The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 263 is your BetterComb upside down? Is bearding ok?

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/bphY5tZ4rew

Today is Friday, June the 21st, and this is Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 263. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. This is actually going to be a short one. It's hot outside. There's a lot going on, and things change in the B yard super fast. So I'm surprised that you're actually here. Rainstorm came through, and I think it dropped seven drops of rain on my fields here.

So, but you want to know how hot it is. The rest of the country is under extreme heat advisories. This is in the United States, the northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania, where I reside. So it's 86 degrees Fahrenheit outside right now. That is 30 degrees Celsius, and it's super muggy. And a lot of records have been set here recently with high temps and so on, 70% relative humidity. And of course, they combine that with a really low wind speed. one mile per hour. So basically no wind, which adds to that. So there is a lot of bearding going on outside the hives,

and that's actually good news because there's a lot of nectar coming in right now. So some of the beehives are wearing their bees, as they would say, and our local weather guy says air you can wear when it's really humid and stuff. I thought that was pretty funny. Anyway, why do we have a high nectar flow right now? Well, I can tell you, fields of clover, for starters, white clover. It's everywhere. And the bees just started working it, which is interesting to me, because I thought they would have been on it right away, but there's other things for them to get nectar and pollen from. One of the things that are exciting to see open, the milkweeds.

I have huge plots of milkweeds. I know if you're a cattle rancher or something like that, that would not be a great thing to have. But if we're into pollination and pollinators, like the monarch butterfly, which is really important, you need milkweed. And it's just a lot of fun to see them, they're at eye level if you were let's say like the supervisor eight years old the milkweed eye level so the bees are all over it that's fun and elder berries are in bloom right now

sumac is in bloom different species so there's a lot going on out there great time to take a walk but there are also rapid changing happening in your apiary your backyard bee yards so that's what we're here to talk about it's not necessarily always just beginner beekeepers by the way it's just small-scale beekeeping which can be very different so anyway news recently i was out closing up my chicken coops at night as i often do it was 8 50 at night so it was still just a little past sunset which means there's plenty of daylight and what do you think was going on that's right a bear was tearing down a suet feeder right in front of me as i came back to the house which means it wasn't even aware that i was out there and

This is not an older bear, a huge bear. It's a good size bear. Maybe 150, 160 pounds, something like that. And it was black and a cinnamon color. Fast moving, by the way. Didn't even know I was there, so I had to yell at it. And eventually it did run away, which is good news. I wanted to provide some stress for it

and make sure it didn't want to stick around here because a lot of questions people have is, what about the bee yard? Well, it's interesting, too, because it made me think for a minute. I don't use an electric fence around my B yard anymore. I did for many years. This is a young bear, so I think it was a little more bold than smart. And older bears are much more cautious. They tend to come in after sunset when it's nice and dark outside. And because it came through at a time when my outdoor perimeter cameras, my wildlife cameras weren't even on.

I set those so that they come on after the chickens go to bed, so I don't just get a whole bunch of video of chickens running all over the place, but it also means that it was 10 minutes before those cameras came on to show the suet feeders, which is where I like to record raccoons doing what they do and see what other wildlife is scooting through here. We have opossums coming through, endless rodents. Like we've got voles, we've got meadow mice, which are voles. They're kind of the same thing.

deer mice, scamping all over the place, and house mice. Those are interesting too, and the rabbit numbers, the rabbits are around, but they seem a little low right now. And of course we have the usual, the marmot family. We have woodchucks, also known as whistle pigs, which are interesting too, and here's the good news about them. I've been spraying my sunflowers and things like that with this repellent smelly spray. It's a deer pestaway spray. And it's supposed to also work on rabbits. What? It looks like my sunflowers just might make it. So that's good news too. Hyssop has bombed and that's because whatever it is that went around out there ate them all down. So I don't have enough hyssop and this is why some people when they plant things for bees and they're told that it's really good for pollinators,

they send me frustrating messages like, I planted everything you said to plant and the bees aren't touching it. Well, this is part of the issue with my hyssop right now. If it doesn't, doesn't exist in sufficient quantity to get your bees attention. You won't see a lot of honeybees on it. And this is where honeybees and native pollinators. So in the opening sequences you saw some bees that weren't honeybees. They're solitary bees. And that's because we also set up habitat for those. Why? So I can look at them. Same reason I keep bees in my backyard in my different hive configurations. I want to get close. I want to see what's going on. I want to see what they do. Same thing with the native. of these species and I'm expanding that of course to hornets, wasps,

wass or hornets, hornets are not necessarily a wasp, pretty interesting too. So anyway, and there are wass out there that are incredibly tiny. We like to see what's going on in the environment. All this diversity represents a healthy environment. So we're seeing all this activity out there and it's just interesting to also provide pollinator resources beyond honeybees and that's because it's good for our impact on the environment. Also when we're using

something that's non-native like the honeybee, you can actually get some pushback on that. And so historically people have said, well, now that you put honeybees there, you'll be pushing out all the valuable native bees and we don't. See? And that's also why I like to document the non-honey bee pollinators that are out here, the non-honeybee insects. Because it shows that they're present, not just that, they're present. and pretty decent numbers, and their reproduction is way up. So that means the numbers of native pollinators, the solitary bees, the bobs, the blue orchard bees and things like that,

they've made it through winter because we had a mild winter, so more of them survived. How do they survive and where do they nest? Well, if you looked at the opening, there's a whole series of little tubes there. They actually nest in the wild in leftovers. So in other words, don't cut down all of your maximilian sunflowers, and don't mow the fields after those things have turned brown and dyed out, because the stocks that are parts of those plants become habitat for your bees that have laid eggs going through winter.

