The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 290, are Purple Martins Eating Your Bees?

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube: https://youtu.be/uG6LBVWb43w

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, January the 17th, and this is Backyard, Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 290. I'm Frederick Dunn and This is the Way to Be! So I'm really glad that you're here today. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order, including additional links for more information. There'll be some interesting stuff to do today. Anyway, first want to start off with a shout-out to the supervisor, my grandson, nine years old, and he won the Road to Gold Award at his school for third grade, the only student. There's one per grade. Apparently, it means he's above average.

So shout out to Quinn on that one, just in case the off chance that he's looking. I know that you're probably wondering what's going on outside here, weather-wise, and I'll tell you, degrees Fahrenheit which is a super warm-up considering what we've had going on. That's zero degrees Celsius, no great surprise there. It's windy. 10 miles per hour, 16 miles kilometer kilometers per hour. Seventy-four percent relative humidity so it's not too wet out there and we're getting gus above 20 miles an hour so that's 32 kilometers per hour and that's pretty much what's going on. So if you have a question, in mind or a topic that you'd like to see covered on one of these Friday Q&As, please go to my

website, the way to be.org, click on the page marked the way to be. That's the same as a contact page on other channels. And you just fill out the form and you never know. It might show up. If you have a question that's pending right now, some issue, or you want to share a picture or a short video or something of some issue you're dealing with, please go to the Facebook group. the way to be fellowship. And there you will find lots of people talking about all kinds of things and all types of hive configurations and practices are welcome. So what else is going on?

I think that's pretty much it. I am still growing my moss in my grow room, which, by the way, is almost 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the house just from the grow lights that are out there. So if you didn't see my grow light review this past week, please check that out. It did make a difference in what kind of growth on whether or not your flowers or plants can bloom

if they're blooming types of plants. So stronger lights, better growth. And I've got fans out there and everything else. We'll just move on. We've talked about that enough in the past. So today we do have some interesting topics and lots of concerns and what better time to study up than when we're stuck inside when it's freezing cold. Also, of course, out in the West, the fires are getting under control,

but devastating losses out in California and our thoughts and prayers are with those who have lost everything in those fires. Okay, so we're going to start right off with Fane, who is in Verroquah, Wisconsin, Verro. V-I-R-O-Q-U-A. I'm sure I ruined that. But anyway, the question is, is the double queen chamber keeper's hive that much different than a double brood chamber single queen hive? Yes. And I say yes, not because I've done it, not because I've used them, because this is the year of my double queen hives here in the way to be apiary. But according to those, who've done it and there are a lot of people that have done it double queen rearing has been around for a very long time the difference is of course if we have a two queen colony and we have two distinctive brood boxes one with a queen in each

we know the queens are limited in the number of eggs that they can produce in a 24-hour period you'll hear statements like these queens will lay 2 000 eggs a day and so we do it's great for applied math if you have homeschoolers or you've got little smarty pants kids that are really great at math that come to your bee yard and you can turn them loose in your observation hives and you can make them time a queen when she's laying eggs on one of the surface frames. And I haven't had one that could even approach the 2,000 egg per 24 hour cycle. It's more like 12 to 1,500.

Okay. So there again, other queens may be more prolific. They may produce eggs that are quicker cadence. They may have better nutrition or something like that and therefore produce more eggs. But the reason that we can make this distinction, I think, and this I'm just forecasting it, because again, I don't have a two queen colony. But if we had a double deep brood box, we have two brood boxes, we still have a limiting factor. What is it?

The amount of eggs that a queen can produce in a 24-hour period. And then, of course, by the week and by the month and so on. and then eventually get to the point where the bees are living how long. So there's an, I don't want to use the term calculus because that makes people turn their brains off. But if we did the calculus and we said, let's say a queen can do 1,500 eggs a day. And let's see that they say that they emerge on the 21st day roughly, right? So then 21 days out, we've got 1,500 new bees emerging from the bruce. bird frames, right, from the comb? And then how long do they live? So then they live about six weeks

during a nectar flow or when the bees are flying. So we're not talking about midwinter. We're talking about high production, springtime. So then you can number crunch all of that and figure out what the maximum size of your colony would be. And then we have to throw in variables. Some of your bees are dying. Some of your bees are being eaten. And that's part of one of the things we're going to talk about today. They're predators of honeybees. There are lots of reasons why honeybees die out other than running the full, you know, length of their life. There are challenges and everything else. So anyway, now the double brood box, okay, may not be ever completely full of brood. So when they get to the end of that laying cycle after they're emerging, so it's a 21-day cycle, right? Eggs to emerging

