The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 289, what about a Two Queen Hive System?

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

This is the audio from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/OLWcUS_HCVI

Hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, January the 10th, and this is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers, episode number 289. I'm Frederick Dunn, and... This is the way to be. So I want to thank the people that volunteered to do those introductions for me. There are a lot more coming in the weeks ahead, so they just happen to be at the North American Honeybee Expo down in Louisville, Kentucky, and I asked them, would you like to introduce my show? so we're going to see a series of them. Thank you for that. So what's going on today? Well, let's start with the weather. Do you see that graphic? I hope that I put up at the beginning there, 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 12 Celsius. We're in the deep freeze here in the northeastern United States, the state of Pennsylvania, northwestern part of the state.

The wind is two miles per hour, which any wind at all is terrible. That's three kilometers per hour, 86% relative humidity. Here we are freezing. California is on fire. If you don't know already, if you haven't checked the news, terrible things are happening in Los Angeles and other parts of California. They don't even have enough firefighting water, so our thoughts and prayers are with those people out there. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description,

and you'll see all the topics listed in order. Today, there are some follow-up links that you can click on and learn more, some of the topics are more in depth than what I cover during the Q&A. So the questions that we're going to go over were submitted during the past week, and you can submit your own topic for a future episode. You can go to the way to be.org and click on the page marked the way to be, and you fill out a form there. That is also, by the way, my contact form.

So if you want to contact me about something else, go to the way to be.org, click on that page, fill out the form, and make sure to include your email address and I will respond to you. So what else is going on? The opening sequences, by the way, there are bluebirds out there. That is the eastern bluebird. They shouldn't be here.

It's too cold. And we know that they eat insects. And what are they doing? They're getting the little fruits, the little, what are they called then? The seeds from the holly bushes. So thank goodness that the bees were there to pollinate those holly bushes so they could produce those seeds and the fruit that goes around them,

the berries, holly bush berries. That would be more like what it is. And they're eating them. I don't know how they're making it. We are going to put out black soldier fly larvae for them since they're here. But what I don't want to do is encourage them to stick around. I want them to go where it's warmer. Maybe they know something we don't. But let me tell you in the coming week, it's going to stay cold. Below freezing all through the weekend, this coming Wednesday, we have a beekees. breakfast those you know about that I just want to remind you that that will be from 9 to 11

and hope to see you there we're going to talk about what went on over the past week so really interesting stuff we made it back from the North American Honeybee Expo down in Louisville Kentucky and I zipped out of there on Sunday morning with my wife Annette we drove and the storms came in right behind us and wouldn't you know it the state of Kentucky was under a state of emergency. And people like Dr. David Peck from Betterby were stuck down there until Wednesday because their flights got canceled. What a mess. I'm so glad the weather cooperated for us down there. Anyway, I won't talk about that a whole lot.

If you want to listen to this rather than watch, it is a podcast. You can Google Podcast, The Way to Be, and you'll find it. It's also on Pod Bean, Iheart Radio, a lot of other sources. You can also go to the way to be.org and click on the podcast page there and see the current episode. So what else? I think that's going to be just about it. I don't know anything else to tell you. So we're going to jump right in with the very first question, which comes from Tina.

Tina says, I really wish Be Smart, which is Be Smart Designs, by the way, would sell replacement black caps for their lids. drives me crazy that they don't. Have you come up with anything to use as replacements by chance? Okay, so it drives me crazy too. And I think that's interesting. I did speak with Clifford, the owner of Be Smart Designs down at the North American Honeybee Expo.

But here's what happens. Look at this insulated inner cover, which many people are using now, including myself. There is a center hole here, which is the feeder hole. Right there. It has a black cap on it. We are supposed to take this black cap off, and look, he designed a reservoir for it to stay right there. Now, that's not helpful to Tina, because Tina's like me. For the most part, I remember to leave it there.

There's no reason to take it out. But then, of course, we come across, and we open one up, and there it is open, and there's a fondant pack over here, or a wrap-and-round or something like that that feeds your bees. This is a mooth jar quark than I have. because I have mooth jars. They're the one pound honey jars. I marked it here that this is 1.25. So one and one quarter inches in diameter. The mooth jar cork goes right in there. And it sticks up just enough so we can grab it. If you want to make it easier to grab, put a screw in there like an eyeball screw right in the center of it and then you'll have something to grab.

But when I talked to Clifford about it, he said you can contact. Be Smart to and say that you've lost your cap and get another one as long as you don't abuse that and keep losing them all the time But you're right. It would be nice if they sold like a two-pack or a three-pack of those through BetterB which is one of the companies that resells the Be Smart Designs. If you want to know which companies sell Be Smart Designs products, you can go to the main website Beesmartdesigns.com and click on their distribution distributor list and then it will show you and maybe one of those people can get them for you. But in the meantime, mooth corks or any cork, actually, that is greater than one and one quarter inches. So that satisfies that. That has been an issue for me too, so I think

it's funny that that came up. And, uh, but it's our fault actually because he made a space for it. I know it must be frustrating for a designer and a retailer to find that, uh, we're not able to keep track of our stuff. It happens to me too. When we talk about these serousel feeders, they have little inserts. If you go to solid food, so we pull off the insert, what do I do? I take them out and I put them in my B kit. Why am I doing that? If I have solid feed, then I'm about to put into that compartment on top of the hive. Why don't just pull the covers off and leave them right there in the reservoir. Man, I am slow to learn sometimes about that. So that's question one. We'll go right on to question number two this is from ruse now r ues n o w 59 89 that's the youtube channel name says could you run a

two queen system in a long lang or a lands hive now i don't know about the lands hive that's a little more of a challenge for me but the principles the same two queen system so that's what i want to talk about If you Google, you go on YouTube and you look up, you look up two queen systems. You'll find the old way, which is, of course, bottom board, brood box, double screen system. The double screen in this case is not like the number eight hardware screen. It is with a queen excluder, double queen excluder there. And then you go up into the next box, and that's also a brood box, two queens, a divider between them. and then the honey supers above that.

I don't like that configuration, which is why I never did it. And the reason I say that is because, sure, we can pull off the honey supers from the top and we can get to that first brood box, but now we've got a screen between them that instead of screen has the queen excluder. And we go to the bottom box,

which is another brood box that we have to inspect, and in order to inspect it, we have to pull everything off from the top. Then you'll find out, as you do further research, as I have done, that there are two queens side-by-side systems. Those are better, in my opinion, but still, when you start to stack on your honey supers, they are overlaying half of each of the bottom standard Langstroth 8 or 10 frame nuke boxes. Not nuke.

Brood boxes. Okay. And then you go up from there. And then what happens is, you still have to pull off the top boxes to get to the bottom, too. And so I'm so glad that this question came up because I was talking with George, who owns or is one of the co-founders of the Keepers Hive. I've told you before that I ordered when they did their fundraiser for the Keepers Hive. I ordered the double queen system, so I'm going to be messing with exactly what we're talking about.

but in a much easier configuration. So the double queen system works for a long lang the same way it would work for this double langstroth box system, which is the keeper's hive. And I'm going to put a link to that because he did a very good job of explaining it. Although I think he's got some problems going on with all the bees that were all over his hive. But moving on, you start two colonies of bees in your long langstroth hive. Now if you look at my house, my Langstroth designs and they are available on my website for free the prints are

you'll see that we have a single entrance at one end now other people make long length draw boxes and they have multiple entrances if you're going to have multiple queens separate brew chambers then you're going to have to have more than one entrance so i highly recommend that your entrances in this case long length is a big box in my case about five feet you can make it a little longer and I recommend that you do if you're planning to have a two queen system because that means double the brood double the production double the honey so what you will do then of course is have your entrances at either end and you'll set up your two or three brood frames to get them started unless you happen to have colonies that are fully loaded that you're going to just

transfer in and that would be of course the quickest build up the word on the street is that double queen systems build up much faster and also produce more honey than a standard single queen system. Now here's a funny part too. Sometimes you'll be looking through a beehive and you do find more than one queen in a normal brood configuration with no queen excluder at all. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about two completely separate brood boxes and then in between the two. So now we need follower boards, which we have. We'll have to drill holes in the follower boards, if you don't have that already. And instead of like number eight screen,

which would be normally what would we do to separate the two so they don't transfer the queen. Medibular fair amount to one another, we are going to put queen excluders on those. And if they're metal queen excluders, highly recommend that you use metal queen excluders on that. You can use plastic, but the metal is better, and here's why. It doesn't flex in and out.

So it won't need center support. if you cut out the center of your follower board, which in my case is made out of two by stock, right? Then, of course, you have a spacer and you've got your queen excluder in there, and then the bees go right through it simple. We don't need double queen excluders. That wouldn't make any sense, but if we were doing screens to separate two colonies, we would have double screens to keep them from passing the mandibular pheromone back and forth. These are queen excluders, so we only need a single queen excluder because the only cast of B inside the hive we want to prevent from migrating to the center in the case

of a long laying is going to be the queens. So we have a queen at each end. Now we have to forecast how many deep frames do we want in the middle there for them to jointly service. Now this is an interesting puzzle for me. That's because if one queen is more, I don't know, smells better, performs better, attracts the workers better. We already have drift going on in the beehive. We have the opportunity for workers to come in, foragers to come in at one end, go through, get into the honey super, start to store their goods, and then carry right on and join the other side, which is where the brood is there. Now foragers are really at the age. They're in their last two weeks, by the way of life in general. So when they're coming in, they're usually passing off their resources

then to what I call storekeeper bees. So these are bees that are inside that have never been out before, right? So they're transitioning through their jobs inside the hive and have not gotten out there as guards on the landing board or done outdoor chores yet. So they're not foragers. So the foragers come in. They transfer their nectar resources to the interior storekeeper bees who then will go through the queen excluders, and they will deposit those resources in frames on comb, right? And on the other side, they're doing the same thing. So what we have are storekeeper bees tending to the same areas. Now, so long as things are equal on both ends of the hive,

with the queen excluders separating the queens, because now, see, the queens can't fight, the queens can't kill each other. And since we're establishing them, as George said, when I spoke with him last weekend, and I agree with it, we want to start with full-strength colonies on each end because we want everything to be equal.

they'll have their own pheromones, and then they're just interacting while they're storing their honey, right? So that would work, and then what you have to do on the long Langstroth hive, because keep in mind we have a finite established honey collection area, an established number of frames that we can't expand. With the standard Langstroth boxes, we would just continue to add them on the top. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that too. I don't want to just talk about the long lang. The lands, you would be doing the same thing.

And the lands that you get from Dr. Leo Shirashkin, if you get it from others, I recommend you look at the Lance Hives at Beersville Bees. Look that up, Beersville Bees.com. They have a really good land hive. And now they also have a Langstroth, which I did not make it to to look at. But just knowing their craftsmanship and the insulation and the way that they make things, that would be a great place to check out. So if you had a lands hive, the same thing applies.

There's come already with several entrances down the face of the land's hive. So there again, we have to establish colonies on either end. They should be equal. Okay? And by that I mean similar broods, similar strength, similar numbers going into spring. And then we have the follower boards. We need two of them now. Usually comes with one.

And again, just as I described before, we would use. queen excluders, one layer queen excluder on each side. There's no point in doing two of them. And then your bees would pass through those, and then your storekeeper bees will store nothing but nectar and honey in there. On the off chance that some of your foragers come in and scoot past everything and get into that part of the hive and deposit bee bread, if they deposit pollen in there, I don't see that as the end of the world. They won't be developing brood in there because the queens are isolated. So you will have to decide how many of the frames to dedicate to brood

and then how many of the frames spacing that you're going to dedicate to honey, nectar development, right? So to keep up with it, you're going to have to do inspections. And when they get that at capping stage or when the water levels are low enough, below 19% highly recommend, 18%, even better or lower. Then you would pull frames and install new forms. frames so it's something that you would have to keep up with because they can store twice as fast because they're twice as many foragers in theory so now let's jump ahead to the keeper's hive and why that's going to be just as good if not better than a horizontal hive configuration for the

two queen system all we're doing is keeping the queens apart and providing a space for honey stores The vertical system, the way that's set up and the Keepers Hive means that we can go to either side and we can open up the bottom. They have these flip-up covers. If you haven't seen it, I'm going to include a link or you can just Google the Keepers Hive. Go to their YouTube channel, look at their demonstrations for detailed instructions. And what that allows you to do is let's say we've got several honey supers on the central column and we've got a queen in this box and a queen in this box. and George recommends we have one opening facing opposite the other box, right? So 180 degrees out to reduce drift. I don't personally think that's necessary.

I want my entrances to face south anyway. So if I have two boxes, I can just concentrate my 3 eighths inch by two inch entrance on either end at the farthest end of their landing board away from one another. You'll notice that when bees come back from foraging, they're very specific about the location they go to. And if they're drifting, it's not going to be just because one entrances on one side of the box or the other. It's because they're just moving on to another colony of bees. So I think personally that it would be okay to have my landing boards for both colonies facing south, south or southeast. They perform better.

And then have your entrances and your entrance reducers opening at the farthest end. away from one another that's just this is what I'm gonna do and then what happens is they start you off with a queen excluder because we're gonna keep our queens separate they go up in the first box on that Keepers Hive that is honey and resources that has a divider in it so I believe that's a 10 frame box so that means that we would have five frames on either side divider between them and that divider goes all the way down and to the queen excluder and so the bees would build resources for themselves in that first box.

I like that idea. I think it's fantastic. Above that we add more supers and you super up and the bees continue to store their resources. Now the claim is and I don't know because I haven't done it so we're sharing theories and stories right now. So the claim is that you'll get more honey from a two queen hive with this method than if you had two separate colonies of the same brood size with boxes going up separately so there has to be some benefit to this community aspect more bees maybe to guard the area maybe there's a warm common wall which i asked george about that he said it was not the case he said that they stayed centered you can look at my north american honeybee expo video and just find the spot

that's marked out for the keepers hive and see that explanation because i did ask those questions, but I think that because there's a colony on either side, inside this box, they will concentrate their brood towards this common wall, because that's what they've been doing when we push nucleus hives together. For example, we have five frame deep nucleosides, and we push those boxes together. They concentrate their brood towards this common wall, so they get this passive heat and warmth from that. So we'll see how it goes. We'll just follow along. Now, what I plan to do because I do not want to put box over, box over box over box over box, and I don't want to have to keep up with them all the time and pull them off to inspect,

because think about it, if we want to know what the progress is with honey, so you've got your keepers hive or you've got your long langstroth. With the long langstroth, you're going to pull it, and you can pull individual frames. Very easy. We're not lifting anything off. So long langstroth lands. The only thing you're lifting are the frames themselves. Great way to go.

The Keepers Hive, now we've got boxes going up. I need to look in to see what they're doing, right? We don't want their boxes to become 100% full of capped honey. Because when they do that, the bees accept that as a ceiling. In other words, they're done. They're full. And that can be a stressor to cause congestion and make them think, hey, we're fat.

We need to do what? Swarm. So we don't want them to swarm and we lose all those workers. and then we've kind of lost the benefit of having a two queen system. My plan this year, 2025, by the way, you might be looking at this years later, I'm going to put flow supers on there. Here's why. If I can put a single flow super, which is a deep honey super, heavy, right,

If I put one of those on, I can pull off the back panel or the end panels and I can see their progress, keeping honey in there. Because we have a queen excluder down below and another box below. We know that we're not going to have any concerns about having brood in those flow super frame cells, right? So we can see their progress. So my plan is one, and if they really feel the first box fast, I'll have a second flow super on there. because they can build fast and why would I do that? Because it is a flow hive, we could just write in theory, open a frame once it's full, and drain the honey off.

And then we freed up space and now they can go back to work, storing even more. And we would have this rapid turnover. I have historically had frames in flow supers full, capped with wax, that's key. Drain them off. And then 11 days later during an nectar flow, have them full and capped again. That's three gallons of honey from the one super, right?

Technically it's three and a half. They don't tend to fill the end frames 100%. So I don't get as much off frame number one and number seven. A flow super only has seven frames if it's sitting on a 10 frame Langstroth. Now stick with me. So because what they do is they fill the cells, but they're still they're hydrating it so they haven't capped it yet and they're full so we need to add another super so that would be a second flow super on top of the first one now you're thinking to yourselves that's a lot of weight i don't feel like lifting that off now i personally i pick things up i put things down i lift things because i don't want to be limited physically but i understand there might be kids working on it there might be people that are much older who don't lift weights who don't train for beekeeping right

Well, now this is another advantage for the Keepers Hive because you can evaluate your brood without pulling those boxes off, and you can look at them from either side from the double queen system. So in my head, this is working out really well, because I can tell on each side, do they have brood? Do they have eggs? Are the queens okay? Are they making queen cells, right? and then George recommends the Demeret Queen Reduction method, which I'm going to talk about later on with another question. But so, the two-queen system will work, but some configurations require more work than others, and I will say in the onset,

I don't like the two-queen systems that are a standard eight- or ten-frame length draw a single bottom board system. Because to get to that bottom column, need to know what's going on you have to pull everything off above it and i don't like it thank goodness for the keepers hive that's been out now for six or seven years in development and uh it works so that's going to allow that to go on now the long lang same thing if you want to see my prints you go to the way to be.org and you download those prints and you're going to do everything the same the only difference is going to be that now you can have an entrance at either end how big is the entrance

hopefully it's 3 eighths of an inch by up to three inches long and the reason we do that you don't need mouse guards the bees feel like they can defend that well there's less robbing and things like that so very good i think i covered all of that keeper's hive has been improved by the way i enjoy looking at that they have plate glass in your observation windows now you do insulate the lower box up to where the central column is and you insulate over the top of that for winter so it follows my principle of having a deep brood box then with a medium honey super minimum on it going into winter with a two queen system i suspect that they will benefit from that common wall being warm centered underneath that riser which is where your supers go what do you think what your thoughts on that question number

three comes from thomas plumber two six seven three says hey Fred, I was wondering just how dark is the inside of a beehive. I saw that acorn frames come in different colors. I saw that too. I talked to them about it. Do bees see any color? I used to have a dark room for film printing with an enlarger, and it had to be dark. For bees, hives, the opening of the hives, lets in a lot of light. I would imagine in the brood box there is a lot of light.

Your thoughts? How far up into the hive does light reach? Okay, so this came about, I mean, I don't know. This is a question that was recently submitted, so it might be based on my interview with the Acorn vendor that was at the Honeybee Expo. Because they had some different colored frames. They had the pink one, which was, of course, for cancer awareness.

Great cause there. They donated a lot for that. But they also have the standard white frames and black. And we know that we pick black foundation, Some of you're watching right now may be putting together your shopping list for what you're going to set up in spring as a new beekeeper. They added a color. So they have a yellow one. It's an orange yellow.

Almost the color of the inside of this Guardian Bee Apparel Cup. And the claim was, or the reports back from the field, the beekeepers. Hey, they're going for the yellow foundation, the yellow frames better than the other colored frame. that are made by acorn and we talked about that but then I thought yeah but inside the hive it's dark bees have terrible low light vision if they're going for one frame or for another that is made by the same company the same configurations the exact same amount of wax foundation because it's the other thing the deeper the wax coating the more bees wax that's on these foundations the quicker the bees take to them

So this would be a very easy test. And as I thought about it while I was there, I thought, maybe I should get some of the yellow-orange foundation and some of the white and some of the black, and then checker-bordom and see if directly opposite each other if one gets drawn at more than the other. But then I thought, I actually don't have to do that test. Here's why. They just can't see it. It won't make a difference.

for talking between white and yellow bees in the field are drawn to yellow things. My grandson pointed out to me that he has a way-to-bee patch on his bee suit, and bees do fly over and go to that patch. I don't think it's a trigger to draw out more comb inside a darkened hive. The other thing is most of my Langstroth hives have slatted rack. on the bottom so there's another gap with a board in the front so the light that would be coming in would be indirect diffused light and then of course we've got the frames close together and we're not talking about the brood box which is the

first box that they're going into we're talking about the honey supers which are up higher and I don't have upper entrances and I do not have upper vents therefore there's no light coming in up there for them to see it so then the other conclusion would be or the speculation would be that may Maybe there's different plastics being used. Maybe the composition of the frame is different. But if everything else is the same and it's covered with beeswax foundation the same, the starter beeswax coating, double thick, triple thick, I don't think there's difference.

So that's going to be it. So I would say if they're all the same price, it's a matter of aesthetics. What do you want to see in your beehive? What looks good to you? The black foundation allows me to see eggs and larvae. better so devinal plus there uh when it comes to the white i think the white kind of looks a little dirty later you know once you get some comb on it and everything i suppose if you're looking for varro destructor mites on the comb on the foundation rather than on the bees themselves or on the

the developing pupa right then uh i would say maybe you would see vera destructor mites better on white i don't know yellow i think it's just aesthetics i don't know if you'll get a big advantage out of that but they're making them they're selling them if you have a different opinion tell me what it is and what it's based on and what you've observed have you check aboard those colors and did you get something different let's move on to question number four which comes from bryce so they have a question i have ruled out afp if you don't know what afb is that stands for american foul brood lethal to bees kills them kills the brood anyway as a cause of a debt out besides chemical buildup? Is there anything disease-wise that will transfer if I melt the dead-out

comb and make foundation out of the cleaned-up wax? Thanks for your time. Okay, so here's the thing. For Bryce, there are diseases that persist in wax. American foulbrood is what we covered. There's another thing called EFB, European foulbrew. It also persist in beeswax. So some people think, but if we run it through, you know, we melt it down and everything and we render the wax and we filter it, would it likely still be there? The scientific evidence says that it will be. There are other things that carry on in your beeswax. Deformed wing virus. So these virus loads can persist also in beeswax. There's chronic bee paralysis that can persist in beeswax. Now I don't want you to become alarmed about that. here's what's really been discovered.

Cuma fos, things like that. Beekeepers put pesticides out in their hives. Not everyone does. And you as a pure beekeeper or organic beekeeper, maybe a treatment-free beekeeper might be very upset to send in samples of your beeswax of your honeycomb to a lab and find out if it has any pesticides in it to learn that even though you haven't treated your hives,

kuma fos is in there. How does that happen? I know how it happens. And here's why. Because you don't treat your colonies. You don't, let's say that. Let's say we think we've got a pure setup. How far are bees flying?

How far are bees foraging? So one thing is to get pesticides, but they should not be coming back with pesticides that are put in the hives by beekeepers. synthetics specifically. We don't want those in our hives. I don't do it if I treat a colony for pro-destructor mites. It's going to be an organic treatment, period. Now why would I have beeswax that could be from other sources? Let's say I collect a swarm somewhere. Put that in. Where do the swarm come from? They're loaded with honey and everything from their colony. So if you're loading up

bees from an unknown source, they could be carrying these things with them and what are they going to do as soon as you put them in a hive and set them up they're going to build new comb because swarms are primed to build comb you can see the little bees wax shingles on their abdomen right so they're ready to go where did they come from if it came from another hive from another keeper nearby who has practices that diverge from your own you could be bringing that into your own apiary into your own hives another thing is just bee drift but foragers again remember those are advanced older bees that are out and about the likelihood that they would just join up in your hive is pretty darn high and could a forager come in

are they going to make bees wax inside your hive and transfer stuff from their original hive wherever they came from before they drifted to you would they transfer that in because they're not wax builders right but remember what i said they do they come into your hive loaded with their resources from wherever they've come from, which can include a dying out colony, and they might be robbing themselves or robbing another hive, right? Foragers are also the robbers. And then they come into your hive, and they pass that on, and it gets used by your own resident wax builders who now have potentially kuma fos or something else that they're going to put into your comb. So these things get transferred. So until we get every beekeeper in your area,

not to use those compounds, not to use those pesticides inside their hives, the chance that's still there that'll come and be a part of your beeswax too. So there's just a lot of ways that these things are moving around. So anyway, the thing is, Deformed Wing virus, chronic bee paralysis, all these things that can be carried in beeswax. Let's talk about the potential for, I already explained that so that you would understand there are reasons why these things can show up other than wax that you've rendered. But when you process your own beeswax, you know the history of the colony.

You've ruled out EFB and AFB. Those are the worst. You know the health history. Do they have deformed wing virus in there? Have you seen these other issues, chronic bee paralysis? Do you see bees trembling around on the ground in front of your hive? If everything's good, what's the purpose of the beeswax? You're coating the foundation. It does not become a 100% of the cell that your bees are going to make, you're going to continue to draw that from the environment. But remember, we have those risky bees from other beekeepers out there that could

just join your colony with their resources and stuff, and on we go. There could be a colony within a mile or two. Your bees will travel a mile or two to rob somebody else's hive. Why? Because the honey that's stored in that hive is like the maximum gain they could get for their travels. If it were just a light sugar syrup, they wouldn't travel that far because it would use it up and energy just bringing it back. But when they're robbing another colony, the health of that colony is very important. And this is why that stuff ends up in your hive too. So want your colonies to be strong. Just do what you can for your beeswax.

Keep an eye on evidence of disease. I do not. And some people think, well, you know what? So-and-so just quit beekeeping. They got too old. they quit. They were injured and their wife wants their bees or their husband wants their bees off their property now.

And I don't recommend going and collecting other people's bee equipment with all the comb and resources in it unless you know for sure that that person was responsible with their bees and did not allow diseases to continue in their hive. depending on how long someone has neglected their bees, you could find evidence of really poor conditions in those colonies and potential disease. So know the origin of everything that came from that. But I don't worry about it when it's from my own hives. You can do whatever you want with your own wax.

You know you're going to monitor it. You know you care. And you're going to be up to speed on that. Question number five. Timothy. from Hamara, Tokyo, Timothy from Hamara, Tokyo. Says you mentioned various apps over the years, and I can't remember all of them.

Could you make a list and a description of all that you've recommended either here or on your YouTube, maybe both, thank you. So here's the thing, apps, what the heck are we talking about? So apps that benefit the beekeeper, that benefit the bees, maybe help you make decisions. So I will put those down in the video description.

This is for question number five. So you'll see these links underneath question number five. So one of the first apps that I thought about and I looked for updates on is called bee scanning. If you haven't looked at that years ago, this app came through and it was for helping you spot Varroa destructor mites on your bees. Their algorithm has been improved over the years.

So this is B scanning. I'm gonna put a link down for that so you can go directly to it the app helps identify what else something we just talked about brood issues unhealthy bees deformed wings on bees so this thing is improving all the time and we'll help you find that so what it is is an app that you load into your smartphone which when it first came out i didn't i was just getting my first smartphone but you take images of your hive service your brood boxes in particular and it is pretty darn good it picks out and shows you images of what

it suspects are for rholytes and things like that then the big argument about that app was the disagreement was that well you know figure the odds that a vera destructor mite one of these overgrown rascals is uh on the thorax or the back side of the bee where you can look at them because we know that they feed under the plates of your abdomen of your bees normally right so the nurse bees in particular. So those are, it was supposed to save you from having to do mite counts by shaking everything out. So the originators of that have continually approved it, claim that if you have, you know, whatever number of mites are visible to that unit, that they understand that that also represents that there are far

more varroa destructor mites on the abdomens and in the comb. So you would know instantly, here's the advantage of it, right? You would know instantly that there are mites on your bees and it estimates the number of mites in the hive or on the frame so on and so you know you're at treatment levels are ready without doing a mite count right so that's one app the next app which we just talked about I interviewed with the guy last year it's free b swarmed.org B-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D dot org and that's a really good app and I'll tell you why I like it and the link will be of course down the description 100% you register yourself as a beekeeper.

What do you want to do? I want to collect swarms. I want to do ripouts. Whatever you think you want to do, you register on this app. You also say, I don't want to collect swarms more than three miles from my house. You set the parameters.

How far are you willing to travel to respond to a swarm call? Then the general public also finds this app because you share about it as I did through social media. somebody sees a swarm somewhere and they report it to be swarmed.org once they do that they're prompted to identify whether or not they're actually honeybees and would they submit pictures and things like that as much detail as possible because the way we've done it historically is through my bee club the northwest pennsylvania beekeepers association somebody learns about a swarm somebody sends an email to someone or an instant message or a direct message or a text somebody gets something

on email, we have the email thread and they say there is a swarm, so-and-so's house, so-and-so, street and so-one. They give that person's information to everybody on our list. Next thing you know, people are like, let me know if somebody's going after it. So there's all this big exchange of information back and forth. It is cumbersome. Because first of all, the person had to respond to the email initially to say that somebody reported the swarm, you understand. If they go to be swarmed.org, the person, that reports it, there's no delay. It shotguns out to everyone who registered and put the app on their phone. I have it on my phone. And you get this alert. Swarm located, 2.5 miles from you. Yes or no?

So I say, wow, I'm actually, you know, I have nothing to do right now. And I have a mentee that wants to learn how to collect swarms. And we just charged up our everything BVAC. Let's go get it. I'll take it. Boom. So then the next person that receives the alert doesn't get. get the opportunity to collect it because now it says claimed on the app instant then we get there and realize wow they said it was eight feet up it's really 16 feet up it's bald face hornets i'm out of here or it is honeybees they're just not your cup of tea where they're located so then you uncollected so you take you go back to the app and you say not claimed now at shotguns again to the same group of beekeepers and somebody else can go try it out and you've had an opportunity

to provide additional information. Fantastic app. There's another one, beescape.org, B-E-E-S-C-A-P-E-D-R-G. You're thinking about setting up an apiary. You're thinking about putting your bees somewhere. How healthy is the environment? How conducive is it for bees?

In other words, is there going to be a dearth? Is there a whole bunch of agricultural activity there that is depositing a lot of pestis? When we say pesticides, then includes fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, it's all of it. And then you get a number associated with that by putting in an address. So, B-scape.org. Those are the ones. That's it.

And I'll put those links down and you have them too. They're very useful. The only one in the whole list that costs you money is the B-scanner app. So the next question. This comes from Vladimir, Worcester, Massachusetts. What's the best method for preventing a swarm? And is this a method that you use? So I mentioned earlier on the Demery method.

Demery method is something that sounds really complicated to people. It's not. It can require a lot of manipulation sometimes. This spring, I am going to do my own version of it. So by my own version of it, I mean I'm simplifying it. Some people, and this is a discussion of polarizing discussion among beekeepers, do you rotate your boxes in spring?

So we get to springtime, which is going to be awesome this year, trust me. And the bees have moved up, and now we want them back down because we want honey above, brood below. So I'm doing my own version of the Demery method. If you want to look it up, look up George Demery, D-E-M-A-R-E-E, 1892 article in the American Bee Journal. That's when it was first described to the public. So the point is to get your queen away from your brood or to relieve congestion in the brood area because this is a trigger for swarming for your bees in spring. The dandelions bloom

where I live and you get whole fields of dandelions. There's a whole bunch of nectar pollen coming in. that is almost the too late time if you haven't already inspected your hives and we know we've got weather conditions and things like that are shifty on us it might rain a lot you don't want to get into your hives during that period so you end up with a packed brood box right and once again the way i keep my bees with no upper venting the bees are encouraged without upreventing to migrate down towards the single entrance and as they get to the single entrance that's where they ventilate and they can take care of their brood the best. But this takes time. So that migration down is slow for some people. So they hurry it up. They pull that top box. They put it on the bottom. They take

the bottom box. They put it on top. Now we have empty brood comb or mostly empty brood comb above and now they're down below and now they can move up and fill that. My plan is different because I use a deep and then a medium. So this method requires a queen excluder historically. I've not use queen excluders now I'm going to go back on my word because I want to separate the queen from her brood. Now in normal demuree methods you have to look for queen cells. If they're already building queen cells you might be in a pickle. You have to have a queen that's still in the colony and we want to get her away from the brood area. So in the demoree method you would have, remember I have a deep and a medium, can't do this. If we had double deep boxes you can do it.

single deep, queen exclude on top, second deep. You pull brood frames that are full, that are in width, of course, with your queen, and you move them to the next box. Usually it's above. Queen stays down below. And then we push the remaining brood frames altogether, and then you add extra frames to the outside of that.

And so the bees up above, those nurse bees that are on that brood, think, ah, no queen, no reason. a swarm, right? Now the workers can go through and continue to spread the queen mandibular pheromone. She's just not on those frames anymore, so she's not laying eggs as those worker bees emerge from their cells. She's down below, and now she's working the frames that you have provided for her down there. I'm doing a different thing from that. I am going to take the queen, who is going to be up in my medium super in spring. I'm going to put a queen excluder under my medium super and I'm going to put the queen on that comb in the

brood box. Now what that does is makes those nurse bees up there think the queen's gone or at least not in the area so that relieves congestion. Her pheromone's thinning out up there. She's locked down in the brood box below. A bunch of nurse bees will go down and join her there and she will start laying her eggs there. So then she will start filling that brood box, which is what we want anyway, and so now your queen excluder becomes a tool. This becomes a way to keep your bees from being congested from getting that early swarm tendency. Once again, you have to be aware if they have already started producing queen cells or not. No queen cells, healthy queen, bunch of eggs, great brood production.

It's a great time to go ahead and relieve that congestion by getting her down. below one of the reasons that I think this is a very good method and better than rotating boxes other than the fact that all my supers are mediums and unless it's a flow super right all my supers are mediums and then my brood box remains a deep and it's a 10 or an 8 so down below we've got that queen and now she can fill all those frames and then what's above those workers will emerge from their and then they just join the brood down below gradually then hopefully we get them past that first massive nectar flow and we've kept all the bees and now they

back fill the upper frames then with honey and then we go from there and we follow suit and just put the flow supers back on in my case whatever your brood box types are that's how that will go so because we want to get them past that early one. You need to do this practice also with the Keepers Hive and with that box it's directly on top of those two, I believe those are eight frame brood boxes down below because the center support system takes up some of that. Haven't opened the box yet so I don't know for sure, but there'll be a queen excluder straight over that and a deep nucleus box for each side. So it's a eight frame on top of that or 10, whatever you've decided to do.

whatever the configuration demands. And then you can pull deep frames and put them up there of brood. Same thing, they're going to emerge and go down below. And of course your queen is retained in those bottom boxes and then they'll backfill up above. Now sometimes beekeepers don't want brood to ever have been in the honey super. Keep in mind with the keeper's hive, that second box is for the bees anyway. So even if that comb becomes a little darker, a little fiber is,

fiber is and they back filled it with honey and you know capped it and things like that is for the bees anyway also with the keeper's hive that queen excluder remains there for me when i move my queen below the queen excluder in spring and this is going to require that you handle your queen or get her down in that lower box you're probably going to have to pick her up and put her in there and get her down in that box then so you can put your queen exclude her on Once this is passed, once the risk of all the swarming is passed, which may never completely end where you are, but where I am, it's pretty predictable. We have a spring swarm season.

July and stuff, things calm down. Then we get into mid and late August, we're back in swarm risk. So you can, again, go through this process and separate the queen to whatever box has the least amount of eggs and brood in it. And leave your heavily brooded area separate by Queen Excluder again until those abandon it. that area that you merge and then we can swap them back getting preparation for winter. So these are all things that you will fill out. But that's the best method I know of to reduce 100% swarm prevention. I don't know if that's possible,

but you can reduce their propensity to swarm that way. And then once the Honeybridge is established, I can take my queen exclitter away again or I can leave it in. And my favorite queen exclutors, I will say, are the wooden framed ones that come from Better Bee. And they're very conspicuous because sometimes you walk around your bee yard. Is there a queen excluder on there or not? You might forget. And if they're thin plastic queen excluders and things like that, you don't notice from a distance with the wooden frames.

Not only are those nice and durable. Also, when you're prying them up, you're prying the wooden frame. You're not risking bending the metal bars on your queen exclure. so they work really well. That's it for question number six. If there's more questions about that, please write down in the description below what the follow-up questions are,

and we'll try to add that to next Friday's Q&A, where I might do intermediate videos this time of year. Question number seven comes from Lynn from Russell, PA. Hoping to begin raising pasture-raised hens for eggs. I'm still in the research phase. As much as I'd like to start in spring, I think I have another year before I'll have the time. Does your chicken DVD, titled Regarding Chickens, work on a PlayStation 5 console, or is it available in a downloadable format to be viewed on a laptop?

We no longer have a DVD player. Who doesn't have a DVD player anymore? Anyway, good news. That three-hour program, which is the DVD, titled Regarding Chickens is available through my YouTube channel. The whole three hour program is free. It's right there. I will put the link down in the video description under question number seven

and you can watch it right through the YouTube channel. If anyone still wants the DVD, I happen to have a bunch of them still left if you have a DVD player. You can get that DVD player, not the player. you can get the DVD in the case regarding chickens. It published in 2006. I realize it's been a while. The information has not gone stale.

It's all still good stuff. You can get it for the cost of shipping and packaging. So for $5, you can get the whole DVD. If I'm coming to a conference where you are, and you let me know ahead of time, if you're coming to the bee breakfast next Wednesday and you want the DVD titled Regarding Chickens, shoot me a message on Facebook,

Fred's Fine Fowl Facebook page and tell me where you're going to be and that you'd like a copy of the DVD. I'll bring it. You can have it for free. They're just sitting around and I think that a lot of people are in that same situation. They just don't use them. Use DVD players anymore. So it's free. It's on my YouTube channel.

Go to the channel, Frederick Dunn, and go up in the search bar and just type in and type in Raising Chickens or Chicken Rearing Guide or something. like that or just type chickens and see all the chicken videos that come up and pick the one you want just look for the time of play it's three hours long thank you for being willing to set through it information is good it's in chapters so you don't have to watch the whole thing all right question number eight Nigel moore nine six five seven can you tell me please if honey has any true nutritional value for humans does it have any great benefit for wounds of Okay, this is an area that was covered at Cornell, which was really interesting to me. You will find, if you Google around, you'll find all kinds of nutritional value,

miracle healing assigned to raw honey. Honey in general. It's amazing to me how far people are willing to go in their claims about honey. Now, I did talk with a research professor down at Texas A&M when I was, I was in Austin, Texas, I think we're going to set up an interview coming up about the medicinal value of honey, which I think is much stronger than nutritional value. There is some nutrition in honey. When you look at the percentages, when you look into the real science behind it, it's like less than half of a percent of honey contains proteins that would be builders for sustaining a mammal. So is it nutritious? Let's make that a comparison. You will hear people make fantastic claims and it's of interest to me. Why people are even willing to do that?

They will say you can lose weight eating honey, right? And so then people think, wow, I just eat a bunch of honey and I'll lose weight. Well, the caloric content of honey is really high. Remember for your bees, it's the carbohydrate. It's the content that gives them the energy to do the things that need to be done the proteins in that are very small we know that there's some pollen in honey again very small representation of pollen so what i want to shift that from is the part any great benefit for wounds yes scientifically supported ding ding ding so health benefit for people now let's put that in perspective do you eat a pile of sugar are you eating a bunch of processed sugar each and every day It's no argument that sugar as a substitute, honey as a substitute for processed sugar is a gain. That's a bonus.

So if you're getting rid of something that's really bad for you, white processed sugar, bad for people, and you're substituting honey. In other words, you're not willing to get sugar out of your diet, but you would like to substitute it. So it's better than processed sugar for you. Now, nutritional value, I'm going to give you a link to a study that will show the breakdown and let me just tell you it's going to hurt your brain. They talk about all the variables in sugar. Now, keep in honey.

Keep in mind, what is in the honey is related to what was in the plant that the honey was taken from, the floral content. So there's a wide variance there. And this again ties into medicinal value, not nutritional value. So the medicine is the emphasis. It can sue the cough, honey. By the way, what's the purest form of honey that you can get? In other words, there are some detractors here which can impact the potency as a medication.

So the more processing has been through, the more filtering has been through, the more materials it's been on all the stainless steel, all the sieves and filters and bottling systems that it's been through. Degrade the honey to some extent. So comb honey would be your purest form, your purest source for honey. Just tossing that in there. It can see the cough. It can have antibacterial properties. These are proven medically. You can put raw honey on a wound and it will sanitize, disinfect the wound.

Honey itself can develop hydrogen peroxide. And sometimes people see that in honey when it's exposed to moisture edges or condensation, you'll see a white, foamy, bubbly substance there. You can put it on a wound and sometimes, sorry to be discussing, but wounds can ooze and they can have liquids associated with them and you'll see a little white foamy edges on that. That is hydrogen peroxide. So honey is proven to have medicinal value, right?

it can reduce scarring. So they prepare bandages with honey, and then that goes on your wounds that are healing, and it keeps them moist, it keeps them disinfected, keeps bacteria from moving in on the wound, and reduces scarring. Proven medical benefits.

There's a whole bunch of research going on regarding the honey's ability to reduce swelling. So chronic inflammation, right? And again, I'm not a scientist. I'm not a medical practitioner. I don't have a lab available to me. So all I can then do is look into studies and see what they've proven will help. So as far as a nutritional value for humans, very small, medicinal potential for humans. Pretty darn significant. And the Texas A&M group has found that there are different floral sources down in the state of Texas that could actually arrive the medicinal value of manuka honey. If you've ever looked up manuka honey, that stuff is super

expensive and the medicinal qualities are pretty significant. So they're hoping to have the same thing with some of the floral content that the bees are producing honey from down in the state of Texas. So pretty interesting stuff. That paper has not yet published. So I hope to talk with them at the time that they're publishing their final paper, right? So there's a lot to do with that. Thanks for that question. People that are thinking you can survive exclusively on honey, for example. Those people are out there that make those claims. And I can't, you know, I wouldn't, in a responsible way, tell someone, prove it.

Go out there and eat nothing but honey and show me with your own life. The way Morgan Spurlock did when he made Super Size Me for McDonald's. Eat nothing but honey and see what happens to you. I can't tell you to do that. I can tell you to check in with your physician, with your dietitian, with these people that understand what the human body needs as far as vitamins and trace elements and proteins and carbs and everything else to exist, honey does not provide what you need. So moving on to question number nine.

David from Amarillo, Texas. Fred, can you comment on planting white Dutch clover for pollinators? I'm thinking about overseeing a lawn with regular white clover or the newer micro-sized white clover. So clover is interesting, and one of the reasons that I try to cycle the mowing on our property here. We have a lot of white clover here. And I'm going to put a link down in the video description for the clover that is very desirable for your bees. It's excellent for soil building. and this is why farmers used to do a lot of cover crops and rotation.

There is, of course, plants that want to grow that are good for their grazing animals. And this white clover, Dutch white clover in particular that's mentioned here, is kind of low growing. So it's good for the soil as a soil builder, not great for grazing animals because it doesn't grow really tall. And then sometimes we'll hear about different types of clover, right? and that some bees that can access some clover have to have long tongues. So the white clover that we're talking about is good for your honeybees. They can forage it and we like it to continue itself, right? So my grandson and I, my pond last year was very low

and it's a spring fed pond and it's normally 14 feet deep. But it backed off and so we went out there with bags of white clover and I try to explain to him we want to prevent erosion. So we spread those seeds everywhere and just dropped them on the surface. So that's what I'm going to share with you is that you can seed in early spring. This is a great time of year to be thinking about it. I'm also going to recommend a source for your white clover where you can read more about the clover that you're going to seed. And the white clover is really good.

And I'm going to recommend Ernst Seeds. So Ernst Seeds has a lot of guides. In fact, their whole catalog can be downloaded digitally, and there's a whole bunch of guides on prepping your soil for seed. Now, the good thing about white clover, this Dutch clover seed, you can overseed your property, and you don't have to do anything to the soil. So you can do a no-till seeding, and you do it while there's still frost. And so I'm just going to go over this briefly with you.

It improves pasture quality. That's great. And the technique requires that seeding be done while the soil. contains frost and here's why. Delaying seeding seating until mid-morning when the soil surface has become slippery will result in poor stand establishment. Now that means we didn't have to kill off all the vegetation. You're just going to go out there and spread seed around and the frost in the soil creates these openings in the soil that the clover seed will enter as the frost melts when it warms up. But you have to get it out there.

This is a no-till seeding. Okay. Into existence. grass. And I have clover everywhere. I have a sister-in-law that likes to mow and she likes to mow short. I try to get her to leave no-mow may, right? So we want to get clover established. We want it to start to bloom. And once it does, once a little clover blossom start, we get an extended bloom through the year. So then we do let it grow up, then we mow off the tops and it comes back, then we mow off the tops, it comes back. We also don't mow everything at once. So we want to always be clover for the bees. Seating rates for white clover on an existing grass pasture. Two to four pounds per acre. So that's not bad. Two pounds per acre. I also looked up what the price is.

One pound of seed contains 800,000 seeds. Right now at Ernstseeds.com, it's $8.40 a pound. So it's cheap to use. and that's pretty much it. The information that I'm giving you was prepared by Marvin H. Hall, who's a professor emeritus of Forest Management, Penn State Extension. So it is a good clover to use. Easy to toss out there. I give my grandkids bags and just make them spread it around.

It's fun. And then they get to see the results because the clover comes up and it's really easy to spot that, among other things. Great for soil building. So yes, use it. Question number 10. And there's other options, by the way, if you go to Earned Seeds and look at that catalog. They talk about all kinds of ground covers and they include information about what pollinators benefit from it. Question number 10 comes from Mike Hudson Valley, New York.

I heard that heater bees will detach their wings from the thorax while vibrating to heat the cluster during the winter. Is that true? And if it's true, can you explain the answer? an anatomical mechanism that allows the detachment and assuming the reattachment to happen. Okay, it's not so much attachment and detachment. It's coupling and uncoupling. So the thorax of your honeybee, that is your engine compartment for the bee. All the power, all the muscle that makes things happen is in there. That's why your wings are attached there. That's why your legs are all attached there. 90% of the thorax is filled with what? Flight muscles.

So anyway, it's just like shivering. The bees vibrate. And I've had people ask me this because there are sounds that come out of a beehive even when the wings are not moving. What is the cause of the sound? Well, they're vibrating. They're shivering. And for people that like to harass their bees, they go out in the wintertime, put their head up against the hive, and they knock on it, and then they'll hear v. The bees didn't flap their wings.

What they're doing is they need to generate warmth in their thorax, which passes on the warmth to their environment, meaning the cells that they're in, because sometimes they heat. If there's one empty cell, a bee gets in there and heats six adjacent cells. So they shivered, they vibrate those flight muscles without flapping the wings. Now, this is still hard on the bee. It burns a lot of calories. It burns a lot of energy. It wears the bee out.

So the more that they have to shiver and generate heat in this way, the quicker they're burning themselves out. just like a foraging bee has to use its flight muscles a lot to fly, they burn themselves out. That's why we have a two-week forager. At the end of it, they're done. They're burned out. So they uncouple and recouple this muscles with the actual physical wing itself. And the other thing is you should know that muscles can't contract, they can only push, they can only contract. So we have muscles that pull in one direction,

and the muscles that pull in the other direction which get your wings to move right so they just uncouple that's the best i can tell you and they vibrate they shiver just like we do sometimes we shiver that's burning energy and so that we can burn calories we can generate warmth that's your body trying to warm itself so that's it shivering shortens life so we want them to do that as little as possible and guess what not all of your bees do it and i've had bees out of outside on the landing board, you could hear it. It was little e-sounds, e-er-e-e-in. They're all making this frequency.

And what they were doing is they were trying to prepare themselves for flight because the bee has to warm its thorax into the 80 degree Fahrenheit range before it can actually fly anywhere. So if they're alarmed, somebody came and knocked on the side of our hive, we need to get our engines warmed up so that we can put it in gear and go somewhere.

So they have to warm their thorax into the 80s just so that they can fly and then it was a false alarm they burned all those calories exercise or flight muscles for nothing wearing out their engines so now we're into the fluff section this is the end of things question 10 was the last one from mike so anyway temps are going to remain below freezing through my area all through next week so there's not a lot that we can do other than what go through and keep entrances clear just in case, you know, the sun shines and we get some cleansing flights going out of there. The other thing is, with these very low temperatures, I'm going to get very clear thermal scans, and I'm hoping that even my insulated hives, that would be the

license, the Apamaze, the layins, those that have thick sidewalls that make thermal scans difficult. There's not a big distinction between the warmth and the cold environment. But when we're down to 10 degrees, I can get out there and do thermal scans. And then we'll see, even on the insulated ones, we should see a little venting warmth, you know, who knows, but I'm going to share that in the coming week. And also we're talking about, somebody asks about planting pollinator plants. We're talking about the clover. I have all this grow stuff going on. Of course, I'm planting moss because I'm growing moss. But here's a good news. I'm also. growing fancy no showy milkweed and something else called rose milkweed which is really hard to start

so i'm doing this indoors because look what's happening new year's over north american honeybee expo is over all the fun stuff is over the holidays are over the next thing coming up is what february we're talking about valentine's day this is the winter dead zone the best thing to do this time of years to grow something indoors because having all these plants by the way all the mosses that I'm growing Irish moss specifically which is not even a true moss has created this room that is full of oxygen it's warmer because I'm using grow lights anyway I highly recommend you grow some kind of plants indoors set up a grow room in your house and I'm going to be doing upcoming reviews on grow lights which I like to do this time of year standard

you know new lights see what was on sale I bought stuff during black Friday I like to get things from Home Depot or lows when they're really cheap and so we're testing some LED lights that are also they generate quite a bit of heat the panels that's wrong so that's coming up in the coming next couple of weeks I also darn it you know I went to the ex-post started to still keep bringing that up but there were people that I wanted to interview and talk to and stuff I wanted to see at the expo thank goodness other people are producing a honeybee expo videos and showing these different vendors you could not get to them all

there just isn't time they just couldn't get there you see people and they say hey Fred stop by I got something to show you and I'm like yeah I'll be over there next thing you know two hours is gone I only got a couple interviews in and it was over with so I did not get to those vendors also I wanted to mention my shirt are highs for heroes a worthy cause they are always their link is always down in my video descriptions because if you want to volunteer if you've got resources or you want to be a mentor or maybe you're a veteran and you listen to this and you think I'd like to get into beekeeping you know check in with highs for heroes follow the link or just go directly to the site just Google it

and you can listen find out what services they're providing if you are capable of mentoring I'm pretty much at my max for mentees for right now, but Highest for Heroes is a great opportunity to help someone get into beekeeping and kind of get out of their doldrums. And I think, in fact, reaching out to someone this time of year is very important for the reason that I just mentioned. Holidays are hard on a lot of people. Some people can feel alone.

You know, we've got these gatherings, we've got these conferences and things like that, fellowships and associations. Those are all great. But getting someone connected with a sponsor so they can start to learn about beekeeping, maybe start to prepare for the coming spring. I know they like new beekeepers not to have bees right away, but to rather connect with someone who's willing to mentor them. Hives for Heroes, check it out. Also, for those you came up to me at the conference, thanks for coming up and saying hi, admitting in public that you knew who I was and that I think I'm okay. It was really great to meet a lot of people in person. Thanks for that. And that's the other thing I just wanted to remind you. Sometimes people are asking me about

practices and beekeeping, walkaway splits, things like that. There are over 1,200 videos on my YouTube channel. It's a mind-boggling number. They're not all dealing with bees. So if you go to my channel and type in what you're looking for in the search line, chances are I've covered it before and if it's not completely explained then you can ask for more information or maybe a follow-up video or maybe our practices have evolved and improved so this is going to be an interesting year I'm backing off on a lot of my professional photography commitments we are focusing pun intended on bees beekeeping and of course the other the environmental issues around honey bees and things that predate on honey bees or that the bees have an impact on

So we'll be talking about other species of insects, arachnids, and everything else in the coming year. So please go do a search. Let me know if there's something that you're not finding and I will provide you a link. Usually when I respond to someone's question, I'll get the video myself and just give you the link down in the comment section. Thanks for being here. I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead and that maybe you can think of some plants that you would start indoors. that would be a great distraction for you, and it doesn't necessarily have to be for pollinators. You can create an oxygen-rich room where you're surrounded by new, growing things, and warm lights.

Emotional health and well-being is worth something in itself. Thanks a lot. Have fantastic weekend.