The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 304 swarms, splits, keeping your bees from going away and more...

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/hD0vyBIkfgQ

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, May the 2nd of 2025. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers. Episode number 304. I'm Frederick Dunn and... This is related! So I'm really glad that you're here. If you want to know we're going to talk about today,

please look down in the video description and see all the topics listed in order and some related links for extra information. So this is also a... podcast. I don't want you to wreck your car trying to look at a screen. So just Google podcast, the way to be, and you'll find it. It's on Podbean, but it's actually hosted on a lot of other podcast apps. So that should be easy to find. I know you want to know, first of all, what's going on outside? Well, here we go. 62.8 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's 17 degrees Celsius. It's actually really nice outside. 1.3 mile per hour winds, which is,

kilometers per hour, 92% relative humidity. Why is that important? Well, because it's going to rain. Storms are coming in. In fact, to the southwest of me, right now, the skies are turning slate gray. It's coming. Rain's coming. More of it. We've had lots of it. Anyway, swarms are reported in my area too. Where is my area? Northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. And a lot of beekeepers here have been reporting swarms already. And there's a bear, just down the road with a couple of cubs and they are staying away from my apiary. Public radio is on at night, along with my motion detectors, noise makers, and all that stuff.

So if it's warm after a storm, expect a swarm. So I have not lost the swarm yet. I'm on top of it this year. Yeah, that's right. It's true. So the other thing is, you may recall that a few weeks back, I frost-seated some clover and some buckwheat. And what is that anyway?

Well, while it's frosty at night and it's going to warm up and thaw during the day, you throw your seed around. And because there's frozen soil, it's open, little tiny openings there. And then when it melts away with the morning sun, the seeds fall into those little gaps and get watered. And buckwheat, that was premature. I took a gamble, took a risk on that. But you know what?

The clover, white sweet clover, by the way, is coming up everywhere. ran monkeys threw that around for me and the buckwheat is also up this is my first year ever trying that and i just put it in areas that uh you know needed something something for the bees something fun to look at and buckwheat grows right among the weeds i did zero prep for that so it's looking good we're going to follow that as it grows because apparently it'll grow and drop its own seeds and reseat itself and go again so it's an annual plant that behaves in a self-seating way so it kind of acts like a perennial, but it's a soil builder.

That's right. So if you want to know how to submit your own topic for consideration, you can always write it right under a video that currently exists. There are a lot of them out there. There's over 1,100 videos on my channel. This is why, if you have a question, topic right on top of your head right now, that you want to know, and it's related to bees, please go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn,

and look in the top right, the little search bar there with the little magnifying glass and if you type in something like make a split collect a swarm be vex things like that just type it in and you'll find probably several videos already out there doesn't mean i'm not going to make any more i will now that the weather's broke i can get out there things are warming up and we can do things i have a lot on my list we keep a whiteboard here that has all the things i'm supposed to do but they're weather contingent so you can submit your questions by going to the way to be.org click on the page mark the way to be it also is titled now questions so fill out the form you can be anonymous if you want to

one person today is anonymous so I think that covers the ground let's get started we're gonna kick it right off with Terry from Troy Missouri which is my hometown and not it's my home state my hometown is Kirkwood suburb of St. Louis okay so it's a Fred when a hive swarms if they find a new home that already has some existing comb. Do the bees empty their gorged honey or nectar into that comb soon after arrival? So here's the thing. I think it's great, by the way, that Terry thinks I would know answers to questions like this. But inquiring minds, sometimes we just want to know things because we want to know things. So I set up observation hives. This is the only place where you're really going to see what's going to happen when a swarm gets installed.

And the observation hive building is going through renovation this year. It's basically a new building, but we're putting in a new observation hive that's going to be a lot of fun. When you put a swarm into a hive, they have preloaded themselves with nectar, sometimes unfinished honey and honey. So they go after the uncapped honey first in the colony in the hive that they are departing from. And when they fly out, this is why some of them just can't wait. They're primed. They have so many resources. is in their body and there are wax builders among the bees in a swarm. And sometimes when they're bivouac location, the temporary location, they're hanging on a branch or something before they move on to their final destination, they'll even start building wax on the tree branch or post or whatever

they happen to be on. It's because they're primed and ready and they need honey to do it. It takes a lot of honey to build infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I mean beeswax comb. So when they move into their new hive, that's their order of business. They need a couple of things. They need energy. So the honey that they have with them is the carbohydrate source for the energy that gives them the boost to do what needs to be done. The other part of that is they have to produce beeswax, and they produce that through their abdomen. They have eight wax glands on their abdomen, four on each side going down, and they will work up the wax. So they have to generate warmth to do it. That uses resources. And then, of course, they're reducing the wax itself. So there are a lot of, you know,

formulas for, you know, a pound of honey, ounce of comb, that kind of thing. But the conversion rate is really bad for the bees, meaning that they need a lot of that resource in order to build comb. And if they can't build comb, there's no place for the queen to lay her eggs, and there's no way for the colony to exist. So this is actually the most critical move. This is why I'm going to say most of the honey that they carry with them gets used up for warmth, so the energy, the carbohydrate source, and also for the construction of comb. It would be really rare for there to be enough left over for them to go ahead and start putting it in the cells.

So the other thing is, when can they fly and go out and get new nectar, which is going to be the next order of business. Nectar to continue to fortify the colony as far as giving them the ability to keep things warm because the minute the queen starts to lay eggs, they're going to keep the brood warm. days after the egg is laid, now we have a larva. So anyway, and that, they have to ramp it right up to 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit, 95 being the sweet spot, and this is all energy base. So I think they're going to use up what they carry with them. The other thing is that if you saw shiny bits of honey in the cells during their first night, that would be really rare, you would start to see it the following day because as soon as the foragers can get out unless it's rainy or storm systems are coming

which is kind of what's happening here they're going to use it up so i don't think this store dilly moving right on the question number two this comes from fred from thorn hill tennessee first time beekeeper getting my three nukes next week nuke is short for nucleus hive which means it already has the queen in it already has brewed in it already has maybe a couple of drones hanging out and comb. Everything is going great and that's the quickest way to start a colony of bees if you're a brand new beekeeper. A nucleus is the way to go. So the plan to work with one deep and one medium super as the main hive. My confusion is, does a queen excluder go under the medium or on top of the medium? So we have a deep box and a medium super above, then a queen excluder

above that. Where does it go? If it goes above that, that's a lot of space, by the way, for a new colony being established. So first of all, I just want to recommend right off the bat, for those of you who are brand new, getting your beats for the first time, and maybe you're listening to this podcast and YouTube video. I recommend you start with just one box. So you have a bottom board, then you have your deep brute box. That's it. Please don't put anything else together at this point. see them build up so then the next question is there there are variations in B management so what I'm going to talk with you about is related to the northeastern United States areas where it gets really cold and it's still getting cold at night this past week it was in the 30s again so keeping them

to the bottom box is what I like to do in spring now my configuration as described here is a deep and a medium now when you get to the end of the year you're going to have to make sure they have access to the medium. But as we come into spring, for those who have had bees are ready and they made it through winter, where's the cluster? Where's the brood? Up underneath the inner cover, probably occupying your second box from the bottom. So we need to move them down. Now, because you have to get them under the queen excluder, so this year, as I mentioned in previous episodes here, I am putting the queen excluder, which I don't normally use. This year I am, And the reason is, I want to push the queen down into the bottom box early. I don't want to wait until the end of June, the 1st of July, to actually get most of the brood down there because a couple of things are happening.

They might hover for a longer period of time with extended bad weather up underneath the undercover and not migrate down towards the entrance, which they historically would do if we had normal weather and a decent warm up this time of year. We are way behind. Things are warming up late. Lots of rain, still cold at night. So if we can move the queen underneath the queen excluder and confine her to the first box, the bottom box, then we accelerate their movement down to the entrance on the bottom board area. And that's what I want to do.