So we're supporting wildlife diversity and, of course, other pollinators. And we have seen monarchs flying around. I've not found the monarch caterpillars. And one of the ways I teach my kids, grandkids, to look for those, is to look for the leaf damage on the milkweed to see what's going on. You may see a honeybee or two dangling from a milkweed flower, and it might be hanging by its foot, and you might wonder how it died. Some of those honeybees get tangled up in the flower of the milkweed,

and they do get stuck and they can't pull free, and a very small percentage of them do die out. But guess what the number one successful pollinator is in this area for the milkweed? Now, we know that we've got butterflies and things, like that that visit them. But if you notice when milkweed, when you're looking at it, it's covered in flowers. Hundreds of flowers. And then at the end of the year, how many pods were developed on that milkweed, sometimes only two or three. That means of all those flowers, only two or three of them had their pollen redistributed to another flower on that

and then produced a pod. And guess what insect is doing the best job at doing that? The honeybee. They are very, very interesting. I hope you go out and pay close attention. So we had the bear showed up and also before we get into the questions, which, by the way, if you want to submit your own question, go to the way to be.org. You can also go to the way to be.com.

Same website. And there's a page called The Way to Be, and there's a form for you to fill out. If you have a question right now that is burning a hole in your mind and you just can't sleep, go to the Way to Be Fellowship. You can Google that.

and you can ask your questions day or night. Why? Because there's someone always there. It's an international group and it's free to join. So share pictures, you got concerns. If you wonder about something, it doesn't matter what your experience level is. You're welcome there. It's on Facebook. So I collected a swarm recently. A lot of people have collected swarms.

Bees are out of hand and they're spreading around. I used Swarm Commander to get a swarm of bees into a hive that wouldn't go in. Now you should probably understand ahead of time that the way I hive my swarms, first of all, I don't need the bees, so it's time to play. And I also have a lot of time on my hands, according to other people. And I'm apt to sit and stare at a beehive for more than an hour at a time. And now that I have an assistant who's eight years old, he can bring me water and things like that, and I don't even have to move. So what I do is I like to collect swarms. I like to set up a hive that I think would be appealing to the swarm. and then I set the bucket, in this case it was a Colorado Peavac,

and I put that box full of bees right in front of the hive. Now, that's a high-risk venture because there are no bees inside that hive that lets you know that that's a place where they should live in, so I'm counting on their social influencers. I'm counting on the bees that are in that cluster in the swarm to enter the hive, walk it out, and see if it's suitable. And if it is, you'll see them come out on the landing board. Their vote of approval will be shown when they lift their asses,

abdomens and their heads go down and they start fanning and you're going to see a little light segment open at the end of their abdomen and that is the Nazanof gland of approval and that's when the rest of the bees all of a sudden wake up and they start moving in so I did that and it should have worked like magic but it didn't they stalled they were outside the hive and they stayed with the bee box so then I took swarm commander you've probably if you're keeping bees these days you You can't keep bees anymore without hearing about Swarm Commander as a way to lure bees. Now, their design, Swarm Commander is used to get bees to go into a swarm trap, which is usually about a 10-gallon-sized box with some frames in it.

And you use a Swarm Commander lure, which smells like lemon grass, but it's much more than that. We learned from the people that developed it. And you can get bees. You'll get scouts, their attention going in there. So I found out, too, it worked very simple. similar to the queen mandibular pheromone lure that is used to displace or to suppress reproduction inside a hive. So there are different purposes but if you just go and try it out

and take a random tree branch somewhere if you've got a lot of bees nearby and just dab swarm commander on the tree branch you'll find out that bees will attach themselves to the tree branch so it's very interesting. So what I did I left that swarm box out there overnight. I figured that by morning time I would walk out there with my cup of coffee and I would sit down and stare at it and see a bunch of bees already starting their day and they would have moved in like clockwork. Well they didn't. They were all outside. They were all clustered. They were rejecting the hive. So I figured, well, they've had enough time. So I took one of the capsules from Swarm Commander and I dab the tiniest bit, not a lot, don't do too much. The tiniest touch on the entrance of the hive.

In this case, it was an appamahive. So then I took the lid off the hive and I went to the back and I dab the tops of the frames in there. So it's a seven-frame nucleus apame hive. And just touched the back, closed it right back up, and then sat down again with my cup of coffee, and four minutes didn't pass before the bees were fanning as if something had changed in the hive. And now all of a sudden it gets the big seal of approval, and they're going into the hive by the thousands. Now that is only going to work if along with all the other bees that are in that swarm the queen has to decide to go in also. So that's the double whammy we're looking for when the queen goes in the rest of them follow two and you have to be aware that there might be secondary

clusters out and around in this big swarm because some of the swarms are huge and if some of them seem to stall if you sort through that poke it around your finger you might find that there's another queen there. You can remove that queen because she's probably a virgin. The one that went in is the one that has the most pheromone appeal to the rest of the colony, and so we can get them all to unite as one colony. So what spurred them on to actually occupy the hive was the swarm commander pheromone. Then what got them to stay in the hive is when the queen goes in herself.

