The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 269 blooms are coming on early, are you ready?

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/AlosQOvGbv4

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, August 2nd, and this is back here to bekeeping questions and answers episode number 269. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I want to thank you for being here, even though there's a very good chance that I would be on your screen when you did. And we got a lot going on right now. Super hot outside, tough week, by the way. You want to know what the temperature is. I know you do. It is 76 degrees Fahrenheit spot showers today at our already rain several times which increase the humidity how high is the humidity you might want to know well 88% relative humidity and the other thing is the wind you know exaggerated by the lack of wind zero mile per hour wind what's that in kilometers zero kilometers no wind so it's super sticky out there smoke impact we have wildfires all over the place in this country in Canada and other parts of

the world that are affecting air quality it's really weird but We're green today, which means no impact. So just keep an eye on that stuff. Do your bees respond when there's smoke from wildfires coming through your area? Not to my knowledge, not that I've seen. So I'm sure you also might want to know what's going on outside. What's growing on outside? Goldenrod.

It's open. It's here. The bees are all over it. There's a nectar flow on. In fact, they're putting in nectar too fast. They're loading up honey. They've drawn out their frames. doing inspections and checking things and I'm way behind. I find out now that I have to fix some boxes and things where I can put them on. But here in the northeastern United States,

the state of Pennsylvania, agricultural zone 5, 1,300 feet above sea level, we have high activity with our honeybees. The environment's waking up too early. We have ironweed, also in blossom. White clover continues to be a mainstay for my bees to get nectar and pollen. Borage, one of the best decisions I ever made was planting borage this year. I'm going to plant more next year. The bees are all over it. And if you look at the blooms yet to open, it still has a long way to go. Plus that stuff competes with weeds and everything else. So it's holding its own. Spreading dog bean. A lot of people don't like it. It's kind of in the milkweed family, I think, because when you peel off the little stems and things, it has milkweed, the milky substance that

comes out. But the bees are all over those white flowers, so they must be producing something worthwhile. poison ivy is blossoming and the bees are on that too i don't like that very much and some people often ask hey if the bees visit the nectaries on poison ivy blossoms does that mean that you've got poison ivy the toxic stuff that's going to cause you to break out in the honey nope no evidence of that so far so that's good news you don't have to worry about it think of all the plants that our honeybees visit that we have no idea about. Within three miles in any direction, they could be visiting anything, including somebody's oriole feeder and getting grape jelly instead of actual nectar from living plants. So another thing that's a problem right now, I planted a lot of maximum

sunflowers. In fact, I've established a border zone around my property of maximum million sunflowers because I decided why not have a maintenance-free perennial that will come up every year and provide a privacy screen as the year progresses, not in spring, obviously. But it will come up year after year and provide blossoms. Here's the problem that I see right now. Blossom heads, although they're not open, are already on the max of millions. That is several weeks early based on the history here, on my own property. So I have concerns about that.

We'll talk about those a little later. But they're just budding too early. I don't see any Aster's or anything like that. bird ox are blossoming bees are on them so some of the plants that aren't great for people are great for your bees so if you want to know what we're going to talk about for the rest of this presentation please go down in the video description and you'll see all the topics in order and some important links and further information so how do you get your own question or topics submitted so that you

can have it considered for one of our Fridays you go to the way to be dot org and you look at the page the way to be there's a form that you can fill out you can remain anonymous if you want to you don't have to put your information down there but if it's something really important you need information right now you have to know what's going on you can't wait for a friday please go to our facebook group the way to be fellowship on facebook you have to answer a couple questions and then you're in and you can talk to people all over the world there's always somebody awake and ready to help we allow no spam no spam no politics zero none always so it's all bees all the time so what else can i talk about i think that's

about it so let's get right into it with question number one which comes from mark in freeman missouri that is by the way my home state uh let's see concerning the question from q and a 268 so that's last friday about feeding fondant in a layan's hive i did this in an experiment in one of my lands hives last winter and I used one of the frame feeders purchased from horizontal hive.com. For those you who don't know, that's Dr. Leo Shirashkin's website. And even though he does not endorse feeding in your land's hives, he does sell you frame feeders. I have one, they're really nice. So when I place the fondant in the feeder, I managed to get an entire five-pound pack of hive-alive fondant in the feeder.

The bees did not use it much during the colder wet. but once it started warming up they went after it and ended up cleaning up every bit of it This was a late season swarm that ended up building up so fast in the spring that they got ahead of me and Swarmed age-old story for beekeepers the v's are always ahead of us If you would like more details on how I did this just let me know so I think that's pretty self-explanatory This is what the land's frame feeder looks like it's deeper Of course, it has the length that's just right to go into a layens hive. You could put syrup in it.

There's a wooden cover for it that goes right down. That's what these clips are for. And that keeps the bees from drowning in there. So if it worked for fondant, that's good news because you don't have to then spread apart the frames. You know, there are always special adaptations necessary when you're working with the layens hive. And for those of you don't know, the layens hive was developed at the same time that the Langstroth hive. So Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth was inventing the removable frame hive and taking advantage of bee space and all of that. At the very same time, the Lanzhive was being developed overseas.

So, and there are people that swear by it, wanted, and nothing else. I have problems with the lands hives overall. I have a couple of them. And every time I need to make a split or add frames or swap resources or something like that. Nothing matches up because the rest of my stuff is Langstroth. So if you're a brand new beekeeper and you're looking at equipment and you're thinking about, oh, there's so many choices, we have top bar hives for horizontal configurations. We have Langstroth and Lance. And now there's the ivory bee observation hive.

Which one would you pick? So I would say for the beginner, here's the thing. It's kind of like camera equipment sometimes. The brand that you start with, you kind of want to stay with because you're going to be buying other equipment that goes along with it. And for cameras, it's lenses and flashes and strobes, speed lights, things like that that go with one particular brand. Well, the biggest and most common brand out there for beehives is going to be the Langstroth configuration. So that's when you end up with the most compatible equipment that goes with it. And if you want a horizontal hive format, which is easier for older people, younger people, my grandstand.

son likes them too even though his favorite hive right now is his flow hive the lay-ins is going to be a little bit more challenging when it comes to getting equipment and it's compatible for it so you just have to be able to work with that and get yourself and sometimes you have to innovate and do unique things to it but that was question number one we're gonna move right on glad the fond it worked and it worked in the frame feeder and And do not split up your brood when you do that, hopefully. You will put that where the honey runs out because the whole point of fondet.