So that's what I'm doing this year. That's what I'm going to recommend to Fred here that you put your queen excluder on top of your deep brood box. Now, the second box up, you will put that on. Once they get well established, we know that the brood can't move up because it's a queen excluter there now. So what happens to the brood that's in the box up above

if we put a queen excluder there? Well, they are going to migrate through the queen excluder. The only thing that can't get through it is the queen. So they will eventually emerge from those cells up there, move down through the queen excluder. They'll all be in the bottom box. This makes B management very easy. This is after extensive talks with a lot of beekeepers that are been doing this for a very long time

And for those that don't have a lot of extra time on their hands So they need to know where the queen is it would be easy management if you know that she's going to be in the bottom box Is that enough space? Well commercial beekeepers say it is Many commercial beekeepers there are still some that use a double deep configuration so what happens to the second box? Well with the queen excluder on and once they start to build out how many frames if you had a 10 frame box six or seven out of 10 would be fine and then we put on the next super because the queen excluder is there so they're not going to move the brood up there and abandon those

historically one and two and you know nine and tenth frame they get kind of abandoned if you expand too early if you're not using a queen excluder then they move up that kind of central column so because we've trapped the queen in the bottom box she's going to have to spread out so it's it is likely they'll end up occupying the entire first box with brood and resources just to support the brood. Then the second box, all your workers as they expand will fill that out with nothing but honey. And then you expand up from there. Now part of this question is what do we do with the queen excluder at the end of the year? We don't want to leave a queen excluder on your hive when you get to cold weather at the end of the year. So in an area where the winters are very well defined by cold and a lack of forage and things like that,

we have to give our bees access to the honey that they've stored. And so there's about 47 pounds of honey in a medium 10 frame super. So we pull the queen excluder out. Now we don't want to lose that thing. You want to keep your queen excluder handy if you're using one. If you don't use one, you can pull it out entirely because now what's in the second box? nothing but honey. We created a honey bridge. So in theory, and something I've been doing for years, the queen won't cross that honey bridge to lay eggs up above unless you've put in venting at the top.

So if you have no upper entrance and no upper venting, it's very easy to keep your queen down in that now established brood box, which is the first box. If you're doing nothing but medium boxes, which a lot of people are doing three mediums equals two deeps so if you're going to go all mediums then your bottom two medium boxes will be just for brood so you do the same thing with a queen excluder put it on top of your second medium box keep the queen underneath get them to use that for brood let the third medium box become full of honey and then you migrate up from there and now you've established your honey bridge you need to leave the queen excluder in place throughout the productive gear if you have an upper entrance and upper venting. So I hope that doesn't make it too complicated. So if you let them use too much space at once too early, I don't know why the bees do this. But and this is demonstrated over and over again sizing your boxes correctly for the population of the bees that are occupying them. If you give them a huge amount of space for some reason they stall. They don't work the space well. I don't know if it's because it's not an

efficient area for them to manage. I don't know if they're overwhelmed in some way. I don't know if all the extra air movement and airspace has something to do with it, but when they're in a right-sized space. And this is why we're looking at the nucleus hives more and more because that narrow column that rises up seems to really get the bees to feel like they can manage it. They're much more productive. So something must be happening in there where they're using fewer resources on the environment they're in and more resources on reproduction and storage of food.

So the food resource would be nectar coming in and the proteins, which then would be the pollen coming in. So then bees can work on smaller infrastructure more efficiently. So that's question number two. and so these giant boxes, big hives, same thing. Like when you have horizontal hives, that's easy because we have follower boards. And with follower boards, you size the space.

You would put your swarm in there or your nucleus hive, which might be five frames. Okay, so if you put your five frames in there, you've got a horizontal hive, now we leave two or three frames unutilized, and we have a follower board established there, and now they will work those extra frames. you're off on your way. Same thing, single entrance, no venting, no secondary entrance. This is just

my preference, something I do, and that makes the bees keep their brood near the entrance, and then it migrates through until you have nothing but frames of honey. And I recently pulled apart a land's hive for inspection in the few hours that we had when it wasn't raining a couple of days ago. and they did exactly that. The hive configuration has three entrances on it. So the other two entrances are closed all the time. I purchased it from Dr. Leo Shirazkins Horizontal hive.com. And I got the most expensive one, the biggest one,

and put the entrance at one end. And that way we establishes predictable progression. And then when spring comes, guess what we do? We remove the oldest cone near the entrance. that goes and then we slide up the brood near the entrance because things are warming up and we leave them with a couple of frames of capped honey just in case something happens like that's happening right now where rain is going to come and prevent them from foraging so horizontal vertical is the same thing we're trying to keep our brood in one area and have a natural predictable manageable progression of proteins and carbohydrate resources and then pure honey up above So that's fantastic. Let's see. Question number three comes from Anonymous,

which is really interesting too. Anyway, the beekeeping jackets I own were purchased from the usual major suppliers in the USA. It does not mention. Each jacket is of good quality and should have many more years of use except for one common problem.

The elastic gives out in a year or two. First, the thumb strap loses its stretch. Later, the elastic around the wrists lose their elasticity, giving plenty of room for bees to crawl inside the jacket. This results in having to replace an otherwise good quality jacket every couple of years. Do you know of a beekeeper jacket with superior strength material in the wrists and waist that will hold up for many years of use? Okay. So one of the things that I have the pleasure of doing is reviewing a lot of equipment for people and companies that are thinking about making B suits, for example, and those that have put them out. So I have a lot of them. Like there's an interesting pullover, B-suit right here behind me that has the big rounded veil, what they would call the Buckfast style veil. Anyway, it's a common problem no matter what company. Natural apiary. Moneyflow.com, Manlake, all of them, datant, better bee, all these companies that provide you with B-suits ultimately have the same problem. The thumbstrap, by the way, when you're looking at B-suits,

and I highly recommend you do, the wider thumbstraps and things like that, don't cut the circulation off in your hand. So that's a good thing. The other thing, there's also an elastic on your gloves. So your B-gloves, when you're pulling them up over your suit. I saw someone in a video. I won't name them. But they put on their bee gloves and then put on the B suit over the top of the B gloves. So now the B glove was sticking out through the sleeve. And I thought, wow, that is a way to really wear out the elastic gathers on your wrist. So it was interesting to me too because now you have to get the jacket off just to get the gloves off.

So this is the order of putting yourself on. If it's a B jacket or a B suit, the main suit goes on and you zip up your, Vail and everything else now here's a piece of kit that I recommend every beekeeper have a mirror Have a mirror in your bee shed your garage your tool shed wherever you keep your bees stuff It can be polished stainless steel. It doesn't have to be really accurate, but here's what you want you want to be able to see yourself and make sure that you're zipping everything completely closed So I have mirrors for that purpose just to make sure because if I'm by myself otherwise you're checking your buddy, right? just like dive equipment check your buddy check your equipment and all that stuff make sure everything is right same thing with beekeeping but you often work alone so you want to look at a mirror get one all right so

then when you put everything together the elastic ultimately eventually fails and it doesn't matter this is why i've named all these companies even my favorite vented be suit which comes from guardian bee apparel they have straps on theirs i see saw them at the North American Honeybee Expo this past January. And they had gloves out there and they had not the gathers, but they had a Velcro strap. I like that. I wish more suits would have Velcro straps. There's no reason you can't have them. Now it's probably more of a challenge for the gathers on the wrist and things like that. You can also buy packets of Velcro straps and find some way you can use fabric glue or something to make them stay in place and you just

cinch them up in a lot of ways that probably seems like a good solution but I often like to give a shout-out to other YouTube channels so today is no different I am going to send you to a place where this person is not a beekeeper this just happens to be someone who teaches sewing so don't throw your stuff away there are fantastic beesuits out there where again the only thing wrong with them is the thumb as stretched out and is just hanging so I, you know, spin it around a bunch of times so that it holds its place. But I'm just going to name the title of the YouTube video, and I hope you do go there, is replacing elastic in a waistband without the casing. So in other words, if you had a gather, you know, your elastic strap might be going through a gather that you,

when you flip it inside out, you'll see that there's a place that you can pick away at the the stitching there so I think it's called a stitching removal tool or something like that but you can cut out the stitching there open that up and then you would want to attach your new elastic to the old elastic and then pull it through so the old elastic comes out and when the new elastic comes through now you can stitch that together and your gathers are back in place most be suits are enclosed it's like a tube that goes through that you can pull your stuff out but attach your new one to the old one. You can just use a stapler to do it probably.