adult and then as soon as the adult emerges, what do we have? We have an empty brood cell, and so then we have a queen putting a new egg in there right away after the nurse bees have cleaned out the cell after the emergence of that new bee, right, the worker. So then it just goes out and contracts, goes out and contract. So there is a limit to how big it will get, and we can forecast that if there are a little over 3,000 worker cells per side of a deep length straw frame and then we have two sides so now we have over 6,000 and so we can look at that wow if that were 10 frames all deep and a single deep right then you've got 60,000 potential bees that's some state of development and growth and adult bees right so we don't

necessarily double that just by giving them more space now the way the double queen system works is you can find a queen with a queen excluder into a single normally a single deep brood box and then she stays over there and then we have this other queen over here and this one also in a deep brood box queen excluder keeps the queens in and the workforce expands up into the honey supers now whether this is one over the top of the other or side by side or a keeper's hive configuration which is also side by side what we've done now is we've doubled egg production we've doubled brood production we have nurse bees on each side so we have bees that can attend to this production that's going on.

So yeah, it is more productive than a single double deep, single queen brood chamber, right? So that's where that comes from. Pretty easy. I can see why it's productive and appealing and not for beginners. We're going to talk about that later today. Question number two comes from David. in Meade, Colorado. This is, hey Fred, I'm trying to liquefy some of my spring honey,

and I started with the warmer set to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Kept an eye on it for two days. It was about 75% liquefied at this point. I turned the temp up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and it has been sitting at this temperature for three full days now, with there being about 10% still crystallized. Any suggestions on how this honey could be fully liquefied? I have lots of suggestions.

So you need, I would say, agitate it. So that means you have to call it names, make fun of it, make fun of the jar it's in, and the coloration and the scent that it has. Of course, I'm being funny. I have to explain that I'm being funny. You have to agitate it, though. So what I do is, and I've often thought of, but never made a rack for quart honey jars that would slowly sit on an axle.

So you put all your jars in this rack, tighten the lids all up, and then it would slowly turn, right? So the jars would invert on a really slow cycle, and it would keep things moving. I would not, for those who are listening, hold it at 120 degrees Fahrenheit for that length of time. I would keep it at 110 and then agitate, invert the jars. You can also stir it up if you're impatient, but your goal is, of course, to get those crystals broken down. Now, another option that will give you if you don't have the patience for that, you can pour off the liquefied portion into another jar,

the parts that have been cleaned that are now liquefied and the crystals are no longer in suspension there, and you've just got that little creamy clump at the bottom. pour off into another jar, the clear portions, and then use the rest as spreadable honey that can melt onto toast or muffins or whatever you like to eat it on. So that's another one. You could clear it off, of course, and just use it right into your tea or coffee or something like that also. So those are my two simple suggestions, but it is something that I've thought about for a long time. You know what these rock tumblers look like? they polish rocks and they just really slowly turn everything.

If we had something like that for honey that would slowly keep it in motion, then we would keep it liquid. It would not set then. So that's all I have for that. Moving right along. If you have better ideas for how to liquefy some stubborn jars, I found that this often happens and I'm not saying that this is the case here, but sometimes when we've fed sugar syrup late in the year,

or two to one syrup, things like that, sometimes you get some sugary, gritty areas that just at the end of the year don't liquefy. You can even find it in your frames of honey in spring after it's been through winter, and you'll see that the bees have cleaned all around and you'll see these white chunks of sugar are still in the cells. So that's a potential also for some that find that it just doesn't liquefy.

But case by case, And of course, we know that the end of the year, honey's sat around here, the easiest. In other words, the Aster, Golden Rod, stuff like that, are known to become crystallized easily. So moving on to question number three. This is the big one for the day, and this sent me right down a rabbit hole. Thanks for that. Rodney from Freeport. I think it's Illinois.

It just says L.L. So I think it's Illinois. So Rodney says, I'd like to build a purple. Martin house added to my backyard should I be concerned that they will reduce my bee population any experience with this okay now the Purple Martin discussion and we have tree swallows and we have barn swallows here and we have a lot of birds on the wing that will eat bugs on the wing and just up the hill for me I have a neighbor named John he has Purple Martins hanging in those really

expensive gourd systems. You can spend a thousand dollars for one of those. Anyway, this is a question that I've had troubles with, by the way. I reach out to the Department of Ornithology. I try to get somebody on record to tell me, will these birds eat honeybees? Because we have a lot of concerns, not just our worker honeybees, which by the way do end up just dying every day while they're out and about. We also have drones. which seem to be pretty darn appealing because they're big and they're conspicuous on the wing and some birds do eat them.

