The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 306 Queen Issues and Swarm-Centered discussions.

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

May 16th YouTube Audio 2025:  https://youtu.be/tVenBm5g448

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, May the 16th of 2025. This is backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 306. I'm Frederick Dunn and... This is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. It's a super nice day outside. If it is nice where you are the way it is here, please get outside, get away from your computer, laptop, phone screen, whatever you're doing because your bees are doing stuff and you're going to want to see what's going on. there. So if you're new, welcome for the first time. If you want to know what's going to happen today in this video, please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and maybe some additional links and resources that will help you out with your backyard beekeeping. So all the questions we're going through today were submitted during the past week.

And if you want to know how to submit your own, please go to my main website, the way to be.org. Click on the page mark the way to be. It also says questions. fill out the form and you can submit your own topic for future considerations so we had a lot of storms through here last night storm front storm tiny storms we have a lightning counter over 400 lightning strikes it looked like the paparazzi were on the horizon in the middle of the night just flashing away it looked fake that's how many lightning strikes there were and no big deal as far as we're concerned other people of course got a lot of rain and we're set this year actually the

rainfall is right on the money for doing good things for the bees so you want to know what's going on outside right this minute I know you do so check this out 77 degrees Fahrenheit that's 25 Celsius perfect not too hot not too cold and you know what your bees are doing right now while you're sitting here as I am in the afternoon early afternoon they're probably swarming 3.6 mile per hour wind is what they're going to be with when they take to the wing, which is 5.7 kilometers per hour, and the humidity, surprisingly, considering that we just had a rainstorm come through, 51% relative humidity, so that's great. A lot of people might be noticing in this neck of the woods, and where is that?

Northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. So what's going on here may not be the same as what's going on where you are. Okay, so sometimes bees, beard, they get on the outside of the hive and they're fanning away and it can be dramatic if you're a new beekeeper because you see them all clustered on the landing board what is going on do we need to expand the hive well it wouldn't hurt to expand the hive this time of year because we are in the middle of a nectar flow and but they're just venting because it's a combination of heat a lot of nectar coming in and they need to dry it out and most of what's collected on the outside of your hive are foragers because they're just in

the way they don't do inside the hive work anymore once they transition into foraging outside So they just cluster the hang out and supering can also help give them a space to be out of the way of the nectar stores, the honey stores, where they are working things up. So right now we're in transition. Anyway, the UV index is 8, which is pretty darn high, which means you can go out there and get a tan if you want to. Be careful. Robbing risk, by the way. And this, again, is pertinent to where I am. Robbing risk is medium to high because what's happening, dandelions.

are closing up. We're in a transitional period here. A lot of the flowering trees have stopped flowering there at the end of it. The dandelions are coming to an end and that was a huge nectar flow for us here this year. So no more may really worked great. And what else is going on? Tree pollen count is super high so you should have no problem with bee bread going into your hives to take care of that new brood that's going on, right? And so another thing that we're doing is we're going to be planting when because I get this question a lot next weekend not this weekend my wife would like me to start now I said no no let's wait have things to do very important things to do so the tree pollen count is number one and it's the highest highest rating they can give so what else is

going on I think most of the questions that are coming out all over the place are about queens and swarming and queen problems and virgin queens, mated queens, how your bees are behaving towards them. The Demeray method. I'm getting so many questions about Demeray. Thank you for thinking I might know a lot about Demeray. I really, it's not my main thing. That's why I send people to others who do the Demeray method. In fact, why not just Google Demeray, D-E-M-A-R-E, I believe, and see what the man himself had to say about the method and how to best execute it. That is the best way to go. Go to the source all the time. It's a matter of pretending, well, not pretending, we are faking out our bees. So we're trying to get them to believe

that they've swarmed when they haven't. We're trying to relieve congestion in the brood area to make sure that your bees don't feel stimulated to swarm. And once they get started, once that ball is rolling, it's hard to stop. Now I know in the past few Fridays I have said, I got my bees under control. I'm ahead of the game. I'm on top of it this year. In fact, I was feeling really good about it. And for the past three days, we've just been dealing with swarms everywhere. The good news is a lot of the swarms aren't mine. They're not from here. They're coming in from other places and that's going to tie in with some of the questions today that we've

received. So we're going to talk about that. I don't want to ruin it for you. I think that's just about it. If you've got something on your mind right now and you just have to talk to somebody, you want to discuss it with your peers. Maybe you've got a photo to show. Go to the Facebook Fellowship, the Way to Be fellowship. And you can join up there and you can talk with people just like yourself all over the world. So the good news about that is there's likely someone there that is in your environment that understands what's going on locally because there is a phrase that all beekeeping is local and that's very true. So a lot of things that I say here when it comes to preparations or winter management and things like that may not be necessary.

where you live and just may not work that well for you but overall I would say the feedback that I'm getting from you has been very positive really good so I appreciate that you're here and that you're getting beneficial things regarding backyard beekeeping so we're going to start right off with Alvin question number one Alvin comes from New York says hi Fred what happens if a charge or capped queen cell was accidentally left in an imitation swarm split. Will the hive recognize that they have the old queen, smaller population, and destroy the cells, or will they swarm once the new queen is born?

Thanks for your time and help. Okay. So when that new queen emerges, by the way, let's just talk about the way they normally do that anyway. So when they are producing queen cells, they're doing it because of time of day is nice and long. That's why it happens this time of year. and that's why they were doing preparations even though the weather wasn't cooperating the amount of daylight was and the environment was responding so your bees were making preparations even on those cold nights and days even with or without rain and everything else is going on and that's why they surprise you between 10 and 2 swarms will surprise you so I'm just no longer surprised that I go out and find swarms and the fun part is coming up this week I'm going to show you how to manage some unique situations with swarms what to do with the little tiny ones that just have virgin queens in them so the thing is we take these things apart and we create splits so this artificial swarm is like a walkaway split right so when you do that you take away the existing queen after all they were trying to get rid of her in the first place they've been pushing her around getting her ready

to depart and in progress would be other queens new queens in queen cells along the frames of your brood frame so along the edges right so this question is if you do all the splits and break them down and reduce the numbers in the hive and you pull away the senior queen the existing laying queen and leave them with these cells with that reduced population would they destroy the cells or they swarm once the new queen is born or emerge from her cell so here's what's happened now no one really can give you a firm 100% of the time answer to this because there are a lot of different things going on that we don't always have a handle on and your bees can do silly things some colonies have swarmed themselves right down to a skeleton crew that cannot survive we would like to avoid that

one of the ways we avoid that is by going in and destroying these cells ourselves but one of them got away from alvin so now i've got a queen cell in there Now, here's what I've seen happen to bees in the past. They have often even just cleaned out all the queen cells that were there. If the existing queen is still there, they'll clean out existing queen cells if the environment no longer supports a swarm. I would personally get rid of that queen cell as soon as I could, and because there just aren't enough bees to swarm and still stay there. So let's look at this again. The cell was accidentally left in the imitation swarm split. So we left a queen cell in the split.