I don't know. I'm not a seamstress. But you can, you know, pull the new one in and then, of course, stitch it up and then you're back in business. However, I want you to watch this. Replacing Elastic in a Wayspan with No Casing. And the YouTube channel name is The Crafty Canary, C-A-R-Y. The Crafty Canary. So because you can just go to a craft store, buy new Elastics,

and because you're going to stitch them on the inside or the inside of the waist, maybe it doesn't fit you right out of the gate. It is nice to have something that gathers well and keeps the bees where they should be on the outside of your suit. Nothing is more fun to the feel a bee. Once you've come inside, you sat down and you're doing a YouTube video like this, and you've been inside for half an hour, and you feel something crawling along right behind your knee inside your pants.

Not good. You're going to be stung. There's no way out of that. So let's fix that. Go to replacing elastic waistband with no casing the crafted canary. Buy your stuff, fix it. Because even with, it doesn't correlate to the most expensive suits, by the way. The elastic seems to fail, no matter what the quality is, how much you've paid. So the only ones that I know of that have the straps right now,

again is Guardian B apparel. So a shout out to Guardian B apparel, check their stuff out. Vented suits, fantastic. You can get pants, separate. from the jacket. So there's another thing. If the elastic, if you're wearing a jumper, the elastic around the waist really doesn't matter. I have a hive tool belt that keeps your waist gathered. Okay. But if you're just wearing the jacket, which is probably the most popular thing, they sell pants and jacket separately, and they sell gloves that have straps on

them. So way to go. Everything's good. Question number four comes from Lucky Crown Honey. So question When you make your nukes and keep them in your apiary without going to an out yard or some other location three to five miles away, how do you keep your foragers in the nukes? Do you leave the nukes closed for three days before opening or do you just open it up from the start and just let the foragers go back to their hives? Okay. And this is timely because a lot of people are doing this exact thing. So I don't actually like make nukes as you know when people talk about making news this time of year they're usually talking about making them and selling them. We're talking about my resource nucleus hives.

So this is an example of and I'll tell you exactly what I do. And I made videos about it. So here we go again. If you go to my page and look it up, how to make a split, walk away split. Easy thing to do. Resource hives, easy things to do. So when you find a colony that's superpopulate, Now, if your bees are getting away from you and they're swarming, that's because you're not keeping up.

Maybe you just like me didn't have the opportunity to get into the hives, but this year, I'm on top of it, more so than I ever have been before. So what are we looking for? When you're inspecting your colony, you want to see it their queen right. You can do that. A lot of this assessment can be done just by looking at the landing board, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, see all the pollen coming in, all the hustling and bustling that's going on. they're really building up but how do you know if they're preparing to swarm we need to look at it and this is where I got into building resource hives because they don't want to lose my bees I'm going to keep them

right in my apiary as described here I don't haul them away so when we're looking at the brood area or we pull up in this case we talked about remember the boxes coming into spring we've got a medium super and a deep brood box so there is still brood this time of year in the medium super usually the center four or five frames has some arc of brood up into it and the rest now is being developed down below so when you're looking at those and you see that there is a lot of brood a lot of egg laying going on you need to look at all of the frames if you come across you know if you come across the queen cells and you need to get familiar with what a queen cell looks like by the way planters peanuts licking shell it's vertical they come off the side usually around the fringe and you need to really look at them sometimes these sneaky little bees

are hiding queen cells in amongst what the drone cells drone cells are already big some people do confuse them for queen cells but remember the queen cells are vertical all of your other cells come out sideways so that's one tell but you have to look because there'll be a cluster of drone cells around and then there'll be just a protrusion straight under those and it looks different And if you've got queen cells under production, you're in a pickle. You have to make a decision because you might be losing your bees. They've made a decision to go. So part of the question is, if I make a split, how do I keep from losing these bees? Because they're right in the same apiary. And it's true. A lot of people do make their splits and make up other replacement colonies and things like that. And they haul the new colonies away with a bunch of foragers that come with them. Foragers are your bees around their last couple of weeks of life. So they've seen the outside.

They know where they live. They know what's going on. And if you put them in a new box in a new spot in the same apiary, they can fly out and reorient right back to the box that they came from. So you're going to take a loss. How do you fix that? I'll tell you. That's what I'm here for.

So first of all, we put capped brood as much of it as possible. So here's what we did. We found queen cells. They're planning to swarm. Now we find the queen, right? But on your way to finding the queen, go ahead and pull a frame or two of fully capped brood. Go ahead and put those in your hive butler or whatever you've got for transporting it. Maybe you've got your nucleus hive box right there ready to go, making it all convenient.

So you pull those out and you put those in. So you've got capped brood and you need to replace those frames. So we come with frames to replace them. Maybe it's last year as drawn up frames that were harvested for honey. That's good too. You push those together and put the drawn comb that's unoccupied with brood on the fringe of the brood area. This is again something that a lot of beekeepers do differently. Some people think it's time to relieve congestion and so they checkerboard that. Checkerboarding just means frame of brood, frame a drawn comb. Frame a brood, frame a drawn comb. I don't do that.

I push all the brood together and makes it very easy for the bees to keep that brood warm at a time of year when we still have cold nights, which is what we have here. If where you are, it's nice and warm and toasty, and they're putting forth very little effort to keep that warmth. Remember, right around 95 degrees Fahrenheit. If it doesn't take a lot of effort for them to do that, then checkerboarding probably doesn't make a huge difference. So then we're going along.

So I took a couple of frames of capped brood, deep frames. How many worker bees does each of those deep frames of capped brood represent? one deep frame both sides capped brood you're averaging 6,000 worker bees so we get the next one 12,000 worker bees do I need more no I don't the minimum is 5,000 so now I put that in my nucleus box and then I keep scooting along until I find the queen and when I find the queen whatever frame she already happens to be on if it is a frame that's full of open brood which can be the case, but the way I inspect hives, it go slow, pull the frames, have aside.

I never go straight into the middle. Oh, I think the broods over here, queen's probably here, pull it straight up, because now we risk rubbing against the adjacent frames of the one we're pulling up, unless we spread them out first. You can roll the queen or roll other bees while you're doing that, just make everyone unhappy

because you may have the cone face matching on the inside that would then rub as it came up. So I always start at the end that I think is least active. And I pull at least one frame out, usually the number two frame from the end. And then that gives me space to look at the face of that frame, pull the next one over, pull the next one over, decide what I'm going to take out, desired what I'm going to leave, keep them all in the same kind of order. And then when I get to where the queen is, if she's on a frame that has eggs and stuff,

it's unusual because what the queen's been doing while I'm doing this evaluation, as she's moving towards the number one position frame. Nine times out of ten. By the time I get to the number one or number two frame, that's where the queen is because of goofed off. I've taken my time. This isn't high production here. This is, let's see what's going on on these frames.

On a nice hot day, on a nice clear, sunny day, when it's not super windy, when the bees won't be stressed, where they're all going to hang out and give you a really good look at them. So don't do this on a stormy winter day like there's some emergency going on. And then when you get there, here's the queen and she's on a frame that's partially drawn comb. Maybe it's got some bee bread on it and stuff like that. Perfect. Let's drop the queen on that frame right into my nucleus hive.

So now how many frames I have in the nucleus hive? Two frames of cat brood, one frame of drawn comb with a queen on it. And then I finish out what would be probably a five-frame nucleus hive with undrawn or drawn empty comb. Right? Let's put that in there. Put it together. I have my nucleus hive. Now, one of the things we thought about, and this is new for me too, by the way, so I've been doing this since 2006. I learn new things all the time, and then what do I do?