And that is your victory moment because once she casts that, vote, they're all in and your hive, your swarm is hive. Now you can speed that up. You can dump out the bees inside the hive. You can put a box on top of the hive and have them walk in through a queen excluder, which is what I like to use. It happened that the Appamee hive is a nucleus, so it's their nucleus variety, which means it doesn't match up with an eight-frame lankstroth or a 10-frame langstroth. So I would have to use my adapter plate, which I could use, but I just decided to see what they would do. So it's 100% risk. If you do this and your bees fly away, don't email me. I'm just telling you what worked for me. I would have been fine for them to find another place to live,

but if I can win them over and get their social influencers, the waggle dancers, to go in there and approve of that space, then we win them over. And they're more apt to stay and not abscond if they feel like they've chosen it on their own without being forcibly dumped in. See what happened? The other thing. that was a drawback for that hive that I was putting them in I only had one frame of drawn come the rest is all plastic heavy wax foundation good news they're still there so we're going to get into the questions first today the very first one comes from susan from bronson michigan so it's i have no more space in my apiary for nukes i want strong production hives what is the best way to combine a nucleus colony

with a 10-frame production colony. So we already described this in another recent Q&A, but because it's happening so often right now, combining a nuke with a 10-frame production colony. So this isn't just inserting it in that empty box. That's easy. We just take the frames out of the nuke, and we put them in a 10-frame deep brood box,

and there they are. The problem comes into play with most people wanting to have deep brood boxes, which I happen to choose myself. And then the upper boxes are medium supers. So if we're going to combine boxes, we have a deep box that we're combining with another deep, and that deep is already full.

So now what do we do if we're going from nuke to the full-size deep, right? Well, now we have to get the bees out of the deep box that they're in, the nukes, because I also prefer the deep nuke boxes. So there are five frames each, five over five over five, The Apamehives, by the way, are performing extremely well. They just happen to be much more expensive than standard wooden nucleus hive boxes. And so the way this question is written, I'm going to have to give two answers. One is to get them out of the box that they're in.

So keep in mind that there's brood and everything else up there. So if we're combining them, we're choosing a queen or we're going to let them choose a queen. So we have to get one of the queens out of there. So you would have to pick your top performing queen and remove her. then put that box above a queen excluder and then the deep brood box down below. There are a lot of beekeepers that are commercial and so on that deal with thousands of hives that use single root box management and it's usually a 10 frame length or off deep. And so by getting the queen out of the top, we can of course put the queen excluter in and then

as there's any brood that emerges from those frames up there, they pass down through the queen exclusion and they're not hindered right so the also it's a way of making certain that we don't have some other queen that we've missed it might still be up there because if we find eggs up there a very good chance you have another queen that you missed so now if the question really was how do I just shift boxes from a nucleus hive to a 10 frame deep that's a simple transfer of all the frames keeping them in the same order that they are in the nucleus hive and hopefully putting that box so you take your nucleus hive you set it on a stand the side, you set on your bottom board, then you put on your deep brood box, and center all of those

frames that are in the nucleus hive. And if you've got two levels, so maybe you've got a double nuke or a triple nuke, so now that's if it's a five over five, now we fill the ten frame box right then. So bunch all of your largest brood frames together, those that have the most brood on them, to the center and then taper that off to the outer positions. And of course, that's 10, 5 over 5, and then if you still have more leftover, that's when we're going to have to empty out that other super in favor of whichever frames have the most brute. So the other thing was people were asking over this past week

because realized the last video that I made was another Q&A last Friday, so am I going to make other videos that show actual bees doing real B things? Yes, I am, because now I finally have the time to do it. And I have to tell you, I wasn't super excited to go out and make a video anyway last week because all we did was sweat all day while we were outside but this coming week is going to be cooler so look for more topic specific videos coming up this week so yeah that's going to happen and if i didn't for susan if i didn't adequately answer that question please uh post a little more information about what specifically you want to know but this is something that comes along often enough

it's on my list for videos that we'll be making in the coming weeks speaking of the coming weeks weeks next Friday is the last Friday the month already I know that should catch some of you off guard the month is scooting right along and that means for here it will be a live Q&A so 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time United States next Friday live Q&A so mark your calendar set your alarm on your watch or your smartphone or whatever and join us and ask the questions and talk about whatever's on your mind and you're more than free to just talk to one another over in the comment section. So next variety, that's what's going on. So question number two comes from David from Baldwin, Missouri.

I know exactly where Baldwin, Missouri is. It's right near Kirkwood, where I'm from. So anyway, says two and a half months ago, I moved my 222 queen into the horizontal hive I built from your plans, starting with about three brood frames, the hive is now 35 frames full and extremely productive the brood area spans 10 frames easily compared to my vertical hives this horizontal hive is bearding beyond my experience all of my hives are shaded and in the woods temps are reaching mid-noughties midday humidity is not bad any ideas on what to do if needed and i know that for a lot of new beekeepers although um David's been keeping bees since 2022, so plenty of time under his belt here. When we get the high humidity and high temps like this, a lot of people had this question at our bee breakfast this last Wednesday, too.

Lots of bearding, lots of numbers on the outside of the hive. That is not something to be alarmed about. Those bees, when they're bearding, and there were, this is something that I walked around to look to see which hive configurations seem to have the most bearding, and then my wife pointed out that I might be wasting my time, because the populations in some of these hives may not match. Therefore, the configuration of the hive alone would not be enough to say why they are or are not bearding.

So that's true. So depending on the population of the hive and listen to that, the description, how many frames of brood are in there. So that's like a single deep brood box, wall-to-wall brood, right? So 10-frame langstroth, and this happens to be a long lang, but there's 10 frames of brood, even though all the other frames are full. all the other frames being full creates a lot of congestion in there and I understand that. I took my cues from people that have been doing cutouts for many years that find these enormous hives in what you and I would consider to be very stifling conditions.