Well, the hive recognized that they have the old queen. So this sounds like it's a split that was taken away from the existing colony. And so we have the old queen in that, but there also is a queen cell in there. So my guess, and it's just an educated guess, based on a few years, of staring at bees and I stare at them a lot, I think they're not going to allow the queen that's in the queen cell emerge at all. I think they're going to clean her up and cannibalize her,

as mean as that sounds. There again, you have an opportunity because the queen cell is there, and you have the old queen with you. I would just kill the queen cell instead of waiting for this to happen. Because if the queen's still around, they still want her, look at the way they're paying attention to her. If they're still feeding her and all of that, then get rid of the other one. That's what I would say. If you have another idea or if you think I misread this, please make a comment.

Down in the comment section. We accept all suggestions and sharing and discussion, even disagreement, so long as it's polite. We don't accept insults. All right. No politics, no religion. Moving on. Question number two comes from Rose from Yakima, Washington. Maybe it's Yakima. Anyway, Demerang, here we go again with the Demeray method. Demerang, the long lang. So what's a long lang? It's a horizontal hive. Langstroth frames, and that's it. It's long. It's horizontal.

So Demerring the long lang. So after fabricating a queen excluder for two of my long langsroth hives, I have been attempting to demure with them. Much easier than the vertical hives, which I am also attempting. The challenge is how often you have to get into a hive to manipulate frames. Find and destroy queen cells, depending on where they are.

Question. If a queen is still laying fresh eggs, this is important. Has she been moved into swarm mode? So if one finds fully capped queen cells, several frames removed from the queen excluder, so that's they're well apart from where your brood is, right? Not in the brood chamber, but in the brood chamber the queen continues to lay up eggs in. Is it safe to remove the queen cells in the other chamber?

Yes, I absolutely would remove the queen cells in the other chamber. So here's the other thing. If a queen is laying eggs, is she actually being prepared to swarm? No. Here's why. When your queen is going to swarm, they lean out her resources. And by they, I'm talking about the nurse bees, the retinue, the group of bees that follows her around, grooms her, feeds her, takes care of her, protects her, does all this stuff. When they start leaning out and start not feeding her enough to produce eggs, then she stops producing eggs. So if you're seeing eggs, that means she's been laying within the last three days.

and I also would pay attention to their treatment of the queen. This tells all if you can look at the queen on the frame, if they're actively feeding her, if they allow her to rest. And that's right, queen's rest. If you've looked at observation hives, the queen will sometimes park herself there for two, three minutes at a time. And so your indicators are their behavior towards the queen. This is going to be a common thread in today's responses to most of the questions.

that were submitted. Look at the way your bees are reacting toward queen's cells, you know, queen cups and capped queen cells and things like that. It tells you what they favor. It tells you kind of ahead of time what they're planning to do. So if they allow her to rest, they're not kicking her out yet because the queen that's being prepared to depart the hive is not given a chance to rest. As soon as she pauses, they actually vibrate her. call cheerleader bees. They grab and they give each other a shake. So they keep pushing her around. They don't let her rest. They're leaning her out, preparing her to fly. And so to do that, she's going to stop laying. So if she's laying, she's not leaving. Maybe there's a rhyme we

could make out of that. The queen's laying, she's not leaving. So let's see, no eggs. Risk is gone. The other thing is, how long do you continue to do this? If you've done your Demerre split, you've pulled frames of brood and you've got them away from your current brood area where the queen is laying and because the queen excluder is used she is prevented from following her brood frames and continuing to lay in them so when you inspect if you see that there's no longer eggs that the open larvae are aging and that there's no new young ones and you're confident that you've scanned each and every frame there and that there are no queen cells there shouldn't be anyway because all you're doing is separating them with a queen excluder. So unless they were already making preparations to swarm,

and the whole point of the Demoree method, from my understanding, is that we want to do this before they're making swarm cells. So before they get into this production, just when you're opening your hives and you see that your frames are full of bees and that there's lots of frames, five, six out of ten frames, full of brood, then it's a great opportunity to decongest that area. pull a couple frames of brood, caped brood, make sure you know where your queen is, leave her in the current brood area, and separate them. Move those other frames up, and as you said, the long Langstroth High facilitates that. No lifting of boxes. You just made a follower board that instead of being a solid follower board, has a queen excluder built into it, which means that what? Nothing can lay eggs past it. And that means that the brood emerges from their brood cells, from their, from their, pupa state cells and they move out and then they go right back through the queen excluder and they can go back and join the group but it relieves congestion so we're faking out our bees without losing numbers so that separation

thins things down okay hope that works horizontal hive so easy but the Demeray method is I would go to the person that originated that who it's named after question number three Levi comes from Vernal Utah There's commercial beekeeper that open feeds their bees until June. They have yards with around 40 hives each, spaced out every two miles in our town, so there's no way to get away from them. We worry about saving any spring honey because they're open feeding so long. How would you suggest we approach asking them not to open feed?

okay well this is interesting and I almost didn't include it because it's not my business how commercial beekeepers manage their areas but this is something that backyard beekeepers come up against quite often you could be set up in your backyard you could have been doing this for 20 years plus and had five or six beehives in your backyard and lo and behold the very next lot to yours grants permission the owner of that gives permission to a commercial beekeeper to come in and park their flatbed trailer or unload a whole bunch of, you know, four hive pallets in a whole series right near your own backyard apiary. What are you going to do about that? Well, legally nothing. So unless you've got laws in your area that prohibit, you know,

certain amounts of, you know, bee density and things like that, commercial beekeepers have even stepped on other commercial beekeepers in this way. So even those that are doing outyards and have genetic exercises going on. So they're trying to, they have drone yards, for example, they have mating yards and they have finishing yards for queens and things like that. And they're controlling the genetics. And then out of the blue, they come there and within a thousand yards, they find out there's a hundred hives parked from a commercial beekeeper who found an area to park their hives when they're not actively being used for pollination. So the reason I bring that up is there are lots of instances

where even commercial beekeepers have friction with one another because they don't match up with what they're trying to achieve. So as a backyard beekeeper, what are you going to be able to do? I figure your chances of suggesting to a commercial beekeeper that they stop open feeding if that's their practice and getting them to not do that out of respect for the fact that you're trying to make sure the honey that's in your hives comes exclusively from floral content, right, from floral sources. The chances are low to none. Even the nicest commercial

beekeeper out there has commitments and they have to boost their brood. They have to boost their colonies and they do that through feeding. Now, do they have to open feed? So maybe there's another angle. Let's say that they're unusual. Let's say that you first, all let's say that you can actually meet and talk with them because that's the other part they are often dropping these things off at nighttime and they don't stick around or it's an employee of the commercial operation and they don't really they're not a decision maker but um let's say you could talk with them and make suggestions and say that hey you know feeding inside the hives maybe putting bucket feeders on your hives would be a more efficient way to deliver those