In fact, I should talk about that now. When we put fondant on frequently, here's the question, when should you put it on and does it matter? It does matter because over the last couple of years, by the way, I never used fondant until I have a live fondet came out. And that's because it's a company that I trust. They do thorough research. They have a well-researched product in the hive-of-life syrup. So I thought, same people, same integrity. They're in Ireland.

And when I decided to start using the fondant packs, it changed the way I fed my bees. So the problem is the bees like it. The fondant is something they go for right away. And that's why I'm going to suggest waiting until it really gets cool, until your bees are finished, settled, and they're already starting to enter states of torpor. So for those of those of you don't know,

honeybees don't hibernate. They go into a state of torpor, which reduces their metabolism, they cluster up, and they hover over their food resources. And this is really interesting because if you put your fondant or something else that they prefer up in the top,

because that's where I recommend you put it on top of your inner cover, and hopefully it's an insulated intercover with insulation again over the top. of the fondant pack and then there's a hole in the middle so if you put it up too soon I find that some of the bees migrated straight up to it right away and you ended up with a winter cluster very close to the fondant now that happened mostly because I put it on late season swarms so they didn't have a lot of honey resources anyway but what they did do is got right up there

which meant then I have to replenish the fondant pegs as we go through winter with a regular colony once they clustered and they're kind of clustered over their brood and we have these fat-bodied winter bees that are developed which live much longer than the worker bees that we have this time of year Once they're clustered up and they start a little brood pattern there and there's plenty of honey resources they kind of stay on it So once things get cold starts drop and below freezing overnight In other parts of the country this rhythm may be totally different and it may not make a difference here where we get snow and it gets we get freezing temperatures put your fondant on when the temperatures finally start dropping around the 30s at night. And that way they are already set.

And Dr. Leo Shirazkin did this research to a cluster. And of course he does the lay enzymes. That's where they came up with this deeper frame. But we're stacking boxes. So they act like a deeper frame. And the bees will migrate upward a millimeter a day. Now I'm sure there's a little variance there. But a millimeter a day allows you to give.

when they start their clustering what honey they have stored above and how many days do you have before they end up directly under that inner cover having consumed those stored honey resources so wait until it freezes then put the fondent packs on they're supposed to be an emergency ration they're not supposed to be the main food for your bees so moving on to question number two let me see did mark he sure did mark snuck in two questions Usually I do one question per person, but this is it. So Mark from Freeman, Missouri again. In this past week's live Q&A you spoke about the importance of checking mite levels this time of year. Absolutely, because they'll be developing those valuable winter bees later on, and we don't want your bees to be diseased from mites at that time. So anyway, this brought to mind an article I read in the USDA website discussing methods for testing. for mites including the sticky board method the sticky board by the way those things are

really expensive I don't know if you've priced them but sticky boards are expensive would be very easy for me as my lands hives all have fully screened bottoms with enclosures around them for pest control trays that is a great piece of kit to have no matter what your hive design is Langstroth Lance if you can have a number eight screen on the bottom and a removable tray or insert under underneath, that is very valuable for management and checking on your business and seeing what's going on. Moving on. With the enclosures around them for pest control trays, the USDA article states, typically,

if 30 or more mites drop in a 24-hour period, then treatment is necessary. I'd say so. That's a lot of mites in 24 hours. I don't have a hive in my apiary that would have that kind of mite drop without some kind of treatment going on in a 24-hour period. So that seems like an awful lot to me. I agree with Mark. And now my question is, the sticky board at all useful as an indicator for my counts. I don't expect them to be as accurate as a sugar shake or alcohol or dish soap wash, but do they have value as an indicator for further testing and or treatment? I treat this the same as

the B-scanner app. I don't know if you guys have known anything about that, but the B scanner app came out and they wanted me to test it, and I did. I installed it on my phone. And what it is is you take four sections on a deep Langstroth frame. So you pull up a brute frame, you take images, and it's got artificial intelligence built into it that will spot Varroa destructor mites for you. Now, there was a lot of pushback about it because you're going to miss a lot of mites

where the mites located on the abdomen of the bees. So if these are nursed bees, they're not going to be clamoring around on the thorax. If they are, you've already got huge problems. So this is interesting because what they did is they actually worked that into their algorithm. So that if there are ferretic or dispersal phase of varro-destructor mites on your bees and they show up,

then that means that they've already calculated that there would be a number of other varro-destructor mites also in the abdomen. And of course, others would already be inside you're developing pupa, right? So then there were treatment thresholds established. And by the way, that app worked really good. It's just cumbersome for me.

And, you know, I have not been keeping up with it, but it worked okay. And it's the same thing in this case. So if you've got trays, if you've got sticky boards, if you've got all of these methods for collecting detritus, it falls through your screens on the bottom. And of course, you cannot, I might as well say this, you can't get a sticky board or please don't get a sticky board and just slide it in your entrance on your solid bottom board because your bees are going to be stuck all over it so i'm just going to say

it i'm not saying anybody would actually do that i'm just saying put a sticky board under a screen only so then uh and of course there are parameters for that and as the u s a article quoted here says 30 or more might's drop in a 24 hour period i would treat absolutely that hives in trouble I would do it. So the same thing for these other methods. If I pull out a tray, I've just recently told my son to pull out his tray from his flow hive and give me a mite count over a 48-hour period.

Just see what drops down in there. He has zero. So would I trade a colony that has zero mites in the tray after 48 hours? Nope. How about five or 10? Yes. Five or 10 that either the mite just died of old age, or was groomed off because that's the other thing how'd they look where their feet chewed are these mite mullers

are these Purdue ankle biters you know what kind of stock is inside the hive these all play because some bees aren't good at grooming them off so if you're finding you set your own threshold but I'm saying this time of year you have an opportunity this is still time to act on the road of structure mites now I also understand there's a broad group of people out there that are 100% treatment-free obviously that's not for you however You might want to think about some kind of intervention. Screen bottom boards actually came out in concert with when the Veroa destructor mites showed up here in the United States.