And one of the things that I would be concerned about the most, of course, is when we're having queens, virgin queens flying out and going to make the drone congregation area, which could in some cases be several miles from already located. So they're in jeopardy on the wing. Nobody would talk on record. So I think they have concerns that they don't want to kill. kick off a pushback from beekeepers, nor do I.

And I'm going to give you a different way to look at this. Let's take the case of the Purple Martin. Even within my own beekeeping group, we have a long time. This came up years ago, and a long time beekeeper, more than 40 years keeping bees, said, yeah, I just saw Purple Martins eating my bees.

And another beekeeper in our club said, I have Purple Martins, they don't need bees. And so he basically said, you're lying, or you don't know what you're seeing. And so back and forth it goes. No reason for this back and forth. I'm going to settle that hash right now. What do you think I'm going to say?

I'm going to say I'm a fan of Purple Martin's, even though I don't have them. But you know why? I feel like I need them now. Because of this question, I jumped into all the different Purple Martin organizations, and I went to Purple Martin Conservancy Association, which is purplemartin. That's my shout-out for today. Purplemartin.org. So here's a new way of thinking of it.

Okay, let's say that those who say that they have seen Purple Martins catch and eat drones, did in fact catch and eat drones. Is that a reason to get rid of the Purple Martins? I say no. Here's why. If we look at what Purple Martins do overall, They eat all kinds of insects. Do you know what one of the top insects that they are snagging on the wing,

which is a pretty amazing feat, given the aerial agility of this particular insect, we're talking about dragonflies. So you might know where I'm going with this discussion. If the Purple Martins are taking out large or decent numbers of dragonflies, would that not then, offset any particular concern you might have about the Purple Martin eating the occasional drone on the wing. We make lots of drones. In fact, here's another wicket to go through. Which drones do we want to meet with our Virgin Queens in spring?

We want the fastest flying, the keenest, the most physically capable drones out there. So we want the ones that can fly faster and dodge the Purple Martins because they will make smarter bees in the future. That's a very simplistic overview. But it's a feel-good way to look at it. So it adds to the screening process of which drones are fast enough to become mated with your queens. And then, of course, those queens have to get back. Now, I would not be happy if a drone were eaten, but if the queen on her way back was eaten by a purple-man, Martin but she's more likely at the end of the year when we have here we have a swarm

season at the end of the year as well the dragon fly numbers are really high in fact we see whole squadrons of them flying through the bee yards snagging bees right and left and they eat the workers the drones anything on the wing they are top tier aerial predators so now we introduce the purple Martins the Purple Martins are eating the dragonflies and therefore for each dragonfly that they are eating those are bees that are not being eaten by the dragonflies therefore by keeping purple martins here we are lowering another predator that would be otherwise feeding on your bees workers drones and queens because those big dragonflies that in the ear can take anything what do you think about that line of thought so not only did I look into this

and look into the Purple Martin houses, but I learned a lot of things. And I'm going to share with you now, even though we're talking about bees. I think it's important for us to understand ecology beyond our bees, right? So take a look at Purple Martins. Here's the thing. We all know the old timer.

At least I think we all do. I did when I was little. The guy's name was Mr. Lawson, who I didn't much care for because he would yell at you for getting anywhere near his vegetable garden or walking on his grass and all that. But he had lots of Purple Martin houses. They look like hotels.

So this actually goes way back and did you know that the Purple Martin's in trouble? In other words, it's not an endangered species, but habitat-wise, they seem to only go toward those man-made Purple Martin houses. And now here's a whole other area that you can get worried about. The reason I mentioned old Mr. Lawson there is because apparently it was only kept by old old men primarily and guess what the new generation are not keeping Purple Martin hotels and houses and things like that goes all the way back to Native Americans cutting out gourds using those for Purple Martins near their gardens near the Mississippi River and so there are a lot of Native American tribes that were very aware of how they could use

Purple Martins to protect their gardens. So they can protect your gardens too and indirectly by taking out other predators on the wing protect your honeybees so that's going to be my new stance on it you might be wondering fred once you did all of that you went to the purple martin conservation association did you join yes i did a half an hour ago so i'm a member of that and i'm going to look at it so and of course purple martins have their challenges to how sparrows They make gender distinctions, by the way, among those who keep Purple Martins because they say, this is them, not me, they say that men who set up Purple Martin villages and clusters for their Purple Martins are also inclined to enforce killing the birds that come and attack the Purple Martins,

which includes house sparrows, which are considered invasive. They said that women who undertake keeping Purple Martin communities fail to kill the species that are coming in, invading, and displacing the Purple Martins. So I think what they're trying to say at the Purple Martin Conservancy is don't set up a colony of Purple Martins unless you're willing to defend them against invasive species. So I found that interesting too.