resources to your bees and then you could get them not to open feed. So there are some very prominent beekeepers who put up 55 gallon drums of syrup, open, full of straw, things like that. And of course, your bees are likely to go to those. So the other option is, after you've tried to talk with them

and found that you got radio silence or that they just weren't interested because they're commercial and you're just a backyarder, they can snub you. I've been snubbed myself. I've been snubbed. So you can't win people over. So what could you do? So this is your compromise, the things that are under your control. When do you super? So just unsuperer yet. We're talking about a week or two anyway when the month of May is over with and maybe they can

stop open feeding. And then that's when you can put your honey supers on and do it immediately. Like the day that they stop open feeding, go for it and get your bees out there. For those of you had conflicts and maybe came up with a resolution or a way of influencing commercial beekeeper to respect the backyard beekeeper or even just backyard small-scale operations in general, how did you do it? What was your resolution? Help Levi here. So I'm thankful that the commercial beekeeper that's near me seems to have lost almost all of their bees. I said I'm thankful for that. It just means they'll have less impact on my genetics. So because they buy in packages from the South every year, so it

disrupts my local genetics that I'm trying to keep folding back on myself that I have, you know, 19 years invested in, cycling back my own genetics here and bringing in only genetically strong queens when I do bring them in. But no more. I cycle in my own stock now exclusively and have been flooding it out and that's why when I get a swarm that comes through the woods I'm comforted because I've influenced the stock to the northeast of me therefore if I get a swarm that comes from that direction through the woods that hives itself in one of my hives in a way all that is is my own genetics coming back to me after a couple of seasons about 2,000 yards away so it can work but we need people willing to work together that's the frustrating part you know

when you try to talk to somebody and they just won't hear you all. I don't know what to say after that. Whatever is under your control and do your best. That's all I can tell you. Question number four comes from Dustin from McKellum Hill, California. I might have messed up the name of that. But anyway, when does a queen lay an egg in a queen's cell? Does she lay every time she comes by and the workers eat the egg until they decide to requeen? Also, I had a swarm that seemed to go back into the original hive. Is that normal? Will they quickly swarm again?

Thanks so much. Okay. Two questions here in one, so we'll do the first one. Does a queen lay an egg in a queen cell? When does she do it? Well, first of all, we find queen cups in frames all the time. In fact, it's something that if you've got foundationless frames in particular, sometimes along the fringe of the brood areas, you'll see a queen cup.

It looks like a little acorn cap. right and then they're just empty all the time and any time you do an inspection we look in them to see what's going on i think when a queen senses now this is keep in mind how i phrased that i think i don't know for sure i don't know 100 percent so i think that when a queen uh is being treated a little differently that uh there's a shift in the air in the colony and the way they're treating her and when they start um being triggered. In other words, there's a lot of resources coming in, the daylight is right, the number of bees, the population is heavy, her pheromone is thinning out a little bit. There are triggers that cause your queen then to park an egg in one of those queen cups, which later becomes a queen's cell. And then they do multiples of those. And there's a lot of discussion you may hear about that people want to know can bees move eggs around themselves.

So if they could, let's argue with ourselves. Always argue with yourself. If you're going to disagree about something, take both sides of it, see if it's feasible, possible, practical, what would they do? So if they could move eggs around, then we wouldn't have these emergency queen cells that occur in the middle of a brood area. So that means something happened to the queen like that. She died, didn't have a chance to plan. And then so that's when we see these queen cells coming out of the center of the field, right? And this ties in to my response to this question. Here's why. That means that they had no plan, and if they were able to move the eggs and had a practice of picking up eggs, moving them to another cell, then they wouldn't do emergency cells in the

middle of the frame like that. They would just gather an egg that they like, and they would run it down and park it in that little queen cell that was already started before on the fringe of the frame. So I think that they're stuck with what they get, and I think the queen decides where she's going to park eggs and what kind of egg she's placing, because the queen does decide when she puts her abdomen into a larger cell, a drone cell. She decides now that that's going to be an infertile egg, and it's going to produce a drone. So she decides what cell to put that in. Smaller cells, worker cells, she knows that she's going to put a fertilized egg in that cell. And likewise, when she finds a queen's cell and the conditions are right and her instincts are in line with the rhythm of the environment that they're in and the normal reproduction of the superorganism, she will park an egg or two in queen's cells.

And she may continue to put them in as they build more queen cells. And then the workers can decide then if they want to cannibalize one and remove it. but I think she does that intentionally and because look at it look at it this way too while we're arguing with ourselves if it's a large cell after all those queen cups are big in diameter in fact a little larger than a drone cell so if she was just randomly parking eggs here and there because it's a larger cell she would likely just park a drone egg in there an unfertilized egg but she doesn't It's a larger cell and she puts a fertilized egg in it that has the potential to be a queen.

Every worker egg has the potential to become a queen after it's been laid. So I think she picks it. So let's talk about the swarm growing out because I just observed this just a few days ago, in fact. We call them fire drills. They fly out. You think you've got a swarm on your hands. You stand there with your cup of coffee or whatever you watch to see where they're going to go. They look like they're about to land on something.

some cases half of them land but the rest of them don't commit and they stay in the air and they swarm around and the next thing you know they're all pouring right back into the same hive that they were coming out of you just witnessed what's called a fire drill so then does that mean whew dodged a bullet there that's over with thank goodness they didn't swarm but here's your opportunity because they're going to swarm so once again if you're 100% confident that you're going to be around that you're going to be home that you're going to know what's going on and you're going to go out there and get this warm once they land on a branch that's fine but if you think you might miss it you have somewhere to go other places to be i barely leave my yard that's why i'm here i'm on it i'm

looking at these bees all the time except for when i'm doing things like this right now doing a q and a so um if you're afraid that you weren't going to be around after that fire drill i would get in there and find the queen and keep her i would get all of her i would put her in a nucleus hive, I would save her. Or remove her completely, but you did not relieve 100% of the triggers for swarming just by removing the queen. You think you did, but you didn't, because the numbers are still high, all the triggers are still there, and they may have produced multiple queen cells, which is pretty common. And then what will happen is the first queen cell to emerge may result in another swarm that would be actually a prime swarm, but this time it's got a virgin

with it and off they go and then like a rapid fire colony they send out another swarm after that and another swarm after that or you'll send out one swarm let's say the queens emerge together and there'll be two or three of them you can get a swarm with multiple queens in it so then how do you parse that out how do you work with those glad you asked because I did that I made videos about it and I'm going to show them to you when maybe this weekend maybe next week But they're recorded. They're not in the can, as they say, in the film industry. Back in the days when they used actual film, today it's just data.