Cycle them out to you so you can learn new things as well. Maybe this isn't new to you. So I've always thought, wow, you know, capped root is really good because it's inexpensive to the bees. They no longer have to feed it, so I don't overtax all my nurse bees. And another reason why I take my time moving them into the nucleus hive is because I want those foragers that are in there, the guard bees and stuff that happen to be hanging around. I want them to fly off. I don't care about them. I just want nurse bees. Keep in mind I'm putting them in a small space, a five-frame box. That is preferred. If you happen to have one of those Appamee 7-frame nucleus hive boxes, those are great too. They have a divider that goes in. right in the middle. So we even created a smaller space for them than the five frame. And if you're going to produce two colonies that once, maybe you've got a couple of colonies that are acting up and they're producing queen cells and you need to take their queens away. Guess what? Seven frame Apamea box, divider in the middle. It comes with it. It's ready to go.

And you put four frames in each side and leave space. You decide what you want to do. But now when you do that, we've got two small nucleus hives of bees in a single deep seven-frame box with a divider and individual entrances on the front that you control. You even have the foresight that came with that design that has entrances on the back. So you could open one on the back, one in the front, if that's what you want to do. But now we did not bring a lot of foragers. What about this heat that I said is necessary to keep your brood viable? I was always thinking that we need to cover those frames with bees. They need to be able to warm them to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is all true. But I completely failed to factor in that the brood itself developing in there is generating warmth. Not like heater bees do, but in other words, it's not like they're sitting around waiting to be warmed by your nurse bees. They are generating some of their warmth, kind of like an economizer, right? They've already brought their temperature up a little bit, so now the effort necessary for the bees on the surface to warm it the rest of the way is minimal. And then we help them by having a single entrance, no venting, no upper entrances, insulated inner cover, all closed up because now they worm that cluster over the brood

and they get the secondary aid of not venting off the warmth that they've just burned calories to generate. I hope that makes sense. So, do I care? Do I move them away? No. Because what's going to happen is, are the nurse bees that are already on it, by the way, are doing the work that they can. They don't have to feed anything. They have to take care of the queen. There's going to be a retinue that follows her around, keeps her fed and cared for. There's probably not enough resources in that hive right out of the gate,

unless you provided them to where the queen can start laying right away. She probably can't and won't until things start to kick up. So remember, this is a resource hive. I don't care that they're setback. The main hive, the main event is going on. That's where they're building queen cells. That's where they were going to kick out their queen anyway. And that's where you were going to lose up to 70% of the population of that colony.

So you just saved it by taking. And then you set that up. And this works almost too well, by the way. Then when do you check again? You check again in two to three weeks. So you go back to the colony that you robbed out. You check them in two or three weeks, and you look to see if there are eggs in there

and see if it looks like you have a queen that's viable. And life is good. And then you've got these resources. sides over here that if you ever come across the situation where remember 75% of the queens get mated when they fly out that means 25% of your colonies could expect it to be queenless at some point so when you look at them now they're queenless now you've flubed up no you didn't now you go back to your divided app of mayhive or your five-frame nuke whatever you have and you take the frame of brood if you want to or you just take the queen away from them because we don't want that to build up really

big and bad and fast. So we take that queen and we return it to this hive. Is there any introduction time there? Or can we just direct release that queen right in there? I direct release her. Why? They came from her. Her genetics are all over that colony still. And the fact that a new queen did not mate and come back, then there's no extra genetics that have been added since she left. So now you get her back, she goes right back to laying. There you go. Totally. This is so easy. beekeeping, it's so uncomplicated, so easy. I hope you realize that I'm making fun of that, and the bees will do everything exactly the opposite

of what I just told you to do. So this is the fun of beekeeping, constant surprises. Question number five comes from Paul, Douglasville, Georgia. So I've been participating in this wonderful Demeris split for about six weeks now on five of my hives. So if you're wondering what this is, by the way, the Demery method. It gets talked about a lot.

It's a way of relieving the desire of your colony to swarm, and you're going to make your brood area uncongested, and you're going to move brood up above well away, so that the bees that are down to the nurse bees and all these other decision makers that decide when to create queen cells and supersede your queen, get rid of her, push her out, starve her, whatever they do, it's satisfied with the Demoree method. So I don't do it because it's complicated.

Anyway, you can go to the Keepers Hive channel. They're the ones that I learned more or was kind of pushed towards thinking about the Demery method more. Please go to the Keepers Hive. They have a YouTube channel. And they talk about the Demerie Method. because this is the time of year when that is being practiced. So let's go on with this. Again, it's something I don't do,

but in a way, when I take the queen out and put her underneath the queen excluder into the brood box and get her away from the bulk of the brood in the hive in spring, I am relieving congestion up there and spreading her out and making sure that she's putting her eggs and everything in a lower area. And so now there's less congestion and things like that. congestion is one of the triggers so one of the way the says here every week i've been rotating frames around

from the bottom brood box up to the top brood box and vice versa to make room for the queen to lay in the bottom brood box these hives are getting huge how long do i have to keep this up i just want to revert back to just a double brood box and some supers all this moving frames around and lifting boxes is getting old. This is why a lot of people don't do the Demeray method. The lifting. So that can take us over

to the Keepers Hive too. This is not sponsored by these people. But the Keepers Hive is a keeping bees from your seat kind of configuration. The boxes that you're lifting are only what? Nuclice size boxes unless you've got the two queen system.

So nucleus size. So nucleus size. boxes easy to lift and stuff easy to manage as a queen excluder there and you can cycle your frames up and down and so on and keep things going there the other thing i want to talk about is a video that i put out in wintertime before i could even manage my bees yet the hive super lifter there's a video for that i'm going to put a link to it down in the video description this is for all of your standard langstroth wooden hives The super lifter is just that. It's for lifting super's. So, beekeepers, like myself, you know, you might be out there picking things up and putting things down that are heavy and maybe you like that as a fitness activity. But maybe you're an older person. Very rare for beekeepers to be older people, but some of them are out there and they might have arthritic wrists and fingers and not be able to grip and lift things as well as they once did. This is the answer to your problem. So the hive super lifter all it does is latches onto your beehive on the brood box or your base box or your bottom two medium boxes and then the second part of it clamps on to the next box above that and there are load bearing screws that come out and I hope you'll watch the video because when I first saw this thing I thought now that I see it why hasn't this

been built many years ago because the way it sets up and it works on uneven ground and everything else once it clips under that top box you have a leg that comes off and when you put the leg down it separates the two boxes at one end and then you tip the super which is full of honey usually the heaviest box up to two deep supers can be tilted back on this thing giving you access to the brood box and your queen excluder and everything under it and there's no lifting. This mechanism takes on the weight, so it uses the fulcrum,

and all you have to do is push it back. Plus, it breaks that propolis seal between the boxes so that you can check it out. I think a lot of people misunderstood when they saw the superlifter because who invented it? Who came up with it? Cedar Anderson. Who's that?

He's the inventor of the flow hive. And as soon as people hear, Flowhive, I don't need that. I don't want that. This lifter isn't just for flow hives. It's for all wooden Langstroth boxes. Don't be put off because of who makes it. Look at what it does for you and it will save your back. And if you're doing this kind of thing, I'm telling you, it works. It's good. It looks like a heavy piece of gear, too, by the way, it weighs less than nine pounds. You can one hand that thing. You can clamp it on a stuff. Does it work on nukes? Yes, it does.

It's a work on eight frame boxes at absolutely how about 10 frames yes 8 10 nuke and everything in between it is it has a yoke that expands and contracts you have to see it to believe it it works easy so this is it how long do you do it well until the risk of them producing queen cells has passed so I think when they stop producing queen cells in the next couple of inspections that you do and you find they're not producing queen cells, you can really think finally we can now get back into production because people have definite swarm seasons where they live. Here where I live, swarm season never ends. Isn't that fun? So in spring, we're in swarm season right now. What was the indicator? Dandelions

everywhere. Regardless of the weather failing to warm up the way it's supposed to or dry out the way it's supposed to, we're in swarm season. Now what happens is in a lot of parts of the country you'll have dearth periods what is a dearth well the dearth period means that resources for your honeybees in the environment are drying up maybe you had not enough rain maybe you don't have the right plant varieties in your area to provide for pollinators throughout the summer so here in Pennsylvania in my part of Pennsylvania we don't have a dearth and what we get we get to like in the south even which is weird to

me because in my mind I think in the South they must have stuff growing and flowering all the time but they don't they have dirt periods which is interesting and then they get all of their or most of their honey crop in spring only and then the rest of the year they're actually feeding their bees which I was not aware of how much sugar syrup is being put on each and every hive just to get them ready for winter so here we get in the northeastern United States we have a late season nectar flow boom that comes out. So we get, you know, sunflowers and stuff like that. There are perennial native sunflowers, by the way. We also get golden rod. We get asters. And a lot of things bloom at the end of the year. And so we get this second influx of resources

just in time for your bees to prepare for winter. But what's the downside? It kicks off so much reproduction in these colonies that then they are likely to swarm at the end of the year. Now let's say you're not in the Deep South and you're not in the Northeastern United States. You're just wondering, is there a dearth where I live? When would I expect that to happen where I am if I don't have anyone to collaborate with and discuss when I'm apt to face a swarm? There's a website I want you to visit. Are you ready? It's called B-escape.org. B-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-R-G. And that lets you know what you're environments like how about the pesticide load maybe you're thinking about becoming a sideline or

beekeeper and you're looking at property in different areas and you're thinking huh i wonder if that would be a good place for honeybees if you go to a site like beescape.org you can find out a lot of things one of the top things i'm concerned about pesticide loading and you might think you look at an area right here 15 minute drive away from where I am, the peasant side load is triple what it is here. So go to beescape.org and find out, see what's going on, and see if the area you're looking at is suitable for bees. See what your dirt periods are like. See if you have swarm season. See what kind of plant varieties are growing there that benefit the bees. It's super interesting. That's the end of question number five. Yeah, you do it until, they say.

Question number six. This comes from PTL Science 380. That's the YouTube channel name. Help! I split my hive. I have a new queen coming this week. As usual, I could not find the queen even after a two-hour hive inspection. Listen carefully to this. Okay. Yep, the bees were not happy. I was taking so long. I split them anyway because they were building queen cells. That's key. Building queen cells is not a very good description, by the way. How far long were the queen cells? Were any of those queen cells? Were any of those queen cells? year or actually capped. Because if they did that, here's why I think it took two hours searching for the queen without finding her. She may be already gone. You may already have a

swarm on your hands. So in a way, the bees were not happy. I was taking so long, split them anyway because they're building queen cells. Now I am hoping to determine which hive is missing a queen by watching the bees behavior. When I put the new queen in her shipping box into one of the hives, if they aren't trying to sting the new queen, then I'll assume they're the queenless hive. Is there a better approach to solving this problem? Thank you very much. Okay, so number one, if we were sitting down and having coffee, I would say, how many queen cells do you see how big are they? Are they capped? You may not have a queen. What else did you see in there? Did you see eggs? Are there still eggs around? Has that queen been around for the last three days? Because if you

can see eggs, then we know she's probably or potentially still around. I'm going to guess she's gone. So let's do that part. So now we're making a split anyway because we just have to do it. The colonies so robust, it's out of control, and they're getting ready to swarm. So we want to split this into two colonies. How will we know which colony has the queen into snot? Which one would then be ready for the introduction of a queen that you're spending your hard-earned cash, you're casting your financial vote for a queen from some breeder, some one, where and you now want to put her into a colony that won't kill the queen. I agree. Good plan. So here's what I would do personally. All the queen cells that you can find, frames that have queen cells on them, put those in one hive. Leave them, in fact, in the resident hive. Let's go ahead. Just put in there. Anyway, then take the frames of brood that do not have queen cells on them and be very careful. If you're unsure about whether or not a frame has a queen cell on it,

don't take it. Take only those that you're 100% sure do not have queen cells on them. Put all those in your new box, the box that you hope to put the queen in. And then when the queen comes in the mail, you should already know the difference. One of these colonies will seem happy, go lucky, very productive, the other colony will seem a little bit unsettled, quiet, self-contained, not foraging very well, not investing in infrastructure, because their will to subsist has gone, right? Subsist. That means they want to bring resources in, continue to invest in what they have in the absence of a queen, and all hope gone because the queen sells the future of the colony are in another box. They're forlorned. They're just hanging out there. And when you bring that queen in her cage to that hive,

they're going to be feeding her through the screen. They're going to be. so happy to see her. Don't jump the gun and just strike release her though. Don't fall for it. Be careful. I still recommend that you pull the cork off on the side that's got candy on the queen cage and put her in so that the bees have access of course to the screen on your queen cage. And they can start feeding her. Of course, observe their behavior and see if they appear to accept her. And I'll bet you they do. And then she will come out of there and she'll be laying eggs. then that's going to put you ahead of the show-offs over in the other box that have all those fancy queen cells because those queens have not yet emerged, they haven't matured, they haven't flown and made it and come back and began to mate.

And this is why that's the established colony. The one that you're going to put your queen in is the new location, the new spot. Because we want the foragers going back and helping out what is now a dwindling colony until the new queens do what they need to do to re-establish the colony and make it whole again. So now we've got this box. We install your new queen and they shoot through the candy in a day or two and she's released and everything is good. And then your life is good. So I highly suspect your queen is already gone.

Please update us and let us know if any of that is even close. Okay, moving on to question number seven. This comes from Hunt Lady and two queen keepers hive. You didn't answer the questions in caps about your two queen keepers hive This is a reference to last Friday the last Friday of April We did a live stream and when I'm doing that it's hard for me to realize if people are just talking to one another in the chat area or if they have a question if they do have a question They're supposed to type it in all caps So this is the thing wanted to know so she has bees coming tomorrow didn't know it because the company didn't send out my notification

on Monday so bees are coming sounds like we have to hype them up anyway so setting up the keepers hive I am dragging my feet there a lot of people are interested in this I should have just shut my yapper and not even said that I was doing the two queen system because of course everybody wants to know how it went how's it going how did how did you like setting it up and putting it together what kind of bottom board did you set up because it comes without a bottom board and stuff like that I haven't set it up it's in the box it's inside the the building it's sitting there waiting why because the weather's bad i'm trying to tell you my pond is flooded it's you know we have more and more rain coming all the time you can't work the bees you know

literally had two days to work bees here uh but again not too bad but the keeper's hive is on the shelf when am i going to set it up i'll tell you i'm going to go ahead and go out on limb this coming week the weather forecast is good this coming week so i'm going to set it up i'm going to cuss and build my bottom board. I'm going to set that thing up. I'm going to establish two colonies. I've already talked with someone else about it because the way I want to set it up

is I want to have the entrances facing the same direction. I want them facing to the south. And I want to also, in all fairness, say this is against the recommendations of those who came up with the Gaper's Hive. They want one entrance facing south, the other entrance, 180 degrees out facing the other direction, but I have my reasons for why I want to do that.

First of all, and of course this is all speculative. It's not set up. It's not functional yet. It's not even out of the box. Like, I don't even know what the quality of workmanship or material is or anything else. I just know it's going to be an above average beekeeping operation. And it's going to be a two queen system, which is a lot of fun. Tell people that you're doing a two queen system and they will caution you. You are going to have a lion in your. your apiary if that's the case I'm going to tell you ahead of time I'm shutting down one side I'm not going to have a colony that is so productive and so full of bees that it has an enormous defensive force that I can send out and sting people in my parking area I just can't have it

it's a solid no so I'm just telling you ahead of time if it gets and it's and if it does in fact what I'm saying is if it does everything it's supposed to do that's exactly what I'm going to have is a colony of bees, a twin two queen system, starting with the same time, the same resources on both sides, queens the same age, colonies coming out from the same area all at once, building together, coming together in the center through a central riser with a queen excluder that prevents these queen sides. The queens can't get together, but their workers do. I've still not gotten a really good explanation as to why, the workers in separate colonies that are attached together will share honey supers

and the storykeeper bees in that hive will work the honey supers together and then as they go down just naturally filter back to their respective queens and colonies because above the queen excluder it's all one unit they're all one group and of course I'm going to put a flow super up there why wouldn't I if you're going to get two or three hundred pounds of honey off of these things it's going to come out of a flow super for me i'm not going to be in there uncapping and extracting i'm already way behind on that i have all this honey that needs to be extracted and i'm goofing off i have a nine-year-old after me about all of his clients so anyway um if you're late putting together your boxes again of course

semi-gloss or gloss exterior latex house paint vals bars at the top of my go to the paint store, harass the paint mixing people, get the what Randy McCaffrey calls it oops paint. Get the paint that's returned that they can't use and use it on your beehive. And get it right out there. Because the latex paints, there's like once it sets, once it's dry, there's no after, there's no odor, anything that would be off putting for your bees. So you can set all that up. And so again, I'm just on report. on this. I'm behind on the Keepers Hive. I have other things going on, trying to work on this new observation hive that I can't wait, tempered glass, all the best stuff. Just don't like the

storms. All right. Moving on to question number eight. This is from Keith Studley, 6071. That's the YouTube channel name. Starting my second season with bees, I caught two swarms in mid-May last year and have them in long lands hives. I thought they were small last fall but both came through the winter and look strong now. My question is would you consider it good to split a colony in a long layens? It's interesting to call them long lands. The land's hives are horizontal hives. They're already kind of long. So anyway, by moving swarm cells. To one end and the queen to the other end of the hive and dividing the region, the region, and dividing the I'll be checking my hive soon. I'm thinking about what I would do if I find swarm cells. Okay

just on this description alone a horizontal hive regardless lands long lengths Roth whatever it is just like you're doing an inspection you find queen cells and you decide huh what if I left my queen over here by this entrance and what if I took the queen cells on these frames took them down at the opposing end and just installed them down there and then left all the honey and stuff in the middle. Could I just go with that? The risk of that is they are already deciding to swarm. You may not satisfy that swarm instinct.

And so long as the bees can all be in full contact with each other, so the bees are over here taking care of the queen cells are going to emerge later and replace the existing queen, they can all touch each other and get through all the way and have full access to each other. That queen that you have is 99% likely to depart with a bunch of your bees. So if you created a divider, so you can end up with a two queen system,

but here's why I personally don't like the idea for the Lans. The Lans is a finite box. There's no way to expand it. once all your frames are involved all your frames are involved there's no more you can't add to the end you can't vertically stack more boxes and things like that not if you're going to be faithful to the land's design so they're not really suited to two queen systems like that just the limitations on expansion now if you have a long langstroth hive in theory because the lands i believe has 20 frames in it. The long Langstroth hive could be built longer. It could be a yeah you can get

lumber two by 12s. That's what it's built off of and if you want to know more about the way we've laid up our Langstroth design go to the way to be.org and click on the page marked prints and plans. They're free for you to use. You can't reproduce and sell them of course but they're free to you so that you can come up with your own ideas, but this is the basis of what works for a long Langstroth hive. But in theory, because the one I have here is five feet long, you can make one eight feet long. There can be a 10-footer.

The longer it is, of course, the more unstable, you'll have to have some kind of strut system to keep it aligned right. But you could end up with multiple colonies in one long log of a hive, so to speak. And so then you would have opposite entrances and things like that. You would have to have queen excluders, which would be your follower boards with clean excluders built into them.

And you would have shared, remember, this is like the two-queen system that I'm talking about with the Keepers Hive configuration. Remember, the Langstroth boxes will stack up and shared by each side. Those store Keeper Bs will be putting that up in there. A lot to learn this year on that. But if you had this in a horizontal configuration, same thing, same principle. You basically set up a two-queen system. with your brood areas at opposing ends with their own entrances then you've got queen

excluders that prevent them from getting through to these queens on either side but sharing a common resource area and it would be all experimental I think you end up with a giganto hive and for the same reason this is just what I'm thinking for the same reason that why smaller colonies start quicker in smaller space They have smaller areas where they have competing airspace and material surfaces and things like that that they have to attend to. If you've got full-blown colonies sharing the same hive box, we also have secondary heat that's being shared. Often people think, boy, I must be super stuffy in there. Wow, it must be super hot.

It's like 80 degrees out here. Don't forget, the brood inside that hive needs to be 95 degrees. So the span is 94 to 97. They're still technically having to warm their brood to keep it at the proper humidity and the proper temperature. That's the critical area. So what's hot to us isn't necessarily hot to them. What is stifling to us isn't necessarily stifling to them. So these multiple queen systems and setups have benefits and drawbacks.

So you have to think about your ability to expand. otherwise you know you've just made a swarm generator so that's about it last question of the day question number nine this comes from Nigel Moore 9657 says can you please tell me if swarming is only caused by the colony growing too large or are there other reasons why the colony might swarm this is you can hear this from a lot of people when people say I guarantee you that I can stop swarming in your hive. People that do the demoree have very good results in trying to limit or stop swarming. Very good, but listen to how much manipulation that requires.

So let's talk about the swarm triggers. If this is an animal, if this is a superorganism, and it is, what is the best time of year for it to generate another superorganism? and survive. Spring. Why spring? Because they have the whole year ahead of them because remember what your bees are trying to do is they're gaining weight. They're gaining weight just like all the other animals out there so they can put on enough fat so they can get through what's going to be the coming winter or in some cases a dearth. They need to have resources stored. So they are triggered to reproduce when there's an abundance of resources.

resources coming in and when the workforce or the population of the hive is big enough that they could divide themselves and still survive. So it is their instinct to produce or cast swarms into the environment. That's their instinct. That's what they're designed to do. Eat, reproduce, survive. That's it. How do they survive? By producing other colonies of bees. If they didn't do that if they didn't cast out other colonies of bees hither and yon all over the place then when a colony died out it would just be dead so we are as beekeepers in most cases trying to stop what they have to do to survive so i just want to start there i don't want you to feel guilty about it but it is their instinct and that's why we satisfy that instinct

when we create these walkaway splits and what some people call people call an artificial swarm. What do we do? We took away the queen, we took away some of the brood, and instinctively now the remaining colony thinks they did what they're supposed to do, they reproduce, they swarmed, they threw a baby out into the world. The baby is actually the new resident colony. The older colony that goes out into the world with the existing queen is one that is most likely to succeed in a new space. So what are the triggers? So over-population. So over-population, Overcrowding as described here is one of those because what happens is as your colony expands in numbers Remember that they are held together by a pheromone so the queen mandibular pheromone is something that the retinue of bees

So what's a retinue of bees anyway these are nurse bees who are assigned to the queen Who continually keep the queen clean the queen does not go outside to go to the bathroom so you might call them chambermaids even They have to clean up her waste material. They have to make sure nothing dirty gets on her. They have to make sure that she's constantly fed, cared for. And they constantly attend to the queen. And here's the funny part, too. The turnover of the retinue is pretty frequent.

It's not like we can mark all the worker bees, the nurse bees that are attending to the queen, and three days later see the same painted thoraxes still attending to the queen. No, you'd be able to track what the other jobs are that they've moved on to. So this retinue is being frequently replaced. So what they're also doing is they're passing on the queen's mandibular pheromone. So they're doing that through direct contact with other bees in the hive. So what happens is the more bees there are in the hive, the more of these little bees that have direct contact with the queen

need to make physical contact with all the other bees in the hive. And then as their numbers increase, the ability to do that is reduced. So therefore, the queen end upular pheromone and holds everyone together becomes thinned out as they expand through the workers in the hive. So when that happens, they're like, oh, no, the queen is not strong enough.

We need to replace the queen. So what do they do? They kick the queen out. They make new ones because that satisfies so many different urges. One, they have the food and resources coming in through the entrance, necessary to stimulate. So food in the environment coming to the bees, proteins, carbohydrates, nectar, pollen, all that stuff is coming in and satisfying what they physically need to perform

this function of giving birth to another superorganism. So when they do that, boom, the queen flies off, new queen, what do they do? They reduce their physical numbers. The new queens come out and they fight it out and one of them prevails and now they've got something to spread new. queen medibular pheromone over what fewer bees which now means that the pheromone is stronger the bee is sense that things are right you have a queen right colony and they're good to go so there are a lot of things that trigger a swarm now the next thing that happens this is really annoying to a lot of beekeepers you leave a bunch of queen cells there and of course your queen is gone they swarmed

and now we've got this new colony with a potentially new, vigorous, ultimately after getting mated, a laying queen. Now, what if the next queen that emerges, they're not satisfied? So the resident bees think, well, we still have too much of a population, for whatever reason. They also send her out, we get an after swarm. So you get what's called a prime swarm in spring. Those are the monsters, right?

Then you get an after swarm. These are the half a football size. And so another queen went out with them. She might be mated. She might not even be mated yet. Because sometimes they fly out when you see these little clusters that are the size of a softball. Chances are you've got a queen that emerged from her cell, but never got successfully mated and doesn't produce the pheromones of a mated queen.

Therefore, nobody cares about her. That's why she has this tiny collection around her and her chances are extremely low. but you know what she did? She caused a bunch of your bees to move out. So you have this afters swarm problem. Because they do that when there are still residual queens that have not emerged from their cells yet, and this queen failed to kill them when she came out, which is her duty. It's her job. So it's just, and that doesn't happen all the time, but it does end up, you could have a colony that just continues to do that. Now there could be triggers in this hive that are the cause for these multiple after swarms. Have you thought about it?

one of the things is you may have really old brood comb in your hive that the bees don't want to be around it is not any longer suitable for what they want to live in right so pesticides build up year after year season after season in the liver of the hive which is the comb right so when we're looking at it as a superorganism so if we're not as beekeepers rotating it out and my average is five years So comb in the brood that's five years old should be rotated out. And then they'll draw new comb and start all over again. Because these toxins are in the environment. They're actually not going away.

So what we can do to help with that is rotate out old brood comb and make sure that they're building new comb at a time when it's nice and clean and they're productive enough to do it. So that's another thing. The other thing is pressure from parasites. You can have parasites and the biggest one is the parasitic mite. So we have Varroa destructor mites. Their numbers can build up and they can drive your bees out. So it can also do something called an abscond where instead of just dwindling, all of them leave. But what do they leave with? When they've got Varroa destructor mites, they took them with them. It did not solve the problem. They took them with them to another colony. Why does this reduce? reduce the number of erode destructor mites when they do that. Well, because they go to a new colony and they have to make new brood comb and they have to lay eggs. So what happened is all these reproductive cycles have been reduced and therefore the number of road structure mites that can be produced in those cells is also cut back.

So genetics can play also. These Africanized colonies, some people are keeping them full time and think that they're very good at controlling varroa destructor mites when what they actually might be doing is swarming a lot so you can get colonies that swarm that practice usurpation which is a whole other thing if you're a new beekeeper you probably are not going to see it but when a africanized queen and her little gang of workers they can actually move into a colony and take it over and kill the queen. That's called usurpation. They move into a colony that doesn't have good defenses. Take it over. Take all their stuff. And they have another colony. So genetics play in the propensity to swarm. And this is why some people think if you're collecting swarms every year or if you're cycling out your

bees every year and swarming and replacing queens and stuff like that, are you not then also selectively getting colonies of bees that are prone to swarm often. So and it is so when you look down at the traits of different bee genetic lines, you'll find high swarm potential, low swarm potential, good honey producers, bad honey producers, great wintering, bad wintering. So all of these categories come together and kind of form what you can expect out of your colony. But what the bee keep does in management practices can also impact their opportunity to swarm. So the propensity, the desire, the installed genetic traits to swarm are already with them. So now you have to understand that biology to know how to make them think that what they want to do they've already done. That's why you have

the Demery method. That's why you have resource hives where you pull the queen away for a time and then you can bring her back later if you want to while you hunt out and destroy it. So this is another way of keeping all your bees. Take the queen with the frames, as I described earlier, go through and hunt out all of the queen cells that you can find in production. Get rid of all of them. And then when you're positive that you didn't lose any, right? So you haven't missed any of those queen cells and they're all gone

and they don't look like there's any chance, then you miraculously bring your queen back, and what did you do? There was no swarm. You did not lose all of your worker bees. You have your old queen whose behavior and productivity. You are very familiar with. Her genetics are good.

She has all the traits that you like, and you just restored her to the colony without losing them in a swarm. But what you did lose during that entire period is all of that production unless she's in a real. resource hive and her production continues there. So now you're bringing her back with thousands of bees. Also, it's called coming in strong. So then you're set up. So there are a lot of things, but for Nigel and others that seem to, you know, it's just drummed into people, stop swarming, don't let them swarm,

how to stop swarms. It's a very popular search. If you can come up with a method that stops them from swarming, why not just make them think they swarm? Let's lie to our Let's make them think it happened and then let's use their own biology against them and then restore them and become their hero too at the end of it when we make the colonies good again. So that's it. We are at the fluff section. Hope you like today's conversation and if you do like this, please don't forget to subscribe if you're not already a subscriber 65% of my viewers are not subscribers. I find that interesting, but I'm glad that you're here and you stuck it out to the very end. So anyway, the fluff part. Swarms are everywhere. And again, I saw it today, social media, so-and-so has a swarm. Has anyone got the message? Does anyone know what to do? Has anyone already responded? Did anyone reach out? And then they provide the person's phone number and all their information in shotgun emails. No, don't. Go to be swarmed. B-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-M-E-D dot or. and register to collect swarms there. Likewise, when someone reaches out and says,

hey, there's a swarm in my yard. What should I do? Well, I know Bob keeps bees and Cindy down the road, she's a great bee wrangler and blah, blah, blah, you could just send that person to beswarned.org. And the general public doesn't know about it unless a beekeeper tells them. Beekers register and then you put down how many miles you're willing to travel Will you do a cutout? No. Will you catch them if they're eight feet off the ground? Yes. Will you get them if they're only a mile away? Absolutely Now you get the text message Swarm in your area 3.5 miles from you Yes or no claim swarm push the button claim the swarm now there's none of this So yeah, thanks for coming there was another beekeeper though was here 10 minutes ago took it and left

Be swarmed.org please use it here in the United States it works anywhere the internet works. So if you're overseas listening to this, I have no reason to think it wouldn't work for you to. Find out. See how it's going. Now, talking about swarms, some of you already have all the bees you need. You don't want swarms, you don't care.

But this is for those who do care, who do need bees, who do want to help out the new beekeeper with what? Free bees. This is a great opportunity for you. As a mentor, don't give them your best bees from your backyard apiary. Get on bee swarmed. Tell your mentees that you're going to help them get bees.

And then when you get the call, say, Meet me at UptiSquot address. I'm headed out right now to collect a swarm. We'll hive them up in your box and you can take them home and you will have bees at the end of the day. How cool is that? So have your swarm kit ready to go. Don't run around like a chicken with your head cut off.

Have your stuff pre-stage. Pretend you're a firefighter. You know how they set up their boots with their ensemble on top of the boots, and over that they've got their helmet, and they've got their MSA packs or whatever, Scott Air packs, MSA, whatever they have. They stage everything so that almost in their sleep,

they can jump into it, pull their suspenders on, get their stuff, and go. This is what a beekeeper should be too. Because darn if that swarm flies away 10 minutes before you got there. Treat it like rapid deployment swarm collection. Have all your stuff ready to go. And this is why if you can have five gallon buckets or whatever, put your stuff in it, have it already in your car.