Inside structures without insulation and I don't know whether there's southern exposures, but by southern exposure, I mean deep south, United States, high humidity. And so they can get along very well in there. They can move the air around just fine. We think of how it would feel to us if we were in there, well, we'd be dead. Because based on Dr. Thomas Seeley's research, the CO2 levels inside some of these hives would be so high that it would knock us out. So we would not survive, but the bees do. So the bearding is you've got this huge population of bees that are ready to forage that move outside the hive and they collect all over the front.

If you have, and I hope you do, hive visors. So that means any projection that sticks out away from the hive that provides shade for your bees, because keep in mind, we're entering the hottest time of the year, and the sun midday is straight above your hives. So if you can put some kind of awning on the hive, you might even make it out of the core flute plastic or whatever and just put it on there, the ones that I make for mine are made out of wood, Some of them are made out of cedar.

There's a lightweight wood. And so it provides shade, and I notice that when they beard, they beard up under. So it actually isn't much of a beard. I think it looks, you know, it's above the entrance. Bearding is generally at the entrance and hanging under the hive. But the bees cluster wherever the shade is. That's why they normally cluster under the hive if you don't have an awning over the front of it. Or if you haven't been able, for example, to extend the cover of your hive.

So this is something else that I just thought of. while I'm answering this, there's a guy named VinoVino Farm, Vino Farm, depending on if you're doing the Italian version Vino's wine. So Vino Farm had put, I personally didn't like it because I thought wind would blow these things around,

but it's the core flute. He just put these big pieces of core flute, the plastic like the campaign signs that I'm sure will be everywhere where you live eventually. He puts those on top of his hive, they extend out over, uses brakes to hold them down. So midday that just created a big shaded area on the front. So that's not a high visor which mounts to the front for year round. Because if we get really high

winds, like we had a storm that came through that was hitting 60 mile an hour winds, I would be concerned just having those held on with bricks and that creates what we call sail area. So but anything you could do, think of today, for example, the wind is not moving very much. That would be something easy to do, a temporary fix to create more. shade and then you'll find that they cluster up under wherever that shade source is. So those are things you can do. I also have my micro mist nozzle for the end of my garden hose that I put out there on my water wall and that creates a mist that just waves all around the apiary and provides cooling through evaporation. So there are a lot of

ways that we can be creative about it. So the shout out to Jim about the thing that he did. So hive visors are what I have and if you've got a horizontal hive Adding an extended visor somebody else showed me that they Recycle their old license plates that some people collect license plates But this one of course ruined it because they bent it a little bit and then used the holes from the license plate to screw on to the front of the hive that became the awning But I think it's metal and when you have that in direct sunlight I think the piece of metal itself is going to get pretty hot but of course it's going to create shade down below they just won't be right up against that metal

because that's going to get hot but it was a creative way to recycle and repurpose license plate otherwise just might be on the wall in your garage like a lot of mine are so I think that pretty much temporary awnings you could do that depending on how big your operation is so I think that's just about it you can't open your entrances more if you want to depending on your your configuration. I leave mine all the same and I've seen no detriment to that. In other words, it did not impact production in the hive. It didn't like inspire them to suddenly swarm. Swarming, by the way, is not going to be just triggered by a weather event. So just because you've got this big population of bees, the population can be a swarm trigger because it means the

queen mandibular pheromone is being kind of watered down as it spreads throughout a larger population of bees inside the hive. But when you get an event or a series of days like a heat wave, several days in a row where the temperatures are really high, that's not enough to get your bees to swarm. Because of course, before they swarm, they would have to be producing replacement queens. Those queens would be in production. There would be queen cells that would either be near capping or already capped. And then that colony would swarm out with the queen and relieve some of that population congestion by generating a swarm. And a lot of people did have swarm. so but that wouldn't happen immediately so in other words that's been underway for a while so they can make those preparations

you don't just get a weather event and all of a sudden there's a new queen or a series of queens coming to drive out the old one so just understand a little bit about the biology of what causes a swarm and what doesn't so having them outside to me is no problem at all now my hives are also well elevated um off the ground so my landing boards are 18 inches off the ground and that's because that's maximum skunk jumping height. And I haven't had much problem with skunks this year, so that's pretty decent. Not too bad at all, but that's why I raise them up. And then there's air movement everywhere. And of course, it keeps them out of trouble when it comes to ants probably and other things like that. Question number three comes from B-H-H-O-L-T.

And the concern is about, oh, so it's Brandon. and it says, we discovered something today that we believe we should be concerned about. We know a little about deformed wing virus, and we think we found a bee with it. Now, this is a new package of Saskatras bees installed this past April. We treated the bees eight days after the queen was released in her cage with exhalic acid vaporization. So I want to pause there. That's a very good practice when you get a package in from somewhere else, or even if you've brought in a swarm as so many of you are bringing in these days, when you hide them up, please do, unless you're absolutely flat-footed against any treatments,

please consider using exhalic acid vaporization because this is your opportunity to knock out almost every Varroa destructor might in that swarm or in the package. That's all I'm going to say. if you're thinking about treating for mites, that is a fantastic opportunity to do it. Okay. Back to Brandon. It says, so we watched this being flown out of the hive one by one, her sisters, and released onto the ground in front of the hive, immediately went over to observe the condition of the bee and noticed the wings. Malthen it up, bottled it up, and took some pictures. So the pictures were included in the email to me, and it is to form

virus. If you're looking at your bees and you want to know what a foreign wing virus looks like, I'm going to take a pause here too and promote a field guide by Penn State, and it is called honeybees and their maladies. This shows ailments like that and also talks about cause and effect and things that you should be concerned about. But get that book and it is, uh, the website is this extension. psu.d.d.u.edu. So, X-T-E-N-S-I-O-N dot P-SU dot EDU. And then you get honeybees and their maladies. So have your club, by the way. I'm going to pause on that too. If your bee club can buy, you know, 50 of them or something.