And there was supposed to be a passive way of reducing mites. And Florida State did research on that too. And that's where they came up with a 15% passive mite reduction. So in other words, mites were just falling through the screen bottom board. And 15% of them were just not making their way back. up into the hive and that's where they came up with spraying cooking spray or putting cooking oil or in my case mineral oil so I could still photograph them nice and clear once they fell into it but you had to have a way to prevent them from getting back

up inside the hive so treatment-free people still need to be active you can't I don't say you can obviously you can some people do but I highly recommend not ignoring your bees just because you've decided to be treatment-free it actually requires a lot of work. Leo Shirashkin has a big gathering coming up and a big presentation. And Thomas Seeley, Dr. Tom Sealy's being quoted a lot as an advocate for treatment-free. That's true, but he's not a hands-off advocate. So we need to pay attention to Dr. Tom Seeley and read the rest of what he says,

which is, if you have high mite loads. So in other words, it's not just ignoring them and saying everything's great. You need to know if they have mites because you, you have to select your genetics so that you can go forward with those top performers. If you have mites on your bees, Dr. Ossaly says you should cull the colony. So if you're not willing to treat, and I'm not saying that you have to, but if you're not willing to treat, it doesn't mean you're not active in controlling disease inside your hive and the vectors of that disease, which the number one culprit for that

will be the varro destructor mite. So a colony that's in collapsing mode or this breeding mites needs to be called according to Dr. Tom Seeley. So people like to take the good and leave out the control aspect of that. So I just have to share with you that treatment, if you are a treatment person, I prefer organic methods, organic treatments, and it's no secret that is axolic acid. Vaporization is my number one treatment and that partnered with the genetics that I have and locally adapted stock and overall very healthy bees. I'm not losing colonies to DeVorea Destruct or mite.

So there's a lot to this, but yes, that situation, 30? I'd panic. Well, I wouldn't panic. I would take action. We'd go to General Quarters. We'd send out the security team to take out those mites right away as soon as possible or sooner. Question number three, moving on, comes from Jim from Foster, Rhode Island. Fred, could you please explain the advantages of the shim box on your long Langstroth hive design?

The bees are building comb on the bottoms of my standard deep frames, which is fine for the brood area, but not for frames of honey I intend to harvest. So yes, I can explain it. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about. First of all, shout out to Ross Millard. Ross Millard is the one who took my technical illustrations and turned them into actual prints. Then we turn them into PDFs and we put those PDFs on my website, which again I'll mention is the way to be.org. And you go to the page and the page just says plans comma prints.

It's in all caps. When you go there, they're not for sale. They're for your use. And they are a beginning point for you. For me, it's an arrival because these are the designs that I currently use. And in fact, that print. setup has been updated by Ross, thanks a lot if he's listing right now, in June of 2024. So we do modify these prints and drawings as we make changes or find ways to improve them. So back to the question, there are two versions of this horizontal hive, which is a long Langstroth configuration. And we have the option to add another depth component to that with the two-by-fours. So the entire hive is super heavy, by the way, which I happen to like.

We are backyard beekeepers and we don't have to move our hives around. So we build really solid, comfortably positioned support systems. Beehive stands for these things. These are two and three person carry hives. They're bulky. They're heavy. That's intentional. The beauty of it is you can have thick stock, well insulated, and continue to use the hive.

So it's five feet long. This thing is big. So the option to have more space underneath is exactly. what's described as a problem here. When you put frames in any hive configuration, let's say you took medium frames, put them in a deep box. Then what happens is the bees fill the medium frame and then of course they build more comb and extend the bottom of the frame. And I've done that too because who hasn't been caught with not enough frames to go around and you just inserted a

medium because you needed a frame as a placeholder. Any frame is better than no frame when you're putting a box together to hive a swarm or something like that anyway and then what the bees do very predictable they'll build comb underneath of the frame and attach it they're also very good at respecting bee space and not running it all the way and connecting it to the bottom this is really interesting and this is why we recommended the shim and that's because some of the comb down there is going to be drone comb in fact most of it will be and the problem as stated here in the question from jim is in the honey super part so there's no supering because it's horizontal all the way and because we have a single entrance at one end it's a predictable progression from brood to a mix of brood and resources which

includes pollen and honey and then eventually becomes nothing but honey frames and off they go down the line and then you can harvest those honey frames so you pull it out you've got that shim underneath and guess what's at the bottom a frame of nice fresh bees wax and it's full of capped honey. That to me is a bonus round. You can't put that in your extractor. Of course, you're going to be cutting it away. So you just shave off that whole bottom there

and you can have chunk honey from that. What's chunk honey, you may be wondering? Well, you cut that comb off the bottom with a nice clean knife and it's all capped honey. And then you can take those chunks and put them inside your honey jars and then you pour the honey that you harvest and fill the jar the rest of the way and you've got something called chunk honey. It looks really good on the shelf.

People love to see actual comb and beeswax. Now the other side of that is you can crush and strain it. There are other ways to harvest the honey off of that. And when you crush and strain, that leaves you with a bunch of nice clean beeswax to use for candles and other things, coating foundation frames and things like that. So it's intentional. Exactly what the problem is for Jim is what is intended in the design. So you have those options.

So the other part is the brood area. You'll be cutting those away if you want to use that as varroa control. So as I mentioned before, those people who are going to be treatment-free should not be management-free. So that allows you when your drones get capped underneath your brood frames, And this happens during high productivity times of gear. So when there's a lot of brood being built up, really strong colonies tend to produce up to 20% drone comb when it comes to their brood. So they put that in the periphery a lot.