So you need to be, I guess, ready to trap. house sparrows and dispatch them and things like that. So and that was a very interesting thing. So I appreciate that question. So the bottom line is, now we're not worried about how many honeybees your Purple Martins would be eating. And I see that we can bring in Purple Martins

and support Purple Martins. And I hope that somebody is listening to this right now who decides, wow, I'm gonna replace some of these old timers that are just no longer taking care of their purple Martin houses and things like that if you put them up you need to be prepared to inspect the nests and of course clean them out they have them on big poles with pulley systems so you can lower the whole little community of martin nests so you can inspect them and make sure that they're not just being taken over by what house sparrows so moving on to question number four

this comes from v y t b b b b 741-46 so that's the YouTube channel name It says for those who want to try the two queen system, so we're still talking about the two queen system that generated a lot of buzz after last week. I suggest you think if you are comfortable with super big colonies. I tried it and I do not recommend. Colonies get so big. It's just too hard to manage. It's easier and quicker with two smaller colonies. especially if you don't have much experience.

So you know what? I was very grateful for this comment because sometimes we forget. If you're a beekeeper who's been around bees for a long time, you understand that sometimes you become a lion tamer, right? So there is some truth to that. If you have a double queen system, the whole point is to create this bonanza of bees inside this two queen system and that you get a higher honey yield. Well, when you get a higher honey yield, the reason you're getting it is because you have thousands of more worker bees. And the question comes up, what if I had one 10-frame Langstroth hive over here,

breed box, and another 10-frame langstroth brood box over here, and then we start them completely separate and let them just go their own way, build up, and then, of course, generate their honey surplus. Do they individually produce more honey than if we put them all together, and have one rice, does that single two-queen system produce more honey than two full-sized colonies independently would? And everyone I've spoken with that stunned the two queen systems, regardless of the system that they adopted, said that they get more honey from that system than if they had had individual colonies. That said, I want to caution you,

if you are a brand-new beekeeper, and this is what you're going into and you're watching me, you're thinking everything i say is a great thing to do um i'm very glad for this because i hadn't thought of it that uh you could get out there and be overwhelmed uh if we look at the keepers hive one of their videos where he was weighing hives so he was weighing the honey boxes to demonstrate how much honey yield they get uh they actually had to abandon their post and uh they cut away and they do a scene that these are not new beekeepers and they're off in the woods because they've learned that retreating into the trees was a great way to escape the bees. So the hive, the colony just got too hot for them.

So there are a lot of things going on there, but one of the arguments that I make or one of the explanations that I have on that, they were also smashing bees. They were sacking boxes, smushing bees underneath and things like that. So alarm furmos are getting them angry. Smaller colonies, far more tolerant because they just don't have that many guards to send out.

If you're going to produce a massive colony of bees, with, I don't know, 30,000 plus occupants, then they have a lot of guards to send your way if you start to do things wrong. And that's why I'm going to bring you full circle to what I plan to do with my Keepers Hive 2-Queen system. So this is a follow-up from last week. I am putting Flo Supers on there.

One, maybe more. I'll have them in hot standby. So if they fill up too quick and they haven't dehydrated them down and started capping them yet, I don't want to slow production, so I will be stacking flow supers one after the other until they reach their maximum potential. Now, here's the thing.

I don't have to pull those off to get the honey out to give them more space to store more honey. And one of the big arguments, because I just recently looked at a thread on Facebook, I don't normally do a lot of looking into threads on Facebook. So because you can get endless discussions and back and forth about this is bad, this is good and so on. And so I just have, you know, my platform here. So the flow hive, if it doesn't get capped all the way, then they can move up and fill the next part until they start getting capped. And then when they do, you open one of those flow frames and you draw honey off. Guess what we're not doing. We haven't smoked them. So we're not agitating because oversmoking a colony

can get the opposite response that we want. It's supposed to interrupt the alarm pheromone. and it actually does that but if you continue to smoke as some people especially new beekeepers including my grandson if you think things are cooking off and getting hot they just smoke smoke even more and keep smoking and what you can get then is a feisty response from your bees instead of a calming one so what i'm bringing you full circle too is again the flow hives passive way of removing the honey that's in those frames. And so when you drain off honey, the bees are not interrupted. You're not in their flight path. Another argument is, well, everybody knows that then people that have that kind of hive, they don't inspect the brood. Well, here we go.