like that you get a you know a case of them and it's much less expensive and then of course all the money goes to Penn State I get nothing so I'm just recommending it to you so anyway I've since taken a look at the other dead bees around and don't see any more with wing issues nor have we seen them taking any others out with this issue we haven't treated since the initial treatment we haven't tested the bees for mites yet thinking that we should wait and I agree you know why I test right now because we did that part before they got into the cappings and in the stage of the pupa development, which would of course protect mites on the reproductive pupa

and protect them from that oxalic acid treatment. So treating them before that happens is very important. So here's what I want to do is unring the alarm bell because deformed wing virus is around. Now it is very common that the burrow destructor mite is one of the carriers of deformed wing virus, but not the only source. of that virus. So the other thing is bees are generally very healthy and doing extremely well

seem to be pretty resistant and one of the reasons it doesn't, you know, sometimes you'll see drones with deformed wing virus and people get alarmed, oh no, it's going to spread those genetics and everything. Well, a drone, which is the male bee with deformed wings, he's not flying anywhere, he's not waiting with anybody, he just isn't making it. So the other thing is this virus can spread bee-to-be on flowers that are visited by multiple pollinators. So including native bees. This is one of the areas where some of the purists get a little angsty about the honeybeekeepers. Because if we do have viruses like this, or we do have unhealthy bees that are spreading viruses onto plants that are visited by bumble bees as well as honey bees, bumble bees can contract. And then of course,

later display the deformed wing virus in their offspring. So it's very interesting. I've also found it in wasps before because I dissect wasp nests and I look at their conditions and I've found wasps with deformed wing virus as well. So it does spread around. It is not only from the deformed wing or from the varro destructor mite. That's just one of the many things they can carry and it's not the end of the world to find one. In fact, it's pretty rare. And the fact that you're paying such good attention and not seeing any more, then especially those as they emerge, because they get hauled out. So when would you be most likely to see a bee from your hive that has deformed wing virus? Well, one could be during inspections of your brood frames, but I highly recommend, as I often do, get out there at sunrise

with your first cup of coffee and look at what's on the landing board. And the reason I say that is an hour later when it's 8 o'clock or 9 a.m. And you go, the landing boards look much different. Because overnight, when they can't fly, because it's too dark, they're using Undertaker bees to drag out their dead. And they park them often right on the landing board. And so when they park these dead bees and these developing, because sometimes remember, they're also uncapping and pulling out

if these are hygienic bees and if there's something wrong with the bees that are under the caps and this happens a lot with drones they'll uncap them pull them out drag them out there and leave them on the landing board so they're still pale creamy colored some of them are in the purple eye phase and then that's where you should really look at them too because you can find out on the landing board that some of those had to form wing virus now you wouldn't even know that because later the bees that pick up from there and fly them away, the bees actually grab the dead and they put a lot of effort into flying with them and they actually are unable to just drop it. So they can't in flight, let it go. They have to land with it somewhere. So they go as far as they can, land in the grass, disconnect from it,

and then they come back to the hive. And you are none the wiser unless you were out there early enough before those cleanup bees got a hold of them so that you could evaluate, being left on the landing board and see what the condition of those bees would be. So it's very interesting but I don't see any alarm bells here at all. So for Brandon and Anthony, no problem. Question number four, because the thing that you would do is, of course, control your varroa mites and make sure that the colonies as healthy as it can possibly be in every other way. So question number four comes from Vladimir from Worcester Mass.

I would like to have a resource hive. People say that a nuke should be used as a resource hive. And by the way, nuke is short for nucleus. But that would mean dealing with this warming instinct. Why not use a single 10 frame deep as a nucleus hive? So the real question is, why not use a 10 frame deep as a resource hive? And that's exactly what I did. You know, for a long time.

I did not use nucleus hives. and here's what I've learned. And you're right, nucleus hives, because they're narrow and tall, they develop quicker, they draw comb faster. They have a more manageable column of warm air inside the hide than they do when they have these wide square boxes.

Because if we were to take a note from noticing what the environment produces as far as cavities go and then what the bees choose to occupy, it would be very rare to find bees in a natural cavity that would be as wide as a tentative. frame standard Langstroth box front to back side to side. The cavities that they occupy tend to be more narrow and the other thing is the column of warmth and control is more vertical and of course it's cylindrical instead of rectangular which is what Langstroth hive is. So it's more efficient use of the

space and that's why the nucleus hives and that's why I'm such a fan. I was late to it. I didn't always keep nucleus hives. I saw no merit in having nucleus hives. Instead I started using. them. But then what happens? And what you're thinking is exactly what I used to think. Why am I going to collect a swarm or why am I going to bring in a package back in the day when I bought packaged bees? I no longer do that. I haven't done that for a long time. Because now we're sustainable. We just keep making our own bees so we don't have to worry about it. But why? I used to think why I put them in a nuke when I can just put them straight in the eight or ten frame deep box and then they're set and I don't have to do anything else.

Also because I learned that they reproduce so fast in these nukes that now it's a resource hive that I can pull resources from and I do what the concern is. I fail to do it. So that means that these nucleus hives build up and they crank out swarms one after another. And then unless you're there to see this swarm occur, you don't necessarily know that that happened because the population, the activity at the hive and everything else seems very consistent. and they seem unstoppable, which means that in that tall, narrow configuration, bees are managing themselves better than they are in our wider, longer front-to-back boxes that we put them in.