Sometimes it's a frame that's more distant from where the central core of work or brood is being developed. And then you can pull whole frames. There are frames designed just for that, but letting the bees build their own comb, and you can uncap that, but you're going to be cutting it off and removing them, while they're capped in their pupa state. So when they're doing that, what you've done is you've removed where a lot of your varro distractor mites are located and you can feed them to your chickens and stuff like that. You can just put them in the freezer, kill them, and then render the wax if you want to. There are a lot of options on what to do with that. And then, of course,

the bees are left building up more comb. Now the other thing is after you've harvested at the end of the year, if you're in an area where it gets cold, like here, Pennsylvania, when you do that the end of the year the bees don't build the replacement comb in those areas at the end of the year so now we've got a free flow area underneath those frames where your bees can move they keep it very clean there isn't a lot of detritus or bits and pieces on the bottom you also have options to have screen bottoms with removable trays and here's the other thing in that design you'll notice that are removable trays and the screen bottoms don't run the full length of the hive because it's unnecessary the reason we want to those screens is underneath brood frames because we want those varroa mites to fall through and bits and pieces like that so you don't have to run your removable frames throughout the entire length of your hive you can you don't have to so i hope that answers the question but it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do so i'm giving a shout out to ross millard very grateful for him uh formalizing those sketches and making those drawings available to everyone and i also want to give a shout out today to horizontal

Bees.com and that is Ricky Rourke. Ricky Rourke makes horizontal hives and he makes them custom for his customer. So, and the reason I mention him is Ricky also made a horizontal Langstroth hive, also known as the Long Lang. He made one based on my prints for me. So I really do appreciate Ricky and if you go to the North American Honeybee Expo, you're always going to see horizontal bees most recent designs and work there. So he has a bunch of different options. Please go check him out. I think he also has a YouTube channel. Tell him I said hello.

So that's today's shout out. Question number four. This comes from, oh, here's an anonymous commenter through my website. GK1 anyway. It says, I imagine you're already aware of what I'm about to reveal from my recent experience, but I'll share it with you anyway, just in case. during my recent OAV treatments, so OAV is oxalic acid vaporization, I blocked the entrance while I did the treatment to maybe contain more of the vapor inside the hive.

What I noticed at the entrance that really stood out at me was the traffic jam I created by blocking the returning forages from entering the hive, and they stayed at the entrance. I was amazed at the amount of returning foragers that had pollen on, especially that early in the morning and in the middle of what I thought was a dearth. Then I thought back on some of your videos and how you've mentioned getting your grandkids to watch the entrances for returning foragers, bringing in pollen 10 or more times a minute. I don't know about you, but it's hard to see them come in and see what they really have on sometimes. Then it hit me. If you really want to see how much is coming in at specific intervals and what they're bringing in, block the entrance for the entrance for the.

that specific time period, take a picture. It makes counting and evaluating so much simpler, and you can record it for your records easier. And then so an example was attached. So I just recently, this week, I think it was on Wednesday, I posted a video quick tips for exhalic acid vaporization. So I did go over those aspects. And the other part is we wanted to block the entrance for 10 minutes. That's the standard. Now, I'm really glad about this by the way because I hadn't thought about this method so it's fantastic for people just want to see these are cotton claws these things are dirt cheap I get these on Amazon for those who want to know you can find them yourself I'm sure but they're 100%

cotton towels I use these to strain bees wax for example if you want to heat that up and stuff because once you use a cotton cloth I think these end up being about 50 cents a piece but if you strain beeswax with them, they become fire starters for you. So it's like a wick. You cut them up and start your, you know, if you've got a stove, if you've got a fireplace at home, or even camping. They work great for that. But here's the thing. I just roll these up and lay them on the landing board and restrict the entrance. So this actually would be perfect even when you're not doing exhalic acid vaporization. You just take it, lay it over the entrance, click your stopwatch or have the kids do it,

let it go for a minute and then take a picture just as described here you will have a chance to see because we know they scoot in super fast this will not interrupt the productivity of your colony at all not just that bees put up with this activity they're really uh not super defensive about it because what is it it's a dry cotton cloth that just ends up laying there and then after 60 seconds take a picture with your cell phone if you want to or you can just look at them they land they land on the of the hive they land on the cloth and there is some air passing through so it's not a hundred percent closing off your hive and if you do it early in the morning because it was interesting if you watch that video and i hope that you do uh then you'll see all the pollen that is coming in and that was at seven o'clock in the morning here also so it was a great way to notice everything without sitting there

going was that pollen was that pollen because i found out too that my grandchildren look for yellow pollen golden pollen and like for example white clover is something that the bees are getting nectar from right now but they're also getting pollen it's just not yellow it's often tan and looks just off white so people miss that because in their head they're looking for something that looks like a cheeto on the corbicula of those bees so that is a great tip and i have to say i love it when my viewers make comments like that of course this person didn't want credit i guess but um These are great ideas, and this is why I always say no one is smarter than everyone, and I don't care if you've been keeping bees for a month.

You may make an observation or have an idea. The beekeepers that have kept bees for decades have completely ignored. I'm all about listening to people, old and new, and this is an example of a great tip that I think will work out. So that's super. Take a picture or just look at them. Question number five, this is from Jin Drown. Said, this last feeder kills bees by the hundreds.

I have talked to the manufacturer and they have no answer why the bees are getting into the feeder and drowning. Don't waste your money. So this particular video that we're talking about is from Ciracelle. So Cirousel makes hive top feeders. They have one of them sitting right here, of course. This is the feeder that we're talking about. It's full of clutter. Cirousel is a good company.

They make a lot of good, useful things. And this feeder has been around for a long time, and I don't use them on my beehive a lot. When I first started out, I put these out, but I'm going to talk about this a little bit, since here's a person who lost a lot of bees and feels strongly. about this design.

They come with a wooden frame. These people, I also interviewed them at last year's North American... Well, it's actually this year, last January. The North American Honeybee Expo, we talked to them about these, and this is actually a very good design that holds syrup.

For your bees, it also can be used to feed solids. So, of course, if you want them to access sugar or whatever you've put out here, fondant, in my case these days, you pull this cover off, they have full access, and of course there's an outer cover on top of this that keeps them from just running a muck everywhere the other thing is they have these inserts in the corners now these inserts are used to allow your bees to get down

into the corners without going over the free surface area of the syrup that you've got in here so the thing of it is that strikes me is that oftentimes when your bees are really hungry for example and because they're in the corners if you tip it if your hive is tilted any which way they're gonna drain it 100% but that's a serousel hive top feeder but the thing that strikes me about this is when you first feed your bees often there's a rush for the resource especially we're talking about syrup if it weren't syrup they wouldn't drown so there are other aspects of this I want you to think about one is when they're really hungry they push each other in I don't know if

there are a lot of people that say all the bees they just care about each other and they're so sensitive and look at them saving them that bee on the landing board that fell in the honey and they're all just licking her to save her life and then she's going to be able to get back in the hive no they're not they're not like that at all they dog pile in fact they don't care if they drown each other they just keep pushing because they all want access to the syrup now heavy syrup the people that make two to one in these really heavy syrups or they put pro sweet straight right into these hive top feeders you will absolutely have some dead bees in there and here's why just like if you put honey in there