The keeper's hive. Even with all the honey supers on, you can go to the side and inspect brood. You're pulling your frames out to the side. You're looking at them. So once again, another problem solved. So I'm bringing together kind of the best of both worlds. Now, you pull those boxes off and you get these bees agitated and they're huge colonies of bees you can expect that possibly if you're because this is for backyard beekeepers remember i had a problem last year where i got into a hive and took their honey took their bogs and the bees patrolled my driveway really well for several days afterwards so i was concerned you know what if the mail person drives up what if the fedex guy gets out and i give all those guys uh

You know, you can link and say how satisfied you are with the way they delivered your package. Well, if they drove up the driveway and delivered a package when I had angsty bees flying around, then they get the above and beyond score. So anyway, so the flow hive is a more passive way to pull it off. No smoke. No opening the hive. Getting your honey out. At the same time, still having access to brute areas for full inspections to make sure that you don't have a row destructor mites and problems and issues like that.

It's a perfect world. So I will leave you a link to the flow hive experience because it's on my website, The Wayto-B.org. Why am I bringing it up right now? I want you to follow it because as spring arrives, my keeper's hive is going to be implemented and I'm going to take you through it for the whole coming spring. Now keep in mind, advance beekeeping. I understand what's going on, but I will walk you through it.

So if you want to see it for a year before you invest, by the way, even flow hives, some people say are only for advanced beekeepers. I think it's for anyone that keeps bees, to be honest. It's a lot of money, though. So the thing that I say to people that are thinking about flow hives, if you're not sure that beekeeping is something that you want to do, don't spend the money yet. Hold off, wait.

Get a standard Langstroth kit. Go over to Nature's Image Farm and get the Endora Hive. and that way if you don't like it you can pass it on to other people they had a brand new Endora hive finish on their boxes at the North American Honeybee Expo and it looks pretty darn good and I just realized I have one already in the garage out there and I didn't bring it in for pictures so I should show it to you it looks really cool one of the reasons that I like the Enduro and by the way they don't ask me to do that I'm not sponsored or anything else Nature's Image Farm makes the indoor hive boxes.

Those of you who are for the first time setting up your beehives. Maybe you live in the country. I hope you do. Now, if you live in town, no big deal either. But do you want everyone driving down the road to spot your beehives from 1,000 yards away through the trees? Or do you want to kind of have your beehives in a place where they kind of by themselves? I do recommend you put up bee alert warning signs. Beware of honey bees, things like that on your driveway and pathways, sidewalks,

ways that people might be approaching your beehives. But from a distance, if your bee hives are the color of natural wood, trees. The Endura hive, that new one, is going to blend right into the environment. The hives that I have that I've treated with eco wood and things like that are also a and blend right into the environment. So I think there's something to be said for having your beehives blend rather than stand out. A lot of new beekeepers want to express themselves artistically and do pastel colors and everything else. And that's fine. Maybe you don't care.

And maybe some people think that's a deterrent to beehive theft. It isn't, actually. So we don't want vandals either. So we don't want attention, unwanted attention to our beehives. So that's what I'm saying. If you want a colony that blends into the woodwork and will last a long time, the Endora hive claims are pretty intense. We haven't seen them out in the environment that long,

but they forecast their longevity to be significant, which means that if you are buying new boxes every 10 years, you wouldn't be. With those hives plus, they have the interior surfaces that are well-prepped are ready for propolis sealant. the hive. So they've done a great job. That's Nature's Image Farm and it's called the Endora hive. Check that out. If you're shopping around for equipment that lasts and blends looks natural like it belongs outside. So yes, this is a very good warning. If you're getting

into bees, don't get too big, too fast, big colonies create a challenge. So I hope that you're spending your first year. I was talking to one of the, oh, hives for heroes group. Their first year, policy is that the person that joins Hives for Heroes gets a mentor does not keep bees for the first year. Instead, they're learning, they're getting some hands-on experience with an experienced beekeeper, and they're going through a full year and learning about management. Now, this can serve a lot of things. And something I really like about that, you may not have thought ahead to what's involved in managing honeybees throughout the year. And so if they can get them in and get them out to see the bees and things like that understand what's involved in honey bee management and small-scale

