The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A #298 spring super splits, strong new colonies one frame at a time.

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube: https://youtu.be/monJSUcPV7M

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday the 21st of March of 2025. And this is back here at Bkeeping Questions and Answers episode number 298. I'm Frederick Dunn and... This is the way to be. And then look at each other, being impressed and impressive. Look up... So I'm really glad that you're here. If we want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description below. And you'll see all the items that we're going to discuss. in order with some extra links and information as needed for each topic. So if you want to know how to submit something yourself, go ahead and go to the main website, which is the way to be.org and click on the page, mark the way to be. There's a form, you fill it out, and you submit your topic.

Maybe you just have a suggestion for me. I've got lots of those over the past week, so that's lots of fun. And if you have a question right now, and you're watching this and you need some real time response, please go to the Fellowship, the Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook. And then you can post pictures, ask questions, share ideas, and no politics, nothing, no hot button stuff, just bees all the time. And it doesn't matter what kind of beekeeping like to do. It's a mix of people, so I hope you'll go there. What else is going on? Things have gotten bad. Obviously here in the northeastern United States, the state of Pennsylvania,

where I live. What happened? Well, what we expected to happen. It got really warm. It got into the 70s. We almost set a record for high heat, almost. But then what's it doing? Look at this. 23 degrees Fahrenheit. That's minus 5 degrees Celsius. Zero mile per hour winds. That's one bonus. If it's going to freeze, 88% relative humidity. And the opening sequences, by the way, what is going on there? That is skunk cabbage. So I like to crawl around in the wetlands and get close-ups and see what the bees are doing. Because I wanted to know where this light-colored pollen was coming from because as you can see in those opening videos, it's piling into the hives the bees are with pollen. And they're getting it from skunk cabbage in the wetlands. So skunk cabbage is really interesting stuff.

By the way, I don't know if you realize that early in the year like this, it can push its way through ice and snow. How does it do that? Well, it generates its own heat. How much heat? 20 degrees higher than the surrounding temperature up to. So that means it can melt its way through the snow. And not only that, while your bees are flying out there and they can fly to it pretty cold.

They get inside, it's like being in a sauna. So imagine it being 45, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And yes, bees will fly in the 50s if it's sunny and if it's to a known source. And they fly in there, so if it's 51 degrees outside, we're talking 71 degrees inside the skunk cabbage. That is some fascinating stuff. So anyway, by the way, one of the reasons that the skunk cabbage heats itself up, heats itself up to get through the ice and snow, but also that warmth makes it spread its scent into the air so that what happens?

Pollination happens. And the bees aren't getting any nectar from it. They're just getting pollen. So right now, what's that mean for you? the backyard beekeeper. It means that we need to provide them with a bunch of sugar syrup if they're light. A lot of my hives are still jammed with honey. They're full. They're still sad. So I don't really have to add anything. And with attempts dropping like this though and the pollen all coming in, if you have a light hive, you run the risk of them starving out. This is a critical time of year

because of what the weather is doing. Going up into the 70s and dropping down the, sub-zero, the bees are challenged because they have brood and it takes a lot of energy to maintain their brood aside from the pollen, the proteins that they need to develop it. So you're going to have to pay close attention. You also may be wondering what kind of wildlife is out there. I posted a video that's pretty much guaranteed to go nowhere yesterday. And by that I mean, it's not going to get a lot of views. It's just an interest thing for me. and that's because I ask a lot of plant experts about things. You know, what do deer eat?

What do they browse? What are they going to damage? What do I have to protect? And so, for example, last year I planted a whole bunch of serviceberry trees and they weren't cheap. And I asked the guy at the garden center, do deer pay any attention to service berry? Do I have to do something to protect these trees? Nope, won't touch them, he said, with absolution. Of course the deer just browsed them all down to nothing.

Now I understand this is not a normal year. So the other thing is, Sumac, no one worries about Staghorn Sumac disappearing from the landscape. This stuff is a volunteer. It shows up all over the place, it's a native plant, and the pollinators use it. Now they'll say that the deer will browse their leaves. So do I have to protect the bark? No, deer won't touch it. So as with a lot of things, video.

definitely can settle a lot of discussions and arguments because I was told that the bark was only off of parts of the sumac because of antler rubs from the bucks during the rut when they're getting the velvet off of their antlers and that is not the case they are eating it and they've eaten a lot of them so I did a little test. I sprayed some of the remaining sumac trees with something called liquid fence. It is the stinkiest stuff on earth that I know of. So I sprayed that on the sumac that had not been browsed by the deer yet, and I let them finish chewing up the already destroyed sumac that already had the bark chewed off. And it worked.

The deer ignored the bark that was sprayed with liquid fens. So had I known ahead of time, that's why I shared it. See, that's why I made a video. Had I known ahead of time that the deer would chew off the bark and girdle those trees and kill them, then I would have spritzed it with that liquid fence and had them move on to something else somewhere else. So that's my sob story right now. Bears are out. Black bears.

Are they hitting beehives? Yep. So we had a bee breakfast on Wednesday and one of our beekeepers there had been visited by a bear who took a bunch of frames out of beehives, which is what they tend to do. They get into your hive, take the frames out, and then haul them off somewhere, and finish each. eating on them in the woods and a field or something like that. So the bears are out. So if you've got things that offend your colonies and your apiaries from bears, this is a time to check them out and make sure they're good to go.

And of course, remember, things could be different where you are, temperature wise, wildlife wise, and everything else, but you don't want to get on their list, on their shopping list, because mother bears are teaching their cubs where to go and what to get. And the cubs are not smart. They will go anywhere and do anything. So if you're going to put up an electric fence, this is the time. If you've got noise makers that surprise them, this is the time.

If you've got electricity near your apiary, as I do, they don't like public radio. So NPR. Put that on your radio and play that all night long out there. See how they like it. They don't like voices. So anyway, what else? Hood and Morganser ducks are on our pond. They're pretty cool.

So I was out there with a supervisor and taught them how to sneak up on a pond we can see ducks. The fox, they are out and about because what's going on now? They're going to be having their kits. And so they're going to be shopping for your chickens. Everything eats chickens. So watch out. Rabbits are out, of course. They've been out. They've been chewing everything. And this is weird now that the snow has melted away. It looks like the rabbits were able to chew trees two, three feet up on the bark, right? But they weren't. They were actually on the snow because remember the snow was deep. So that was interesting too.

Possums are out running around. O possums, people want me to say because possums and opossums are different species. But it is common to call an opossum, just plain possum. And the interesting thing we found, it looks like a coyote killed one and ate it. And I was showing that to my grandson. Do you know that they have more teeth in their mouth than any other mammal in North America? I thought that was really interesting and it's believable when you look at their jaws. Lots of teeth.

Deer mice, of course, are everywhere. Vols are out. Wood chucks are making and showing are already, so that's not good, just because they're going to dig holes and everything. And they're going to be munching on the plants that I hope to plant to benefit the pollinators. The woodchucks are my number one muncher of sunflowers and everything else that I hope to grow. So what else? We've got the woodchucks, which also, by the way, are called whistle pigs. I don't know where you live if you know that that's what they are. They're marmots.

So they're just giant ground squirrels. And also, I found out if you chase them and there's a tree nearby, they run right up the tree. So they can climb things. So here's the thing, the week ahead. So I know this should be part of the fluff section at the very end, but I just wanted to open with it because it's that important. A lot of people will think that their bees have made it. A lot of people will see or have seen activity on their landing boards last week when it was nice. and warm and they get a false sense of confidence about their bees and actually this is crunch

time so we're in March we've had snow here as late as April and your bees can starve out easily right now so you need to monitor them please make sure that they have if nothing else sucrose as a backup that is their energy source if they don't have that and they run out they cannot forage for the resources the colony needs in order to preserve the brew that they're currently developing. So please be on top of your hives knowing what they need. It doesn't mean you have to open them, but you should see if they're heavy. And also landing board observations. That's pretty much it.

So I think that's everything for now. I'm going to jump right in with question number one, which comes from Khalid from Greater Boston, Massachusetts. says, I have a question about feeding sugar syrup to my bees. I overwintered my colony with a super full of honey. Can I let them feed on the honey from the super now that the winter is coming to an end, which I don't mind at all? Or do I have to feed them sugar syrup and take off the honey super?