One of the most dangerous things to bees, ironically, is honey, full-blown honey that has a lot of surface area open to the bees. Bees are designed to eat honey out of cells, and they actually lick it through the cappings. They cut a little hole in the capping, and they lick it out that way, unless it's a robbing situation, and then they're just tearing everything apart. But the bees don't get their bodies in full contact with the highly viscous honey. The same thing is true of heavy syrup. Now, since I'm not a person that feeds heavy syrup, right? So I put light syrups in, and you'll find out there is a correlation between how much sugar is in the syrup

and how your bees have the ability to get out of it or not. One bee in an open, even an entrance feeder, which, again, I don't use, but I use entrance feeders as my testing vessels when I'm doing backyard citizen science projects. So the highly viscous liquids, the bees can land on it, flip over on their backs, that's when it really happens. They flip on their backs and then their wings touch it and they get stuck and then they can drown. A honeybee can stick its entire head under a heavy syrup and not suffocate. Why is that? Because they don't breathe through their mouth or their head.

They respirate through the thorax in the abdomen. That's why their heads can be all the way in, their abdomen can be out and it's pulsing, right? so they have holes along the sides that they breed through. Spiricals. So anyway, the heavy syrups can put your bees in jeopardy, and you should expect to find several dead bees inside any of your heavy syrup feeders. Now, if you go one-to-one or even lighter, then you'll find that even when there's this big dog pile going on,

their chances of climbing out are much higher. So fewer dead bees, thinner syrup, and so it goes. So the other thing is contacting them and saying don't waste your money. I don't know that the money is a waste if it's something that you need, but I'll explain why I don't use that large hive top feeder because frankly if I needed to do an inspection or something like that, it's just big. And if you had a bunch of syrup in it, it's unwieldy,

and you could dump the syrup. So I have it for display purposes. I tested it. It works good. The place where I do like the cirrhicel, smaller reservoir hive top feeders are their nucleus hive top feeders those things are fantastic they weren't great and I've never found a bunch of dead bees but there again I'm only feeding one to one or lighter and it's only to kick off a nucleus hive or something like that so I'm not trying to get them to store a bunch of honey

great so I hope that Jim gets a good answer or if maybe it's the viscosity of the syrup that was on there that was the culprit so don't throw away and don't feel that you've wasted your money. I hope you try it again and come back and let us know if that might have been the problem. There are other options because I've talked with developers for companies like this. There are options to create a wicking material that would keep your bees out of the syrup altogether. So one of the things I've done through the years, which is kind of funny, is 100% cotton socks. And you put cotton socks. And you put cotton socks in those corners, then it would have capillary action, which would draw the syrup up, and the bees drink out of the sock fabric, which should be 100% cotton. And that way,

none of them can get into it, but it really does slow down the uptake of the sugar syrup. If you're trying to boost a colony and really kick them off and get them going, then we don't want to impede their ability to drink the syrup, right? So, but socks, cotton, other materials that act as a wick that you have to wash out frequently because they do just gum up when it dries out and they've used it all the sock dries and of course it has sugar all through it and then it just becomes hard so you have to rinse them periodically and you use a light bleach water to also keep them sanitized so we don't want any bacteria we don't want mold growing on those but there are a lot of ways to fool around with it and deal with keeping them out of that

syrup so they don't drown and die because that is a bad feeling when you come across your dead bees. Question number six comes from Lynn, and it says, I did see that Dara mentioned the new easy syrup was a two to one ratio. So what we're talking about here is I recently did an interview with Dara Scott, who is the principal owner at Hive Alive. So we talked about stuff, and there is a new product coming out, and they're a pre-release and they're on sale and that's what we're talking about.

It's a good ratio, two to one, really good fall feeding. I like that I can put it on the top of frames. Normally, I use an in-frame feeder in my deep-brewed box, and this will be easier. And that's because when you use frame feeders, then what you've done is you've taken away a frame of comb inside your hive and also you have to access it. So that means pulling off the outer cover, the inner cover, and of course getting to the frame feeder so that you can fill it or check it out.

So that's a lot of work. And when the weather's really bad and cold and so on, that's not a fun thing to do. So by having the feeding on top of your inner cover, and there are a lot of companies that make hive top feeders, I recommend looking at those over frame feeders. So anyway, the one question left unanswered was, since these are fixed two pound packages, I run eight frame hives. I'm wondering how big these will be on top of my frames. And then Lynn says, I'll see you at the Expo in January.

So yes, they fit eight and ten frame both equally. And I believe he said they need an inch and a half of space or an inch of space above the frames. So you may have to have a feeder shim on top of that if you're going to put it directly on the frames. And for those who are listening or watching and don't understand what we're even talking about, a hive alive, the same company that makes the fondant and the hive alive syrup has pre-mixed two-to-one syrup in packets. And it's the same principle as those, I'm sure you've seen people that like to take gallon Ziploc baggies, fill them up with syrup, zip-lock the bag, and set it right on the frames and just poke tiny holes in it. And then the bees consume out of those holes, and then it just flattens out the bag.

the baggie and then you just take it out and you're done it's similar to that and i thought it would be the same configuration but when he showed it in the video it has a flat bottom to it and then there's a domed section that holds the syrup someone else commented there that uh they did the cost analysis on that and it costs the same to buy the packet as to make your own two to one syrup i find that a little odd because there's a lot in it it's not just sugar syrup it is invert sugar and it's has a lot of stuff added just like the hive alive material so it'll be interesting to see how that goes and because it's a heavy syrup that would be something that you're feeding near the end of the year when you've got a colony that's in trouble it didn't save enough uh honey to get through so

hopefully that would be enough for them to build and of course store that's one of the bonus aspects of the heavy syrup is that the beast don't just consume it and use it day to day they will draw that out and then put it in cells and treat it like honey so that that would only be put on when your honey supers are not on and you're just trying to get your bees ready for winter if the colonies are light they need those resources to get going and then of course that's when i would swap it out temperature gets cold what would i put on bond in so that's it and it says at the end i'll see you at the expo in january so this is interesting too for those of you who follow the north american honeybee expo there is a website so you can google it north american honeybee

Expo and Kamen Reynolds runs that and he did post the list of presenters and I saw myself on the list so I'm all excited yes I get to go so the thing is he didn't say anything to me but it's okay for him to assume that I will be there because I will be there if I'm asked so so just like for example tomorrow Saturday I'll be at the Beaver Valley beekeepers Association picnic and I'm giving a presentation there. It's very casual. So if there's any chance you're in that neck of the woods in the state of Pennsylvania and you want to go to a picnic and you want to see a presentation where I guarantee that you will learn at least one new thing, then join us at the Beaver Valley beak picnic, something like that.