But there are a lot of things that we can do to get things back on track and get that colony together. But yes, they're on their way out. They're going. So if you want to do two things, satisfy their urge to swarm, like the Queen, not lose them. If you're going to be around, then make sure that you understand that you've got to be. that one that's ready to go so starting at 10 a.m. you better park yourself out there in your lawn chair with your cooler next to you or whatever you do and keep an eye on it and see when they're going to go and then when they land on a tree branch I'm sure it's going to be right at eye level you know right where you need it to be then you're

going to hype them up so keep your stuff ready they're going if they're not gone already in fact I'd like to hear from Dustin and find out did they go how would you know How would you know if they went? Question number five comes from Rob, Southern New Hampshire. I installed the package of bees about a month ago in a five frame deep with fully drawn frames. It came with a blue marked queen, so I assume she's new. I've only done two fairly quick inspections to make sure the queen is in there laying eggs

and they're starting to build up. Today, I took a quick look and I found the marked queen and eggs, but I also found one hatched queen supersedger cell. So this is just the cell, not the queen. The cell was open on the bottom and not chewed open from the side. I didn't see any sign of the other queen, so I assume if some virgin queen did hatch, she was killed by the current queen or is out on a mating flight

and they will fight it out when she gets back. What's going on here? Is it common for bees to try and supersede right away in a newly installed package? Keep in mind that when you get a package, those are not those queens offspring, by the way. They're just a package of bees. It was dumped in there, and they took a queen in a cage, and they introduced her, and then they're getting acquainted during the trip. So they still may have different genetics.

They are not. By the way, when you get a package of bees and you go, why, these bees are unpleasant, or these bees are easy to manage and things like that, you don't really know what you have from the queen yet until you're more than 30 days out because the queen's genetics are not represented in the package so the thing of it is what's going to happen here um you put it in there you found this queen cell now what's key is remember the queen cell was uncapped at the end not chewed through the side the way queens do it so it sounds like the workers did it here's the other thing check back again because i've seen them disappear those

cells, right? They remove them like magic. Sometimes they just decide they're not going to swarm, and it sounds like they shouldn't, unless, you know, they're really congested in a tiny package. You can cause a swarm in a very tiny hive. If you're not providing them with adequate space for resources and expansion, they sense that and they will split. In some cases, they'll even abscond. You really don't want that. But it sounds to me like, because the queen is still there, I highly doubt that there was a virgin queen that emerged and then also made her flight because now we're talking another week past that which means that you would have missed this for over a week before she would fly out otherwise she's still there so I think she's dead and gone and I have seen that

I've seen workers turn on a queen chew the cap off watch the queen come out and then go right to chewing her wings off, chewing her feet, and then before you know it, an hour later, she's dead on the bottom. A couple hours after that, they're dragging her out and getting rid of her. So that's what I suspect happened. They're favoring your current queen. Good news, because that's what you paid for when you bought your package. The package is just a support system for the queen that you bought. So anyway, I think she's gone. What do you think? I think they just destroyed it. That's it. And I think you're see that queen cell disappear question number six comes from jack commerce michigan just harvested a five-gallon bucket from last year's failed lay-ins hive some of the honey is the color of green radiator fluid

a small amount five times darker green than that is that stuff okay for consumption it smells good it's runny like the rest of the honey in other words not set right just very dark green maybe five percent of the entire harvest. So my suspicion is, well, they got into something, first of all, because I don't know of anything that makes green honey. We can get different tones of amber to clear, you know, but when I hear about green honey, you know what I suspect, and I don't know if this is being used where you are, Spirilina. Last year, after the nectar flow was done, and we were trying to provide a boost to some colonies that were needing resources, getting prepared, for winter, we put spirulina in there and it turned out to be a good move. Here's why.

When we look at pulling the hives apart now, getting rid of capped winter leftover honey, because we augmented their feed with spirulina sugar syrup, now I know when they stored it, which frames have the spirulina in it. And I also then know that that's where they were storing sugar syrup for the colonies that were stocking up in that way. And so when it's green like that, there's something else in it. I mean, if you want to use that for yourself, sure. I wouldn't package it and try to sell it anywhere. Another option is, of course, to feed it back to your bees during a dearth period.

And I realize that honey is expensive. It's a great thing to feed back to your bees, though. You already have it. If you can't market it, and if it's green, that's my first guess. Now, spirulina, here's what's interesting about it. When you look at spirulina powder, and I hope you have a microscope, if you don't, you can get a very inexpensive one. And get some spirulina from Amazon or wherever else. I'll put a link down to the video description if you don't know where to get it.

I use organic spirulina that's intended for people. And so you put a drop of water in a microscope slide, you put spirulina in the drop of water, and then you put a little glass cover on that, and you look at it under your microscope. microscope. Then you're going to see what Spirulina looks like. And it's very interesting. Little single-celled plant, right? So it is just algae. So then you can look for that very same thing once you identify it in the honey that is green. So I recommend take the honey, put it on. And if you don't have a microscope, do you know that some libraries offer microscopes? if you ask. So there are go to your local public library which is very underutilized these days.

It's amazing what resources they have available to you. And so you could probably maybe bring samples right to your library and do it anyway. So then you put your honey on there and you look to see if it is actually a plant base that causes that green coloration. And so you'll be able to see it. In the absence of that, you've got something else in there. So they might have gotten into candy. Maybe it's a candy factory nearby. You know, out in Northeast, PA, they have the Welch's factory out there. So there are a lot of opportunities for bees to get into things that are in partially used containers and stuff like that.

So you want to try to identify it. I think that that would be fun. And they also hope that when you realize what it is that you share with us. I hope to hear from Jack and know what the green was. But when you have a suspicion about something, as I do, Spirulina would have been something here. Very easy to identify because we have a standard. In other words, a known standard of what it looks like,

and then we could just match it up. Because, by the way, just looking at pollen and recognizing what kind of pollen it is without a comparison of a known pollen source, it's very hard. And people have done that for decades, and it's still very challenging to classify pollen. It's harder than you think.

I think with AI coming out, that it's much better because it used to be just some old-timer who really understood, who had seen hundreds of thousands of slides of pollen and matched them up over the years. I think that once AI, artificial intelligence, is educated to look at a scan, look at a screen, that is a digital representation of what's on the microscope,

that you'll find that they get an instant classification where it used to take much more time. So that's one area where we're really accelerating. Let's move on to question number seven with Chuck, who comes from Akron, Ohio. This is while performing an inspection on one of my hives, I noticed five queen cells on the bottom of the frame, and they were capped. I pulled one off, and the queen emerged right in my hand. I added her to a nuke box and added some frames of nurse bees in a frame of pollen nectar. I also shaped two frames of bees, and the next day,

Mother's Day, the hive swarmed to the top of my 40-foot cedar tree. The original hive had to let them go. So this is interesting. So it took a new queen because that new queen can't swarm. She can't fly. She's not ready for dittily yet. So this queen was moved into a nucleus hive with resources and then the existing hive is what we're talking about here that swarmed. So I must have missed the cap queen's cell question. Will the unmated queen in the nuke have a strong enough pheromone to keep the bees in this box until she got mated or did I waste my time? So there are a lot of things going on here. One, the cell that just had a queen emerge, it didn't emerge and swarm in a day. That would be so unlikely. She needs to be exercise. She needs to be

fed. She needs to harden up and toughen up. Some queens even do practice flights and things like that, and she's unmated. So they, if they do fly out like that, they don't go far. You probably go 10 feet, 5 feet from the hive because this is a under-horsepowered queen that really can't do much. So I highly suspect there was another queen in there that may have been overlooked. So anyway, keeping that you have a queen that you watched emerged from a, cell and created a colony for her, I think she's the one to watch. So we'll watch both of these. I personally would keep an eye on each, keep them separate, and see what pans out.