Okay, so this is Massachusetts, by the way, so they're northeast of us even. I would not pull any honey off your hive right now. In fact, these warm-ups give your bees an opportunity to reach the honey that they otherwise couldn't when they're in that winter tight cluster. But with the momentary warm-ups, they can spread out inside the hive, and it's my goal personally to have them use up the honey that's in there from last fall. I don't particularly like that honey that much anyway because it's golden rod and aster's has a tendency to set or crystallize. There's a lot of granules in it, so it's really good for the bees. I say leave it on. The other thing is right now we don't want to be pulling our hives apart yet. It's too soon. So you don't need to add sugar syrup unless the hive is light, they're starving, and you need something else on there.

A lot of people that I've spoken with still have their fondant packs on. That's good to leave them. No reason to take them off. That can result in emergency resources for your bees and be a great resource. If you just want to swap it out because, you know, you have ants in your pants. and it's above an insulated and recover, you can do that, but why waste it? Why not let them keep using that? Because another thing that happens this time of year with, think about it, really cold mornings, really warm afternoons, there's going to be plenty of condensation inside the hives,

which means there's going to be plenty of liquid there for your bees to use and metabolize fondant. And if you've got dry sugar, sugar bricks, things like that, we also spoke with some of our members that had sugar breaks or candy boards on top of their hives. And the bees are consuming those. They need a lot more water to consume the resources and metabolize those from candy boards than they do a fondant. And of course, the easiest for them to metabolize would be the syrup. And there's another syrup that we tried out this year,

or that we're trying this year. And it's the easy feed from hive alive, so that's just an invert sugar. And which means that it's already ready for them to metabolize quicker and everything. so it's a boost of energy kind of deal. So we can check that out. But anyway, that's what's going on with that. Sugar syrup, but don't pull off your honey soupers. If they're there, let your bees use them.

That's just my opinion. If you want to harvest them and take them, you can go ahead. But I leave them on for the bees because the bottom two boxes are for my bees anyway. Question number two comes from Jason. So I lost a colony and opened it up, and it was soaked. I had insulated the top with two layers of double bubble, had small spots of brood, lots of pollen and bread. So bread is pollen that has been processed by the bees.

So fermented, so it's called bee bread. Anyway, loads of honey and they never even got into the upper. But was alive in December. Do you trash all the comb? Let it dry and use for resources, drain and use for meat. Thanks for your time and thoughts. Okay, so here's the thing for Jason. Let me just hit on the very last comment there, the mead.

That's one of my bottles of mead right there. Some people think that, well, if you have really bad honey or honey that you don't want to use for anything else, let it turn into mead. And I say, no, you want to use really good honey for mead, not the cast-off stuff. So there's a lot of things you can do. So a lot of people are dealing with deadouts now. And also let's address, why is it wet in there? it's wet because they died and there's a bunch of honey and everything left in there which of course

does what at night freezes or gets cold right and then the warm up comes and now it's still cold while the rest of the world warms up condensation forms on it and if there's a dead cluster of bees they can't warn themselves they can't dry out and so they're just a source of condensation and then ultimately mold and mildew so you want to get those dead bees out as quick as possible Also, you can pull the honey, inspect brood frames, inspect brood areas, and kind of do some investigating and find out why those things died. Look in the cells and look for little granules, little deposits, something called frass, because you may have had a high population of rural destructor mites in there, which could be part of the reason why they died. And then you

can find evidence that they were searching for live bees to serve a a host because they're parasitic and they're going to die out without a host. So yeah, you need to dry it out. Here's the thing I want to caution some people about when you are cleaning up a hive after a dead out. A lot of people have plastic frames. Some people have flow hives. Now the thing with the flow hive is they have flow supers, flow supers with the flow frames should not be on your hives in wintertime at all period because that's for harvesting. It's not for brooding or anything else so the bees wouldn't have access to those in the wintertime. So those are off and should never be exposed to direct sunlight.

Plastic is really challenged when exposed to direct sunlight. So when we talk about airing it out, drying it out, things like that, you can do that, but try not to set if you have plastic frames or plastic foundation and stuff like that. Try not to leave it in direct sunlight. It seems like it's something you would want to do. Now the opposite is true. If you've got wooden frames or wooden boxes and things like that, the ultraviolet rays of the sun are great sanitizers.

by the way. So having your wooden wear exposed to sunlight is good. Plastic, bad. So we do. We want to clean it up, get those things ready because we don't want there to be a bunch of bacteria developing in there as the year continues and the weather warms, warmer weather, faster bacteria growth, right? So we want to get that cleaned up and you can cycle back the honey to your bees if you want to, your own bees. So the common. So the common There is going to be that once nature wakes up and nectar starts coming in and pollen starts coming in, they're going to pretty much ignore even their long-term stores. This is why back to the first question, I like my bees to use up whatever honey is still in there from the previous year

because I don't want it personally. The best honey for us here in the Northeastern U.S. is spring and summer. So you get clover and all the great stuff that happens in spring. Nice, light honey that doesn't crystallize as a mild scent, mild flavor. And this year I'm going to plant a bunch of buckwheat, of course, and we're going to see how that goes. But let last year's honey get consumed by your bees. So if you've got a light colony and you've got another colony that has a whole bunch of surplus, you've got another colony over here that's in your same apiary. There is nothing wrong with taking the honey from one

and putting it in the other. Now people will frequently say, can't the honey transmit disease? Yes, it can. This is why you need to understand the status of the the colony and why it died. You don't want to be spreading any disease through the honey, but there's another thing that I'm constantly reminded of, and that is the fact that your bees are flying into each other's colonies all the time. So that's why I say specifically your APR into your control. You don't want to open feed and let somebody else's bees come and get your honey. Anyway, who wants to feed the neighbor's bees? So, trash the comb, no, save it. By the way, you can render that stuff.

You can get the bees wax. You can put it in a pot of boiling water. Get a friar. Those things are dirt cheap. You crank that thing up to about 155 degrees, and you can melt all your propolis and bees wax in it and start to get that separated out, and then maybe get some beeswax out of it.

So don't just trash everything. The other thing is you can use the power washer to clean off your plastic frames and things like that, heat, all of that, melt it, get it ready, and then put it all back together without food and resources. and just have the brood comb. So leave the brood comb. If it's in great shape,

blow it out with low pressure air, rinse it off if you really have to. If there's something that you're worried about, mold-wise or something like that, it with a 10% bleach solution and then air dry it. It can smell like it came out of a chlorinated swimming pool and the bees like that just fine. So that's it for that.

Question number three. Oh yeah, so I'm going to reflect on a presentation that we had from our own beekeepers in our own association, which is the Northwest Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. And sometimes your best presenters, by the way, are people that are in-house, people that already belong to your membership. You don't need to bring in some presenter from out-of-state, from another country even to talk to you about bees

because some of the stuff is homegrown and really good. So I'm going to give a shout-out to Adam. He's a member of our club. gave a very good presentation, and it was a fresher in a lot of ways, because in the past, we talked about scientific beekeeping, which is Randy Oliver's website. And so I used to really use rapid rounds a lot until I came up with other alternatives for feeding my bees.

So rapid round feeder is still good. If you've got them, you can put solids in them, so sugar, fondant, you can put liquid syrups in it. So you can do a lot of things with a rapid round, and they're really good. So in the past, we recommended based on Randy Oliver's site that you could use one teaspoon of bleach and one gallon of sugar syrup. And that would sanitize the sugar syrup and the feeders, the drinkers that you put it in. So then you didn't have to scrub everything out. And so that was really good.

And Randy Oliver would often say, I wish somebody would do more extensive research. He didn't think that there was any damage to the bees or the microbiome. of the bee and things like that, but of course without research and controlled studies, you wouldn't know for sure if those things happened. Well, guess what? Our member, Adam, is doing and did a study for a year. And so the study was to see what would happen. First of all, bee's preference, brood size. So it had a control, right? A control of something without being fed anything at all. another would be sugar syrup a consistency of light sugar syrup which is one to one fed one colony of bees without chlorine bleach added at one teaspoon per gallon

and then one with that so all the controls the same in other words the water source is the same and then the amount of sugar added is the same and then the change is adding a teaspoon of bleach So what happened was that, and the study hasn't published, but they had stronger brood. But there was a side effect to that too. That was actually very beneficial, which was interesting because what Adam did is he got a hemocytometer. What is that?

