don't come out fast, but what they're doing is they're going

to have a running kind of information resource that you can check in on and that's going to be helpful. So Alex says, Fred, now you can use your cell phone as a recorder on your voice acting. Yeah, you can use your cell phone too. I just don't like to because I don't want to deal with my cell phone at all. Here's the thing. When I have my cell phone in the B yard, I don't use that thing to talk to people. I pick my cell phone based on its photographic and video capability. The cell phone that I have right now will shoot 8K video.

So it's a tool, and that's why I don't even let people have my number because they don't want them to call me. So I'm not going to use it as a digital audio recorder. I know those apps are good for your phones. I use the digital recorder as a standalone, and my phone is a tool to document what I'm doing. But I suppose anybody else, that's another good suggestion. You definitely already have one. The thing I like about the digital recorder is it can be 100% passive and it activates when you talk to it. So it's kind of cool too.

So do to do, San Franciscovi. Castle Hives. Yeah, that's Brian. He says, Android is best. Can't lie. Can't lie. I'll tell you. Can't disagree because Apple is proprietary.

carry, and you know, they're very annoying. So sorry if you're an apple person. I'm going to just move on here. Did I get the very first question? Oh, the very first question was, I was wondering what would happen if you put a fertilized egg into a drone-sized comb. Would we have giant worker bees?

No, you're not a giant worker bees, but it's much more complex than that. So let's say, let's walk this through. Let's see what happens. So what we're talking about is there are three cell types in your comb, in your hive. Do you know what they are? Answer them before I say it because I don't want to say it. And you go, I knew that.

So here's the thing. If you have worker cells, those are size for workers. And then you have larger cells, which are the drone cells. Now, you have a third cell that's even larger than that. And that's for what? A queen cell, queen cup that later becomes a queen cell. So here's what happens. your queen is the fertile layer in the hive.

She's been mated. So because she's been mated, she will produce diploid eggs. So those are fertile eggs that can be female. So you can also become a queen later if they get fed the right stuff. So now what the queen does, she goes around and she deposits her eggs. She inspects, by the way. If you've watched the queen move over the cells, she looks into every cell to see if it's been cleaned well enough, to see if it's ready for an egg.

and then she decides if it's a worker cell, she fertilizes that egg on its way out. Pretty interesting. So then that goes in the worker cell. Now, if she does not fertilize the egg because it's a large cell, drone cell, and she deposits that, that is haploid. I know that's exciting to know those words.

So now that's going to be a drone. And she decides based on the size of the cell. So that's pretty interesting. Now let's say she makes a mistake as if a queen can make a mistake. but anyway, she pops a worker cell into an oversized, a worker egg into an oversized cell. What happens? Well, who has to take care of that?

The workers, the nurse bees do. So they do something that's called policing up. You ever look in a cell and you see a new queen and she's laid maybe three or four eggs by mistake? That's different than a laying worker. This is just an overproductive queen. You don't see triplets coming out of cells. You don't see twins. You only get one.

And the reason is the nurse bee. that check those eggs out, decide which one they're going to keep. The eggs let the workers know if that egg belongs there or not. So the likelihood that a worker develops in a drone cell is very rare. It could happen. So the next part of the question is, does that result in a drone-sized worker, let's say? Not really. They can be a little larger, marginally larger. And this is something that people have tried to make larger bees this way, but this really tied too much to the genetics, not so much the cell size. Interestingly enough, the cell size is dependent upon the genetics of the bees and the size of the bees that are building the cells to begin with.

You get my point. So it will not result in a big one. So the other thing is, since we're talking about cell sizes, there are worker cells, and you may have laying workers in the absence of a queen. In some cases, we have laying workers even when a queen is present. So let's just muddy the water a little bit there. So if you have a laying worker, what's that mean? She hasn't made it with a drone. So she can lay eggs, but the eggs then will be what?

There'll be drones. So then when they lay their eggs, they just pop them anywhere they can. In fact, you'll see the eggs on the sidewalls most often, and sometimes a little shotgun pattern of eggs down there. So the same thing starts to happen. We don't get multiple drones out of that. But the interesting part is drones will be developed in what we call bullet cells. And the reason we call it that is because the capping on top of it is highly convex.

And that's because what's developing in there are runty, little skinny drone. So there's a drone that's outgrowing itself. So it is somewhat restricted. But as far as could we, for example, have a bunch of large cells and they create a bunch of large worker bees? No, it doesn't work that way. And I've actually had, when I was doing early testing on the flow frames from the flow hive company, those cells are low.

larger than worker cells up in the super. And I let the queen put her eggs in there because speculation was, they would all be drones. Well, more than 60% of them were workers. And the cappings were actually very low in the cell. That was interesting stuff. And they did develop worker bees and drones out of that flow super. That was interesting stuff.

George Garcia is here. Let me make sure I haven't missed anyone. Oh, boy, I got to back up. Let's see. How can you use your cell phone as a recorder? Moving on. This is from Pamela. Question.

One of my hives has a lot of poop on it. Is that always nozima? Can the bees survive? Can I reuse the comb if they die? Okay, those are a lot of questions piled together, Pamela Donnelly. Poop, dysentery, bees flying out and letting fly of other things the minute they get out of the hive. So it's all over the front of the hive. Does that mean that it is nozema?

No. is not a sign of nozema. Could it help spread nozema? Sure. Is it caused by nozema? No. It's caused by a lot of solids that are built up in your bees hindgut, and they just can't hold it anymore.

Out it comes. Now, it also doesn't mean your bees are going to die either. It just means they have some dysentery. They could be eating buckwheat honey, for example, that has a lot of particulates in it. Honey that has a lot of material in it needs a cleansing flight more often than your lighter honeies that are super clear. There's a correlation between how dark the honey is and how much is in it.

So that's some interesting stuff. But so can the bees survive? Yes, they can. Can I reuse the comb if they die? So reason the comb if they die. Here's the thing. Your bees are pooping outside the hive. That's a healthy move.

That's right up there with self-evicting to die in the snow. That's a healthy move. That's how they keep their hive clean. That's why they're pooping all over the front of it. If you're lucky enough to be nearby when they fly overhead, you can get that stuff on yourself, too, right on your glasses. So that's healthy bee activity. And actually, so when they fly out, I look at where they land in the snow to see if they leave little tea stained spots in the snow. We know that they're eliminating.

They're doing cleansing flights. So pooping on the frame itself, you would see that on the wooden frame, the backs of the frames, the face of the frame. That's a hive. if they're eliminating inside the hive, that's an unhealthy colony of bees. They got problems. So you're going to have to, if you're brand new, you're going to want to bring in one of your mentors or a friend in your bee club or something like that with more experience. And you're going to have to kind of run down the list of what might indicate a disease inside your hive and fail safe. So by that I mean, if you can't tell and it doesn't look good and it doesn't smell good, don't bother cleaning it up, get rid of those frames and replace them.

them is my recommendation. You could do it yourself. You could listen to somebody and clean it up with whatever they recommend. But if you're not sure and it doesn't seem right and it doesn't smell right, your chances of getting other bees to occupy that dead out space are much reduced also. So here's Kyle. It says, I have a dead out that I was feeding hive alive fondant. They had plenty of honey. Am I able to harvest that honey for my personal use? Yes, Kyle. Absolutely. You can and harvest that honey. Because here's the thing, we don't get bee diseases ourselves, nor do the bees get diseases from us.

So feeding it hive to hive is the issue when you have leftover honey and there's a debt out and we don't necessarily know everything that might have happened that caused them to die. We don't feed other bees without honey. We just don't cycle it over. Unless you're experienced and you're 100% sure that it was just an abscond or your bees died without disease

or, you know, who knows what else might. have happened but we can harvest it we can extract it we can put it in jars and it is safe for human consumption so do to do to do so grason's here too anyway let's move on Craig Shevlin fred what is the average weight of your honey from your horizontal hive okay have three horizontal hives so the honey weighs the same no matter what hive it comes out of That's smart alegancer, 11 pounds per gallon, whatever. So in other words, how much honey do you get out of it is probably what the question is. And my long Langstroth hive is a very productive hive.

And I pull honey and resources from that to make other colonies. So I don't necessarily harvest from it. Conservatively, you could get seven deep frames out of that. So that's less than one deep super of honey. The other thing is, let's see, What's the colony size? That colony tends to swarm from time to time, which reduces their numbers, which reduces honey production, which reduces what we could take from it.

So if I've taken seven frames and they refill that fast, that's anybody's guess. Now, the lay-ins hives, those frames, I'm going to put myself on report. I've never extracted honey from the lay-ins hives. And they build up huge numbers, and they swarm out too. and I just let them do their own thing. So now the question could be in an indirect way, is that horizontal hive producing as much honey as a vertical hive would? It all really just comes down to the population and the numbers

and what space they have to expand to and horizontal hives. I like them a lot, my long Langstroth hive in particular, because you can move your follower board out and add frames as you go, or if you're in a dearth period or whatever, and you want to start to fold that back on itself and remove frames. For example, while we're talking about horizontal hives, some people rotate their boxes in spring. You have multiple boxes.