And I don't mean to imply that the nucleus hive is any narrower or shorter from front-to-back. That is the same as your standard 8-10 frame. It's the width that expands, but I'm saying, that's another part of it. If we had them in vertical cylinders, it would be more efficient for the bees overall. The closer we could match, you know, the space inside of a tree, probably the better it would be for the bees. And they've told us for thousands of years that that's the space they want to occupy. But yes, they would swarm, generate. But it is a resource hive. So the purpose of that is, we have a colony that we rob all the time. The first question that we had today was about

the long Langstroth hive. I believe, oh no, it was the second one. My Langstroth hives, my horizontal hives, same thing. Brood, brood, brood, brood, lots of frames of it. So whenever I need to create a nucleus hive or establish another hive, and if I want to just go and not feel bad about pulling out a couple of frames of brood, because if you have a deep Langstroth frame that's capped, so that means all capped brood, and maybe some little fringe resources on it,

but if you're starting another colony, you just introduced almost 6,000 worker bees into a colony on a single deep frame that has pupa capped on both sides, and they're going to be emerging very soon. So if you're setting something up and you've picked a favorite queen or you happen to buy in a queen that you're trying to start up with, put a couple of frames of brood from a resource hive, my Langstroth hive. And the Langstroth hive is just happy to have that.

You know, we say they're happy. I don't know if they're happy, but it seems like I created more space for them. I close up the space where I pulled those cap-brewed frames out of, and then I added more drawn comb outboard of that. So further down the line from the entrance. So very predictable, you know, arrangement there. I had Quinn, my grandson, with me,

so that we could work a horizontal hive together. It's just so, you know, it goes empty frames to partially full frames of honey, full frames of honey and then in you go until you start to see honey mixed with pollen and then you get into pollen brood and honey and then you get eventually to nothing but brood and all the way towards the entrance where again it's brood so those make great resource hives too so a horizontal long langstroth hive is a great resource hive and then you don't have this concern that you're going to lose a bunch of swarms people particularly in towns and cities and places like that where your neighborhood might not be super excited to see you know 20,000 bees on the wing flying to a

nearby tree if you had a horizontal hive then you have much easier management expansion and contraction through the year frame by frame and you can of course that much more easily inspect exactly where they are for example the long langsworth hive has already you know it's like books on a shelf all the frames are there if i want to look at the those if we did even a thermal scan obviously super hot outside right now so that's not very effective but if we had a cold morning we can see very easily where most of the broods concentrated and this is what i'm trying to teach my grandson let's look at all these frames and decide which ones we would look at if we're after brood well we look at those are the warmest so we can go

straight to it if this were a langstroth hive configuration before we get into the brood i have to pull off the supers and we have to stage them somewhere this is incredible disruptive to the hive. So now if all I'm after is brood, I have coverboards. My cover boards are four inches wide and they run the full length of the horizontal hive, which by the way, you can find plans to this hive at the wayto-be.org and you look at hive plans. There's a little tab there. You go to that. You can download the PDFs absolutely for free. Build it exactly as it is. If you want to, you'll also. see pictures of others who have built the hive and you can see how it's set up it's a static hive it

doesn't have to be moved anywhere too heavy to be moved around by one person now we'll get back to the discussion where all i have to do is find the brood uncover the cover boards that are right there so guess what else happens the bees are very calm when you keep the frames that you are not directly dealing with or interacting with when you keep them covered with cover boards the colony remains very calm. What happens when we go to the brood box on a standard Langstroth hive? We uncover the entire thing all at once.

So that gets a response from the bees, which requires us to smoke them and keep them calm and keep them down. And if it's a really hot day, we can of course, sprit some a little bit with sugar syrup with a little honeybee healthy in it, and we can occupy them that way. And as I mentioned at our bee breakfast on Wednesday,

I like to spritz the guard bees with sugar syrup one to one with honeybee healthy in it and it turns the guard bees into temporary candy for the rest of the bees because they jump all over them and they're cleaning them up and they don't have time to come after you so it's in place of smoke and then we just pull the frames we want slide the other frames in and we're only moving the four-inch boards that are directly over the frames as we move them and of course when we do that and if we pull it out of the middle which is what happened now we have to go through and push all the frames down the line right back in to fill the space that we just remove the frames and create it so it's very

easy to do it's a lot it's very relaxing to do you have a platform in front of you that you can hold frames up on tilt them against the back it is the easiest beekeeping there is someone recently asked me do they produce as much honey as the other hives do they definitely produce a lot of brood um i don't know that the honey is more or less than the vertical hives and I just because I'm not a honey counter and I don't honey is not a big market thing for me so I don't like like measure my success with honey or a hive success by the amount of honey that they make I know that these colonies are sustainable that they're very healthy and when I say it's sustainable I mean that I've not had them not replace a queen and then had to intervene by introducing a new queen or something like that

that they are very healthy colonies. So, and easy to manage. And that's in my future. You know, they'll come a time when I cannot, or I'm not going to be interested in, lifting off big boxes, and horizontal hives are going to be what I'm looking at. And then, of course, now we get into,

there's a top bar hive, which is horizontal. There's the Layans hive, which is horizontal. And then there's the long Langstroth hive, which is the horizontal. as well. And the number one colony that my wife and I both agree and of course my supervisor, the eight-year-old all agrees the Langstroth. Long Langstroth is our preferred hive to work and to keep our bees in and of course to pull frames from and everything else. So if I had my choice of all the horizontal hives out there right now as it is, the long Langstroth configuration