But you'll find out it's on there and I'm going tomorrow from noon on. So you don't have to pre-register. There is an online link that you should follow and let them know to make sure that you can come so that there's food and everything we just open everyone you don't have to be a member so we're plugging that but i'm also plugging the north american honeybee expo not just because i get to be a presenter there but because it's a great place to be get it because here's the thing there are i already know because thanks to my connections with people in this industry there are a bunch of new things coming out that will be revealed in January 2025, Louisville, Kentucky, the North American Honeybee Expo. So whether you care about the presenters, the speakers, or not, it is worth it just to go to meet the company owners and the shakers and movers that are coming up with all this new gear or improving existing equipment for beekeepers. Just the deals alone, depending on how big you are most of my viewers i think are backyard beekeepers but if you're going to buy

hive equipment things that are heavy things that cost a lot to ship if you're going there you can almost pay for whatever the entry fee is uh you would get that back and have all this great exposure and maybe go and see a presentation from your favorite beekeeper or something commercial people some of the biggest names in commercial beekeeping will be there giving presentations The house is divided. So there are multiple presentations going on at the same time. And backyard beekeeper-oriented stuff over here and the big commercial beekeeping stuff going on over here.

So you want to make fat stacks off of your bees. Go listen to Bob Benny and all these other people. If you want to have knowledge for the sake of knowledge, you would go and listen to somebody like me because I'm going to be honest, the things I tell you don't necessarily have a return on your. your investment they don't I'm not the person to come to if you're trying to make a fortune in beekeeping I keep bees because I'm fascinated by the bees and I share information that will hopefully

help you keep your bees alive and thriving and I learn to keep bees so I can keep bees to learn it's that simple so I want my bees alive because dead bees teach us nothing and what ends up happening is I learn interesting things about bees. I meet other beekeepers that also are like-minded and just want to know about bees and how they cope with the natural world and how they put up with beekeepers like us. And so that's what I do. My thing is, you know, I can ruin you financially. Actually, if you just bought everything that I ever mentioned that might be used for beekeeping, it doesn't always have a great return on the investment. But if you want to know fun stuff,

I'm someone that you might want to listen to. If you want to succeed, what I'm trying to say is the full spectrum is going to be at the North American Honeybee Expo and go there, hang out. I will buy you a free cup of coffee if you show up there. I will. I'll show you right where you can get. And a muffin, free muffin.

I will buy you a free muffin if you say hi to me. at the North American Honeybee Expo. So this is the fluff section. If you haven't guessed, we're just shooting the breeze right now. But yet please watch that interview with Dara Scott. It's recent. You can go to my website.

I'll say it again, The Way to be.org. And there's a page called interviews you can listen to and watch. It is a playlist. Everything is also as a podcast on Podbean. Or you can Google the Way to Be podcast. podcasts and you'll find the entire playlist of what you're listening to right now as well as all my

other interviews and things like that i have interviews coming up they're going to be very interesting hopefully they're interesting to me people are doing things with bees that you might not have thought of and i'm very happy that the people doing this research are willing to talk to me and be recorded so that you can listen later so in the fluff section here don't take too much honey here's the thing. I don't know what's going on with the environment this year. Growers, here where I live, they have a cherry festival, by the way, which is in sync with what?

When the cherries are harvested and they make cherry pies and all this other stuff, but the cherries showed up way early. So it was out of sync with the cherry festival. This is no different than for beekeepers right now, and this is a problem. Why? Well, because we count on bees getting late season forage because I pull honey from my bees this month. And so this is the month of August. This is where I get my biggest yields here in the northeastern part of the country.

And I count on my bees having the time then. I usually stop the second week of September. And it's early enough because that leaves them about three really good weeks of bringing in those final resources. Where do those resources come from? Aster's, Maximilian sunflowers, some of the cosmos that's out there, and also the golden rod. Now here's the thing, golden rod is blooming right now. And that seems great because they're bringing in all of this nectar,

they're turning it into honey, and of course now we're getting this big boost. And my grandson is hitting me up because all of his customers are after him. He has sold out all of his honey. the best eight-year-old salesperson I've ever known. Anyway, you can get excited and end up harvesting all of your honey because there's peer pressure. What do people do when they get together at bee meetings? Well, I have a beehive. This is just an example.

I'm not saying it actually happened. I have a beehive that yielded 300 pounds of honey, one hive, and it was a swarm this spring. And they're just doing so well. And other people say, well, I have one hive and it yields. So here's the thing. You get the gist of it. There's a point of pride associated with how much honey you've pulled off your hives. And then, of course, showing a picture with a brood box with five supers on it, six supers.

Whatever it takes to make you look like a fantastic beekeeper. I want to warn you about that pitfall, particularly when people are brand new to beekeeping, they want to be able to show a picture on social media of all the honey jars on their kitchen table and you know kind of the payoff for keeping bees and for some people it's why they keep bees to get a bunch of honey and to show everybody give it away to people sell it honey let's face it honey is real money that is not cheap stuff you want to get an eye-opener go to leo shirashkin who lives in the Ozarks look at his website look at what he sells honey for and you'll also see that it's sold out that is some of the most expensive honey in the United States