Your bees have moved up. We talked about that earlier, and what's at the bottom? Old brood frame, right? So some people rotate those. They put the old brood frame up above, and now the bees expand into it. With your long Langstroth hive in particular, with a single entrance at one end,

which is the configuration I like to have, in spring, there are a bunch of empty brood frames that are there. There's brood comb, the first three or four frames in that hive are now empty. Instead of rotating the boxes, all I have to do is pull those frames out, put them in storage at the end of the hive, slide the other frames with brute on them closer to the entrance, bring up those transitional frames that have the pollen, and they've got the bee bread, and they've got the beginnings of storing new honey.

So one of the questions, too, was about leftover honey. I find that when the nectar flow really hits, when the dandelions are blooming and stuff like that, they don't go into their old capped honey. So this is your opportunity to harvest that out and leave them with insurance policies, two or three frames that have honey in them. But you don't need to leave that whole winter resists. deserve anymore. So you can pull those and do it yourself. Now we have extracted comb. We have that stuff is ready to go. And then as the season progresses, you keep adding that back in. So when it comes to sorting and

shifting resources and brood frames and comb and things like that, horizontal hives are the easiest hive to manage, period. I can't, they're on par with what my vertical hives do. But there again, I'm not a honey producer per se. But I can't say that, I get way more honey off of a standard Langstroth than I do the long Langstroth. And the lay-in sides are productive. I don't extract. I don't know what the future holds for those. Okay.

Let me see if I'm missing something. Any suggestions on a good B-suit for a 10-year-old? For a 10-year-old. Here's the thing about, I was going to say right off the bat, Guardian bee apparel, which makes my favorite vented B suits. But I think they did not have, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think they had children's suits. So I will say with the supervisor who could pick any B-suit he wants,

because we have a rack of B-suits in the Way to Be Academy. And Natural Apiary made the suit that was his famous, his favorite one, and his cousin also chose that same suit, but then they quit making them. So the next B-suit company that makes suits for kids, from two-year-olds all the way up, flow.com. Honeyflow.com.

They're inexpensive, 100% organic cotton, super comfy. They also sell vented suits, but I don't know if you can get a vented suit for a little type, but others can feel free to share links of their favorite suits, but those are the ones right now, natural apiary.

They make the camouflage ones. Those are cool for kids. They like cool stuff, you know. But I think they quit that and if the guys over at guardian bee apparel would just make kids suits i think they would sell those really well because they hold up and they're good that's it for those uh david miller says fred thoughts could you treat two single brood boxes with one formid dose by using a double screenboard Okay, so when it comes to dosing, see, I want this video to have perennial application.

What am I going to say? Follow the label on your format. Because they say per brood box, so these doses are assigned based on that. So if we have a double screen board, like a Snell Grove board or something like that, and of course we're venting for another colony, I think you have to treat. each colony as an individual colony. So in other words, dosing the first colony down below would not be treating your upper colony at the same time because it's based on boxes of brood and the treatment and dose.

You're going to have to, I'm going to cop out. You're going to have to follow the label on that, but those are my thoughts right off the bat. So here's Aaron Paris. Wanted to know, how many colonies do you have? How many losses did you have? Okay. I know for sure going into winter, we had a 10% loss. Okay.

So it was 43 colonies. And I think we've lost five for sure. Okay. The other end of this is what I spoke about earlier, we don't know what our losses are right now, but we can hear them. We see there are colonies humming away inside their boxes. We are snow covered. We have cold temperatures. We have more snow coming, in fact.

yay. And we don't know what our bees are capable of right now or how many total losses we have. But 10% for sure, which is a lot for me. But the state average is more than 50%. So again, that's going to unfold as the season comes in. I know a lot of people out west, the Midwest, the South, they're all working their bees. They're opening their hives. Good for them. I can't do that yet. We're still snow covered. And I don't know those answers. But I'll do like last year last spring, I did 35 landing boards in a video. So what we did is we just went hive to hive to hive to hive and showed the landing board activity and to see what they were doing in spring. So 35 colonies were alive last spring. So the problem is every year I'm adding colonies.

And I want to go the other way. So this spring will be condensing colonies, but we will do an assessment. And if we find some good examples that we can do a necropsy on, then we'll take them apart and do cause and effect, and it better not be because they starved. That is unacceptable for me here. But there are colonies that look dead, that my wife comes in and tells me they look dead because she's out there in the rain and everything

and the snow and the sleet clearing entrances because she heard some YouTuber tell her that that was important. And then she tells me that one is dead for sure. There's no activity in front of it. And then so I have to put down my coffee. I have to get foul weather gear on, go out there, put my head to the side of it, and they're alive. They're just not flying yet. So we don't know what our numbers are.

And that's the problem too. That's why the April 1st is going to be the next mark for all the people that are reporting their colony losses. And that will help Project Apis M get a clearer picture on backyard keepers, sidelineers. And again, what help their bees the most? So part of that is coming up with best practices. So we're going to learn more. But right now, that's it. I don't have, it's not one of those things where I walk out.

Oh, every hive is dead. All my bees are dead. There's a hive that we're hoping, guys, in my, that's a terrible thing to say. But at my son's house, up in, it's, oh, a 15-minute drive from us. We're just hoping those bees don't survive winter because those things are attacking you before you're within 60 feet of the So we're not going to feel bad about them, but if they make it in spring, I got something else to deal with there. But right now, we just don't know. So Patty Long, let me show.

Let me share I'm not skipping people. Christina Hackle. Is pollen for humans okay for bees? And would it be better than a substitute pollen? Is pollen for humans okay for bees? pollen for humans. Oh, I see. I know what I think I know what we're saying. Let's say we went to a whole food store and we're getting all our vitamin packs and everything.

And we go down the aisle and here's a bunch of dried, desiccated pollen for us to eat. Can we take that and feed it to the bees? You could. It's not going to do dittily niddly for your bees. Here's why. The pollen that you feed to your bees has to be fresher. is better. It has to be from a source that benefits your bees. There are a lot of pollen sources out there. There's a range of nutritional value and amino acid profiles and everything else for these

pollen. So me personally, when I go and buy pollen that's dried and packaged for people and feed it back to the bees, I personally would not do that. If you want to save pollen to feed to your bees at another time of year, it's best to. trap the pollen from your own hives and don't dry it out. It goes to a freezer and you keep it in the freezer and it gets used within six months. So I don't know, I have this discussion with pollen paddy makers, which we just mentioned earlier today, the winning pollen patty was from global patties. So they seem to win all the time. But when you ask them, where the pollen come from? They'll see California pollen.

Well, what plants in California? Well, California plants. They don't know the specific. Somebody knows where the pollen came from. So we don't even know what the identification of the plant is that the pollen came from that goes into the global paddies. So if somebody can figure that out, I ask them. And they just say California pollen. But as far as I would not waste my money and time and effort putting that in, I would put

out a really good winter patty or a spring patty pollen patties are the most expensive thing you can put in your hives so it really has to justify the cost and effort to do that i would just put in some sort of winter patty some sort of feed that keeps your bees from starving to death and not focus so much on the proteins this is something else that you can look at project apism Project APSM tells you if a protein boost helped your bees survive, if it was just sugar only helped your bees survive. So they break these details down, and you're going to find that there's no significant difference in colony survival.

So if that's your target is to get your bees to survive, you're much ahead just by giving them a fondant sugar patty, winter patty, something like that that gives them the carbohydrates they need to do their other, functions. So I hope that helps. Here comes from really is this the name flip and twit. Question, have you thought of having Phil Chandler, barefoot beekeeper in the UK on your interview with expert series to talk about Topar Hives and Eco Floors? Well, I haven't invited Phil Chandler, but thank you for the prompt because this week we have, we're talking talking about top our hives and we're going to, I have a guest coming on and we're going to do that zoom.

The eco floors, people, in case you're wondering what that is, that's seeding the floor of your hive with the tritis of materials, organic materials that are decomposing naturally that also have tiny predators in them that say, for example, of a road destructor might toppled through the screen and got down in there that they would feed on that, right? So pseudos scorpions, all kinds of things would live in these, it's also called biofloor sometimes. And I do ask a lot of people about this, those who do research and so on. One of the things about bio floors or eco floors

or when you put all the substrate down there, mosses and decaying wood and material like that, is it's often installed in a hive, but yet kept out of reach of your bees. And the reason being is kind of like an auto garbage disposal for these mites that would fall off. So therefore, if you have to keep it away from the bees, it's something that the bees would clean out otherwise. So as far as Phil Chandler, for those of you don't know, you can just Google or go to YouTube and search for Phil Chandler, the barefoot beekeeper.

And you can probably learn his processes on that. I did notice one of his videos about that. I also didn't see any recent follow-ups on those kind of floors. So I'm reserving whether or not I would recommend that to other people if we have to keep the bees out of it for it to exist in a hive. It's not something that we find in natural cavities, in trees. It's not something that we find in feral colonies. Because, for example, a tree, let's say that it was beneficial to the bees and the bees wanted it there. As the detritus accumulates in the bottom of a cavity inside a bee tree, if the bees wanted it, it would remain there.

but it doesn't happen that way. The bees remove and clean out. And so what's at the bottom of a cavity like that? It's very sparse as far as that goes. So we're kind of like creating something that sounds like it's good, but I need more follow-up on that. So my advice would be when someone has put out something like that, that the follow-up is very important because this is a novel approach

and it's not something the bees would do on their own and we're keeping the bees out of it while it exists in the bottom of the hunt. So we need to know more about that. But as far as the top of our hives, I already have somebody lined up to talk to about that. That's coming up this week. So that's going to be interesting. But people can go and check that out.

So let's see what else. I'm looking for all the caps if somebody has a question. So beekeeping. So it says this is again, beekeeping Fred. Phil Chandler built a long horizontal hive from Builders Foil, foam, board, Builders Foil phone board for 50 pounds, say $70 in a video only a few days ago. Again, everybody can go and watch YouTubers, and I'm happy to see people experiment with different

things and building foil. And that's the beauty of backyard beekeeping. And then again, having a voice, having a YouTube channel or a way to share what it is that you're doing. I also think it's very important to explain why we're using that material and how well it lasts over time and what the final results are, what the final findings are. Because there are a lot of hive configurations and a lot of hive materials that are being used. And I have to admit that I can't keep up with a lot of other YouTubers and content creators that are beekeepers.

So people bring it to my attention like this right now. So the thing of it is we look for follow-up. I usually let those play out and see what the final findings are before I would share or endorse something to my own viewers, unless it's something I also would put into practice here. So the things that I talk about, I've used or have really good scientific data to back them up. And then I would share with people and then send them out. But today's shout out is for Project Apis M. And so we'll go on.

Brad Oliphant from New York submitted this question. It says, I've started re-queaning all of my hives, the first thing before our strong nectar flow. I do this not only to keep strong and diverse genetics in my apiary, but mainly to prevent swarming. As most, all my research tells me that older queens, even in their second year, are much more likely to swarm than younger queens. Even though my experience tells me this is true,

I'm confused as to how this would make a difference. when it is the worker bees themselves that make all the decisions in the hive. Could it be that the workers sense a younger queen and don't feel the need to swarm or is the queen actually getting involved with swarming decisions as they are older? Well, the queen is doing the best she can at all times. So here's the thing. Again, one of the consensus, because now they're looking at why colonies are dying and which colonies survive better than others,

those that requeen their colonies every year, which is one of the practices that a lot of commercial beekeepers do, because they also have queen breeding operations, and you'd have to if you want to survive. You have to cut costs by having your own. Those that were re-queening every year actually had a lower survival rate than those that were carrying on their queens, like I do, for example.

One of the reasons we mark our queens is so we know that they're not superseded, and if they are, what do we do? We log it and keep track of that colony, and its progress and how well it works out. So I personally don't requeen every year, and I don't think I would, but until I started marking my queens and putting a paint dot on the thorax,

I didn't realize how rapidly they were turning over on their own. I would have told you that these colonies have the same queen for a couple of years, three years, because I never saw a break in production. I never noticed this is years ago. I never noticed that the queen was absent. They seemed to just go right along, and I also was not actively collecting swarms.

I was studying swarms and just watching them go their happy way. Now that I collect swarms, I'm much more interested in that, marking my queens, I notice that they're cycling out. We need to know what our queens are doing with their performances, and so a second-year queen are the ones that I try to reproduce from. So if I'm intentionally dividing a colony, if I'm intentionally making a split, it comes from a colony that's been around for two winters. And so because, again, I understand that's, you know, I don't have a breeding program with 43 colonies max. I'm not making a big dent, but every little bit helps.

And in my mind, by breeding from those queens and creating more colonies from those that have more longevity, I'm getting a stronger stock in my mind. but of course if they're swapping out their queens and as you said, the workers are in charge of they stop feeding the queen. They control her diet. And they can run her around and get her ready to swarm. And they're also the ones that make the queen cups,

for example, that she can lay that egg in because that's the best when they go into swarm mode and they start building all these queen cups, which later become a queen cell when the egg goes in it. And that's the V is deciding that, they want another queen or they want to expand. But remember, it's more complex than that because the population of the hive impacts, whether or not they decide they're going to swarm.

So when they swarm, they automatically make new queens, not because the old queen is no good, but because they have to push out more bees, they're congested, and the old queen naturally is the one that departs. So this is also why I collect those queens that are leaving. I put them in resource hives, and it's an insurance policy. just in case because when they replace the queen, that queen has to mature, that queen has to fly out, that queen has to mate and return. And if we look at percentages of queens that actually come back, mated, it could be 79%, which sounds great. But that also means that 21% of your queens

are not coming back mated. So now that's the insurance policy you have over here, restore her to the colony, and off they go. So it doesn't necessarily, mean that the queen that they're replacing on their own is deficient it means the colony is growing and they have a superorganism that they're going to reproduce on that level so we're colony reproduction and then internal reproduction when it comes to the workers and the drones and things like that but when the entire colony splits off and sends its queen out it's not necessarily because she's bad the fact she was so good she built a strong enough colony to afford to replace her and drop up to 75 70% of their working population.

So it's another way to look at it. Here's Suburban Hive Company. Fred, explain how bees move in a horizontal hive in the winter. Explain how they move. Well, they use their feet anyway. In the wintertime in the horizontal hive, by the way, I changed survival of my horizontal hive colonies significantly just by putting insulation inside the hive on top of the coverboards.

Before that, almost every year, we lost that colony. Okay. Now that we put double bubble on top of your cover boards in there and now we insulate it. So when the top closes, that insulation, single bubble or double bubble, becomes a gasket, right? So it seals it. No more air movement at all on top of the coverboards. What's under the coverboards, 3 eighths of an inch B space. What's under that?

The frames themselves. What's under that? Space underneath. And so the thing is how they move, right? They're going to move through the hive. So do they get through the, that this is interesting, because I've also said cut corners when it comes putting foundation. If you're using heavy waxed foundation, which is plastic foundation, inside your

wooden frames, there are no holes in that for your bees to migrate through the frames. So what do they have to do? Winter time. Here's the cluster. They have to gradually move over it, take an advantage of that three-eighth-inch bee space over the top, which by the way isn't found in nature when it comes to these, when you see comb, you might see little holes up there, but you don't see a whole 3 eighths inch space above. The other thing, they can move around the edges, but they're hesitant to. They can go underneath the frames.

But again, they do that, but it's not as efficient as passing directly through the frames. So when we're looking at natural comb in a horizontal configuration, a horizontal space, floor joists, things like that, for these people to do cutouts and ripouts and find these feral colonies, there are these little holes that we have to look for, but your bees gradually pass through those.

And so it's kind of like a slow pour of sand going through, but it's bees and they're going through the frame, and they're coming out on the other side, and then the surrounding the next frame of stored honey and hard-capped wax there. And as they consume the honey from the center, what's happening? They're building their winter population of bees right in there

because we have our fat-bodied nurse bees or fat-bodied winter bees. in there. So with a long hive, we need to help them out if you want them to make that migration efficiently and successfully so that in springtime, they're alive. Now, the cool thing is we can do thermal scans because it's just a wooden hive and it's dimensional lumber, but it's two-by-twelves. These are the sidewalls, right? So on a really cold day, we can do a thermal scan. I know exactly where they are. I also know, because of my notes, how much of the resources are still left. And so for the past two winters, I haven't had to do any supplemental feed on my long Langstrath hive at all.

And that's because we insulated the top. And now the bees can move, plus we cut corners. So we clipped the plastic foundation on the corners. And now I have what's called a hollow punch. It's a three-quarter inch metal punch. And I knock a hole right through the plastic foundation as I'm installing new foundation. So when I put that hole there, the bees have a choice. They can build their own beeswax in that, and they can chew it or not.

So they can use it as an egress route if they want to or they can close it up. They usually leave some of it open. We took away that choice if we're using plastic foundation, and we don't cut those holes and we don't cut those corners. The bees cannot chew through that highly waxed plastic foundation. So it's up to us to leave the holes there and then let the bees. go through it or close it up whatever they like to do. Because here's the other advantage if it's beeswax in the hole

because they decided to close it up. Winter time comes along as they glom onto that and they warm the center so that's still workable. They chew that out and then they make their holes again and they move through it. So that's the progress in and out. So I hope that answer that question. So Christine Hackle, thank you, Fred.

saved me money. I'm getting my first package this spring and worried about brood buildup in the spring. I'm glad to save you money. I'm also glad to help people spend their money too. So either way works. Glenn Perkins, where did you get the blue access tube with the gate on back of your observation hive? Oh, you mean the hive gate? Wait, the blue access tube on the back of your observation hive. I don't have a blue access tube on the back. Oh, the blast gate. Here I thought we were going to talk about hive gates.

The blast gate that's on the side of my observation hives, and for those of you don't know what we're talking about, you can go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, if you're just listening, and you do a search up in the top right where it has a little searching magnifying glass there and just put in observation hive installation. What those are is I put these on the side of the observation hives. They're blast gates.

They are sold. Home Depot, Menards, whatever building center you go to. They're sold online. Amazon sells them. Therefore, systems that collect dust. So dust collection systems for table saws, you know, miter saws, whatever you've got going on. I use those as introduction tubes.

So I put that on the side of my observation hives. There is a clear, I want to say they're two and a half inch diameter. Could be wrong. Whatever the standard shop back diameter is. Anyway, that clear piece is in there. And I can open this blast gate and I can introduce a queen into a colony and see how they're behaving. I can also put food and resources in there. So I put those new B-bytes in there, which are the,

they're the new algae, the blue algae bites that are fortifying your bees. So I put those in through there too because in the translucent tube that connects it, I can also see how the bees are reacting. If they're, for example, if I thought they needed a queen, and I put a queen in there, I can see them doubling over trying to sting it or whatever. And then I can just open that up and pull it right back out. So it gives me access to an observation hive without pulling the glass front off the back and really getting into the hive.

So they're just dust collection. I think they're called blast gates. Really easy. They're aluminum, the ones that I have. But it's important, too, to have that translucent or clear plastic. And a lot of dust collection systems are made out of lucide or some clear material. So you can see if there's a clog in the dust or sawdust in there. And that's what I use.

And those have come in super handy, by the way. Very nice. So, do, do, do, do, do. Okay, what's there? Where did you get the blue? See, the blue access tube. Okay, moving on. Chase and C-word, do mites migrate off the bees when they die.

I was wondering, because I have it dead out, and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to do a mitewash on them. I don't see other evidence of mites. no fecal patches or anything, but it would definitely make me feel better if I knew for certain your mite numbers were below threshold. I believe the cluster just got too small to move to other food, not 100% sure. Okay, here's the thing, because I do like to look at mites when a colony is dead or dying or diseased. The mites, as soon as your bees die, they leave the bodies of the bees.

They're looking for another host. So in the wintertime, they can't find one because there's no robbing going on or anything. that comes in springtime. This is why when you have a colony of bees in the wintertime that dies from Varroa, destructor, mite infestation, and of course the pathogens they carry with them, then if your bees come in spring and rob out that colony, would they then pick up those mites? No, because the mites don't survive for very long.

They get about four days without a host, and they're dead, and they don't feed on dead bees. So if the bees are dying and dead, You'll find them if you get into that quick, and I did, and I did a video so you can actually see what that looks like. It was a video about sack brood and bald brood and how to test for American foulbreed. So if you're looking for the video, that's it. But in the ultra macro of those cells, I have the mites scooting around cell to sell looking for a host. And they couldn't find one.

It was really sad. I should have put really sad music in there as the mrs. mites could not find a host and ultimately starve to death, I think is what they did. So anyway, it's not worth doing mite washes on your dead beads because the mites have left the bodies of the bees. Now, if you've got trays underneath the screen underneath your hive, that's where you're likely going to find your mites. But be very careful when you pull out the frames and a dead out and get your penlight flashlight out and your magnifying glass and look into the cells. So we're going to see frass. Fras is the little droppings left over from a mite occupation.

So they leave little specks that looks like super tiny granules of sugar. It looks like natural sugar. Sometimes it's tan. And where you see those, you can actually find possibly the dead bodies of the mites that perished because they did not have a nurse bee to feed on. So you can look at that. Bottom boards, bottom trays. Those are other places where you can find your mites. Now, it's hard because when they've died, depending on when you did your last mite wash, they could have been in trouble for a while. It could have been a colony that had some robbing activity. So sometimes when they're being robbed, also, these mites are on their way out. They're jumping on these bodies of the foragers that are doing the robbing, and they're scooting right along and getting into another colony.

So there's a lot going on with the mites and at different times. but if they died in winter when there's no sharing of resources calling the colony, there's no drift going on and things like that, the mites just die without a host. Okay. B. Kathy, hello from Southwest Michigan, February 24th. The next four days are going to be high, 40s, and sunny. If I put out sugar feeding bags this week during the day,

would I put it closer to the highs? versus hundreds of feet away from the highs. Thank you. Please hear me on this. If you're going to feed, first of all, a lot of you will probably key in on 40s and sunny. And then you will read things about bees not flying unless it's 60 degrees Fahrenheit or something like that.

Your bees on a sunny day will fly out and seek resources even though it's really cold if they have a known resource to seek. If that makes sense. So the reason this is very important from Kathy, so I'm glad to get this question. Some people are thinking about putting out resources for the bees and I see nothing wrong with it.

Don't put it in your apiary, don't put it on your hives. I see people putting it on top of the beehive. Please don't. Here's why. What's the next thing that's going to happen as the weather starts to pick up and it gets a little warmer? these bees are going to be pinging each other's entrances,

and they're going to be looking for ways in, and they're looking for 100% gain for energy expended. What do I mean by that? They want honey, and if they can get into a hive that's not well-guarded, that's not well-populated, they can start to rob it out, so you're about to hit robbing season. As well as, by the way, when all the resources really kick in, and they've all, they're all happy,

and they're all getting nectar and pollen and all the stuff that they need from the environment, robbing threshold falls way down. So it's not so much of a big deal at that point. But there's a critical time that we're coming up on where we get these weird warm-up days and some of your bigger colonies are definitely going to be looking at other colonies

as potential resources. Don't help them by providing some kind of high sucrose resource, which I think is actually a good idea, but put that out well away from your apiary on your own property. And the bees that go to that, that discover it, that find a resource there that's usable, that justifies the energy expended to get there.

So they're going to use their resources to stay warm while they're flying. We know that their thorax needs to be in the 80s. So that uses energy to get to it. That's why if it's a low gain resource, they're not going to fly very far for it. So put them out away from your bees, but make it a consistent resource that they can remember. And then when you get these intermediate warmups, you can fortify them.

Of course, your best way to feed a colony that you think needs help is inside that specific hive. But I know it feels good to see them come and get resources that you've put out. And also there's some advantage you're providing these foragers a resource away from other hives because that saves you from having them paying or defeat the defenses of another colony of bees, get in there, and get their resources. So that's how I choose to think of it. Get out there, and I want to thank Ross Wagner, by the way, for $10 donation. It's very generous.

I appreciate it. So for bee Kathy, yes, you can feed them well away. And the reason I want you to look at my study of that, because how cold will bees fly? it is astonishing what they will risk if they have a high reward resource that's location is known. What they don't do until it's in the high 50s or low 60s, they don't fly out and forage for new resources. They go to known resources. So fun stuff.

And I'm personally going to be putting out dry pollen substitute as well, AP 23, just because it's feel a good thing to watch them come and get it and it doesn't hurt anything for them to take that back and it lets me know kind of which colonies are really strong because only the strongest colonies can send out those kind of foragers early in the year next question comes from glen's natural honey which is a youtube channel name how many people show for your beekeeping breakfast and it sounds like a great idea to try our club has two to three hundred members so i guess we'd have to get an rsvp to not overload a restaurant. Do you do it on a weekend to get other than non-retirees?

This is a point of contention, by the way, for my bee club, the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. And what Glenn is referring to is we do a bee breakfast. So, and it's the people that work for a living that are upset about it because they miss out. How many people do we have? It averages 19 to 29 people. That's actually a lot of people to show up for a bee breakfast. And what this does, and this is why I think it's good to have this in today's conversation,

this is the long stretch here in the northeastern United States. This is when people are bored. This is when people eat Cheetos and binge watch Netflix or whatever they do. There's nothing to do. So having a gathering every other week or once a month at a local restaurant works out really well. Because when you talk to the managers of these restaurants, the restaurant businesses can be, they're a little slow. They would be happy to have a group of 20 or 30 people show up

and all order breakfast, even though you're going to sit around for two hours and talk about these. They'll give you a space, you know, a lot of these fast food restaurants and stuff, I don't do fast food restaurants, but they all have these little rooms off to the back that are very easily marked off for birthday parties and things like that.

So you can talk to the manager and say, can we just get that room, you know, every third Wednesday of the month and show up from 9 to 11, and we guarantee you a certain number of meals will be ordered. And so it's to the point where we're such nice people that the waitresses like to come and wait on us because we leave them heavy tips. We're getting a room.

They set up the tables for us. They do everything. It's fantastic. And you get to answer people's questions and concerns. it's also fantastic for new beekeepers to come and be in conversation with people in some cases that have been keeping bees for 40 years. So it's a great mix.

It's a great opportunity to talk. And the restaurant's already there. Nobody has to make coffee. Nobody has to clean up. It's very easy. I highly recommend that you do it. You may be wondering what restaurant do we use. We use IHOP, the International House of Pancakes.

which to me is my favorite. So, yeah, we have as many as 29 people. We fill the room. It's a lot of fun, good conversations. And I highly recommend that you find a group of people to do that with. Let's see if there's any questions here. By the way, if you have a question for me, please type it in all caps.

Wouldn't you know it bekeeping types of question here? Does open feeding sugar syrup or pollen sub not cause the spread of diseases or pathogens? Many discouraged to open feed. Can you advise pros and cons? Okay. I dismiss that claim. Okay, and here's why. When you have bees and you open feed,

this comes up, and I know that there are whole regions where it is illegal to open feed. So I want to talk a little bit about the responsibility that goes to the open feeder. If you are in a time of year when there are honey soupers on in your area, you should not be putting out sugar syrup and open feed. The reason being that other people do not have control over where their bees go,

and they can land on your sugar syrup, and they can be bringing sugar syrup home when they're gathering that honey to be harvested for sale or otherwise. So this is at the time of year when people do not have honey supersone, and you in particular should not have honey super saun. The question about the spread of disease. And here's why I want to explain my thinking on that. And it's because these bees are silly.