is by far my favorite. Okay, so that's it. On the nuke resource hive question. And next comes from Mike. And it says, I wonder what I did wrong. I bought one already built better bee comb frame and replaced a plastic foundation frame that was not built at yet in my very first colony. I put it in slot number four near the center of the box. Two weeks later, my bees had built out the frames around the better comb,

but no nectar pollen. or brood in the better comb. Zero. I was hoping I'd have brood, but no cigar. Any suggestions? All right. I've done a lot of videos showing better comb. It comes from BetterB. And if you look at the thumbnail from today's video,

it is Bettercombe, which is sold in Hungary under the name Hexas Cell. So this is what it is, and why on earth do I have a Q-tip? sticking out of the front of this Better comb insert. First of all, you should know I put these in myself. So in other words, I bought the kit from BetterB because I knew I'd be using a lot of this when it first came out. And I wire these myself. So if you look at the edge here, there's a little metal grommet that goes in there.

And so they sell you a kit for 100 hives, right? For 100 frames. I'm sorry, not 100 hives. But 100 frames, you get a kit. them yourselves and then everything will be nice and tight then you buy the better comb as in this case it's a medium for a medium super and you also the most common one for me is to use it for deeps and so you get the better comb in a box and there's you know a piece of paper between each comb so they don't merge together and stuff like that but one of the issues that i've been told this hasn't happened to me

so i'm just sharing information uh that others told me that uh when they had better being installed this better comb for them so they bought these complete that's in some cases the comb was installed upside down and some people don't realize that better comb and even the cells on the frames in your hive are at an angle and you'll hear a bunch of different degrees referencing that angle 13 degrees is pretty standard but so what I did is I took a Q-tip and this is what I want you to do if you have better comb and you want to find out if it was put in right side up the Q-tip when you put it in the cell and then center it in the cell so if you look at that up close it should have an up angle if the person a better be that was putting these together and I'm not saying that they did but this comment has come up several times where people found this problem if you for example put it in there and you

put a Q-tip in there and you see that that Q-tip angle is down instead of up when this is the top bar of the frame your bees are far less likely to use it the comb has to be angled up the other thing I have to say is if you have received comb from better be better comb and it was already framed and already put together for you and you found that it was installed upside down please let them know that one of their people maybe doesn't understand how the comb should go. It comes with instructions. It's very clear. So that's another thing to look at if you've got better comb and you find that your bees are not using it

because they did the part that we see most often. They do such a good job at closing up all the edges. In fact, better comb when it's in a frame gets sealed completely around. And it works extremely well. So I have a lot of videos. If you'd like to see more about it, you've never heard of it maybe. If you go to my YouTube channel and then the top right of the YouTube channel, you'll see a little magnifying glass there in a space for you to type in your search. Just type in Bettercombe, B-E-T-T-E-R-C-O-M-B, and you'll see a list of videos on my YouTube channel that cover how to install it because I demonstrate that step-by-step.

And I also cover carefully these angles. You can also see whether or not the bees will use that for brood and all the other things that they do. inside the hive, which includes storing pollen, honey, and everything else. So that's all in there, and they do use it. My first question, when somebody says they're just not using it, but they're using other comb nearby. If that comb is older, they're going to use that first. Of course, this is new comb. And the real reason that I recommend people use better comb is if you've got a colony of bees that's struggling that is just getting started and you just want to put a couple of frames in there to get them rolling. It's very expensive.

So if you want to put it in a couple of frames to get them going and also as a guide, you know, put foundationless between them or put your heavily waxed plastic foundation in between them. It does give your newly installed swarm. Late season swarms, for example, are where I use that a lot. And it just gives them a big jump on that game. So mine have always worked. So that's all I can suggest to check that out. You can get them to work it maybe a little more.

Sprade some sugar syrup in there. like that and see if you can get them to work it a little better anyway so now we're into the fluff section already so as I mentioned this is a short Friday Q&A and so for fluff just to remind you next Friday is going to be live so please join us for live conversation and bring your questions ask anything you want haven't decided yet if my eight-year-old beekeeper will be here for the very tail end of that I can't have them through the whole thing because he wouldn't let me speak at all. So anyway, more videos coming this week. So these will not just be me sitting here talking to you about things. We have videos that are in the can already that are ready to be produced

and narrated and put out. I've just been occupied with photography. So that's going to happen. A lot of people were reporting that the bees are really going after mineral water, mineral salts and things like that right now. So if you want to mix up some quart open feeding situations for water, it's a teaspoon per quart and one of the most preferred salts that your bees were going after in the studies that I've done are the Morton Sea salts. So one teaspoon of Morton Sea salts per quarter of fresh water and it doesn't replace freshwater offerings. So that's the other thing that came up is people are just now putting out water for the bees and the bees are still going to swimming pools and things like that. So we'll backtrack a little bit. It's too late. You know,

start as we should have in the spring, but I always have the water source for the bees consistent throughout the year, and we start it in spring. So as long as the bees are finding the resources they need in a predictable location, and it's always there, it's constant, it's never dried up, they won't necessarily go out and forage for water in other places. So fresh water, always available and water with added salts and minerals might keep them out of some other trouble there when it comes to farms and things like that after the rain where you don't want to see your bees getting a bunch of water out of cow pies and things like that so and the Morton Sea salts we've done those studies too so honey bees need salt is the name of the video

and you can see exactly how we arrived at which one was best for them and even salinity level that's when we end up with the teaspoon per quart we did more we did less and we found out what the bees were going to the most putting out a salt lick and then hoping that it rains on it and you know the bees would they visit a salt lick they might but uh they can't use it as quickly as they can if you pre-mix it for them and offer it with fresh water so uh the other thing is dead outs some people have you know it's not unusual to lose your bees mid-season if you've lost your queen in the spring during swarming and they generated a new queen and she was supposed to fly out and mate and she didn't make it back this year I learned a lot

of wasp queens yellow jackets and European hornet queens don't make it back to their nests I had two under observation European hornet nests the queens laid eggs they had developing larvae in there and then the queen one day just did not make it back to the nest so you may have a colony that got out of your control and just died out. So one of the things we talked about too is these make great swarm magnets. So if you're looking at a beehive and you're thinking, well, it was occupied before and now they're dead and we just wanted to get occupied again, you do have to go in and do house cleaning. You have to sweep out dead bees off the bottom.

You have to take a look at the brood frames that are left over. And I do highly recommend that you wash out any leftover pollen that's stored in there too. So what we were and this is what we were doing these past few days with my supervisor. We were dunking the frames and cells in bleach water and I've said 10% bleach for bleaching surfaces, but it can be a much lower concentration of bleach if you have a big flat water area that you're going to rinse everything. So we soaked all the frames with the beeswax and everything in the bleach water and then later we rinse them out and I also showed him how to lay out a hundred feet of garden hose in the sun and then that produced nice hot water roughly 125

degree water just from a dark hose being exposed to sun and letting the water come through it in just a fine spritz and now we rinsed out all of the cells on this open comb so once you rinse that out air dry it you don't have to do anything after that rinse it with fresh water if you want to and it will still smell like as he says a swimming pool when you put that in the beehives, you'll find that the bees start using them right away. If it's full of dead bees, old material that's in those cells like the pollen that they stored

and things like that. Rinsing that out will encourage bees to use those frames again. Bees wax is extremely valuable to your bees. So get that back in there. If you don't clean them out, you'll find that you will not easily get a swarm to move in. And then don't forget to touch the tops of those frames with Swarm Commander if you're trying to encourage scouts from future swarms to check out that hive

and reoccupy it for you. So combining wheat colonies. So there's the thing too. Your other option. If you've got a colony that's dwindling, queenless, hopelessly queenless, combine them with a stronger colony and just salvage the bees. We're coming up on the end of June for a lot of areas. There isn't a lot of time to build a colony from scratch now. So you can, you can, actually combine weaker colonies go with the one the location of the one that has the best queen and then you'll build their numbers and that will allow you then to take advantage of the upcoming nectar flows that are going to happen in my neck of the woods starting it in august so we'll get really big nectar flows then uh what else uh observe temperature restrictions a lot of people

are thinking about using organic treatments for their bees to control the varrode structure mites you definitely want to get your varodistructor mites under control before the next season nectar flow comes around and if you're using formic pro do not take lightly the limitations regarding temperatures high temperature formic pro put in a hive you will end up with a lot of dead bees and potentially a dead queen so really stick to temperature restrictions on that follow all the instructions on all the labels of the stuff that you're using. So the other thing is a lot of people are putting out surveys this time of year. It's great to respond and you can stay anonymous and help people understand what the trends are.

I'm wearing a shirt from the Be Informed Partnership. These surveys have been absorbed by other universities and stuff. So Penn State in this case is doing surveys. Please log in and report what you do. Are you a natural beekeeper treatment free? Do you treat through the year? the year, what kind of stock do you use, and what's your management style? And then ultimately, we'll learn from that what the best practices should be for beekeepers in your neck of the woods,

because regional beekeeping practices are very important. What goes on in the desert southwest of the United States might not necessarily be very good for people that are keeping bees where I am in the northeastern part of the United States. So that kind of data collection is very important. And if you've done multiple surveys with multiple places, it doesn't hurt you to keep providing that information. The more we know, the better we'll go with our bees. So the other thing was we mentioned before, the Keepers Hive had that Indiegogo campaign. And if you don't know what the Keepers Hive is, just Google it. The Keepers Hive. You can also go to my website or my YouTube channel, Frederick Dunn, and type it into the search there. The Keepers Hive is an interview with the owner. I have mine

out in the apiary right now and it's another method that is supposed to help you not have to lift off your hives so the campaign they met their goal on indigo go by the way and i think that campaign is still going so if you want to look up the keepers hive indigo go fundraiser look and see what the offerings are so since i already have the single one which is nukes on top of an eight frame box i decided to experiment so i invested my own money and bought the double queen keepers hive setup so what it is it looks like it's two Langstroth 10 frame deep boxes and then their angled roofs going up and they share a center which of course there'll be queen excluders below that and then there'll be a center column that will be for

honey production so what we have then will be double the foragers from two colonies of brood and then we'll be providing one of course honey super stack in the center and what do you think I'm going to put on there I'm going to start off with a medium super of honey of course and then on top of that I'm going to put a flow super so I'm going to see if I can't create a super flow super off of the Keepers Hive 2 queen system so that's the one I bought if you're wondering which one I invested in that's how I did it but they met their goal good news so innovation pays off and it's working out just fine so that's it for today I want to thank you you for spending your time with me here please write down in the comment section

below what your questions are I do look at every single comment and if there's a question there that you have for next Friday even though that series is going to be live next Friday I do take the questions during the week that have not been covered before or pertinent for what's going on this time of year in your backyard apiary and then I will keep those included and I will answer those during the live Q&A next Friday so I hope I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead, and I hope the bears are staying out of your bees.

Thanks a lot for watching and listening. This series is also available as a podcast. Just Google the Way to Be podcast, and you'll pick it up on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening and watching.