I've seen anywhere and he sells out so there is an opportunity to make real money from beekeeping but the reason I'm prefacing with that is leave enough for your bees first because here's what happens when this environment dries up our bees are going to be in a pickle what do the bees do when there's still plenty of warm weather ahead still plenty of flying days ahead but all of the resources in the environment have dried up what are your honey bees going to do because at that point of the year they have a surplus workforce in the thousands now when they do that and those are unemployed guess what they're going to do

they're going to get employed what's their employment going to be they're going to be thieves, they're going to rob out weaker colonies. And when that forage dries up, the intensity, the pressure from all these other bees are going to be scouting each other out and any colony that's queenless. So this is part for you. This is why this is the fluff section. I'm giving you this information well ahead. If you have a queenless colony or small colony that is not doing well, they're going to be top of the list for getting robbed by these a great. foragers from some of your largest most successful colonies and it only takes a couple of them to get in and access some nectar or honey and get away with it and go back and waggle that we have a

colony with a landing board that's not well defended that they zipped right in they got it back out and a bunch more go in and then they get in and out and now we've got this feeding frenzy that's almost impossible to stop So some of the things I want you to stock up on and be ready for if you're a new beekeeper if you've been doing this a while you already know what's coming These are robbing screens. This is a robbing screen from B-smart designs by the way when the North American Honeybee Expo comes up You're going to want to see what's new at B-smart designs along with other people this is another robbing screen made by Cirousel the company that made that hive top feeder and there are plenty of tutorial videos on YouTube that show you how to make your own robbing screen. And so you have to have it in place ahead of time because let me explain that once the robbing starts

and you notice it, it's going to sound like a colony is swarming. The difference between robbing and swarming is the amount of debris on the landing board. It looks like a melee. It looks like Black Friday at Walmart with everybody just running all over each other. So by then, the frenzy has started and very difficult to stop you can stop it but here's the other thing

that colony may already be weak and by getting robbed out their chances of surviving winter are zero so or you'd have to feed feed after you've closed it up and protect it so what can you do reduce your entrances so after and this is not while the nectar flow is on of course all your bees are fat and happy This is when the resources start to dwindle. This is when I want you to come down and really narrow up your entrances so that your colonies can defend much easier. And if they're robbed out, that's just it. You have a mess on your hands.

So I've warned you about that. Don't take too much. Don't fall for it. Don't feel like you have to brag about the amount of honey that you make. So anyway, light syrup won't dry. ground your bees so that's a refresher about what was going on with that feeder water pan escape so we put a lot of water pans out I have those plastic barrels the bottoms are cut off and so we put out water because it's dual purpose my chickens go to it to drink

and we also have Japanese beetle traps so we collect Japanese beetles and we dump them in the water the chickens run over and they eat them we also feed Japanese beetles to our pond fish I have plenty of videos showing how to do that on my channel the channel is Frederick done on YouTube and there's a little search part up at the right there you can type in Japanese beetle traps and things like that recycling and I kill my Japanese beetles just with hot water so how easy is that anyway the pan you will see honeybees flipping off the edge of a drinker and upside down buzzing around in the water and again I want to say that people think you know the bees they're going to help each other out because you've got a whole

row of bees along the circumference and they're drinking too and certainly they'll help the drowning bee get out so i sit there and i watch because i'm a observer of bees and uh i see the little bee drowning doing its little circles and stuff and it gets close and sure enough one of the bees on the edge grabbed it and got a hold of her so she could get out no she didn't she held on to the in the water and use her tongue to drink from the saturated hairs on the bee that's drowning and then once that bee drank from her it flew off and left her still spinning around in the water so that leads me to fluff tip here these are available at craft stores this is plastic and it's used for needlework of some kind I'm not a needlework person so I don't know but these look like they're about 8th inch openings maybe and this plastic at first I thought I would just throw it in the water and then it would float and then any bees zinging around that couldn't get its footing would get on this and climb out and be saved but then I found out it sits too low in the water

so what would you do you buy these impacts of like five or six they're on Amazon I'm sure you can get them I just bend it over like this see I waited until I'm making this video before I bend it over because I want you to see how easy it is to mess up a piece of plastic that you get from Amazon or your local craft store and see what happens is it stays bent very easy I thought I was going to have to heat it or something so then what I do is you can put this in a bird bath or in whatever your open pan is because a lot of people put gravel in and things like that I don't do that because remember my chickens are drinking from it we also like to be able to rinse it out i hook this on the edge of it and let this part go right in now i have a ramp

the bees go around and they climb up guess what else the bees do now that i put this here it's not just an escape route for the drowning bees other bees land on it and go down to the edge and they can drink right through it how cool is that that's fluff these are dirt cheap get these needlepoint things maybe you know you know somebody that has them that's artsy crafty and they're a horde so they saved a whole bunch of them that don't plan to use just help yourself just put them in there so that's my plastic grid prep for wasp defense here's the other thing i've had calls from people that were concerned about was just a couple of days ago my grandson wants to go on all these calls and i realize this is bad why is it bad well people make a living

doing pest control. And a friend of mine sent me a picture as people often do and they said, is this a problem? So here's the sidewalk

in front of their house in suburbia and there's a maple tree there. It looks like a red maple and what's hanging from it? A big nest of bald-faced hornets.

The other part is she's allergic. So they contacted a pest control company and it was going to be like $260, $280. So $280. She said they were

going to come out and just spray it and leave it right there and what did I think I said well I think you need to get rid of the bald-faced hornets because they're right over the sidewalk this time of year they're going to be you know aggressive later and that's something you don't want to be stung by they don't call them bullet hornets for nothing and they're really just wasps they're not even in the hornet family at all they're just wasps they get this name so anyway my grandson I thought this would be great teaching experience he was so disappointed in me it was palpable because you know we thought it was going to be this big dramatic thing and what it did is i brought my industrial trash bag at six mills you can get really thick industrial waste

style trash bags and i climbed a ladder and i brought a clipper with me and i put the bag over the nest just move really slow just like with honeybees if you're moving really slow your gentle even bald-faced horns they don't know what to do with you so i closed it all up and then i clipped it and I dropped it inside and I goose neck the top of the bag and I zip tied that shut. Take the bag, set it in the sun and they're done. So now I have this really cool intact, bald-faced hornet nest, very cool stuff. But he was disappointed because he thought it would be more dramatic, like the bees, the wastes would attack you and things like that.

But the reason I'm telling you the story is, as beekeepers, we often get called about bees. People who have bees in my tree, you come and get them. And then you're going to find out they're woss. yellow jacket nests at the end of the year can be huge and the reason it's a big deal this year is we had where I live a mild winter the result of the mild winter was that the queens that are wintering over as solitary bees a big percentage of those just don't make it so the queens get out there they dig into humus and things like that they overwinter and each queen in the spring starts her own paper was nest. They do not reuse the existing nest from the year before. They make new ones always. So for

example, you find one that's in your attic and your ceiling and a gable somewhere and you think, we have to take that down. We don't want them to move into it. They don't reoccupy it. So in fact, some people leave them as a deterrent. And then you'll find a fake paper wasp nest that people hang up as a deterrent for wasp building new ones. I don't know if that works. I personally wouldn't do that. But you can leave a wasp nest. and they won't reoccupy it. But the problem we have is the numbers are high, and that's why I'm telling you.

Aside from robbing from your bees, those who are new to beekeeping are going to be shocked to find, and I always recommend you go out early in the morning while it's still cold outside, or colder, of course. Look at your landing boards. Here's what will cause a lot of stress for new beekeepers. You have a wide open landing board, a wide open entrance because you did not follow my helpful guidance on how to restrict your entrance.

And you will see on a cold morning no defenders of the hive on the landing board because they're clustered because below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, they generally don't have a lot of activity on the landing board. And guess what takes advantage of that? The Vespits, the wastes, yellow jackets will be scooting right in there. Now they go through the entrance, they go straight. up the interior wall what are they after open cells of nectar first so once they do that you'll see 10 and 20 and 100 and then the bees wake up later and then they start moving around and then they drive them off but here's what happens more and more wasks come day by day and they are meat eaters so they're not just after the honey they can fight your bees and they can bite

their heads off and all this other stuff so i want you think it ahead this is just part part of the fluff just us shooting the breeze think ahead about the kind of entrance configuration you're going to have that's going to help your bees defend themselves better from yellow jackets yellow jackets are jerks so the other part of that is uh there is a beast we talked about cirracell the company that makes that feeder and uh they make a lot of other things that are useful they have a beast blocker i believe it's called Beast Blocker Bottom Board. Look it up, and the reason I'm telling you to look it up

is not necessarily go out and buy one because who's going to change the bottom board on their hive at the end of the year? Almost nobody. But one of the things that's very interesting about the Beast Blocker is it has a tray underneath of it that has cones going into it. And it's at the back and it's underneath the bottom board.

I would suggest looking at that for those who want to trap these scout wasps, right? Because robbers don't come to the front door later in the day. What they do is they're looking for little openings to see if this beekeeper has left their boxes a little askew or hasn't done good maintenance and there's little gaps in the back between the boxes and things like that. Even robbing honeybees are looking. So you see bees hitting the size and going under the outer cover of your hive and things like that. you've got bees, I almost said people, you've got bees looking to rob that hive. So Bees Blocker has an interesting tray with those cones, and what I would suggest is maybe you can make

something of your own that would help you collect and retain some of those early scout wasps, and then the rest of them wouldn't show up and be a problem. So I think it's going to be very interesting. The size of that Bald-Face Hornet nest already this time of year, we've got a couple of months left for them to continue growing. we're going to see basketball size if not bigger bald face hornet nests in our neck of the woods so I'm telling you that because it's not the baldface hornet that raid your beehives that bad it's the yellow jackets because pure numbers alone and they have a bad disposition so your robbing wrists are going to be high this year I'm telling you well in advance so that you can get robbing screens

and things like that those do help with the was because wass like to go straight in they don't want to go up and over anything and then down in so this is helping in your bees your resident bees can still come and go and you can avoid some of these problems so uh and that's uh oh and i want to give a thank you a shout out to the people that have been buying the switch grass pellet fuel for your smokers this is a non-profit organization it's a northwest pennsylvania beekeepers and they sell the switch grass pellets for your smoker. The feedback on that fuel is fantastic. I'm going to put a link down in the video description. It funds the Northwest BA Beekeepers Association and funds our outreach programs and our educational programs for beekeepers and pollinators and things like that. So all of our programs,

this helps fund that. So the switchgrass pellets, dense smoke, lower temperature, longer I was recently listening to a podcast and one of the topics that they had on there, I think it's the beekeeping today podcast that sponsored by Better Be. And they talked about just can't keep the smoker lit and the smoker goes out at the most critical time when they really need it. Now here's what I used to do. I used to line up multiple smokers and I used pine shavings because pine shavings is what I had is betting in my chicken coop. So that was my smoking. So that was my smoke or fuel and what I would do is then of course if I went to puff one and it was out or then I would just grab another one and light it and carry on but this is the good thing about these switch grass

pellets and to my knowledge the only place you can get them is through our beekeeping association and that's because Ernst seeds is making them and providing them exclusively to us so you can't go to Ernst and like work a deal and get your own. So Ernst is supporting our outreach programs also. So the thing it is one of our members, and I don't, you know, this is anecdotal. This is somebody telling me. I'm not saying they're making anything up, but he left his smoker out with a smoker pellets in it and it burned for three days. So that means you're not puffing it every hour or whatever, but it just smoldered and was still burning for three days. Now that's a long time for a smoker. So what I'm going to say is with confidence, and just based on my experience with it too,

one medium-sized smoker full of switchgrass pellets, I don't care how many hives you have or how much puffing you do through the day, that load of pellets is going to last you all day. One load in a can with smoker pellets for someone like me with only 40-some hives, last me more than a week. one load, one smoker, because as soon as I'm done, doing whatever I need to do with my bees, I put a cork in the end of it that extinguishes it almost right away, and then I can put it inside the garage or in a storage area and not worry about it, filling that area with smoke. So it works really well. The bees respond to it with very little puffing, and it burns really

long, and one load will get you through an entire day. And if you're using it and you're using it and one of these people the shout-on and the thank you is for those of you who have bought the smoker pellets from the northwest pennsylvania beekeepers association there's a picture at the bottom of the cover page with a smoker on it you click on that and you can order the smoker pellets they're the best smoker fuel in other words suffice it to say that when i use smokers that you light that is the only fuel i'm ever going to be using in my smoker and it's not just because it's a fundraiser for bee-kewarm keeping association that I am personally associated with is because it works so well, period, hands down. If it weren't true, I would not say so. So that wraps it up for today.

I want to thank you for listening to me and for spending your time here. I hope that your year is going really well and then you have really good plans, equipment on standby, and that your bees are doing awesome. If you have a question for me, please don't forget to go to the way to b.org, get on the page marked the way to be, fill out the form, and I will consider your topic or your question as a potential topic for next Friday. Thank you for being here. Have a fantastic weekend.