They are mixing it up at every single hive. They go into hives at random and join forces. So the mixing up of bees at an open feeder is that good or bad. In other words, are they spreading something? Is there a contact there that they wouldn't be getting if they went into another hive? So here's my thinking. Stick with me. If you're about to present your case and try to get that changed,

I'm not going to say that you should get a change, but I'm just explaining the logic. One of the reasons that we put out this feeding at times of dearth is because it draws off the bees that would be robbing other hives. What happens when they rob other hives? I'll tell you what happens. They get in there, and the contact with those bees is so intense, and they're so frenzied in their accessing of those resources,

rubbing against one another, do you know what they do? They rub their hairs off. They are in such tight contact with one another while they engage in robbing activity that they rub their hairs off and they look like shiny, hairless bees. Is that more or less of an opportunity to share diseases that would be spread through contact? There's much more of a concern spreading diseases through trophlaxis, feeding one another, right? grooming one another. So this physical contact at a robbing station, that's why I call a feeding station is really kind of a robbing station. They are not in the same tight context that they were

because we're deterring robbing. So if we have robbing over here, open feeding over here, which ones are in the tightest physical quarters with one another? These little bees over here robbing out this colony here in CQB and they're coming out with all their hairs. rubbed off these over here are getting their resources and they're going home and you can spread it out enough to where they're feeding they're not necessarily dogpiling one another they're on top of each other when they're robbing so just going to have to weigh the odds because I think that when you open feed and draw off these would-be robbers to a situation that's open air and everything else you prevent robbing where they definitely would be the other thing

is your foragers are interacting all the time with other colonies. Which ones have to be the cleanest? Which ones do we want to make sure they're not spreading pathogens? Your nurse bees have never been out of the hive. Your nurse bees do not interact with foragers, right? The nurse bees get their resources from stored resources in the hive. The pollen carrying bees come out. They don't give their pollen to nurse bees, they put it in the cells, the nurse bees then attend to the pollen. So the bees that are out in direct contact, I'm just adding layers to the discussion. This is not an argument. So the bees that are out foraging don't come in contact in a way that spreads disease in a meaningful way in comparison to how they would or could in a robbing situation.

and I've demonstrated over and over that these bees are not faithful, they go into each other's hives all the time. If you've got a disease, colony of bees somewhere, you need to be dealing with that. There should not be American foul brood or European foul brood in your backyard apiary period. Okay. I hope that makes sense. Who's with me on that? Who agrees that logic holds weight? Here's from Tommy Chu.

I've considered doing some open feeding lately, but this time of year in South West Missouri, warm weather means high winds, which is what we have here along with the warmth. So that's judgment call. But here's the thing, if you see the bees out bouncing off your windows of your house and stuff like that, they are foraging, they're looking for stuff. And here's another layer. Let's say you just wanted to do this feel good, spring feeding, and you only want to feed your bees. Forget those neighbors and they're free-loading bees, right? So now you just want to feed your bees and give them some sucrose, right? So here's what we do.

Let's thin that down. You have one-to-one sugar syrup, right? You can go lighter than that. Okay. So you can create a very light sugar syrup. This is dry sugar and water, nothing else. Okay. You put that out there?

Guess what you just did? the only bees that can expend the energy to get that resource, that light-loaded sucrose that you put out there, is going to be your own apiary. Bees that are a mile away aren't going to travel a mile to get a light-loaded sucrose. Now, if it was two-to-one, they'd be all over it. These higher sugar content, remember, if they use up their entire gas tank on their way to a resource that doesn't refill their gas tank all the way, and it just gets them home, then it's not worth it. That's not a resource that's viable for them to put the energy out to get. get it. So by creating a very light, very thin sugar syrup, you're providing something for your bees and making it unappetizing for colonies from other apiary. So once again, you're just circling back

on your own hive. So whatever you already have, you already have and you keep. Now we're not bringing in the others. How do you like that? So to do. So it's okay, if there's local regulations, don't you dare use my name and say, Fred said, I don't have to listen to your regulations. I'm just saying regulations can be changed. You have to have really good justification for that. But often these decisions are made. Regulations are established at a time

when someone who's good at debate who can look at all angles is not present to make the case. I want to be able to feed my bees. Now, if I can't open feed, fine. I feed inside the hive, as I said before. and just keep them up to speed. That's all.

So moving on, what do we have here? Oh, this comes from Brian from Wibram, Massachusetts. It says, good morning, Fred. I watched your process for using Ross rounds from four years ago on YouTube. Thank you for watching. Do you know of a company that is making a kit to build out the rounds size for Nucleus Hive? or should I just build the outer frame myself, use the parts from an 8 or 10 frame kit? Okay, way ahead of you.

So the nucleus hives, five frame deep nucleus hives. There is one. So the Ross rounds, for those you don't know, this is for comb honey. They were made right after World War II. Guess what the name of the dude was that made them Ross. So anyway, they made these rounds and they insert into plastic frames. And because guess what happened after World War II, we got our hands on plastic. That's why all the toys started being made out of plastic and stuff,

and they found out that it was a material that could be used for a lot of different things, including comb honey. So they put these frames in there, but they built a special wooden frame that was sized right for these Ross rounds. Now, another company called Ciracelle out of New Zealand, came up with brackets so that you could double up the Ross Round frames and it uses the Ross round frame. So in other words, they're not stealing Ross rounds and, you know, violating some kind of

patent or something. They made brackets that use Ross rounds the way they come. So they're standard Ross rounds. And now they fit into deep supers. So they're perfect for, that's why I put them on, this is what I did. I put them on, I put some of them in the Appamee 7 frame nucleus hive, which we messed up and made a video about it so that my grandson can point out that they made mistakes. Because we didn't use all of the Ross rounds across.

I put a couple of them in there. Then I put regular frames next of them, which caused Ross rounds to build out farther than the otherwise would have. So there is a game to it. But let's say you had five of these frames. It's actually four over four on each one, I believe. So that's eight per frame. So it's five times eight. And now that fills it.

And then your bees can work it. and if it's a standard Langstroth hive, no special box necessary. And I put that on really strong colonies, overly productive colonies, which were, again, how did I end up with that colony? Let's tie it back to what we were talking about earlier today. I take a queen that's about to swarm. I take her bees with her. I put her in a nucleus hive as a resource hive, as an insurance policy,

just in case they don't correctly requeen themselves. But then they did requeen themselves, and I have this other colonies. So now I have five over five over five. So I have a triple stack of nucleus hives, all wood. And I use that top box for comb production. And for comb production for drawing out comb on foundation, that again, it's a resource hive, so I use that on other hives. The other thing is I use it for wax production and I use it for comb honey.

So very interesting. Works really well. highly recommend it. Sericel makes those. You're probably wondering where you could get it. If you're in the United States, the B-L-Y-T-H-E-W-O-O-D, B-L-W-O-D, B-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-S stuff, the Hive Top Feeders, those frame brackets, everything. So go there and don't forget to tell the good folks at Blythe-Wod that I sent you so that you can pay the same as everyone else. So that satisfies the wrong.

cross round question moving on here this is from w3 bk y tat 73 that's the YouTube channel name do you have a lower temp cutoff when you won't open the hive to put on it on the inner cover how about lifting the inner cover off quickly to slide resources winter pollen patties or extra little sugar breaks into the candyboard that I keep under my insulated inner cover I'm always torn better starving obviously better than starving. Okay, so here's the thing. That's exactly my thought. We have a 50-degree day coming up, but guess what? It's probably going to be windy and rainy, and who knows what else. Here's the thing. If your bees are out of food, I don't care

what the weather is. If they're starving to death, you have to send your wife, I mean, you have to go out there and feed those bees. If you've got a fondant pack that's completely empty, if it's a hive that you thought had a lot of resources, now they're up at the top, and you're just thinking, oh, man, I hope the weather breaks, and I hope that they can get the resources they need. This is managed livestock. You have the resources sitting right next to you. You have sugar at the very least.

Put something on that starving hive, or you will be looking at dead bees, and the reason they're going to be dead is because of you. So I don't want to be harsh. I don't want to pick on you. but if it's cold and they're starving feed them popping the lid and getting that on there by the way have your stuff ready to go i mean don't pull it out and like look around see what's going on put the food on there close it right back up get your insulation on and uh go your happy way save a bee as they say save save a bee now this is interesting um apomondia epamondia 2005 guess what they're not going to

do. They are not going to give awards for any of the honey entries or honey product entries this year. You know why? Because so many people are cheating. Too many people are adulterating their honey. And this is at competition level. So instead of fighting the fight with all of these because, why do they do that, by the way, is Appamandi not doing it. Stick with me. There's a reason why I'm doing this. In 2019, they kind of blindsided the people that entered all. all of these competitions for honey. And 40% of the honey submissions, this is for competition. These are the blue ribbon winners.

These are the people that champion honey competitions every year. 40% of them were rejected and labeled as adulterated. Adulterated with everything from, it could be toxins from varomite treatments, or it could be people using sugar syrup and things like that to boost the honey to make it look better. So anyway, to avoid all the conflict and all the pushback that they got when they hired this company to test that honey, they're just not going to award any trophies at the Appamandia in Denmark. So this is very interesting. And the reason I bring it up to you is please don't ever be the person who adulterates your honey. Because here's the thing.

integrity is everything for beekeepers and your reputation, your reputation building when you give someone a jar honey, even if it's just a giveaway, giving away the honey. You're building a reputation. And people that there are people that know by the smell and the taste of honey if it's right or not. They're called honey salmaliés. These are experts, right? And then you'll hear people say things like, wow, comb honey. We can make comb honey, and that can't be faked, right?

Yeah, but what do we just talk about earlier? What if you put out sugar syrup all the time and your bees were drawing on the sugar syrup to make comb? We know that when you install a swarm of bees into a hive, they're comb-building maniacs. They are going after it. They're drawing out the comb, and you can keep that going by doing what?

Light, sugar, syrup. So there is a temptation for people to use, sugar syrup to get their bees to perform because and here's what I blame I blame this kind of one-upsmanship that happens in bee clubs one of the ways that they gauge if someone's a good beekeeper or not how much honey did you make how much how much honey did you get off those hives well I got 700 pounds off of that hive here's the thing that should not be a competition it should be what does the honey tastes like, what does it smell like? How fantastic is that honey? And there shouldn't be pressure

to perform. And this is what, by the way, gets a lot of brand new beekeepers to fail at beekeeping. Because the other end of it is, let's say they're not trying to taint the honey or provide them with huge amounts of sugar syrup just so they can build it up and have a honey flow, so that a synthetic honey flow, so then they can draw it off and say, look at all the honey I got. it's bad in general when you do that because people once they realize that you've done that, you don't ever recover. You don't recover. At Appamandia, when they did that and they used a nuclear system,

I reached out to the people that did the testing. They were a contracted laboratory, and they are no game players. These guys damaged reputations when they did that. but who really damaged their reputation, the people that tainted their honey. That's all I'm saying. So don't do that. Don't play games with honey.

Anyway, I have in all caps here. Steve Amos, good afternoon, Fred. Do you know if the insulation factor doubles with two layers of reflect text? Oh, the reflect text thing, now if you're looking at a layer by itself, that's equivalent to a three-quarter inch piece of pine. But when you have reflect text in there,

an airspace, and then reflect, text locked airspace no air movement through it that is a insulation multiplier if you just sandwich them straight on top of each other that's like another three-quarter inch of pine and then another three-quarter inch of pine so it's an air barrier that's good and it has an insulation factor that's good but it's not as insulating as if you establish an airspace and then you have reflect text up here airspace reflect text below and this is your feeder shim. That's where the R value really kicks in. And it can't be moving air through that. And here's Carmine. Hi, Fred. I know you're not an attorney or an insurance agent, but can you

suggest a way that I can be covered legally and insured if I place a hive in a neighbor's backyard, I'm not commercial? That's a very good question. And our bee associations have those standard, I will bet you can do a search for a standard disclaimer to do that because here's a thing. I'm not right. I'm not an attorney. I'm not even a paralegal. I'm just a Googler.

It's like a lot of other people here. But if I were going to put a hive in somebody's yard, they need to clearly have responsibility for the bees that are there. You should not be responsible. Here's what happens. When a neighbor gets stung by one of those bees, there's legal precedent for this. Trust me, my youngest sister is a lawyer. She is scary.

The neighbor gets stung by the bee. Okay. How do they know that was your bee? That person, heaven forbid, has anaphylaxis, goes to prison, goes to the hospital. They sue you. How do you know those were your bees? okay, these lawyers are smarter than we sometimes think. If they get samples from your bees and they can prove a DNA connection or whatever,

there was a legal case that that worked out with. Okay, I'm just going to clean all that up and say, if you're giving your bees to somebody else and put it in their yard because they want bees, then they need to find a way to accept full responsibility for the venomous insects that are now under their property's insurance, right? Which isn't terrible. I have insurance coverage

for my hives on my property. So insurance coverage is usually part of your homeowners thing. Now the minute I open to school, the minute I bring people here and start teaching, this is what shut me down on the way to be academy.

I bring people here, 10 people, and I just want to teach them about bees. Now my insurance is unaffordable because now I have an activity, a business model that deals with them. If you're just a homeowner, you've just got bees. The homeowner that owns the property where your bees are being kept is the one that should accept responsibility.

You should get that in writing. It could be a very cursory thing. You just don't want to be the one they get sued because people are out of their box when it comes to who they go after when somebody gets hurt. They can be stung by yellow jackets on the ground and say a honeybees stung them. You hear that all the time. So we need very smart people to make sure that you don't get sued. But there is a precedent. That's what's scary. That means somebody took it. Somebody filed a case. Case went to a hearing and awards were given.

And that scares insurance companies and they're not going to be the ones holding the bag on that. It's also why you can't, where I live, bring bees in an observation hive into an elementary school to teach kids about bees. Their insurance will not cover it. So no way. Let's see what else here. Do to do to do to do. To do to do. The next question is from,

M.M. from Scotland. So this is it. What's the best way to keep her? Oh, we already did that. Yes, I knew that question was familiar. We covered that early today. So we're already here. See, I was going to answer that question.

Moving on to the next question here from Donna, from Herodzburg, Kentucky. When I cleaned out my entrance, I pulled out a couple of dead dried up pupa. Fondent is on the colony, and they have not touched it. They were loaded with honey going into winter. Configuration, two double deeps, central Kentucky.

Okay, so this is one of the things that in springtime I want you to look at. Get out as early as you can and look at landing boards, and because it's cold, what's happening is your undertaker bees are dragging the bees to the landing board, and because your bees are not flying yet, they're not hauling them away. So these sunrise inspections are very important. You should not be alarmed when you see pupa. on your landing board, particularly in spring, because here's one of the things that can happen.

There are a lot of things that can happen. This is beekeeping. But one of the things that can happen is in spring, we get these warm-ups and what happens? They get a little influx of resources. They start brooding up. I've seen this happen. Observation hives are fantastic

for seeing this kind of thing happen. The queen goes into lay. She puts out 2,000 eggs. And in two days, you've got a whole frame, one whole side of it is full of eggs and they're going and you're just like marking your whiteboard on how productive that queen is and everything. But then what happens, temperatures drop, rain comes. Resources are not coming in anymore. And then the next thing you you know, you look at that exact same frame and every single egg is gone. It's as if they were never

there. So if you hadn't been paying attention, you wouldn't even know this happened. Now here's what happens. We get to, they feed them, they brewed them up. They get them into their, uh, a state so they're capped now and then what they have to do they have to keep them warm but they also have open larvae too at this time so they're feeding those and this is where it gets sketchy for a colony that's not well populated you get this cold thing they collect around the open brood right they give them maximum protection during this cold snap so what did that do on the fringe you'll get and i'm not saying this is what happened this is what could happen and this is what i've seen on the fringe You'll get some of your pupa that are no longer covered by that thermal blanket of bees.

And so they're not being warmed. And so then they freeze kill. They die off. And so you'll see some that try to even emerge in some cases. So their caps are partially chewed and stuff. But then your bees have to go and pull them out. They're dead now. They got too cold.

And they're actually in a very delicate state at this later development when it comes to hot and cold rushes on their frames. So now they have to drag them out. your undertaker bees, they're uncapping, dragging them out, and they're dropping them on your landing board. So you can see these dead pupa, but it doesn't mean your colony is at a loss. It just means that they don't have enough bees to maintain what they need to under the current weather conditions. So one of the things I would ask is when you see the dead pupa and stuff out, is there a recent, this is where records come in. Your records should include weather conditions,

precipitation, wind, cold, all that stuff together. And you might be able to start to correlate that it's a reason for some of these die-offs. So not the end of the world. I know this is a long one today because we had a lot of really good questions right off the bat. So go in here because I want to answer the questions for the people that wrote in. And so here's from Stefan from Fredonia, New York. Should you be by the entrance? Should you be?

hive entrance, B facing a certain direction, I did a Google search and they said South or Southeast doesn't really matter. Okay, so Google search, by the way, Google has some good information these days because South by Southeast is exactly my preferred entrance facing direction. So if you've seen, you know, the way I arranged my beehives, I face them in every direction. I face them east. I face them north. I face them south, southeast.

I do not face my entrances to the west. Why? I mean, that's where the sun sets. Certainly your bees want to sit out on the landing board and enjoy the last little twinkles of sun as it sets over the horizon or prevailing winds come out of the west, would jam right into your hive entrances

and blow unpleasant rain, snow, and wind. We had very bad conditions going into winter this year. I had west-facing hives. They would be blasted. So that's the only direction I don't face them. Now, year after year after year, I see a trend that my bees that face south by southeast, the snow and ice is off their landing boards first.

Their entrances are cleared first. They fly out and they forage earlier than the colonies with landing boards that face north. So, yeah, it makes a difference. significant, I don't know. It's not like the hives with the landing boards facing north die, or we don't get honey from those hives because we do. We even get comb honey from hives with landing boards facing north. So that's why I still haven't turned them all south by southeast, because they're all making it. They can't do cleansing flights right away unless they get out there

and clean the entrances and things like that. So south by southeast, if you want to pick one, Yep, way to go. That's it. South by southeast. Watch out for prevailing winds. And other than that, oh, here's what I want to say about your landing boards. I've seen people put beehives right by their driveway. Now, this isn't to be critical of them, but I'm trying to fail safe here. I've learned that if you make your bees angry, okay, where are the guards? Guards are on the landing board. Maybe you've done this in the past. You took some honey off and you're really excited about it. You got a real load of honey.

In fact, the supervisor, your nine-year-old grandson is satisfied that his clients are being satisfied and that his wallet's thickening. So here's the thing. After they get mad, though, it's line of sight. So what I mean by that is our driveway was not safe for more than a week because the bees saw the movement from their landing board. So this is one of the things I just want you to think about. You can put up a little privacy fence or something, something that disrupts the line of sight between your beehive and your driveway or your sidewalk in front of your house if you're in a residential area.

Where people are going to be walking, if you can just block line of sight, you're not going to pick up these guard bees that still hold a grudge from the last time you visited your hive. So that occurred to me because when we were getting, attacked, I could look between the buildings and see the hive that we were in. And if you were not standing, if they didn't see that movement, they wouldn't come after you. So landing board placement as well as direction plays. And I highly recommend that wherever you set up your beehives, that your landing board, where the guards are, does not have line of sight

where you get your mail and where packages get delivered and where your neighbors come up the driveway or walk down the street super just fail safe right just yeah it's going to help that's all i'm saying this is from sonda 47 when cleaning out your entrances this time of year how many dead bees should you expect to be removing okay first of all my grandson and my wife cleaning the entrances. I supervise from inside the house, safe and warm. But here's the thing. Depending on the size of the colony, you could scrape out 50, 60, 100 bees. Here's the important thing. When you're looking at and you're scraping out dead bees from the entrance of your hive, look at what's with the bees, because these are indicators. If you look at the bodies of the bees

that you're pulling out of there, if you see bits of, you know, bee bread and you see yellow bits in there, and so they're pulling out pollen and stuff too, that's an indicator that your colony is starving because what they're doing is they're actually getting into their long-term pollen stores and getting every,

because remember there's some sweetness in that too, so there's some carbohydrates in there because they're dispensing it. They're not consuming it. They're digging through it, rummaging through it, trying to get every tiny morsel, And it's on your landing board now. That's an indicator of a starving colony.

So check that out. So how many? It shouldn't be piles of bees. You shouldn't have 500 dead bees in front of your hive from a clean out. A couple hundred, sure. Why not? Because it's been too cold, depending on your local climate, for them to self-evict. So you're pulling them out.

And it does make a big help. It makes a big difference for those bees. If you've done that, plus it gives you a change. to look through them. So there you go. So the entrance, hive facing, so on. This is David now from Cleveland, Ohio.

Hi, Fred was wondering. Where you're sourcing your moss are you using seed. This may have nothing to be to do with bees, you might think, but I'm building my water wall, my moss wall, because bees like to drink water where there's plenty of moss, where there's algae, and we know that there's a health benefit to algae. So I went a little nuts last year and I forage for my own woods.

And if I want to, let's say I want moss to grow on center blogs. I find moss that's already growing on rocks and I put it there. I want moss that can grow in full sun through parts of the day. So I find the moss that's already growing on full sun on the substrate that I want it to grow on. I don't do that thing where you put it through the blender and buttermilk and all the stuff. I've seen those people do that. And I found out by talking to experts, moss people, that you don't need to do that. You just collect the moss and stuff it places.

So that's what I'm doing. I source it on my own property. There is such a thing. I found out that people steal moss. Who would do that? They go walking down the sidewalk and they see the moss. They want and they go over. They just grab whole handfuls of it.

So within the moss gleaning culture, you're supposed to take a little bit to pieces and leave parts of the moss that you took behind. Now the other thing is what I'm really growing this year is not moss. It's called moss. It's called Irish moss. And my whole grow room is full of it. So Irish moss is what I'm really doing. It's not real moss though, but it's cool. And I'm going to be growing that stuff in as many places I can get it to grow. In fact, on my license plate, on my car, the little frame around it says, the more you know the less you mow because that's a bee thing but it's also for lazy people so if you don't want to mow grow moss so i'm going to be planting irish moss everywhere i can you'll find

it sold or promoted to be put between flagstones and things like that that's great i want that stuff to take over my whole bee yard i'm going to be putting irish moss everywhere i can get it to grow and you know what it grows in a lot of different substrates because being me i have it in pans and pots, and then I have it in whole vases. And I'm even growing it in Ziploc bag is just full of starter soil. So I'm finding out where it does the best. Low light, bright light, so on. It's good stuff.

So Irish moss is what I'm growing. But the other moss I just find. In fact, because of this question, I put my mosses of the North American Forest book right back there by Jerry Jenkins. So if you want to go down the rabbit hole on moss, I've been growing moss in my woods and on the pathways and everything. We clear leaves out of the way so the moss can grow. And I want to walk on moss everywhere I go. I want it all along the pond and everything else.

So it's fantastic stuff. It handles the really cold temperatures where we live. And that's just it. Here's from Queen Bee. Hi, Fred. If temperature is outside drop below 35. Fahrenheit, is grafting cell going to be damaged in starting the hive? Well, okay, so here's somebody that's grafting.

We have outside temperatures, 35, inside the hive, will the cell be damaged if you're starting a hive? There are a lot of variables here. Starting the hive, how many bees are in there? Because they're going to protect that graft, by the way. I don't know what part of the country you're in. I personally would not be starting any queen cells this time of year, but see, in southern states, you know, they can do it. I, just for general information, I don't do any grafting. Okay.

I'm a walkaway split guy. So I find out when the bees are actually doing things on their own. if I see that they're building queen cells halfway in production, I'm about to lose a queen. I do my splits and I leave them to themselves. Now, once the colony is populated, they control the climate inside that cluster. Now, when it comes to a queen cell or something like that, and that's their only queen, they're going to use their resources to preserve the queen. She is the future of the colony.

They know that. So this has to do with what your configuration is and everything else. So there are a lot of variables there, but outside temps are not as critical as resources that are available. And I don't know what else to tell you. But if I were trying to do that and I had those kind of temperatures, I would make sure that that colony was provided with copious amounts of resources because now I have queens that were trying to develop. Okay.

Grafting queen cell. Oh my gosh. I would wait until I see lots of drones and everything else and life is good before I started that, but I'm not a queen breeder either. That's a good question for Corey Stevens. I would ask him, see what he thinks about that. Philip Morris, how long does it take for pollen to be turned into bee bread? I noticed pollen pellets were falling out of the frames when I tip them to inspect. That is a great question. question Philip Morse. And here's the thing. This is another observation hive thing. We look at the bees putting pollen because remember the foragers get pollen on their corbicula, their hind legs. And those foragers go into the hive after they do some waggle dancing, do a little

bragging and let the other bees kind of check out what they brought back with them, maybe nectar as well. They go off and they scratch it off of their hind legs and they stuff it into the cells themselves. Now, the question is how long before the bees are going to use? it or they process it. Well, if you notice, they even put multiple colors in the same cells. You can see little green, olive green pollen balls in there, and you'll see Cheeto orange in there, all the same cells. So they're mixing it up. Now, the processing has actually started already, because how did they get the pollen to stick to their legs in the first place?

Usually they've brought nectar with them or honey with them, and they're straking it back. They'll run their forelimbs off their tongue, and they'll start rubbing it back, and they groom themselves and they get the pollen to stick to the back and guess what else on their hind leg there's a pollen press so they push it into this little pollen press and their leg squishes the pollen and forces it up into those little stiff hairs on the corbicula it's exciting stuff so what's happened is what do they do they just contributed already something's going to cause the pollen to ferment so it already has sweetness in it so they get that back they put it in the hive now who takes over nurse bees take over and they start jamming it in the bottom of the cell you'll see the pollen jammed in

and so what we did is we circle it because i wanted to see not so much how they were processing it but when did the bees because it's adjacent to the brood we wanted to see when they were consuming the pollen after it was put in the cell and also um when pollen got too old and they were ignoring it so we found 48 hours to 72 hours was the sweet spot. That's also during high production when the hives really smell like it's yeasty because it is fermenting. And so 48 to 72 hours, that's the stuff that is ripe for consumption for the nurse bees. And when they're bringing in plenty of it, this is really interesting. So you can use those whiteboard markers and write right on the glass of your observation hives.

and put timestamps on there for when different things are happening as a teaching tool. Here's an egg. It's standing straight up. That was just late. It's laying over. That's two days old. It's laying flat. That's three days old.

Now it's going to hatch. These are teaching tools because if you mark that then later we know 21 days down the road, we should be seeing some emergence after that leg, that egg was placed. So same thing with the pollen, 48 to 72 hours. They're really processing that. So it's really good stuff. So that's bee bread. I say it's finished at 72 hours, and after that it's just stored.