Well, that's a slide that you used to count cells underneath your microscope. And you put that on there, what do you think he was looking for? Nozema. So what are the things I've talked about in the past? Nozema control, but we used something called Hive Alive for Nozema Control.

So that's what this stuff is, and they have published studies about it. And that's why actually I liked Hive Alive. It had published studies where compared to a lot of other feed stimulants and supplements for your syrup and stuff like that, really had no proven benefit. And we had a bunch of people saying, well, I think it does better for my bees. I think it's great to add to sugar.

I think it's great to add to sugar syrup. But I did those control tests long ago and high of the life is okay, but that's because they've got proven scientific research and studies that were published and peer reviewed and all that stuff to show that it had an impact on nozema spores. Other nutrients and feed stimulates had no scientific support to live up to the claims that a lot of people were making. So this is interesting. nozema spores were reduced by the presence of you guessed it chlorinated bleach in the sugar syrup so that was very interesting stuff and I can't imagine anything much cheaper than bleach now some of you may be asking as we did what kind of bleach should we use and you want the

bleach that has nothing else in it you want bleach that is designed to be a sanitizer That's it. There shouldn't be anything in it to make it splash-free. You don't have the big concentrates and things like that unless it's nothing but bleach or 99% bleach or whatever. So we're also going to talk a little bit about that because I had some ideas that are not proven out yet. So I'm not going to discuss them here yet, but I thought maybe we should be adding sanitizing capability or additives to that sugar syrup that's already approved for human consumption. because bleach is really technically not approved for human consumption, which wouldn't matter anyway because you're not feeding sugar syrup on your hives.

If you've got honey super zon that are going to produce honey that are good for people, this is something else that we need to think about. So anyway, that bleach seemed to have similar or equal control over those mesospores. Has something like hive alive. Now, High of Life had other ingredients in it, so it's a nutritional supplement as well. There's clearly no nutrition in bleach sugar syrup. Sugar syrup is considered a carbohydrate and energy resource. It's just like you or I consuming high sugar content, food that would give our muscles energy

to do what we need to do. So that's very interesting, and when that publishes his research paper, I will be sure. I've already asked Adam if he could come on and do an interview. and we'll talk about his research and the controls and the results and everything else because very easy, very accessible, promising stuff. So I'm very happy about that. Question number four. This comes from Clyde. It says, FYI, I hope you comment. I put, okay, well, I'm commenting. So I put pollen substitute A-23 out this AM as the bees were looking to be active. While observing a little later, I was head-buzzed as I observed a forager, hauling in golden-brown pollen.

No dandelions yet. My local experts are perplexed, however. I found a pod on a stick or plant, either multifloral, rose, or similarly blackberry. Okay, so this color of pollen, this comes up a lot. Now first we're going to talk about the pollen substitutes, which a lot of people are going to have and going to put out. while they wait for the environment to kick in. Now I put out AP 23, which is sold by D-A-D-A-N-T, and I put that out because I thought my beads would be going for it as they have in the past, and they didn't. So why didn't they? Because they were finding all this pollen.

So I tracked down the wetlands and I went into the areas where the skunk cabbage was and I found out that the beads are just rolling out of there. So they have all the pollen they need, naturally. therefore they're not after a pollen substitute, which is not pollen. But there are, depending on where you are, you may have a dearth. You may have an area where it's warm enough and your bees are flying and they're trying to brood up but they can't get a protein to kick start it. So you get a chance to put out a dry pollen substitute.

There are three top tier substitutes available. So I'm going to mention all of them. AP 23 by Dayton, Megabee, which comes from BetterB. BetterB also, by the way, publishes a a recipe for mixing that up with your sugar syrup and adding it in there. I don't personally do that because I offer things free choice separately. So we also recently had this discussion amongst our beekeeping fellowship that, you know, when you buy a sugar supplement or a candyboard or something like that that has a whole bunch of things mixed in it already that are supposed to

boost your bees, well, you just made them consume whatever that is. They had no choice. If they want the sucrose, they had to also ingest whatever supplemental proteins and things like that you might have put in there. So my suggestion is always, for example, let's say we're making our own sugar breaks. And we want to find out if the bees are going to consume one more than the other based on supplements that we put in it. Put one that is nothing but sugar and water until it blocks up and becomes a sugar break. And then let the other one be the formula that people think is going to be much more appealing to your bees. Put them both on the hive. together side by side identical with the exception of one has additives and one does not see what your

bees go for you might find that they go after the one that does not have any additives in it so easy backyard tests but i want to address the golden brown thing so mega bee also comes from and that's very pale and then ultra bee which comes from man lake so between these three how significant are the differences in their performance under laboratory conditions where they were tested. And the testing was done to see if the bees could brood and rear young, right, on a pollen substitute without real pollen being available. So that's where they came out with AP 23 being the top performer. Remember, all we're doing is supplementing what they're needing from the environment. So if it hasn't opened yet, if the pollen isn't available, then we

supplement just to keep them gone so they don't start about so they don't cannibalize they're young we don't want them to do that but i would suggest uh going with whichever of those three has the best price point right now whoever can get it to you the soonest if you need it and don't have it so the other thing is even when they get the ap 23 this stuff is very pale um it's almost just like chalk remember yellow chalk not white chalk. It looks like yellow chalk from back when those of us who didn't have white boards and smart boards, when we were little, we had chalkboards. So, but when they move that on to their bodies, when they move it back to their hind legs, so the corpicular, where they pack on the pollen and then they fly back, it does change to a brown or a light tan or something in between that.

So it sounds like they were just bringing back the AP 23, and it does, it no longer looks the way it does when it's untouched by bees. But when you go and look at the landing boards and see what's going in, I've seen some tan pollen coming in too. But tan to brown is what normally shows up when you're using AP 23. It also looks the same when you're using megaby, and it also looks the same when you use ultra bee. So I think it's just the substitute that's coming in. And it's just darker because what do they do? They amended that with their own honey or nectar. And, uh, That's what's darkening it up. Question number five comes from Darlene from Phillipsburg, Montana.

I have a bee hive, I want to re-queen because my current queen is a spicy queen. And the bees follow me all over the yard if I open the hive for inspections. But I have a hard time finding the queen because she's small. I'm thinking of splitting the hive in two weeks into two boxes and then wait two days. Whichever hive makes a queen's cell will be the queenless hive. My question is, can I take those frames and add them to another hive with comer genetics? Do we need to do the newspaper method in this situation? First of all, I love the queen finding challenge, so I'd much prefer that you could find the queen.

And then there are some things to think about before you do that. Since we're counting on what's known as a false swarm or a walkaway split, right? There's no mention here that they are already building queen cells. If they are, then this is a great thing to do. If not, I would like you to wait. And I know she's spicy, but I would like you to wait until you see them building queen cells or until you start to see plenty of drones on landing boards flying, leaving, coming back. The reason is we count on them to be able to mate once they come out.

So let's say you did an inspection on a super hot day. So what's a super hot day and what's the best time to do an inspection? When it hits the 60s and sunny, that's my, because we're queen hunting now. We're going to expose the hive. We're going to keep it open for a while until we find the queen. So I have my method for that. I also don't like to bring, so let's say you have a deep brood box and that's where you're going to be hunting for your queen. Just hypothetical because there's no description in here about the box configurations.

and we're going to move, we're going to split up the resources, the brood and everything into another box and we want to move the queen out of the hive that we're trying to get to re-queen itself. So but we want to find the queen. So we can do this in a way that gets rid of those hot genetics, right? So we can get rid of that queen totally. So you go in there and here's I'm going to mention a tool that a lot of people don't seem to like. I like it. It's super handy, and it's called the Hive Butler. So if you don't know what a Hive Butler tote is, please look it up. Somebody else later today has a question about it so we can talk more too.

But often people, when you see them doing an inspection, you'll have a rack on the side that clips onto the side of your brood box, and that's a frame holder, which is decent. and you keep your frames in order. So I understand wouldn't this be better if I just went out in the V-yard and demonstrated it? I would love to, except that it's freezing outside. So unlike other people who get to go outside

and make videos of actual bees, I have to sit here and talk about the theory, so that's what we're doing. Anyway, so we put the frameholder on the side. What's my favorite frame holder? It's a heavy-duty wire frame holder that is completely enclosed. And it's a...

supports three frames and none of them can fall through. Okay, but after saying this, I no longer use them. But if you get a frame holder, make sure it's one that is very well made. The last thing you want to do is be putting a frame of brood out there and have it fall off your frame holder and hit the ground. Now, there are other demonstrations that I've seen where people pull the frames out full of brood and they lay it right on the ground and tilt it. Or they'll put the lid upside down on the ground, set it on end, and lead it against the side of the hive. Personally, if I'm your mentor, I do not want you to do that. I don't want any chance that the queen can walk off of your frame and depart your hive, right? Because the goal is to find the queen.

So that's what I'm about to describe. So let's say you don't have a hive, Butler, Toat, then please get a deep, empty box that matches the size of the one that you're working and set that on a controlled surface. So not the grass. Set up another hive stand next to you. Put your cover on, inverted if you want to, or another landing board, because we are, after all, making another colony.

So you would set that up there, keep it at the same height as both of these boxes. So it's just super convenient. And so keep in mind, if you put them in the hive butler toad, the bees are calmer. Why? There's no air movement around their sides and from underneath.

Bees that are flying by can't zip in and visit those frames as you're going to put inside a hive butler. The hive butler will hold 10 deep frames with extra space underneath because then if you pull a frame that just happens to have queen cells on it, they may extend a little bit below that bottom of your frame. The hive butler is designed to accommodate that and not smash that valuable queen cell that you have. So I like to start from the side that has the least activity in your brood box. Because we make an assumption that where your bees are concentrated, where the most heat is coming off, and you can feel the heat with the back of your hand, really sensitive. I like to do that when I'm teaching my grandson how to find the queen where we think it's going to be,

and I make him explain to me why he thinks she would be in one area. So then we start pulling frames that we're 99% sure do not have the queen on them. And so you take the frames, so here's the safety factor. If you stick it into a hive butler tote, the frame is fixed in its position and there's plenty of space also between the frames. So we have that bottom clearance and they're between the frames. So each frame we examine as close as we can and we put it in that box until we work our way through nice and slow. Light smoke, don't get your bees really upset because even over smoking can cause them to be defensive. So there are other things here. I don't know if Darlene used light smoke when she went into

her hive and got them a little worked up. Weather conditions can play. Overcast day, they're not happy. Windy day, they're not happy. Cold day, they're not happy. At a time when they don't have resources and they're not well fed can also make them not happy. They're desperate. They're defending their new brood in spring. So you can get a response from your colony that's not great. So back to the frames. We're pulling them out one by one and we're looking carefully for queens. And so we go through and what happens is if we do this nice and slow, the queen, if she's on one of these frames, tends to move away from the light and start to work her way along to the opposite side of the box that you're working. And eventually you'll get to where you've pulled your last frame if you still haven't found your queen when you do that

because they all went into the hive butler toe where they're nice and protected, you start to look at the side walls and the bottom board of the hive that you're working because the queen can often be right on the side. And so we need to move those bees around. The other thing is look at them to see if they're looking to attend to a queen because she could be smaller, she could just be dark. So then the next thing is, of course, if they're all spread out and you're 100% sure that the queen is not in the box,

now we go back to our tote and we start to bring them back. But before we do that, we look at the frames that have the most bees on them. And they gather around two things. One will be, of course, the brood. Any open brood and stuff, they'll be trying to protect and keep warm. They are also feeding that, so you're in the middle of kind of a critical time of year for them. The other thing is they'll also be around the queen. So there will be a retinue watching her.

She's critical. She is the future of the hive. So then you come along and you actually, find the queen. Now you have to have something to put her in or you're just going to kill her. What do we need if we're going to kill the queen? Drones around as a guarantee, right? Because remember, it only takes 15 days to make a new queen. So when you look at it and you're looking at the frames, we need eggs. We need workers, right? So we need nurse bees. So we need bees of all stages of development. And we want to make sure that we divide those resources equally. So if

there are eggs and open brood, those become the center of each colony as we replace our bees, right, as we replace the frames. And then we start to work out for that brood in the middle, and then we go out to mixed brood, resources. And this would be a great opportunity for those of you who have colonies that didn't make it, or maybe you save some capped honey and things like that. The capped honey can go in the outboard edges, so you have mixed brood and then cap honey next to that. So they have resources immediate to the nursery. Okay. And then so you fill it out, and then the outer most frames, of course, are ones that are still available for development, right, for filling and working. So we divide eggs and resources equally.

You need three or four frames of each in there. Now, you can also, I like to do this too, put frame feeders in. Not as frame feeders, though. I put frame feeders in mother load, makes really good ones. You can use those for insulation. So you can put those as the number one or the number eight position if you have eight frame boxes, number one and number 10 if you have 10 frame boxes. So that just reduced the space by two frames while they build back up.

Less space to manage and they work quicker in tighter spaces. Don't ask me why. And then you put it all back together. If you found your queen and killed her, they will go immediately into selecting an egg that they want once it emerges, once it hatches on the third day, after the third day, they'll start feeding and they'll decide which one of those is the most promising queen. I don't personally like the on-the-spot queen-wearing method.

And that's because you take your hive tool, you pick an egg in a cell or a day-old larvae or a very young larvae, and they smash down things around that, so they've destroyed the cells around it, the eggs around it, or the developing larvae that are around it, and they smash them all up, they tell the bees, this is the one we want you to build your queen cell over and to feed her and turn that one into a queen. I like to let the bees decide because the bees are going to pick

the nurse bees are going to select which one they decide to make into a queen. Okay, which they're much better at it than I am and that's why I like them to just pick whatever they want, put them all together. And since we're dividing these resources, if you had, let's say you had six and a half frames of brood and so we would take three of those and leave them in the spot where they currently are then we take the three and a half the more resources with bees on them and we put them in the new colony the new hive that we're making and the reason for that is they should have the extra resources as compared to the resident colony which all the foragers and scouts and everything that are coming and going will be returning to that spot so they

should have if there's a choice between leaving one a little weaker than the other leave the weaker colony in the current resident position okay and then off you go and yeah they'll go and mate with bees that have survived winter and off it goes just my method it's just what i would do a lot of fun easy to do but finding the queen i would really nitpick through there pick a nine-year-old that understands what queens look like they spot queen so fast it is really funny. I've had my grandson have a queen in a queen cage without my permission because he was certain she was going to get away if he didn't do it. I don't like them to handle my queens but he spotted her and so it went.

Moving on with question number six comes from Jason. It says, wondered what the benefit of the screen top might have. Let's see, what are we talking about? Oh yeah, for the hive butler. So we're talking about the hive butler totes again. they come with options. There are screen tops. By the way, there's a discount code, which is why Jason contacted me wasn't sure if it was going to work.

It's called Fred 5. So just Fred and the number 5. And I get nothing for that. I want you to understand. That's not an affiliate. I don't get anything. They don't send me free, Hyve Butler Toats for that or anything.

It's just something they offered. And of course, there's a payoff because I mention it like I'm doing right now, but it's a tool that I like and use and recommend. So they come with a screen top or a solid top. And what are the differences? Like, why would you even need one or the other?

And I looked at it because I wanted to see if that Fred 5 even worked and it did. So I put stuff in my shopping basket just to see if I could apply the code and it could. So, you know, 5%. Hey, it's 5%. There was a tote that comes with the solid top and the screen top. Now here's one of the things I really like hive butler toads for. First of all, I have one set aside as my go-kid. What's a go-kid?

Well, there are going to be swarms being reported soon. So everything you need to collect a swarm should be in your go-kid. So for me, it's a high-bubhutter tote with a screen top. And what goes in there? Pruning shears. One of those little flip-out saws that you can cut a tree branch, little loppers if you need them. And the reason for that is sometimes you're going to go and you're going to find that this giganto cluster of bees that they were talking about on social media, the biggest thing they've ever seen, certainly a million bees on the branch, turns out to be about this big.

Which is not necessarily an awesome swarm to get, but here's the good news. It's on a small branch, and if the people own the property and they better, because they called you to come and get bees. So do you own this property? Yeah, do you own this tree? Yeah. can I clip this branch that has all the bees on it? Now I could just shake them off, easy peasy, or I could bring the hive butler toad over there.

I could clip the branch carefully and just place them right in the hive, not the hive, but the hive butler tote, and then put the screen top on. Now that's why you need the screen top. They need to breathe. So you're going to have them in transit. And I highly recommend there are holes on the four corners. Make sure that this whole thing,

fits nice and snug and you close it up and you put it inside your vehicle and off you go it is so easy it is the quickest way to collect and hive a swarm when it's small enough to fit in there now i do like to put a couple of frames in there it can be better comb because the cells are already drawn it can be brewed comb that you have from one of your leftover cleanouts because then they'll cling to those The other good thing is when you have a hive butler toe, the interior surfaces are smooth. So it's very easy to pour the bees out of it and into your hive if you want to. I send them up on end and I put them right in front of the hive and I let them walk in. For some reason, I feel like, see, there's that I feel like.

They stay better if they seem to choose to go into the hive that I've set up for them. Now keep in mind, we took them many miles away from where they live. They don't know anything about where they are now. and they are very prone to move right into the very first habitable space that we present them with. The other thing is I find that putting that in direct contact with the landing board makes a big difference. They tend to explore and a couple of them go in. It's a lot of fun. You sit out there and drink your coffee or whatever you like to do,

and it's an excuse to sit around and do nothing while you study your bees, and then you watch them move in, and then you get a chance to see your queen too. So that's why they have the screen top. Now the other thing is when I'm managing the bee yard, because this year I'm going to do super splits. And that's just a silly term, but a super split is. Remember what I just described for the previous question was that you defied resources pretty much equally,

and you create a split that way. You can also put them in a nucleus hive instead of a full-size hive, but I'm putting them in a full-size hive and then putting spacers in there. It doesn't mean I don't like my nucleus hives, anymore, but it gives you a chance to keep them in a resident, big colony, and then just pull out those frame feeders later and install a foundation that's wax that you want your bees to draw out. So, once we have this, what is a super split? Okay. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to, because

the weather is terrible, as I mentioned, once I see that we have drones around. Now, I am trying my best to condense my apiary. I have a theory. I have a theory. that I'm over-foraging, that I have too many colonies here. I was trying to think back to 2007, 2008, when we used to get a lot of honey from just a handful of beehives. So I'm thinking that we're taxing the resources in our area too much, that it's not necessarily good to have a lot of bee colonies out there. So you could condens your bee colonies,

and the president of my bee club, I think, said this at one time. you'll get just as much honey off of six colonies in one spot as you would if you had 12 in the exact same spot because of forage availability and abundance and things like that. Now, I don't know if that's true, but it does make some sense that you could eventually tax an area by having so many pollinators there that they have to go farther for those resources because bees have to visit millions of plants. They do. So part of that is, that is, I don't want to say I'm lazy, but it can feel like work when you have too many colonies out there. We want to focus on specific hive types we're going to work with. And so the super

split, you're probably wondering, get on with it. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a hive butler tote, Fred five, get one. Tell them I said hello. I take that with me on the golf cart, whatever you use, a wagon you pull, and I'm going to go to every hive. And that's looking strong. And this is an example of where I can make a split from a smaller colony too. But remember, I don't want to take one colony and turn it into two. I'm going to take a frame from each colony. So I will have full frames of brood.

How many bees are on a single deep frame of capped brood? Over 3,000 on one side if it's completely worked up. which means now if I have a double-sided, single-deep, capped brood frame, I have over potentially 6,000 workers on a single frame. So bear with me. The minimum number of bees that we need for a use social group of insects to succeed in spring is 5,000. I don't know who came up with that. Somebody I must have trusted because I cycle that number a lot.

So now I have one frame, potentially 6,000 bees. Go to the next hive. Pull another frame. Make sure the queen's not on it. Potentially 6,000 bees. Go to another one, a really abundant colony, full of eggs and stuff. I pull one of their frames that's got the eggs on it. Or let's say I luck out and they actually have frames that have queen cells on them. I'm going to take that, put that in here. So then what I'll do is I will have five frames of full brood from a bunch of different hives. Now here's the other thing. When you do that and they each have nurse bees on them, there is no friendlier bunch of bees in your hive and more accepting cast of bees in your hive than the worker bees that are still in the nurse bee stage.

So when we put them all together, they don't fight. They don't do anything. They just accept each other and they just do all their stuff. So then we put that together and let's say I found queen cells great because that means they're on their way. We're going to have a queen emerging from that after their captain. They matured and finished pupating and then out they go and then it's going to be a perfect world because they're going to fly out and they're going to mate and they're going to come back. But I have a monster colony now without effectively reducing too much of the resources from any of the hives that I chose to pull from. Now you be the judge. You decide how many of these frames you're going to pull.

if you've got 15 fantastic super strong colonies don't pull 15 frames but you could pull five from each right five you know divide the group and just get five and create two five frame colonies that are loaded that would be a very powerful nucleus hive that you would have to expand almost right away and then you get really high production and also you created some congestion relief in the brood area of the colonies that you worked. So that might have helped remove some of the swarming stimulus. Now let's say that you don't have any queen cells. And when you do that, what did I say?

You need to have drones around because you want them flying ahead of time. But then you can just make sure that they have the opportunity to make their own queen cells. Because even while they're dwindling, remember, we loaded this colony with thousands of bees. So super splits. That's all I'm going to say.

There's super splits. Have I done that before? No. Well, yeah, I actually did once. When I started my very first observation hive, I went around and just pulled a frame from several different hives, put them all together in the observation hive, and populated it that way.

And it made a really strong super productive hive. And why did it do that? Because we wanted to see them construct a queen cell. We wanted to see them cycle through an entire year from start to finish. kind of thing. And that was back when things were, it was a tall, skinny one, and now I have a tall fat one that I'm setting up this year. So it's going to be different. So the screen top is ventilation and I just explained my super split and I hope that everybody does that because it's guaranteed

recipe for better than half a percentage of success. Okay. Question number seven comes from George. Look forward to your experiments on the wood frame queen excluders. You often say use a medium above your flow hive as a honey bridge to not use a queen excluder. Is the medium never harvested or managed? What management do you do with the brood box? Doesn't the brood box eventually become honeybound as well? Okay, so there's a lot going on in this, but I want to clear it up that when I say,

because I don't use queen excluders. The reason being that I did experiments with queen excluders years ago, and I set up syrup feeders, and I put queen excluders on them, plastic, metal, all the different queen excluders that I could find at the time. And so the bees were already accustomed to, the foragers were going in, getting sugar syrup and flying out to take it back to their hives. And then I put queen excluders on top of each of these polystyrene feeders that I had. And then what we observed was that, and I videoed it, the video is still on my YouTube channel,

a lot of the workers either had a lot of trouble getting through the queen excluder or couldn't get through the queen excluder at all and gave up. So that led me to think there is a percentage of foragers in your hive that can't navigate the queen excluder. They can't get through it. Or if they do, they're really wearing themselves out using a lot of effort and there's a lot of wear and tear because they're rubbing their bodies to squeeze through it and so on. So I decided looking at the way colonies are when they're left on their own. You would see that the bees would have their brood starting somewhere near the entrance. And then it would cascade out from there, mixed brood and resources, and then ultimately honey

and then stored honey. So open honey, then capped honey, and the long term capped honey. and then new frames, new comb being built by your beads in there. And so long as the space had an area to expand, off they went, and the oldest, darkest comb was always near the entrance because it was always for brood. And it seemed weird, too, because what's the dirtiest part of your beehive, especially if it's a vertical space? The dirtiest part of your hive is the brood area.

That doesn't seem backwards to you. That seems backwards to me. because the bees from outside or traips them all over and they go through the brood or they go up the interior walls which is the best move but everything from up above that drops down that's a tritis or anything else tumbles along or gets moved along your brood area which i find really interesting but anyway this is what led me to use what i call the honey bridge and yes i never extract the second box from any of my hives So the first box is a brood box. The second box is honey and resources for the bees alone. And that's our wintering configuration, which leaves me to what I should probably talk about

and have talked about before, but getting your bees back down towards that entrance in spring without letting them become, as described here, honeybound. So I want the brood to be back down near the entrance when things warm up, and I want them to backfill in a perfect world with capped honey, of course, and resources. And then what they do beyond that is for taking off. So stuff that you want to keep for yourselves, and that's the honey you want to sell, and things like that is the third box and up.

So this year I'm doing something different for the first time because depending on the weather conditions that you have and how prolific your bees are, how productive they are, they can be very stubborn or very slow at moving their, brood back down to that single entrance so this is why we fool around with entrance sizes venting no venting insulated not insulated which we did all of that through this winter two and by having a reduced entrance they move closer to that with her brood sooner as things heat up so then they back fill it and so

we've got this kind of accordion thing going on through the year so this year as I've mentioned before and I'll just touch on it again right now I'm going back to using a queen excluder temporarily so how do I use it I'm going to get my bees out of that top medium super earlier and get them down into the deep brood box sooner so I have to find the queen again now finding your queen is important in just about everything I do with bee management here I need to find the queen and I need to I'm using the wooden framed queen excluders which are metal, expanded metal, not expanded metal, but the queen excluder itself is metal, and so it's easy to measure and they hold their shape really well, and the bees get through them better than some of the

plastic queen excluders. Someone else mentioned that the edges where the metal goes into that wooden frame could be a place for small high beetles to hide. So I suggested melting beeswax and dribbling it into those edges before you put it in if you're in an area that has a lot of small high beetles, we can keep those out that way. And she suggested that you would use food grade silicone to seal it up, kind of like tub and tile silicone seal, and you just close up those gaps that way. So however you do it,

I thought melting wax would seem more bee-friendly, but if it's inert material once it sets up, it really doesn't matter. Moving on, I get the queen. You can have to handle the queen. So highly recommend if you're not comfortable doing that, get whoever your mentor is to teach you how to handle the queen so you don't damage her. You have to get her down on those lower frames, which probably has some brood in there anyway. So we're going to pull that top box up.

We're going to find the queen if she's up there and that's where all your brood is. And we're going to put her down below. Then we're going to put the queen excluder back down on top of now your bottom box. Some people never deviate from this. There are some people that practice in my state single deep brood management all year long. And then they supplemental feed like crazy, which goes back to this here. What if they backfill and become honeybound in the deep brood box? So in a way, the queen will be down there.

She'll start laying a bunch of nurseries. We'll follow her, even if there are no active brood down in that box. And then that, those that are up above will emerge from their. cells and they'll migrate down through the queen excluter and join everything down below. And then they'll backfill that medium super creating a honey bridge again with nothing but honey. And once it's all capped and everything, guess what, Queen Excluter can come out again. Or if you decide that you like the Queen Excluter, that you like the idea that you know exactly what box your queen is in all the time, which is why some commercial keepers do that practice.

So I'm talking about Steve Rapasky. So then he just knows. so he's not wasting a lot of time trying to find out which box is the queen in and hunting for her and things like that also manipulating frames and pulling honey and things like that no guesswork the queen is down below when you pull your let's say by some miracle they already had drone cells up in that upper box and here you put the queen excluder down and you follow my you know suggestion that you use a single entrance on that landing board the drones will be trapped above the queen exclusion but when you do your inspection you pull that in your cover the drones will be the first to fly out they're ready to go so i don't see that also as a huge problem drones have to emerge they have to be fed

they have to mature they have to you know be ready for mating so but that's what that's about and of course the thinking was that more bees will be able to pass more freely through and this may be why flow supers can fill up quicker on colonies that don't have queen excluders although the designers of that use queen excluders on all their hives. But remember, they've got a single box going straight into the honey super. So we're going to fiddle around with that this year. And I've mentioned it before. I thought I would mention it again.

Then I'm going to move the queen down. This is instead of rotating boxes. And then we'll see how that goes. Now the part about honeybound. Honeybound, depending on when that happens, what time of year? I actually want my colonies to become honeybound when at the end of the year, October, preferably. And that's because we're past the swarm zone. So here in the northeastern U.S., by the time October hits us, the bees are still, you know,

building resources for winter, and it's kind of like maximizing their resources. So I don't care that the brood area, the brood area where the queen has been laying her eggs is the last to kind of get crowded by honey and pollen and nectar and things like that. But if they did it, it's not the end of the world, because where's the brood now? On top of the honey. What are they going to be doing as soon as it gets cold? They're going to be consuming the honey directly under the cluster, and they're going to open up those cells, clean those cells out. So it's nourishment for the bees.

They cleaned out the cells, and now they're laying eggs, and your fat-bodied winter bees are taking over, tending to open brood while they're in the winter cluster. So for me, that's extra credit for the bees, extra resources, and they consume it quick enough that they're going to be able to go right back into brooding. So our lowest brood area historically here is the end of November, the 1st of December, that time zone, which can be completely messed up as it was this year, when heavy weather showed up early and ruined everybody's plans.

Okay. So Honeybound, not a problem at the end of the year. early in the year, I recommend pulling frames. If you've got a fully kept frame of honey that's in your box and they're definitely crowded and they're needing space, you pull the frame, extract it frame by frame by frame, extract the honey in spring and put drawn comb, freshly extracted drawn comb right back in its place. And this is why saving your best comb for that is a really good idea because you can do that and relieve the congestion and keep them in production without being Honeybound and crowded and swarming. So you can make a split. You can do a lot of things. All right. Number eight, this comes from Alvin from Yonkers, New York. Hey Fred, I have a hive in a shed that I overwinter this year.

The entrance is extended a few inches and then about three to four feet up. So the entrance extends a few inches and then goes three to four feet up. That's so the bees will exit near three. the roof. I'm planning to make a split this year. If the hive's entrance is two feet away, will they share foragers or could that cause robbing? Also, I notice the entrance extension was covered in propolis, but no burricom, even though it's much bigger than bee space. Is it unusual for the bees not to expand outside the hive box? That is not unusual. It is exactly what they do. So for those we're trying to visualize what we're talking about,

because remember this is also a podcast, so you can Google the Way to Be podcast, and you can listen to this instead of watching. There are lots of observation hives. I love observation hives. I pay attention to how they're made. If I go to a nature center anywhere, I was in one up in Vermont by White River Junction.

I thought that thing was awesome. They had a two and a half inch diameter clear entrance to their observation hive inside their science center and it extended several feet horizontally to the outside so the bees don't build burcombe in there the bees want to control airflow so that's the most important thing to them the cavity they occupy is where they're building honeycomb burcombe bridge comb brace comb all the other honeycomb types that there are so when they get out into these spaces and so one of the things I always am curious about what's the

longest tube clear tube that we could have going into an observation hive. One of the reasons that the Dice Lab at the Cornell University's Honeybee Studies Lab, which is the Dice Lab, they have observation hives in there and they have their entrances mounted to benches. And I was asking Dr. Thomas Seeley how long these entrances are and they're four feet in some cases, at least when he was there. And so and they have little vent holes in them. So condensation doesn't build up and make it so that you can't see inside the access thing. But it allows you to observe bees coming to, you know,

leaving and arriving to the colony, and you get to see them bringing pollen in. You get to see their behavior. You get to see them interact with each other. And you also will notice when you have a robbing event, or it's also a very long corridor that a wasp or some other intruder has to follow, and their opportunity to interact with guard bees is increased.

So the longer they have to travel to do that, the more chance your bees have to defend the colony. So it's an interesting part too because the vertical part of this, there's a bee tree. I want to say it was at colonial Williamsburg. So in other words, this is where you have a lot of colonial reenactors and things like that. And there was a bee tree there and they were concerned about visitors walking right by this big knot hole in the tree that the bees were coming and going from and somebody who gets stung, somebody might be anaphylachian. So they wanted to kill the bees or remove the bees from the tree, which turned out to be a huge challenge. And instead, what they did was what's kind of described here.

They ran a snorkel several feet up the tree from this opening on the side, which is right near eye level. And they covered it with synthetic bark. So they made it look good because it's important if you have some kind of theme park or whatever that things look good. So the tube went up into the tree and then their exit was up there. So it came up and then it angled down and the bees just continued to occupy the tree but now their flyway was well up and above people's heads and guess what? It worked. So if you've seen that or you've been there and noticed that modification because let me tell you what,

you have to be looking for it because it actually looks like tree bark. They didn't just like clamp a tube on it that you can see the bees coming and going. they made it look like part of the tree. So if you've seen it, please make a comment down below. So your bees, you can have a snarkle situation or a plenum situation that your bees travel once they've left the hive cavity, and they'll come and go through that. And moving it just up and over people's walkway is very effective in keeping them from being bothered by the bees, and the bees bothered by people, by the way. The other thing that was cool was depending on the diameter of the riser, if it were like a three inch diameter transparent riser the beast didn't walk up it they flew up it

so once they come through the little inch and a half tube that was lateral and then they made the 90 degree elbow and then they went up the vertical they flew up that so they didn't waste their time and energy walking that distance so really interesting and though they didn't propelize it just joints and things like that they do but they didn't try to build additional comb out there at all so it's really interesting. So what else would it be the foragers? So the other thing is I want you to think of it this way because this comes up a lot, you know, entrances right next to each other and having multiple hives in a row that look alike and then you learn that bees can distinguish up to four colonies in a row and go directly to one of four that they've come from.

but the other thing is look at these A-Z buildings, these hive buildings that have 40 colonies, shoulder to shoulder, tiered up directly above each other. They're jam-packed together for obvious reasons. They're in a cold climate. And these hives, the bees are going directly. Of course, they do things to the entrances to make them distinctive.

There's a lot of artwork going on there. Some of the visors, landing boards, landing pads, landing extensions, all slightly different because bees recognize physical configurations very distinctively and they fly to what they know and there is drift at the same time so i personally do not worry about bees zipping into other colonies i already know that they're foraging and they're not faithful to the colony that they departed that they can zip into some other pheromone line that they just decide sounds or smells interesting and they go in and they join another colony So long as your colonies are going well and strong and you can see the numbers in them and that they're active and they have brood and that they have an active queen and she's doing everything she's supposed to do, I don't worry too much about how close they are to each other.

Keep in mind another example of colonies that are right close to each other. Sometimes, well, let's take Michael Palmer. Let's throw him under the B-Bus. So he will sometimes have, you know, nucleus colonies just jammed right alongside each other. He's got combined colonies that are nuclei that go together and form a double column and things like that. But there are often entrances for separate colonies right adjacent to one another in the same like 10 frame size base brood box. So same thing. You know, that's basically what should be one hive is now two. And the only distinction is that we have separate entrances.

and your bees, both colonies, are developing healthy and are populated well. So I don't personally worry a lot about separation. Now that I've said that, I have to throw a monkey wrench in. Colonies that are set out well apart by themselves tend to do better. So the more separation you have, the less fiddling around there is when your bees are foraging in and out, coming back to the colony, finding it. That's why landmarks are important. This one's by a big rock.

this one's by a tree or a shrub or a fence post. Bees recognize landmarks and navigate by landmarks really well. So bee colonies and hives that are out by themselves, the more separation that there is, they tend to be more efficient. That doesn't mean that you can't have them right next to one another. And they already know that they're sharing resources. They're just, it's a mosh pit.

They're just coming and going anywhere they want. They're joining up. But what really matters is how strong the colony is. so and that they're healthy. So I don't personally worry about that. Last question of the day, question number nine. This comes from Gary and it says I built two of your horizontal hives with the shim boxes underneath. I was curious if you had any videos on your channel that went over the actual functionality of the shim box.

All the videos I came across seem to show your hive without it. That's true. okay so anye is there a reason it's not in most of your videos yes and I'm going to get to that just not being a smart alec here I'm just are there any accessories you would add to it or suggest like a screen for mites ventilation yes we have a screen version with removable trays and ventilation single entrance ventilation these are my first two hives I am brand new to be keeping it any advice or help would be be awesome. I was also curious about burcombe. Would having the shim box allow the bees to build

comb below the frames and does this create a mess? Yes it does let them build comb below the bottom frame of the deep frame, Langstroth, and does it create a mess? It does not create a mess. Okay, so how would you do the entrance if you hope to possibly, now this is the cool part, right? And I wrote a message to Ross Miller this morning on this very topic. How would you do the entrance if you hope to possibly have more than one colony in a horizontal hive? Or would that not be suggested? Okay. So now I'm going to throw monkey wrenches in every direction. One of the things that holds me back on my long-length shroth hive, first of all, it's been over a year that Ross was bringing me one of the ones that was showcasing all the things we decided that they needed and it didn't pan

out and we didn't install it in the bee yard so i have one long lanksroth hive that was the original that all this came out of and it looks like a coffin and it's a cool hive and it's fun to work with and everything else but we want to do more with horizontal hives so the shim so for those of you are listening to this what's up with this hive what's up with the shim well they're made out a standard two by 12 stock so the side walls are two by 12s and then we added a two by four underneath of that for several reasons one being we wanted to have screen bottom boards as described here that would be specifically under the brood area we don't need screens that we can pull out or trays that we can pull out

that run the full length of the hive the reason being that most of the detritus most of the grooming off of varomites and things like that occur in the root area. That's where the varomites like to feed the most, of course. So those are all in the plans, and so we know that Gary knows about the plans because he followed them. So we're talking about putting up new plans, so there will be modifications coming out. And part of it is this idea of a two-queen system. So we also know that the Keepers Hive has a two-queen system, which I have, and then it takes advantage of the vertical stacking of the hive. We know that a lot of people just can't manage that, right? So once again, we're back to looking at horizontal hives. Two queen systems are not new.

A lot of people have horizontal bees, for example. That's Ricky Rourke. He has made multiple queen or multiple colony long langstroth hives so that people could use them for brood builders and things like that. I don't want to use it for nucleus hives where you've got six of them in one box because I just don't build nukes like that, but understand that they share the warmth generator from the adjacent colonies. So this is an advantage. So the other thing is with the horizontal, the long langs roth hive, the way it's designed and the way the prints are,

and they're free to you, by the way, and you can make your mods and build off of that all you want. they do keep the bottom very clean the only thing that happens is they will extend often drone comb underneath the standard deep Langstroth frames and that's perfect because we want to be able to cut comb off of that we want to be able to collect some people want to use drones as part of an integrated pest management so drones once are capped and they get the varroa destructor mice that are trapped in those cells so it's a chemical-free method of removing vera-destructor mites. The other thing is, and you get beeswax that you can then process and make candles from.

And so those extensions, they run down to the bottom, but they don't connect to the bottom. So it makes it easy. Pull it up. You've got this extension. You can cut it away or leave it. It's up to you. So it creates a deeper frame. All right.

And they keep it clean. So here's the configuration. I'll describe to you what I was describing to Ross today. So now we make a really big Langstroth, horizontal hive. And you know, sky's the limit, because once it's installed, you can build this thing in place. You don't have to move it around afterwards. So if this colony weighs 250, 300 pounds all by itself before you even put bees in it, that's great. It's a static mass that's going to help it endure, storms, wind, everything else.

And it's bearproof, by the way. So because the roof is heavy, everything is. is heavy. Now, so here's the thinking, just for those you're sitting and wondering, well, then how's it going to go? Well, we have an entrance at one end. And by the way, the entrance, I want to change, if it hasn't been changed already, we want it to be only three-eighths of an inch high, and we want that to be three inches long. Three-eighths of an inch high, three inches long for the entrance. Mice, foals, nothing can get into that entrance. Bumblebees cannot get into that entrance, and bees do freely get through that entrance.

So we would have an identical entrance at the opposite end of your long length Roth hive. And then my suggestion is, and you can do any modification of this that you want to do, you can get two by 12s that are 16 feet long for Pete six. Now, I'm not recommending you make a 16 foot hive, but you could definitely do an 8 foot hive or something like that.

And then so I'm recommending that we preserve the 10 frames. The first 10 frames would be all, brood and resources for your bees right that's your one queen system at one end skip over all that intermediate space go to the other end and now we have also a 10 frame deep langstroth frames and then a queen excluder that slides in that's in a wooden frame now we have this middle space uh you can move things over and have another entrance if you want to put them closer together but i say let them send out and store their resources in here and let their frames of honey move towards one another. So it's a two queen system. If we look at people that have used two queen systems with the

vertical configuration, they ended up with hundreds of pounds of honey. So they do produce more honey than these colonies would do independent of one another. And in a shared space, shared box, shared hive, shared stored honey areas. So we have storekeeper bees from each individual colony sharing the space, putting up their resources, and then going back through their queen excluders, and then we don't have any brooding happening that overlaps one another. And so for some reason, they also don't have one queen taken out the other queen because they can't.

So the colonies seem to get along. So I think they have to be started at the same time. Those who practice two queen management would understand more about that. But that's been my question right along and I've never done it. So I have to admit that too, that this is just experimental. But they say that the workers from both colonies will store honey together and share the honey resources. Now then wintertime comes along. What are you going to do now?

Well, now you have to pull your follower board, pull your queen excluder out, and you have to give them an extra four or five frames of solid capped honey to survive winter. And it would be much like if we were doing the vertical configuration where the medium is for winter per colony. Now we need resources for each hives on the end and we would pull out partial frames and we would of course harvest full frames of honey during high production. So you can, it's an experiment, you can play with that. But now we've got two colonies under one roof that are going to share a common wall or a common space. and share warmth in generated from the brood areas

because let's face it, the brood areas are the heat generators in the hive. That's where they're really keeping things warm, 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit over the brood, and then there'll be secondary heat from that passive heat that gets shared inside a well-insulated long-langstroth hive. So there will be updates to prints that are going to be on that page, which is on the website, The Way to be.org,

and the page is prints and drawings, for you. And again, you can't copy them and resell them or distribute them, but you can use them to build your own stuff absolutely free. They're no charge. Ross Millard has really taken off on doing a lot of that. And initially, we just did sketches and technical drawings, and then he's the one that does CAD and does all that computer-assisted drafting and comes up with the actual formal prints from that. So there are things in the works coming down the line. So there are configurations, that we want to work on. We have plans for things that are going to be available to beekeepers, and that's available to Queen System and a horizontal hive. You can definitely do it. Some people

do even more than that, multiple colonies in one horizontal structure. So, and the other thing is, my goal personally is to have these things. And I see big benefits in having your beehives inside buildings with the entrances going through the walls. And my goal is to do that. stalled because I'm too close to my property line so I don't think anybody cares but that's what's going on here so now we're into the fluff section so just as I said the beginning it is crunch time this is where your bees can starve and really let you down and where you can let your bees down if you don't provide them with resources to get them through a sudden cold snap followed by two or

three days of rain what does it hurt you to put a little bit of sugar syrup on there and keep them going now in the cover shot today I'm showing a picture of what this is just a standard you know student assignment book it's by elin and this is edition d a 4-0 this is not an affiliate thing this is just I want you to keep records see how this is you can do one of these for every year they're pre-perforated so that you can put them on your three-ring binder and it has assignments so when you have assignment area areas these are projects for you to do in your you might put recipes in here for if you're going to make your own fondant or something or if you're going to make your own sugar bricks or

something like that you can write down your recipes maybe you've got a project in mind there's spaces to sketch you also have calendars now the calendars are really important it doesn't matter that you buy one that's outdated these are super cheap so this is from 2020 but you can change that to 2025 and make it the month that you want What's really important is you document things like, when did you first see drones? When did you first see pollen coming in? What was the source of the pollen? What did I have to do for the bees?

And you document as much as you can about what's going on in your bee yards. So you have historical references that help you look back. Because what we're doing right now, this year is very different than last year. Last year at this time, they were taking pollen sub like crazy. They were all over it. There was a cloud of bees collecting pollen sub. Not one bee will land on pollen sub, and that's because they have plenty of stuff in the environment right now.

So some people also want to know when I do inspections, what am I looking for? I downloaded this sheet from Man Lake Limited. So if you just do a Google search for a hive inspection sheet by Manlake, this is what it looks like. it has all the checkouts if you're a brand new beekeeper i highly suggest that you get an organized hive inspection sheet some of it may not apply to you but to anything that's on here that you don't care about just don't market but it's a tickler because often you get in a hive you get busy you notice something cool and before you know it you've left the hive you've buttoned it all up and you totally

forgot to find out how are the food stores or you know where did i look for diseases and pests and things this does this hive have a history of chalkbrood in spring things like that so it's just a tickler sheet you can make as many copies as you want man lake offers them for free and uh it's just one of the most comprehensive ones that i looked at honey pollen everything else so get inspection sheets and you can punch those up and put those in here too so keep records i don't care if you only have one hive you're going to wish that you knew exactly when you installed that package or when you got that swarm or what was the origin what was the behavior what did the queen look like did i mark her you get the picture you need to make records and keep them so oh my shirt today i want to thank my cousins up in

Vermont because this is a flannel shirt from the Vermont flannel company. The reason I mentioned that is I used to get Johnson Woolen Mills shirts, shammie shirts from Johnson, Vermont. My dad did, not me. I still wear those shirts. Guess when I bought them? My dad got me a Johnson Woolen Mills shirt when I was 15 years old. Do you know I still wear it? So the reason I say that is Annette has one too. These are cotton flannel shirts, and I just wanted to give them a shout out because they gave it to me. So my cousins sent it to me, but they come from Vermont, 100% organic cotton. And one of the things that was funny that it says on here, it says, each side of the fabric is brushed beyond reason.

So I have to admit, super comfortable shirts. So I'm going to just give a shout out to vermontflannel.com. You want a shirt that's going to last you of other? very long time. This is it. Okay, just in case you're wondering. One to one sugar syrup, don't forget, one teaspoon pure bleach per gallon. That has a proven benefit. The bees go for it. If you put, this is funny too. I have water drinkers out already. This is another thing. You have to start establishing the location for a consistent source of water for your bees because we don't want them in the neighbor's swimming pool and we want to control where they go. And once they start going to a

resource, they continue unless the resource is absent one day. So it's up to you to keep that up. So if you add a little chlorine even to the water. So I put those, they have above ground swimming pools. You have blow-up swimming pools and then they sell these little tiny chlorinator tabs that you can drop in them, which keeps them from getting taken over with algae. Now another reason that those are good is it kills mosquitoes. Like mosquitoes will not lay their eggs and you won't have mosquito larvae in the water that your bees are using.

If you put that, I notice the bees are demonstrating a strong preference for drinking water that has chlorinated smells to it. So almost like city water. We don't have city water. We have wells. The other thing is,

it does not defeat my other project, which is having a water source in the middle of the apiary that is made of center blocks and rocks and concrete and I've been spreading moss on it. So I've been finding moss that's already growing on rocks. It's in the sun and I'm transferring that to my water feature because the bees like to land on mossy water and they like to drink from algae water. And I realize that's the direct opposite of what I just described in our bases that we put out that have the chlorinated water that bees also go for because here's the thing they go for both and i think it's for different reasons so they're still going to go after the water that seems

turbid that seems dirty that's got a lot of minerals in it and they will also show a preference for water that has some chlorination in it so it's very interesting to me i haven't you know don't have the ability really to solve that except that we need to offer choices to a are bees, just like the feed that's in the hive, give them choices, we'll find out what they need, what they want, and they'll take it. Same thing goes with water, and whatever you start with, stay with. So it's very good to do, and looking forward to that. So don't do splits, don't start taking apart your hives and stuff until you see the drones going until things are booming. Do your best and stay out of your hives, unless you absolutely have to, unless you think they're in real trouble,

make sure that they're fed. And that's just about everything. everything for today, so I hope we said something that was useful to you. And if you like what's going on here, please subscribe to the way to be. I want to thank you for being here, and I hope that your weekend is fantastic, and that next week has decent weather for you and your bees. Thanks for watching.