The queen that you have that has not yet mated will be continued, will continue to be cared for by the nurse fees that you dumped in there. It sounds like they were well set up. And so expect her to fly out and mate within the next nine days of the time of this question, of course. And then she should return. So within two weeks, for the time you put that queen in that box, you should see eggs in there. So two weeks. Look for eggs. Get back to us. Tell us about it. See how both. Give us an update on both of those hives, because the other one too may not be done yet. There's more going on there. Question number eight. This comes from Rodney 9799. How long does it take for queen to lay eggs after she swarms?

Okay. How long does it take for queen to lay eggs after she swarms? So we have to talk about before she swarms. Remember what I said earlier that they exercise the queen, they lean back her food, she has to stop laying eggs because the queen that's in full production has a large abdomen. She flies heavy and lands soon. So they lean her out, off she flies, and it is nice to see a prime swarm with a nice big queen in it because she's bigger than these unmated queens that we see in there. And when we say bigger and smaller, they look bigger in every way,

but it's really the abdomen that just expands all the way out when it's full of eggs. Because keep in mind, a productive queen is in full production. She's laying up to her body weight in eggs every 24 hours, which is remarkable. And so when they lean her out, she's off egg laying. So once she gets hived up again, you wouldn't expect to see eggs the next day after you put her back in there. Because the first order of business, once they're hived up, and all your bees are with her,

they're going to get that queen back online because she is the center of attention and, of course, the core of all reproduction in the hive. And so they're going to feed her up. So within two to three days, at the earliest, you can see her. That's why when we hive swarms and things like that, I always recommend, for those of you who treat your bees, this is the absolute best opportunity that you have

to put the smackdown on any Varroa destructor mites that would have gone with that swarm. So that's why I say do it on the eighth day. If she had been laying eggs immediately, like the minute you hived them, then the eighth day, they could be capped already and you'd have a hiding place for your varroa destructor mites to reproduce. That's why we're pretty safe.

Eight, nine days. I've never hived a swarm. and then nine days afterwards looked at it and seen capped brood right so we know that there's a delay and this is a very easy backyard experiment to do you don't even have to see all the eggs or even spot eggs which you should note on your calendar if you're inspecting is what day did you see capped brood now the other thing is we don't want to force and abscond so we don't need to look at them every day because we know that that's not possible anyway so if all we're going to do is not to start them but we want an answer to this question right then you hive them up and you'll leave them

alone when would your first inspection be the earliest possible day that she could have laid an egg and have that resulted in capped brood right so we're looking at the eighth day that's when you start those inspections and you don't see any capped brood well she didn't lay eggs yet so ninth 10th day probably the 12th day 11th day is when you would start to see capped brood So that lets us know that it takes her a few days before she's capable of producing fertile eggs that can replace the stock eventually. And that should be the way it goes. Question number nine. This comes from beekeeper carmine.

Hi Fred. Speaking of swarms. Sorry, this is all the people want to talk about now. Speaking of swarms, I know how well I manage my bees. I don't know the health of a capture. swarm. Should I assume that most swarms are healthy and were treated for mites? Or should I pass on capturing them for fear of an aged queen, disease spread, and so on? Now, this is where, you know, if we could all be on the same page in a perfect world and all your neighbors, all your beekeepers

around you would all share with each other what's going on and things like that. Early spring swarms, the sickest ones, the sickest, colonies tend to die out in the wintertime. So this time of year, I have a pretty high confidence in the health of the swarms that are zipping out there. But you can if you want to err on the side of caution. I use my son's backyard in a neighboring town, and I have another mentee that has another yard just three and a half miles from here. Maybe it's a little more than that. But these are places where if I collect a swarm and I want to know.

how they perform I can put them in that yard as an out yard and observe their behavior and observe their production value and everything else before I bring them back I will say and I'm going to say it again because you have a swarm you have opportunity to observe and to knock out prood destructer mites please do it please do it if you're not comfortable around accelic acid vapor there's foroxan now which I don't recommend putting in a brand new colony, but you could put axolic acid dribble. And if you want to see what the formula is for that, go to websites like better be.com and look at their exhalic acid page,

methods of treatment, and then you'll see that there's a dribble description. The whole recipe's there exactly how to do it. And also very high efficacy at knocking out vera destructor mites early on. Don't miss those windows. Please don't miss those windows of opportunities. Now, if you're treatment free, you're going to watch them. You're going to count mites, I hope, and figure out if they're loaded or not, because a swarm can have come from a cavity somewhere in a tree, and they may have swarmed because they may have absconded due to high mite loads and could be carrying mites on their bodies.

So you're right to want to check them out and see what's going on, and you have an opportunity then. When you do your, you can, I don't recommend doing mite washes at that point, I would just go ahead. I mean, why kill 250 bees when you don't have to, or 300 bees, whatever you're doing? If you don't have to, because you can treat with exhalic acid or not kill any of the bees. So there you go. So health of a captured swarm. I was at a presentation one time where the presenter said that every single swarm had American fowl brood and that's why they don't collect swarms.

I thought, what? No way. So if you knew that, you should have killed them and not let them go. So moving on. But if an out yard, a place away from your apiary, if you have doubts about the origin of the swarm and the health of the swarm, an out yard, ask somebody if you can park a colony in the yard for a while until you know what's going on, because it'll show up in the brood if it's a brood issue. And you'll know more.

Question number 10 comes from James Barron 1202. That's the YouTube name. I bought a huge bag of black oil sunflower seeds bird feed from Walmart. Much cheaper than the seed companies and great germination on the ones I planted. I hope my bees work them. So this is because we were talking about last week. Remember the different seeds that we put out? And I put out sunflower seeds that are a variety of sunflower seeds.

one of the things that I look for and we'll get back to the black oil sunflower seed bird seed But I look for the fact that they're going to have pollen on them because keep in mind some seed producers are selling you pollen free Seed and the reason is because people use them for cut flowers and they don't want Cut sunflowers on their centerpiece of their table with yellow pollen all over the table cloth and things like that I want lots of pollen on it now we know I've spoken with people people that produce a black oil sunflower seed and they say things like well it won't plant it won't germinate it won't do all of these things and the point is it is dirt cheap but you get all of the exact same variety of sunflower and as far as whether or not the bees work them i know that they germinate

because they germinate right underneath the bird feeder so uncared for they're just dropped on the ground and the chickens are through there every day it's a miracle that any plant grows there but you can plant them and they will grow. So as far as the pollen load and what specific variety they are, I don't know. And I know they tell us they won't germinate because they don't want you growing your own because then you've got your own bird seed on the stem at the end of the year, which is actually really cool. And I would like to do more research on, especially coming from Walmart, what was the origin of the sunflower? You know, what are the genetics? Is it going to have a bunch of pollen? Is it good for the bees? Because studies have been done. regarding different pollen quality from different specific sunflower varieties.