Because you know what they do after that? They will even seal it with a little bit of beeswax, just a thin. That's why older pollen has kind of a shiny surface to it. They're encapsulating it. It's fermented. It's done. It's ready. It's bee bread.

It's good to eat. Here comes from Donna. I need to requeen a testy colony. I would like to use a queen I have from another colony. I don't graft. How can I do this? Okay, so these are great questions for springtime when things are really kicking in, but you've got a queen that's testy. You want to get rid of her. You've got another colony that has a queen.

Okay, I like this. It's a philosophy called going in strong. In other words, taking a queen by herself and introducing her into a colony that you've removed a queen from. You get pushed back, just a queen by herself. They can go after her. They can start biting her. They can try to sting her. They can form a ball around here and generate so much heat that they put themselves on the fringe of death just to cook a queen and drag her out.

So let's go in strong and make sure that they accept the queen. How do we do that? We bring her with her own brood. So you have to bring in frames. You've got a colony that the queen is coming from and you're joining a colony. So I like to take frames of brood with my new queen on it and the nurse bees. everybody else and I bring them right in and replace frames, whatever the lowest performing or the least full frames that you have. And your frames all have to be, of course, the same size.

We're talking deep frames, right? And I replace the center frames where the brood currently is, and I install my queen just like that. And you know what they do? They don't fight very much because they're overwhelmed because every view that you just brought in and the comb and everything that you're brought in there is heavy with the queen mandibular pherom from the queen that you're introducing they're without a queen, which they notice almost right away. When you remove that other queen, you can give them a day if you want to, but I've done it just because I'm myself and I didn't care. You know, I was doing it just to see what happened, which is, by the way, emotionally, the best thing you can be doing with your bees. Let's just find out what happens if we do this and keep your

records. Because then when you go in strong with these frames of brood and your queen and you find out they'll take her. Now, let's say you want to be safer. You don't want them to hurt your queen. Okay. There is a queen introduction cage. That is like a queen, queen introduction cages, even workers can't go through it. Now, this is an extra step that if you've got the frames and the brood to bring with your queen,

you don't need to do. But let's say you just want to take the queen and you want to put her in there. Now you have to get a frame of brood, capped brood, no workers. and you have to put her in this frame. Let's pretend that I have a queen introduction cage right here. This is a fail-safe way to introduce your queen into a colony that you just removed the queen from so that they don't destroy her. Queen goes on a frame.

Now because it's in this thing, it can be a medium frame or anything else. This is capped brood, let's say. You get your queen on this frame with the cap. Brude, no workers. You put this lid on top. Who sells these? BetterBee.com. She's in there. Now it goes inside. Now what happens? You have capped brood. The captive brood starts to emerge. And so she has nurse bees right away. She also has cells to lay in. So now she is starting to establish herself in a colony that had a queen and they were mean. That's why you got rid of that queen because she was obnoxious in some way. And so now they started. start to spread their pheromones because they can lick each other through the bars. They can't sting her, can't get all grip on her because when they're trying to kill a queen, they fight her, they hold on, they try to sing her that way. They can't do it through that.

So that's one way to introduce a queen and, you know, be better feeling about, you have to remove two frames to accommodate that cage, but it's called a queen introduction cage, which is different from a queen isolation cage, different purposes. But if you're introducing a queen and you don't anything to happen to her, you try that. Okay, do, do, do, too, and so Donna, let me know after you've had complete success, and don't forget to give me full credit, if something bad happens, we don't know each other, we never talked. Okay, the next question comes from Dan. This is, by the way, the last question. So we're here from Dan, Montague, Michigan. Is anyone making 3D printed frame that is full depth of a cell that the bees could just have to cap over.

Okay, years ago, a company reached out to me and they sent these things called permacom to me. And I didn't like them. So, but they worked. So permacom, very heavy frames. Somebody may still have this stock around somewhere because I think somebody passed away. that went out of business. Nobody picked up the baton on that. But it was fully formed, full cells, everything else.

And the whole point was that then all the bees had to do was draw up from the face of the cell and cap it after filling it with honey. So they're designed for honey production. The other thing is they did these tests where they drove over it with their trucks and everything else to show you how tough it is. So permacomb is something you could look for

to see if it's still around. If that's what you really want to use, it's heavy stuff. In other words, you fill a super with that stuff before anything else is in it. You have a heavy super already. There's that much food-grade plastic in it. The other thing is there's an interview that I have coming up this week. I don't want to be a spoiler.

We're going to talk about a comb situation that is mostly done, and it's from Australia. So we're going to talk about that. It's an interview coming up this week. It's for people that want to micro. This is the teaser. They're going to want to micro-process honey. In other words, you don't even want to take a full frame. You just want to take a little bit of honey for one reason or another.

And I have my own reasons for why I like this new piece of kit. The other thing is flow supers. A lot of people do not like flow hives. They're very expensive. But the flow super is fully formed cells that all the bees do is finish off the edges, cap them off after they're finished filling. them with honey so that already exists but those frames are running about $64 per frame so look for permacom see if somebody has some of that still around and uh the other one that's coming up this week

i'm not going to tell you what it is because i want people to watch my stuff and uh that's it i don't know of any other already drawn cells out of food grade plastic than that so now we're into the fluff uh by the way i keep chickens as well wait let me see Rodney, looking to buy two packages I currently have, Carniolins, what breed would you recommend? This is from Rodney. This is hard to recommend a current genetic line of bees because I like the Varroa-sensitive hygienic bees,

also known Varroa-sensitive hygiene, VSH. I like the Corey Stevens. Oh, yeah, yeah, let's do this. this. Corey Stevens, who creates these survivor stock, these bees, these genetics, he's been doing for a long time, has this master's in entomology, hardworking dude. He's partnered up with somebody that a lot of people have heard of, came in Reynolds. They're going to be selling packages with that stock.

And they've hooked up with somebody else who has a drone yard or where they can finish them off with genetics that they need to complete these desirable survivor line, treatment-free queens. So look up, Corey Stevens, Cayman Reynolds, and I forget the name of the guy that's doing the drone yard. But anyway, they just announced that stuff. So if somebody else knows about it,

you can, oh, they're selling nukes, not packages. Steve Amos says this. All right, way to put me in my place, right in front of everybody. Way to go. So when you're buying a package, the only thing that matters is the queen. So I like Carney,

You're on to them, Oliverus, carniol and queens. There are some others that sell some good stock. So you could, you're buying a package. The package, the bees that come in that are from random colonies. The queen 30 days out is going to be what's going to be represented inside that colony. But you're going to pick your own. Now, I have to say, oh yeah, Chris Warner is the producer from Florida.

All right. Anyway, all good names that you've heard. These are people with seller reputations that generate great stock. So David Miller says, go to the Stevens website. So once again, go to Corey Stevens. Tell him you want all his stuff. Throw your money at the screen. Tell him Fred sent you so that you will pay the same again as everyone else.

So because I have to admit that I like to keep my own stock here. I like to collect my own swarms, cycle back my own business. bees. I don't have to buy any bees. We're coming into spring. If you can wrangle some swarms in your backyard beekeeper, I think it's a fantastic way to continue. Here's why. And this is nothing to do with, I support queen breeding programs. I support treatment-free genetics. Daniel Weaver out in Texas. People that are doing that deserve our money. and resources to help carry that on. Now, in my own backyard,

how long am I going to keep one of those queens, right? That queen might be gone in a year. That queen might get superseded six months after I put her in a hive. Have I reinforced the genetics in my own apiary? I have not, really. So what I like to do is cycle back locally adapted stock and bees that are already existing well in this environment. If you want to know if you have an environment that's suitable for bees, for feral colonies,

go to beescape.org, B-E-E-S-C-A-B-E-C-A-B-E-S-A-B-E-E-S-A-B-R-G. Go there, put in your location, and see what the environment provides for you. If you're in a high feral area for bees, then your chances of getting locally adapted stock are very high if you can just learn to collect some swarms. The other thing is for people that maybe can't afford to buy packages or, you know, genetics that are kind of expensive, you can get on a list to collect swarms, and it's called be swarmed, B-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D dot org. You register there and you get on a zone like five miles from your house or wherever.

I've spoken about this before. This is a free website, and you get a text alert when there are swarms in your area that the general public is reporting. And then as a beekeeper, it's your job to inform the general public that when you see bees on a fence post or on a tree or on something like that, that they contact beesworm.org and report it. And then they get put in touch with a beekeeper that will come and get it.

And it saves you from showing up only to find out another beekeeper was there 10 minutes before you got there, that kind of thing. So support bee genetics. That's the future of beekeeping. We have to have better genetics, but we also need to have a better agricultural system in this country where we support diversity of forage for all pollinators. Okay. That's all I'm going to say for today because we've gone really long. I just want to wrap it up. I want to thank everybody for being here and joining me. These have been great questions. I hope that's spring. is bringing you very good information when it comes to your own bee stock.

I do want to say if you're a backyard beekeeper and if things have been sketchy, weather-wise, where you are at the earliest opportunity, I highly suggest that you feed your bees to help them survive the challenges of spring and the weather dynamic that often brings. So thanks a lot for being here. I hope that you have a great weekend. Thanks again.