apiary management, they may decide that bees aren't for them. And that would be fine too. So it would be like, let's talk them out of it before they make this big commitment, spend a lot of money and resources that they only feel depressed about later. So they may permanently just want to assist other beekeepers and that's fine too. Every beekeeper at some time a year is going to need some help. Usually with honey extraction, moving hives, things like that. We're also at the time of year we're moving your hives around. Is that a prime other than for us right now because we have like three feet of snow out there and nothing's going anywhere. But we get to this time of year before spring arrives and your bees start really flying,

the orientation flights really start happening. You have an opportunity now to shift your hive around and move them on your property to new locations if you need to. And we'll talk about some more about that in the fluff. But that's a great point. Safety first. New beekeepers, don't try, you know, these complicated setups until, you know, for sure, what to expect from your bees. And work your way through them. Smooth and steady. No bumping and knocking things around.

Smooth and steady. Your bees will appreciate you for that. Moving on to question number five comes from Ken. Crawford'sville, Indiana. I saw your video on the Keepers Hive. So here we are again, the Keepers Hive. Thanks for that and wondered if you lost one of your queens in the dual Queen Keepers Hive setup,

where the workers share the other Queen's pheromones to suppress laying workers' reproduction in a queenless side. So something I noticed last spring. Well, let me go ahead and I'm going to answer the first paragraph. One of the triggers for your bees producing a replacement, queen, swarm cells, is a reduction in the queen's pheromone. Queen mandibular pheromone. It's called QMP. Now when they have that, it's because the colony is so big, that pheromone is spread B to B to B physically from B to B through that colony.

When that pheromone is thinned out because there are so many bees, the population is so high, they start to make preparations to divide this overly populated colony. So would this pheromone from one side, the Keepers Hive, with a queen right box over here, and a queen excluded keeping the queen over there, over here on the other side, they've lost the queen, which has the high potential to happen, would the pheromone from the remaining queen spread through both boxes

and into that brood over here and suppress their desire to replace their queen. And in theory, no. They would be apt to, with a low queen and abelifuramon there and sensing the loss of their own queen, which they do almost right away, they would then go ahead and make preparations to replace the queen. And that means using eggs that are there, building a queen's cell around young larvae, multiple cells usually as a emergency replacement, right? So there's something called supersedeer cells and there are emergency queen cells. Because they're unplanned if something instantly or suddenly happened to the queen and she died, they're an emergency cell. They sometimes happen in the middle of the brood area because

that's where the eggs are. That's where the young larvae are that have just emerged hatch from eggs and that's where they build them out. If it was long-term planning and the queen were slowly, you know, getting bad or they're rejecting her, that's when you're you'll see a collection of queen cells along the fringe of those brood frames. And those are generally thought to be much healthier, larger queens. Okay, so you can suppress that if you wanted to, and now we're going to go on to this part. Something I noticed last spring, I was doing inspections in a remote ape area of mine, ran across a queenless laying worker hive with multiple eggs and cells, yada, yada.

It just so happened. I had some queen pheromone strips on me, put one in and the next week I came back to put in some fresh brood and notice there were no new eggs for the workers so I put a mated queen in the next day and it took I've never heard of someone using pheromone strips to suppress laying workers reproduction okay so there is something called temp queen now I get mine from better B there's probably other sources it's that queen mandibular pheromone QMP, it's a synthetic that imitates the queen's pheromone, which makes your bees think a queen is present, even if she isn't. And I've done a lot of fun stuff with those QMP noodles. The purpose of those is to put them in a hive in a colony that is queenless to keep the laying workers from

activating their ovaries and from beginning to produce eggs. So I've never used it to get laying workers to stop being laying workers by installing a QMP, Queen Manipular Ferramone, Temp Queen. Stuff is only like five bucks. I highly recommend you have some on hand. It's super handy. So, no, I've not heard of that. And the thing is, I'm on top of my bees enough to where they don't get that three weeks necessary before you get a bunch of laying workers taking over a colony. so again you would want to be inspecting your queenless colony you would want to know that it's queenless fairly early there are a lot of ways to know that from the landing board observations and of course from noticing that your queen's not laying eggs and then you'll get a timeline of how long she's been out of there

because it takes three weeks for those laying workers to actually begin laying eggs and they lay drone eggs so it's very interesting stuff and if that worked that's fantastic good news that's great and I'm also glad that they accepted the new queen so that's all good stuff QMP temp queen better be dot com tell them I sent you pay the same as everybody else who goes there shopping so the other thing is I've noticed that sometimes if I've had laying workers while we're talking about that this is unlikely that that's a condition you're going to find early in spring because if they made it through winter there has been pretty

in the colony replacing brood as it go through winter. You need a queen that's viable to do that. So one of the things that I like to do in spring if I want to make a split and introduce, like if I've got a colony that I just got rid of the queen or I just discovered that they're queenless and I want to restore a queen from a resource hive, which are my resource nucleus hives,