And now some of that even had an impact on American foul brood reduction and things like that. And then I tried to dive deeper and find out more about the specific sunflower varieties. And of course, how I could get a hold of those and plant them. I mean, if they're going to knock down viral loads inside your hive, or if they're going to improve the health and well-being of your bees with the pollen that they produce, then wouldn't you want that? Absolutely. And then I started hitting dead ends on how to get them,

what specific variety there was. The Zerxes Society, for those of you are looking at things to plant for your bees, the 100 top plants for pollinators, that's the name of a book that they sell on Amazon. I highly recommend it. I have that book. It talks about the value for specific pollinators, nectar, or, and pollen. So there's a lot going on.

And I don't know why it's so hard to get a hold of it. And here's the thing. When you find out the value of different plants for your bees, I'd like to see a rating chart, you know, like consumer reports of pollen. You know, this pollen is the best for your bees, one to ten or one to five. And then show us that. But the thing, and then I started to understand why they can't tell us that. Because everywhere your plants are growing, even under the same variegated.

plant. Let's take Goldenrod just as an example. We say golden rod, like it's one plant, but it's not. It's like more than 20 different species. Or types of golden rod. I'm not a botanist, so I don't know all these details. But in some places people say, golden rod, worthless, doesn't do anything for my bees. They barely use it. Where I am, golden rod is it. Like at the end of the year, they're all over it. It is a huge nectar flow. Pollant, nectar, everything is coming from the golden rod that we have here. The exact same variety of a plant grown here on my property might be super fortified. It might be full of all the amino acids and everything else.

It could be gangbusters, fantastic, the right sun, rain, soil composition, and everything else. But yet the same plant variety elsewhere in depleted soil or an area where they don't have good rainfall or there's something else going on in the soil that's impacting your plants and therefore the pollen and the nectar that's coming from that plant. So you can't say that that's a five there when it's a five here, but only a three or a two somewhere else. And that's why we don't have this central publication that shows all the different plants in order,

because what would we do? We'd look at the top plant for nectar and pollen, and we'd plant it. It would just put that stuff everywhere because that's the number one plant is what we want. So it's not straightforward. But it's true. Black oil sunflower seeds, you can buy those 40-pound bags. We have a new competitor here with tractor supply that sells 40-pound bags of sunflower seeds for like $17.

And, you know, last year at another store, it was $30. So it's greatly reduced. And nobody's in that store. I can't name the store right now, but nobody shops there. And what they're selling a lot of are when I say nobody. I mean, the numbers are, you feel like you. you're the only person in the store and it's as big as tractor supply. And we were loading up on chicken feed and stuff there because that was cheap too. But if I think of the name of it,

I'll put it down in response to question number 10 if you want to know that store. But yeah, it grows and you can plant a pile of it. So even if we had low germination, who cares? You have 40 pounds of it. That's a lot of seed. You can really spread that around. But of course, what happens the very minute you put that out there before you can even roll it in. Birds are all over it, stealing your seeds, robbing you of a future with your plants, robbing your bees. Okay, question number 11 comes from Trish Westberg 6982, YouTube channel 8. Okay, so when should I take the capped honey frames left over from winter out of the hives? I only have flow frame supers and do not harvest these frames but save them for fall feeding.

I pull them now. And of course, this is regional. Don't forget, I'll be keeping it's local. So but here where I am right now, all the leftover winter honey has to come off. And I hope you can read the subtext of this that there's a lot of it. Quinn was here yesterday to help me get honey for his clients.

He did all of 10 minutes with me and ran off to write his. laser or razor or whatever is skateboard thing is and left me there to do all the honey extraction so right now pull off surplus honey now keep in mind this is where your records come in if it's going to be fed back to the colony that you take it off from no big deal but if you're going to process it and if it's going to be as for my grandson for his clients then you need to make sure that it was not supplemental Fed. So these are colonies that everything that came into them was from the environment.

And that winter honey, see, let me pause and change my thoughts on it. I don't like it anymore as far as bottling, saving. Because the asters and golden rod and the end of the year nectar flow is abundant. It does a fantastic job of giving your bees an opportunity to do a final lay. of provisioning the hive with the resources they need to get through winter. Even with this really long extended winter that we had, they did not consume all of their honey. So that leaves me with honey that now I have to deal with and it's fall honey.

So because that stuff crystallizes so easily and sets, so now we've got crystallized honey. I don't like it. I was listening to another YouTube presentation. and Blake Shook was being interviewed. His hot room, I don't have a hot room. So that's part of it. I don't have a hot room to put my honey supers in

to warm them up and liquefy them before they go through processing. His hot room was at 130 degrees Fahrenheit. I never heard of that. So that seems really warm to me. But if I just had 120 degree hot room, right? So it was just 120 degrees, I could put the whole honey super in there.

it would re-liquify some of the set honey in the cells and then it would be in jars and we could process it so that's probably on my to-do list eventually some kind of hot room and then my wife was looking at that we're thinking about that and thought think of how hot your vehicle gets parked in the driveway on a day even like today we're at summer and summer but sunny and in the 70s right how hot is it inside what's right about 115 degrees Fahrenheit inside your car. Now, if it's not a work vehicle, you're not going to do this, but if it's a, you know, an SUV or something, and you've got one of those bedliners in the back, which I do, in the back of the hive, a hive back of the car, why not just put the supers in there and let the car heat them up? I thought that was actually a really good idea.

Not only that, it's at waste height. It's perfect. loaded on no stooping no reaching up it's right there and the fact that we have the weather tech liner in the back and that goes up on all the edges you can put your honey on there it's not going to drip out and that would save me because i'm not hauling it to my dehydrator tent which involves a set of stairs not doing that so having a panel truck or any kind of truck that you can enclose and sit park it in the sunlight is protected from bees and everything else you just put those superas in there let it warm up and harvest it and i realized for trish here that i went a long way around

the barn on it but that is free energy have you ever noticed that they came out with a solar powered uh clothes drying system and that's 100% free solar powered and um those are two things that people look at for renewable energy sources, wind and solar. And you look on Facebook and everywhere else, you look at houses up and down the road. It's available to everyone and nobody uses it. And I just thought, why aren't people using solar powered clothes dryers? Because they use a lot of resources. If you've got an electric clothes dryer, you are using a lot of resources. Or natural gas, you're using a lot of resources. And I hope you've seen through this that a solar powered wind-powered

clothes dryer is a clothes line. When I was a kid, every backyard had clothes on the clothes line. You always got in trouble running through sheets and things like that. But we have free energy in your own backyard in the sun.