If you know which car you use just for swarms. And have you so ready to go. If you're using something like the Everything BVAC, which is pretty sweet, charge it up. You can get several swarms off of one charge with that thing. And if you don't know what that is, look up the Everything BVAC. I reviewed it on my site. Look at that.

It's a good one. If you know that where you're going, you're going to have a place to plug in the Colorado BVAC. If you get that thing, you're already in a 10-frame Langstroth box with your bees, and you pull the cookie sheet out and it goes right into your hive. That is a very convenient way to collect swarms. And of course there's lots of other stuff. We have the trash can method. We've got the swarm reacher, which is the little clamp, a little plastic thing goes on the end of a pole.

Some people recently gave up on a swarm because it was 30 feet up, 20 feet up. But if you've got an extension pole and if you can get those bees, the clamor off of that tree branch or whatever they're on, onto your frames one by one and bring them down and put them in a box and send it back up with another frame on it and get them onto that and bring it down, this is tedious, but it's fun. And you get to talk to people about bees while you're there. So try to think of every potential situation

and make sure the gear is already staged for you to respond to that. What if you get there and it's bigger than, your thought and it won't fit into one box then you have to have multiple boxes to go and that's why with the colorado bvac i have multiple boxes ready to go and because if you overload a bvac you can kill the bees they overheat they die remarkably fast nitral gloves handy just get them they're cheap get a box of them have them ready to go register on b swarm.org i already mentioned that by the way in your own apiary if you've got dead out still out there clean them out don't just dump a bunch of bees from a swarm into a hive that's a mess

and listen to people that say and i've heard them which is amazing to me when they go oh the bees will just clean it out in fact i use swarms to clean out dead out hives please don't do that please clean the hive yourself you know you're going to hive a swarm first of all they have to do so much more work then to clean out the interior of that hive at the very least dump out the dead bees inspect the frames, make sure those are clean, as clean as possible. And then install your swarms. And if you want to let them finish cleaning things up, I highly recommend you get rid of every dead bee you can find that's in a hive.

If it's a dead out, replace equipment that doesn't fit well. Today I put together a hive that I've had sitting in the box all winter that I'm actually very impressed by. It is by Nature's Image Farm. that is Greg Burns and do they have the Endura Hive I thought I was getting one of those big fancy copper finished ones they had it the North American Honey Bee Expo but it's not it's wax dipped so that's cool it's still an indoor hive it's still built that way and it has the propolis like the propola hive interior surface for that so it's an example of you know me being late I opened it up

I put it all together today because I'm going to the zoo tomorrow I'm bringing it with me because it's a great way to show people the features of a beehive and to walk you through it so it takes a wooden hive It's got the Appamee bottom board that's compatible with wooden hives and the Apamea top the insulated top and the feeders on top And then what we did is we loaded it up with Picture frames so these are photos that are in deep Langstroth frames showing the different functions of honeybees from swarming to brood development to propolis what is that to you know you know floral foraging and

everything else it's all in there so if you can't bring bees which you can't because it's supposed to rain tomorrow so I'll have these photo frames and up at the Probola hive is the Endura hive partnered with Propola which is from Premier that's a lot of peas anyway it actually looks really good so it's gonna be fun to talk to people and the way it's set up I can talk to people about the biology of the honeybee and the different things that people should be looking for in a beehive from preservation to the facility that feeders provide for and things like that if you want to landing boards and stuff like that so clean your hive tools by the way you should not have just one hive tool I highly recommend

now my grandson he's a thief he has taken every hive tool he can find and he has magnetic bars in the garage where he stores all his stuff and his hive inspection kit which i recommend everyone have one it looks almost like a shoe shine kit i don't know if you remember underdog or any of that but anyway you have your shoe shine kit and that's where you put your hive tool and your marking pen and your queen clips queen um trap so that you can hold your queens they look like this have queen clips have multiples and tell the little kids that are with you not to grab the queen. If you're watching this right now, grandfather, can it mark the queen?

No, you can't. Okay, I'll put her back then. He had the queen in his hand. This is a problem. Don't touch the queens. More training necessary. Queen clips, queen cages, have all this stuff in one spot so that you don't have to give it a thought when you take off

and go to get a swarm. Also, let's see, B logs. Please keep a log. You think, because you only have a couple of hives, that you're going to remember everything that happened. You know what also makes a good log is different companies send you free calendars. Take that calendar and stick that in your hive inspection kit.

And when you see a swarm or you find queen cells and things like that, mark it on the calendar. is if nothing else, please keep records. Because what's going to happen is months, past, weeks, years, and you're going to want to recall exactly when things happen. This is how we know. This is swarm week. This is swarm week. It didn't even matter what the weather's doing. Bees are taking off, right? I have not lost a single swarm from my apiary this year because I'm Johnny on the spot now. I'm out there. I'm on to them. I know what they're doing. I know what they're about to do before they do it. I am out there watching the hives after the rain clears when it's warm after a storm,

warm after a storm, expect a swarm. It's true. They're going to be out there. You can do something about it. If you can actually be out there when the queen is leaving a hive for a swarm, and if you can get a hold of that queen, you just stop the swarm. All the other bees go right back in. Get the queen. Control the swarm. Be that person. Okay, so clean your hive tools. I was mentioning that have a bunch of them the really flat ones they're they're so inexpensive leave a hive tool on the inner cover of every one of your hives and when you pull off the outer cover there it is you're not hunting for your hive tool you're also not cross-contaminating any of your hives and uh pick someone to be your hive tool cleaner so what does that look like you use one of those uh friars they're dirt cheap

you heat it up to 170 degrees and they drop the hive tools in it and it cleans all the propolis and beeswax off and then they go right back on that magnetic strip for the next trip so once you use them swap them out clean them inexpensive ready to go and I also encourage you if you've got confidence and experience and you want to pass it on please be a mentor to someone and you might be you know just on your third or fourth year of beekeeping and someone else just has no mentor right they're just they come to the bee club, they come to a meeting and they live too far away from everyone else and you might just have someone just down the road from you that wants to know a little bit about bees. There's nothing wrong with them coming along and learning right along with you because some people are very keen and they can look at stuff, they can start asking questions and when you're a mentor and you realize you don't have all the answers and let's be honest who does, no one is smarter than everyone. So when you have a mentor, you want them to ask questions. You want them to grill you on.

Why are you doing that? Well, it's the way we always did it. Well, it's the way it was shown to me. Well, why does that work? If you cannot fill in the blanks on why you're doing what you're doing, maybe you should be taking a second look at it. So anyway, I want to thank you for being here today, become a mentor. If you're confident and you're not killing bees every day, and you feel like you've got good stuff to pass on, be a mentor. There are national organizations. If you are a veteran, there are veterans programs that I like a lot, by the way. There's one down in Florida called Swamp Apes. I think I got that right. Swamp Apes are for veterans to go out and help get invasive species.

So they're in there after Burmese pythons and stuff like that. And that looked like a lot of fun to me. So if you need a sense of adventure and you're down in the Florida area, a lot of retired veterans are in Florida. Look up swamp apes and see what that's about. The other thing is on a national program, Hives for Heroes. They have a website, hives for heroes.org. And go there, there's always a link down in the video description

for every one of my videos that links you to hives for heroes. If you want to be a mentor to a veteran, maybe you're a veteran yourself, you happen to be a beekeeper, and you feel like you've got the time available to help someone out. Now, maybe you don't have the time to go and physically participate in helping with mentoring, but you could provide resources. Maybe you've got some hive equipment that you're going to scale down and you're going to get rid of some of it. Then you could help a veteran get high equipment and get a start.

Maybe you could help them with a swarm or something like that. So be a mentor. It is a fantastic thing to be doing. thank you for being here. I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead. I will see some of you tomorrow at the Erie Zoo. And I hope it goes great. So I hope all is good with your bees. Post your questions down below. Please go to the way to be.org. Click on the page mark the way to be or questions and fill out topics that you think I should address in the future. Have a great weekend.