I bring them in strong. There's something called going in strong. And by that I mean strong pheromone, the new queen in a resource hive on brood, I'll bring three frames of brood with my queen on the frames and pull three frames from the colony that's queenless, saving the most healthiest brood frames that are there, the brood comb, swapping out the oldest, crappiest comb that I have at the same time. And I bring her in, there's no delayed introduction. She comes in with all this pheromone, all these nurses, all this brood, and a productive laying queen, even though there may be laying workers present, this knocks them out of the park. So I have never had that method fail, but you need to have a resource colony with a queen in it

in order to make that move and restart a colony that is missing its queen. So, but buying in a queen is one way to do it, but you can do it with free queens if you're creating your own resources as far as queens, nucleus hide, things like that. So something else to think about going into spring. Have a plan for that. Number six, this comes from Brian, Wilbrum, Massachusetts.

Last year was my first year with top bar hives. Instead, I had challenges as a first year beekeeper. And a late season swarm, November, that led to the loss of a hive. I'm continuing my top bars this year. However, I did purchase a keeper's hive. I've also ordered poline bees through my local bee club. My understanding is that VsHBs are physically smaller than non-VSHBs. Is this true in all cases? And there are modifications needed to be made, are there?

So for the queen excluder to account for smaller V sizes, thanks in advance. Okay, so VHBs for roll. sensitive hygienic queens there are a lot of genetics going on there and they are not too small to be kept behind the queen excluders so you don't need to make any modifications that I know of boleine bees there is a group of beekeepers out there that are small cell beekeepers and they regress their bees in other words they kind of force them to go back to a tinier bee and if you add something like that that is extremely rare by the way and I will say that it's not scientifically supported

to have any impact whatsoever on the borough destructor mite reproduction in the colony. So forcing your bees to have smaller bees, smaller cells or starting with small cell foundation will not at least will not impact the borough destructor mite reproduction inside your colony. So yeah there's no distinction. There are lots of V.S.H. Linesh. and they perform just the same. So and if you want to know what size brood comb your bees would make on their own, let them work foundationless frames and then see what the sizes are and see what those are like. But I think if they are smaller at all, it's going to be micron scale differences, like not detectable. So now we are into the fluff section, the plan of the week, if you will, for what's coming up.

bad things are coming up here in the northeastern United States. I'm in the state of Pennsylvania and we're going down to single digits. That's right. I don't know what the wind conditions are going to be, but the good news is we have deep snow everywhere, heaped up against all the buildings, heaped around all the hives. I have a funny video, which I just might add at the end of today's video of a cottontail rabbit out there digging holes through the snow right in front of the beehives and getting down to the clover there. that's on the ground and it has some pretty interesting behavior so I'll try to toss that on at the end in fact to show you the noise makers that are getting my deer away from my feeders by the way once deer these are white-tailed deer northeastern United States once they discover a food resource in

wintertime getting them away from that food resource is a big deal it's a challenge but I did it So anyway, some of the things you can plan for, plan your landscape, you will probably want to plant some pollinator plants, even though you may not be able to do it on any serious scale if you just have a yard. But I'm trying to convert every part of every green space under my control into something that benefits wildlife and or pollinators. So I'm trying to get rid of regular grass,

so I'm doing low-growing stuff, and I'm starting as much as I can, but I'm finding my interior growing space is inadequate for the scale that I want to impact my environment. But you can start planting because some of the seeds that we like to plant outside have to go through something called stratification. That means they have to have a cycle into the refrigerator

or if you're like us out here, you can just put them in a protective container and put them right out in cold storage, which means any unheeded building. And so I've started some of my stuff. I started it too soon. are too big already. They should be going outside right now and that can't happen. So there's something called frost sewing your seeds, which means that the seeds have to be

broadcast after stratification while the ground is still frosty. In other words, that apparently makes openings in the ground that the seeds get into as the frost melts off. And then there they plant. So think about the plants. I'm doing a bunch of different milkweed, showy milkweed, swamp milkweed. I'm not, planting regular milkweed for lack of, I don't know what scientific term is for it, but I already have acres of it, so I don't need any more of that. So I'm trying to get the more exotic varieties. Why would I do that? Because some of the milkweed varieties bloom earlier in the year. So what I'd like to have in a perfect world would be a series of milkweed plant

so that there is always some milkweed in bloom providing nectar for our bees. So that's something I'm working on. The other thing was doing flats for my grow room I went to the hardware store and found totes. The really shallow tots that are really long that are designed to keep things under your bed. Extra close. I don't know what people slide under their bed, but these shallow toats are very inexpensive and you can put a bunch of grow pots in those and then just pour the water into the tote and it feeds or waters your grow pots from underneath. And now we've got these big totes to carry things. around and those same totes because they're translucent they're semi-clear you could take those outside if you were starting direct seating outside you could just turn them upside down and use them kind of as cold frames or whatever people use from back in the day so anyway look at the shallow totes

super cheap they work great lots of possibilities also a reminder if you've got frames if you've got hive boxes and things like that get those things together as soon as you can glow them up and get them finish and stuff because what happens is we think spring is so far away but it gets here really fast you have other things going on and then you're out there painting yourself and the reason I want you to do it early I don't want your hive boxes to smell like fresh paint I want them to smell like things that your bees will like so anyway best finishes for your hives unless you're getting an indoor hive which I mentioned earlier those are bees wax sealed up and other things high temp stuff I don't know all the details

but you can use eco wood and things like that also but glow them up get them ready okay if you've got electric fences and heavy snows how effective is that electric fence right now not at all because the snow is packed it down what do you need instead noisemakers this is an empty box but these are my noise makers you're going to see these at the end of today's video these are the things that are making the sound 129 dbs I set them up to only go off. They're motion activated and I set them up to only go off at night. So they have four settings.

I don't, if you have them in the day here, especially with the wind we have out here, they'll just go and go and go. The solar power keeps up because they only go off when there's motion and they only go off at night. Therefore, they're charged much more frequently than they are discharged while functioning. And we face them away from our house and we don't even hear them in the middle of the night. So I'm going to include sequences of the deer slowly, initially walking away from that. And I overdid it.

I have a whole bunch of them out there. But those are called solar alarm lamps. I'll give you a link to that. They're easy to find. For some reason, they're changing them out to another type. That I don't like. So I'll give you a link to those alarms. But those are a good backup.

So in other words, if you've got an electric fence, like heavy rain, tall grass, all these things can impact your electric fences effectiveness. So let's stress out some wildlife with some motion detector alarms and get them away. And it works, even works on raccoons, and it works on possums. But those don't seem to be much of a problem. Skunks are much tougher, but skunks don't like white light.

The deer, you can put floodlights on them when they come up to your bird feeders and they don't even care they stand right there and feed for hours at a time they had to go clear your entrances pull trays if you have them it's something that even when we get them and it's so convenient they're part of your hives getting out there in the gold and pulling the tray out and scraping it out what are you going to scrape it with your hive scrapers these plastic things are perfect for it so um keep your entrances clear, your trays clear. The good news is the trays don't have any water in them. So that's new, actually, this year.

Last year, they had quite a bit of condensation making it down into the trays, which caused a bunch of mold in there, which is one of the reasons you have to actively participate in cleaning them out unless you have a bunch of grand monkeys that you can have over and give them each a nickel or something that they think is really valuable until people come through and ruin your workforce by handing them dollars for nothing. not mentioning any names. Okay, so pay attention to electric fences, alarm systems, pull trays, and prep frames and foundation for spring.

Some people are using better comb and things like that. This is also a great time set up a little shop in your basement or some utility room and get those frames all set and ready to go. Because when you get into your hives in spring, if you find out you've got frames that are covered in mold or they're in really bad shape and you're going to have to run them through some kind of. kind of preparation cycle, you need fresh frames to put in because what are we going to catch in spring? Swarms. So I hope you're ready for that. So I want to thank you for being here with me today, and I hope that you learn something worthwhile. If you have a question on your mind or something that is just going on and you'd like to have me cover it or do a deeper dive on it, please go ahead and write that down in the comment section. Or once again, please go to my website, the way to be.org,

click on the page, mark the way to be, and submit your topic. Thanks a lot for watching. I hope you're staying warm and safe as these winter storms work are we through the northeastern United States.