Time to harvest it to warm your honey soupers that you're taking off right now because the capped honey when the new nectar comes in, bees don't use it. They use one. what's new, they don't use the old stuff, the old stuff sits there,

and now you risk being honeybound. It's time to collect it now, in the Northeast anyway. Question number 12 comes from Cobber Pete. After watching you clean up your observation hive, I now want to build one. Can you give me some general dimensions and some dues and don'ts to make sure I get something that will work?

So, and of course I responded to Cobber Pete, and I gave a detailed response and if you want to see that response you go to Q&A episode 305 which came out on May 9th and you look down at Cobber Pete's question and I gave a detailed response because I figured he's in a shop he needs to do work right now and he wants to build something so I gave him some specs so I will say this to those of you who are listening and wanting to build an observation hive one of the things that's very expensive and not easily worked, tempered glass. Because part of what I've encountered with the plexiglass is I don't like it.

It flexes a little bit. Sometimes it bends in towards your frame. Sometimes it flexes out. You need a spacer in the middle that maintain that bee space there so it doesn't kind of suck in on the bees. The other thing is when it comes to send it clean it up. Plexiglass, I don't like it. It scratches and everything else. So I produce a video that shows how you use steaks it. with 100% cotton cloth over your steamer just like a fabric steamer and you can run the steam through your cotton cloth onto the pliques of glass surface and it will absorb away all of the beeswax fur comb brace comb even the proplice little extra you know elbow grease there but it takes it all off so since we want tempered glass

I look for the tempered glass size first. In other words, what's already available? Because once glass is tempered, it's not like you just go to the hardware store and get a glass cutter and cut it. You'll end up with a bunch of broken tempered glass. So find tempered glass that is the size of the observation hive you want to build

and go from there. So if it's 24 by 30 or whatever it is, then that becomes your framework and then you work in from there to match up with your standard Langstroth frames. So I'm just going to give you some very quick, very basic things that I know that work in an unheeded space because observation hives historically are kept in buildings

that are heated, climate controlled, and everything like that. So keep them out of direct sunlight. Shouldn't be exposed to a window somewhere where when you open it or that colony gets hit with direct sunlight. Good news is you don't have to put any finish on them because they're inside buildings. So if you keep your frames in triples, if your observation hive is not at least three frames deep. So we have two surfaces that we will see and there will be four surfaces in

interfacing that you do not see. That is not the end of the world because everything they're doing in there, they're ultimately going to eventually do on the outside frames and it's fun to watch them get there. So if you want to see how they use that space and if you want to see the production of comb, for example, then you use foundation list frames and off you go. But I have foundation and foundationless in my observation hives. So these are my pet peeves, right? Triples, if you want them to survive, you need triples. The next thing is I want them all to be deep frames, not the mediums. Deep frames, even though jokes on me because the bees that flew in that I posted the video last week, bees that flew in from through the woods to the northeast of us

they came and they selected one of my dead out observation hives and they moved into it which one did they move into the one with triple mediums four levels high so there's only you know there's only 12 frames that are mediums in there that is a small space but that's what they chose who's going to argue with what the bees decide so what I'm sharing with you though is at least three levels of deeps and if you can go four all the better and keep the triples push right together nice and snug and leave B space between the outer frames and the inner surface of your glass the next thing that I want you to consider is that underneath the bottom frames

your first tier there should be two or three inches of open space down there the reason for the that is I want to see the bees coming and going through the entrances on the side of the observation hive and if it's coming straight into the end of frames sure the bees can get in and out but I can't see them I don't know what's going on so I want to see it so I want to see them go across the bottom and if they want to draw down drone comb down there all the better educational opportunity there so that's really basic the other thing is when you put a feeder on an observation hive I like the feeder to be out to the side or off center because we know that the brood is going to be focused through the center of your frames

so I like to have if you're going to put an inverted jar type feeder on the top then put it on one side on you know closer to the frame ends so that if there's an expansion of air in there so it gets really warm during the day cools off at night and expresses syrup down in and it will we want that to go down the sides not the center where the brood is In fact, while we're talking about that, if you have an inner cover on your hive and you're one of these people that just has to use inverted jars to feed your bees that need it, please don't put it dead center, put it offset, set it in a corner either way. So that if it does, and it will, express syrup out whether your bees want it or not when it's cold at night and warm during the day, it is basic physics that that air chamber is going to expand. it's going to push the syrup out to a degree until it creates that vacuum again, and then what's going to happen at night, it's going to get cold,

that airspace is going to contract, it's going to draw air bubbles in, and then it's going to have even more air in there than when the morning time comes, it will expand again when it heaps up and express more syrup, and the cycle continues. So don't put it directly over your brood centers, because that will potentially drown kill larvae. you don't want that you want to protect them so that's it these are the basics tempered glass b space both sides triples and at least three levels high four levels optimum screen bottom board removable tray underneath enclosed okay and uh that's the whole thing the other thing is uh put a

now that i said that's the whole thing i put a blast gate on one side. And so if we have the bottom of a frame here, the top of a frame here, B space in between them, the blast gate goes right on the frame. And that has a little chamber. And blast gates are made for controlling, you know, dust collection systems in wood shops and things like that. But the reason I have it there is if I ever need to introduce a new queen, I realize they're queenless. They haven't had brood for a while. You know, the queen's gone. they might be in a pickle. You know, they sent a queen out to get mated.

She never came back. And now we might end up in a laying worker's situation. So by having that blast gate there, I can open it up, stick the new queen in. And I have a translucent tube section there so I can see the V's behavior towards the queen in her cage when I slide her in there. If it's going bad, if they don't need her, if they don't want her, if they have a queen somewhere and I just missed her, then I can pull it back out. or I can leave it there and pull the cork and let that be go and still withdraw it. So having access for things like that is the other good part. And having good insulation panels, that was my failure last winter.

I got confident. They were making it every year, no matter what I did. And I had what I called hot pockets, which are double bubble, that just loose leaf over the top of the whole thing, like a pillowcase. Not good enough last year. so because in the end you know they were all clustered and you know there was honey above them and everything else they just couldn't move to do it and that's because we've got these huge glass panels and we have nothing snug up against the glass panel except a little thin sheet of luan which is

part of the blinder that closes up so that will now be an r10 so going into this winter 2025 all the observation hives will have face plate covers all the glass will be covered with r 10 no more issues with that so those are the basics that's it i know the rest of you wanted to know that and the last question of the day question number 13 comes from rene from let me get this right pekeepsie new york but keepsi bekeepsie okay so i just wanted to share my swarm catching adventure with you. I was in the driveway power washing my unused Appameh equipment when I realized there was a lot of buzzing coming from the backyard. I looked back there, saw the cloud of bees, they looked like they were going to go up the giant maple. I ran to the freezer and I grabbed my QMP noodles. So if you don't know what that is, it's a queen mandibular pheromone, also known as temp queen.

anyway i attached it with a rubber band to a russian scion look up russian scion if you want to know what that is it's a way to attract a swarm anyway i had it in the backyard stood in the middle of the swarm holding the cyan and they started getting lower then i took it on to the dogwood tree which was in easy reach i waited they all congregated on the russian sion i was then he of to easily shake them into a newly washed appamane nuke, thank you for sharing things like QMP noodles. So QMP, Queen Mendebular Pharmon, imitation. It imitates the scent of a queen. It's usually used as a placeholder when you don't want laying workers, but it also attracts bees. Also part of what's coming up this week when I show you how to manage a swarm and how to manipulate them and

get them to go where you go even if they don't want to queens so it's called temp queen you can get it from better be probably other places to sell it too it's very inexpensive you have to keep it in the freezer uh i use it to get bees to collect over and over on the same branch in a pine tree that i have it's actually a spruce tree and the more frequently they use it the more it smells right and it even has a little bit of bees wax on it so bees naturally will accumulate there. Now there is a word of caution. If you use this queen mandibular pheromone and you zip tie it on there, you can collect a bunch of bees without a queen. So in this case with Renee, we're talking about a swarm that was already actively swarming so we know they had a queen and everything and they all just

gathered on this branch. So it was a good way to collect them, but just word of caution that it actually would draw your bees just as if you had an unmaided queen out there that was stuck to a branch like queen on a stake and then they will accumulate so you can end up with a queenless swarm so but that's interesting glad that was shared that was the last question of the day we're in the fluff section so don't forget to watch the videos that I'm going to put up I can't decide if I'm going to do them two together because they both satisfy questions and problems that we often face when collecting swarms particularly small ones little softball size collections of swarms and there's multiples on a branch what to do how to handle that that's coming up

the videos are done anyway check drones for mites when you are pulling your frames apart when you're pulling a box off and we know drone comb goes between your frames upper box lower box you'll often expose drones that are in their pupa state look them over that's your chance you can really inspect those right away for varro distractor mites your drones are great opportunities for mite check So I highly recommend you do that. It's time to super. So at the end of this week, we will have all of our hives supered. So that means that we're starting to collect honey that can be then harbuses.

So I'm shifting my practices there. Remember what I described, goldenrod, asses, things like that. That ends up being the end of the summer or productive year resource for your bees. I don't like it. I don't want it. I don't want to deal with it. So I'm shifting. In the past, I did the deep brood box, did the medium right away, and all of that was for the bees so that we had that set aside for the end of the year. I'm going to change that now. So, and we're not doing it to the entire apiary at once. Once again, we're going to divide things. We're going to do some practices the old way with some hives and this new practice with others. So I,

am going to put a queen excluter directly on the single brood box which will be a deep 10 frame i'm getting rid of in fact gave away too late gave away a lot of uh eight frame equipment the entire hives gave them away uh because i'm making room for all 10 frames and then of course my seven frame apamase and nuke hives okay so then i'm going to put the queen excluder on and then everything above that will not have brood in it at all because the other thing is talking about harvesting leftover honey from winter those frames have also been used for brood in a lot of cases so half the frame get used for brood and the rest was still honey well now we're harvesting from a frame that's got a lot of fibrous material in it because it was

used for brood and there were cocoons and everything else in there so we're shifting that around I don't ever want to have brood in honey supers that we harvest so So we'll have both going because we want to see do they save honey at the same rate? Do they collect and store at the same rate with and without? And the reason that it's changed, one of the things that I did with queen excluders and why I stopped is because a lot of bees were having a very difficult time getting through queen excluders. But then it occurred to me. We have new queen excluders designed by the same company that makes those queen.

isolation cages and the queen introduction cages and when you know it I'm gonna talk about it didn't even bring it in so it's the same company from Better B where they sell queen isolation queen introduction cages and you'll see that very similar flat band that goes through all the metal wires that make up this wooden framed queen excluder. And the reason I like it is it's the same on both sides. Before with the queen excluders the way they were, there was a lower wire on one side, and that would be the downside and so on. So we wanted to have space so that you're basically over the top of frames and also through the queen excluder. But with their queen excluder, and I didn't put a mic on it or anything like that

to measure exactly what these openings are, queens can't get through, but the workers are all getting through. So we may not have the same challenges we had before with the plastic queen excluders that were so popular. And they may actually be coming through the wire queen excluders much better from that particular company. And so what I'll do is this gets me nothing, by the way, so this isn't like I'm trying to give you an affiliate sale. But if you go to BetterBee, and I will put a link to the Queen Excluders from BetterB that I'm talking about, they had no resistance to the bees getting through them. So I'm going to half of the hives will have them, half will not.

We're going to see if production changes, if they're storing quicker. Let's see, beesworm.org, please don't forget. I know a lot of people are already sitting fat. They have all the swarms they need. But register as a beekeeper with B-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D dot org. and please go to social media. I don't know if you've got Instagram, I don't know if you have Facebook,

whatever your preferred social media is. Let the general public know because they're the ones that don't understand bees, beekeeping, and what happens when you get a swarm. Because people are still emailing people and they're emailing people and they're emailing people and trying to get an interest in a swarm that's been reported somewhere.

But if the general public knew about B-swarmed.org, then when they see a swarm somewhere, they could report it to the website. It's free. And then beekeepers that are in that proximity would get an alert on their cell phone, and then they could go and get it. So that's pretty much it. The other thing is swarm collection gear, I really like the big, if it's accessible, and it's on a tree branch, I like shaking them into butterfly nets.

They are working really well. Pull winter cap honey, I already have that. That was in there. and planting next weekend. That's pretty much it. What are you planting and where are you planting it and what has worked in the past? And based on what I said today, if you know of a publication that really defines the benefits of the pollen from specific plants in specific regions that are optimum for honeybees that have proven to have a medicinal value for your bees and things like that, please share about it down in the comment section below.

often if you post something that has a link associated with it, will always, in fact, if you have a link that goes with that, it will not be shown to everyone right away. I have to manually go in and release those. So when you share a link to something, there's a delay. But I will release it so that we can all see what kind of pollen resources there are for your bees and what are the best things to plant for them. And what are your thoughts about only not? native plants because we have a lot of pollen resources and nectar resources that are plants that may not be native to where you live and you can get some solid pushback on that.

So what are your thoughts on planting for your pollinators non-native plants or should you plant exclusively with native plants even though they just may not provide as much as some of these other plant resources could for honey? and pollen for your bee brood. What are your thoughts on that? Thanks a lot for watching and I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead.