The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 313 July 4th 2025

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/AXpRF4kzLI4

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and answers episode number 313, and this is Friday, July the 4th. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here. And of course, it's our Independence Day here in the United States, the day that the great British people allowed us home rule. That's what I was told by somebody from Britain.

allowed us home rule. Anyway, so I hope you're having a fantastic extended weekend, and it's going to be hot and clear here in the Northeast. Hotest day coming up is going to be Sunday, by the way, here in the state of Pennsylvania, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. Some people are traveling. So if you're listening to the podcast, thank you for doing that. And what is the podcast name? It is the way to be podcasts. You can just Google that and find it. It's on a lot of the different podcast carriers. So while you're stuck, in traffic, hopefully not missing your flight due to all the rains and storms that are going on on the eastern seaboard here. I just hope you get where you need to be and that you're not bored

to tears listening to this podcast if that's what you're doing. Anyway, what's going on outside right now? It's 76.8 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 25 Celsius. Not bad at all. How's the humidity? Is it air we can wear? Nope, 58% relative humidity. which means it's nice and dry and our bees are not bearding on the front of their hives right now for a switch the UV index is three which means you can still get a tan but you're not going to fry yourself in a short amount of time so if you like to go outside soak up some of those rays the grand monkeys have been here swimming in the pond which by the way is snake free for those of you who watched my video over the past week we removed the northern water snakes from our pond because it was bothering some of our family members So moving on. Sunday it's going to be in the 90s.

So that is 33 Celsius and above. So it's going to be nice. What are we going to talk about today? Please look down in the video description below and see all the topics listed in order and some related links for further information if you want to dive deeper and know more. So the other thing is the questions were submitted

during this past week. And how do you submit your own question? Go to the website, the way to be. dot org and click on the page mark the way to be it's also identified as questions and uh you can spit your own topic for consideration for a future friday q and a i think that just about covers it so everything we're going to talk about today was submitted over the past week the opening sequences were videoed this morning so i hope you enjoyed that really nice weather the dew was heavy on everything and that's just fantastic great way to start the friday

And I hope you're having a cookout. We are here. We're having all the kids over because my youngest grandson turned six. So he already turned six on, I think it was Wednesday or Thursday. Didn't he pick out some chickens? So baby chicks from the farm store. And of course, now we have golden-laced wine dots for him, six of them. We'll see how those go.

anyway so the very first thing that we talk about today that we're in the opening sequence is this mulean it's also pronounced mullin these really tall velvety plants they're also they have nicknames like flannel mullin and things like that and they have medicinal value but guess what it's an invasive species how tall do you think they get they get up to seven feet in some cases depending on where you search and where you try to get your information more than seven feet tall. And so they take two years to get that big. So the first year, you know, they just have the big leaves, which are super fuzzy, which have been used for medical purposes like burns and scrapes and cuts and,

I guess, emergency bandages back in the day. But, so they have a biennial lifestyle, woolly mullin, a flannel plant. Anyway, seeds can persist. Listen to this. When they produce seeds, they can persist. in the soil for a hundred years. So if there was some kind of severe drought and they were just sitting idle in the soil

100 years later and it rained, they could germinate and grow. That is impressive. So not native plant, but the honey bees are all over it. So there's another example of a non-native plant that's actually working to our benefit if you're a beekeeper. And I'm not sure what the downside is to them.

Other than I guess they could push out some of our native plants and things like that. Probably not great for grazy. cattle and ruminant animals things like that so anyway the milkweed is also doing fantastic as you saw in the opening it's just started to bloom in a meaningful way the little leaf linden tree has closed up so that store is shut for nectar and pollen for the bees and the larger leafed linden trees the baswood trees are still yet to bloom so those are coming up this week so good

news for the bees they just have lots of choices and there's still light on the white clover so that means when other plants are not providing what they need they fall back on the clover which is everywhere right now so that's doing great and the farmer did not plant anything that's going to be beneficial to the bees on the fields nearby so it's all going to be corn this year so they do get corn pollen but it's not anything meaningful for them so i guess we're going to jump right into it here with brian from denver colorado question number one One of my hives swarmed on June the 26th, I collected the swarm in a pro-nuke box, and it took them to a location about three miles away.

At this time, I don't have any space to set up a new colony. I'm considering combining the nuke with the original hive in about a week after confirming the queen in the nuke is laying eggs. Can this strategy work? Thank you. Yes, it can work. here's why because I'm failing at keeping once again my apiary under control. So it is a good way to combine them. And I like the fact that you're using that nucleus hive, which are taking them away in, because there are queen cells behind that are

going to emerge and then they're going to get mature and then they're going to fly out and they're going to mate and come back. Seventy-five percent overall success rate you should expect. So waiting until those queens come back mated and then within two weeks you should see eggs in that original colony. And if there are, now you could actually get rid of the queen that's in the nuke and bring back those nuke frames. This is why I suggest that you get those frame feeders. And I don't use them for feeders. I use them for frame placeholders. And that's because when you bring them back, if your queen's been in production this whole time that she's away and why wouldn't she be when you bring her back you're going to bring her back with all her

brood in the frames that you took out so you need to put them back in so placeholders you can also just come up with your own placeholder it's just easy to use i use mother load lode that's the company that i ran into it the north american honeybee expo and i like the frame feeders just easy to use and again i don't use them to feed the bees i use them as temporary placeholders for situations just like the one described by Brian which is taking away the queen avoiding swarming not losing your bees and then bringing them back without losing any production in the event that your queen does not get mated you can just reinstall the original queen in your back in beesness there we go question number one was

super easy question number two comes from Thane in Verroqua Wisconsin for Roque for Roqua. Anyway, I'm a second year beekeeper. In this past Sunday, I watched my hive begin to swarm and land in a bush right by the parent hive. I gathered my gear and was able to cut the branch and shake the bees into a plastic tart. And I got lucky and I found the queen. I immediately put her in a hive box, which was a dead out from the past spring. I filled the brood box with undrawn foundation and put a queen excluder.

below the brood box and bottom board. I used your method of leaning aboard up against the hive entrance and dumped the remaining bees onto it. As soon as I got the bees on the board, a huge thunderstorm rolled in with heavy rain. I covered the hive and made a shift ramp with a tarp and propped it up and gave the bee space to walk in, which they did. So as of today, they're still doing their orientation fly,

and foraging flights all week long tomorrow i'll inspect i rehive this swarm less than 10 feet from the original hive i assumed from what i've learned online that doing that was next to impossible and that the bees would go back to the original hive or leave for good did the thunderstorm improve my luck or am i wrong about my assumption on rehiving in close proximity thank you okay so here's the thing And this happens to a lot of backyard beekeepers, because that's the emphasis of this YouTube channel. Backyard beekeepers are not necessarily beginning beekeepers. They're just people that keep things small scale and have limited resources in a lot of situations. So taking them away three miles, ten miles, five miles, whatever beyond the flying range of your foragers,

is not always practical for people. So you may be doing what I do always. I experimented in years past with using our son's backyard as a satellite bee yard, which I've stopped doing. And now I just hive them up. Maybe I'm lazy, I don't know, I just hive them up right in my own apiary. So if you've got space and you want to keep them right in your own yard, when I do splits and when I capture swarms, remember the swarm, they left on their own. So they've already decided to go. The foragers that are with them decided to go. And they could just as easily, fly back into any hive that has a productive queen in it.

Now the good news is, right, if this is a swarm and they flew out, what's the competition for a queen pheromone? Because that's the argument that you'll get, argument, discussion, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, if you collected a swarm in your backyard apiary, as described here, you put them in a hive as described here. Now you're thinking, oh, I put them in a hive, but the original hives are right there so the forage is probably going to go back to the original hive what's going on in the original hive well there's probably queen cells in there that are emerging soon within the week

when those emerge what are those mated queens or are they virgin queens they are virgin queens they are virgin queens that are unmated therefore their pheromones to attract those workers back to the original hive are greatly reduced so they have that against them in other words the mated queen that they're already familiar with and they left with keep that in mind too they departed the hive and you hive them up in a good situation so the queen is going to start laying eggs almost right away assuming we have good resources coming into the hive food water everything that they need and the space to expand which is already established plus it was a hive that was previously used so they already have drawn comb and things like that and some undrawn foundation okay and the queen excluders there to keep them

from abscondy. So I think your chances are really good that you're going to keep them there. Now let's say it goes bad. I need to give you other ways to manage this rate. So let's say it does go bad and you go to inspect and you've got a loss of the workforce there. They're greatly reduced. And you see a bunch of restored workers back in the original hive as unlikely as that might be. So what do you do? Well, you get in there and you look at some of the brood frames because, for example, there should be a lot of capped brood in there. Pull one frame of capped root. It doesn't have to be a full one.

Just even a three-quarters frame of capped root and put that into your newly established hive. What does that do for you? Well, even if you're losing some of your foraging force, because those are the ones that have been outside of the hive, they're the foragers. When you swarm, bees of all ages can join a swarm. I've seen fuzzy little new bees

that probably just barely learn. to fly zipping out and going with a swarm. They're very distinctive. So we have bees of all ages, which means you also have nurse bees that are ready to go. So we can just fortify those with capped brood. And so that brood will emerge and keep them in adequate numbers of bees that have never been outside the hive, and they just keep going. And you pull one of your frames and replace that, pushing all the brood frames together that you pulled it from. And I think you're in business. I don't think it's the end of the world. I'm kind of surprised. people said it's not even possible when it's what I do all the time.

I don't take my bees anywhere else anymore. Now would it be an improvement to take them all away at once as soon as you have the swarm? And would you be guaranteed not to lose foragers then? Yeah, you're going to do that for two to three weeks and then bring them back. How did I come up with a two to three week time frame? Well, the foragers are the ones that have been outside the hive, and they remember that they live on average of six weeks. weeks total from the time they emerge to the time that they're done with their lives and they're

burned out from foraging so two weeks of that six weeks generally speaking is done foraging outside the hive so that means we have to eliminate those with those memories so we have to keep them somewhere else for two weeks or more and then bring them back and there you go but i don't see that as completely necessary remember we're back our beekeepers we're not high production beekeepers what's our goal to keep them in the hive long enough to build up their numbers large enough to get the resources stored up enough to get them through whatever winter you face where you live so you're going to move on now to question number three which comes from alvin from yonkers new york hi fred how do you know when it's time to replace a queen i have a slowly growing split

that made two nearly complete supersedure cells but never cap them off It's almost three weeks now, and they haven't been taken down either. So the queen is alive and still laying, though she is not covering the frames like she used to, and I'm hesitant to replace her in case this is just a dearth. Or maybe an error on my end by not providing enough drawn comb for her to lay and appreciate your time and help. So here's the thing, and these are issues that are facing a lot of people

in the northern parts of the United States this time of year. And so sometimes they all just decline, and it is a good thing to ask the question, do they have the resources necessary to keep brooding up, to keep those nurse bees fortified? Because it's the nurse bees that need to be nourished that also feed the queen. And the queen gets her cues from the nurse bees which are feeding her to show that there's adequate stores and resources in the hive for her to produce the eggs necessary to keep the workforce up to speed to match the environment. So this queen, let's look at the other hives in the apiary

and make comparisons. Are they all kind of slowing down? Because if they are, that's an indicator that we've got some reducing resources in the environment. Now, you've started this new hive, you've started a new bee colony, and sometimes you might want to boost those a little bit. So you can do it.

to see if it's the queen or not, because if it is not the queen, and it is just resources, you could do a test. Maybe you don't have them already, but if you do, hive alive pollen patties is what I would recommend. I recommend those because they have them handy. If you have global pollen patties, these high protein boosters, those will help stimulate your bees because you need the protein and you need the carbohydrates, which hopefully they already have from the environment.

but those patties provide both, and it's the protein that will trigger brood production. Also, they need to have plenty of fresh water around and just see if she doesn't pick back up. So that could be the case. It is not unusual that I've had colonies that produce a number of queen cells and then never finish them off and just clean them out.

Sometimes they chew them down to the point where you're like, what just happened? There's no evidence of the queen cells there at all anymore. But what it sounds like is these queen cells are there, partially developed, and they're just in case they decide to again replace the queen. So if you have eggs and you have plenty of resources and food going in, this is another reason I want you to use pollen patties, for example, if there is a dearth going on.

If you want to replace that queen, we need to first boost the nutrition of the nurse bees that are going to feed the queen that is saying going to produce the eggs that are going to produce your replacement queen because we don't just decide, ah, things are going well, it might be because of a nutritional deficit. Let me just go ahead and pull the queen out

and have them make an emergency queen. Because when they do that, if it is, in fact, a reduction in diet available, they're going to be forced to make a queen, from one of their new eggs that hatches and they're going to boost that brood to the best of their ability but if they're not properly nourished you're going to get an inferior queen so food for thought any way you slice it if you're going to get rid of the queen because she's not performing well and you want to replace her don't do that immediately boost their food resources first make sure there's

plenty of pollen being stored if it already exists if you do an inspection there's plenty of nectar being stored there's plenty of honey being capped there's plenty of pollen in the cells then you probably are in good shape and could probably allow them to produce a replacement queen however if you do this inspection and you should and you find that there's no protein that is there no pollen stored or inadequate pollen then you need to boost their nutrition before you produce that queen. That's all I'm saying. So I hope that's helpful. Question number four. This is an interesting one from Craig, Willow Spring, North Carolina. And this is one of those things where there's a discussion going on and

usually if they name a specific YouTuber or something like that, I don't respond to the questions because I don't want to pass judgment. I'd rather reach out to the YouTuber and have a discussion if that's even possible. Some YouTubers don't respond to questions about their practices, and that's okay too. But anyway, Craig says from Willisbury, North Carolina, there's been a discussion on a forum. Okay. And it says that I have been following this forum

regarding keeping the queen and brood nest over an excluder in the hive. So I thought that I would bring to your attention for a possible discussion on your podcast. So it is a possible. discussion. Actually, the interesting part is I had not heard of this. So, originally, I wasn't going to talk about it. But then I thought about it. Let's argue with ourselves. Let's practice critical thinking. So here's what happens. Sometimes somebody has an idea, and they think it's a great idea, especially when it comes to managing your bees.

And it can feel like, well, this is really going to work great. And it's so good for so many reasons. but I want you to, whenever you are the originator of an idea like this, argue with yourself, or put it out to the others for them to tear it apart. This is what sometimes people that do peer-reviewed research, right? They come up with an experiment, they do an experiment, they have an hypothesis, and they find out, you know, is this an answer to what I was trying to discover?

And then they throw it out to people with equal education, background to pick it apart and make it prove itself they find loopholes and problems with it so that's what we're doing right now so rather than tell you is it a good idea this is a queen excluder that i'm holding in the wooden frame which these are the ones that i like right now uh if you want to keep your queen down in a brood box the normal practice is a bottom landing board right so the bottom of your hive then your brood box sits on this bottom board, and then above that you would put a queen excluder that covers it. This happens to be a 10-frame queen excluder.

Then the practice would be above your queen excluder. You have all of your resources stored honey, and you don't have to worry about the queen laying eggs and everything. So the entrance is at the landing board, and there's an entrance reducer. Then everything goes through here, and then the honey's up above. So according to this discussion, from Craig the suggestion is to have your brood box on top have the queen

excluder underneath so the queen is in that top box which means no top entrance no top venting close it up and then all your brood is on the top of the hive then your workers from the field come in through the bottom and then they're building up stores and resources underneath the queen excluder underneath what is now the brood box on top. Why would they do it? Well, because they want to be able to inspect their brood with some frequency. Most people are teaching that you should inspect your brood every two to three weeks.

Just to know that things are okay. You don't have to track down your queen. See evidence that she's there, eggs, larvae, nutrition, so on. Just make sure everything's right. And to do that, a lot of people find it challenging to remove honey supers. Honey supers would normally be above your brood box. You're hefting those off, 8 frame, 10 frame, mediums,

whatever they happen to be. And this makes people less inspired to inspect their brood when they should, and they tend to just let things go. So, this suggestion is, lock your queen up on the top of the hive, have the queen excluder.

Now all we have to do is pull the cover, pull the inner cover, look into the brood, see the status of the hive, queen close it all back up and you're good to go is that a good practice so i'm going to weigh the pros and cons and i want to know your opinion too because we might be stepping on toes here because i did not look up the forum i did not look up the discussion i don't know anything about it and the this suggestion or this method this recommendation doesn't really have a name associated with it it's a

bunch of letters could be an acronym. So I'll just tell you my thoughts. You tell me your thoughts. First of all, having a queen and the brood on top of this configuration, right, is not something that would happen in nature at all. Okay. So when we think about when you find bees occupying spaces completely on their own, most often, the lower third, is where the entrance is. Then what gets concentrated near the entrance is the brood. Because your bees need to provide for the brood, ventilation and everything else easiest near that entrance and then as you get farther into the cavity, whether it's horizontal or vertical, fallen tree, vertical tree. Floor joys,

side walls of a house, right? The first thing you encounter is always going to be, be brewed near the entrance. Then what they do is they follow up with transitioning from brood to food and then food being the protein also from flowers. So we've got all of our pollen and our bee bread and everything is there. And then we go on to what's hidden farthest into the cavity would normally be your honey stores. So this reverses that. So the deepest recess into the cavity from the entrance down below now is your brood at the top. of the hive. So there are some problems with it, right? First off being, if you have drones up here being produced in your brood area, you need to do routine inspections to release those drones.

And so the suggestion is that you'll do that often enough that the drones can get away and they're not trapped. So that turns into pretty frequent inspections. So your bees do not respond well to frequent inspections and evasion by the inspector. So drones up above locked in can't go through the entrance. That's another issue. The ventilation part, your bees have to work harder to ventilate the brood area, which they don't work so hard to ventilate your honey area, especially once the honey is capped.

So now we have to work in a different way. The other part of that is you have an increased, risk of robbing because the honey would now be near the entrance and your brood is set back rather than the brood at the entrance and the fringe of that would be guard bees and other bees populating your colony so that they could defend the hive right away at the entrance but now the brood and everything is way up above and the first thing the potential robbers are going to get to are those honey resources that are stored normally well away from the entrance so that any invader or would-be robber has to go through and meet with the guard bees in that hive first so and the

drawback of course is that if you had it the way nature the way they normally organized themselves if you want to get down to that you would have to remove honey supers but there is that new hive super lifter which would now lift off and hinge away the supers which gives you access to your brood box so There are workarounds for this as well. But just overall, and I know, you know, you can tell what my opinion is just because it's what I don't do in my hive. I did give it full consideration. I thought about it. I can see why people might think that's a great way to go.

But I personally do see some drawbacks to it. What do you see as the listener, as the viewer, regarding drawbacks or positives for that? So I personally would not do it myself. I do like the idea with these queen excluders, by the way, that are coming from Better Bee and others that have the metal ones. The worker bees are getting through those pretty easily. So I'm going 50-50 on my hives this year with queen excluders above the brood box, but I'm sticking with brood box on the bottom, entrance through the bottom.

The other thing is, and I talked about, this with Dr. Tom Seeley. The dirty part of your hive is your brood area. This is interesting. So food for thought too. When they're working brood and everything else, all the detritus and everything falls down through the hive. So now if you've got your brood up at the top and your honey, which is normally the cleanest area of the hive, is now down below the brood, all little bits and pieces that are constantly dropping off and falling down there, are now going to your honey cells. So those that are uncapped and so on.

So I don't know if it means they're going to be dirty or not. I haven't done it. So I don't know, but it's just more food for thought and consideration. Are there little bits and pieces of detritus that are falling down now over the honey, which otherwise wouldn't because the honey would be well above the brood. So cleanliness might be another thing. So what are you thinking?

How's it going? And I just say, argue with yourself. Decide. whether that's a good practice or not. And see if you like it. Because it clearly goes against what the bees do on their own, and we've already done that, I mean, we're putting them in beehives for Pete's sakes.

We're modifying the equipment to make it more convenient for us to keep them. So the question is, how much out of order do we want to push our bees for the convenience of not having to lift off hives? So an alternative might be just go horizontal. If what's keeping you out of your brood is lifting things, then I highly recommend a long Langstroth, horizontal hive, and then you don't have any of these issues.

So, food for thought. Question number five. This comes from Mark from Salem, Virginia. Hi, Fred, I saw my first spotted lantern fly last year. And this year, they're everywhere. Says it seems that they started in our home state, or in your home state, which is Pennsylvania. Okay, and so I thought I would ask you if you have any interactions, problems, etc. with them.

There seems to be some beekeepers online that actually try to harvest spotted lanternfly honey. And others think that it is almost Armageddon. So if you don't know what we're talking about, good for you because it's the spotted lanternfly. An invasive species that showed up here and yes, it's right. It started right in the state of Pennsylvania. Why? because somebody had to get patio stone for their patio. Couldn't deal with any of the stone that was already here in the United States.

They had to import it from somewhere else. And when they brought it in, it came with spotted lanternfly eggs, and off they went. Now we have them. Now there's nothing we can do about it because they're here. And so they're being tracked around. So people are moving firewood, stone, resources. It's sticking to cars, sticking to trucks and vehicles.

kind of unstoppable it's going everywhere so what's the update and and this is actually true by the way some beekeepers because I see the light bulbs go on over their heads when they hear this discussion about spotted lantern flies produce honeydew like aphids I don't know if you've ever seen little aphids on trees and plants but they're often being herded around and farmed by ants and you'll even see them on milkweed sometimes. And I've seen ants drive off honeybees for milkweed because they're getting too close to the little apis that are being attended to by the ants,

which are getting the honeydew from the apis, which is that high sucrose resource that they want. So this is what happens. The spotted lantern flies, and I haven't seen them here. So they're not in my neck of the woods yet, but they are spread out through the state. By the way, wild birds are starting to eat them. So even chickens, if you've got free-range chickens, as I do,

and for all I know, we have spotted lanternflies and they're just not making it up a tree trunk because my chickens are all over them. My chickens forage through the woods. They're very thorough. They forage all day long every single day. Even in the winter time, unless snow is covering the ground, they're out and foraging.

So, first of all, the drawback, let's just hit on that. They attack grape vines. I have friends that own vine. vineyards and they have some vineyards on the eastern part of the state of Pennsylvania. Huge concerns about the spotted lanternfly because what's happening is they tap through because they have this little proboscis that drills into the plant, these woody areas of the plant and they suck away the nutrients from the plant. And then because they concentrate these nutrients in their bodies, they extrude some of it. They secrete it. Yeah, that's it. They secrete it. And

these little driplets fall out of their rear ends and it sticks all over the surface of the vines and stuff that they're on. So this is one of the tells that they've been around. I don't think you can see the tiny holes they make, but what you see is a bunch of black sooty looking surface material because that's the honeydew dripping onto the surface of the plant. And then, of course, it molds. So that's a sign. And when they're juveniles, see, that's just it. This year, we're not. not at the point where we would see the adults yet. So the juveniles are these little spotted. They're pretty wild looking. So looking for them is another interesting part. But so what they're doing is they're making the plants anemic. So these plants don't do well in the wintertime anymore

because they don't have enough resources to do well in winter. They're also impacting the grape yield, right? So if you're running a vineyard, you need those grapes to grow completely and you need as much juice from them as you can. And so just to put it in a perspective, the impact on Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture right now, $42.6 million in losses because of the spotted lantern fly. Now, they're also found in 18 different states. The spotted lantern fly is feeding on 70 different known species of plants. So they've seen them, found them working 70.

different plant species. One of them is a tree of heaven, which people don't feel too bad about, because it's tree of heaven. Apparently, it looks like sumac, but it's not. It's an invasive species, so they figure like, oh, who cares? One invasive species feeding on another invasive species. And then we have these beekeepers. You should meet these people because they're an interesting group. All of a sudden, an area when they would normally have dearth, this is the conflict I'm about to get to. When they normally would have dearth, and the bees would be in decline and they'd have to think about feeding them sugar syrup or something to keep their bees going. All of a sudden, they've got a bunch of nectar coming in.

What's the source of this nectar? Well, they're sourcing nectar from plants that your honeybees otherwise historically would not have been able to access. So how are they getting it out of these plants? You guessed it. The spotted lantern flies. So when these little bubbles are secreted from the abdomen of the spotted lanternfly adults, honeybees are picking up on it and, bringing it back to the hive.

So that's called honey-dew honey. And it has a really strong flavor. But here's the thing. Some people who are in these areas, beekeepers, are getting a big bonus. Now, would that make you jump up and go, wow, I want there to be lots of spotted lanternflies so I can get lots of honey-dew honey

honey so I can jar that up and sell it as a delicacy? It has a smoky kind of sooty look. it's taste to it it's a strong taste now so what would make it valuable to you what if i did an interview i do a series called interviews with experts and i highly recommend you check it out it's on my website the way to be.org i mentioned that before and there's a page that's marked interviews you can listen to so i interviewed with an entomologist from the state of pennsylvania Dr. Robin Underwood, and we talked about spotted lantern flies specifically. The other part of that is the honey that your bees produce from the spotted lantern fly,

honeydew, is demonstrating very strong medicinal properties. So what that means is not only are they producing honey when they otherwise wouldn't, but they're producing a honey of a quality, medically speaking, that is defeating, outperforming manuka honey, which used to be one of the biggest celebrated medicinal honeies anywhere. And if you don't believe me, look at the price on that stuff. It is ridiculous. So the idea that honey-do honey has medicinal properties and could be a niche market that as this plague of spotted lantern flies moves across our eastern seaboard and some of the northeastern states

and then branches out to the rest of our nation the results might be a medically beneficial honey that could be marketed at a pretty high price so you can look into that there's some interesting parts of it we think like if there's a stand of trees and the spotted lanternfly goes after this variety of tree right the species of tree. You would kind of see them spread out everywhere, but you don't. They like to congregate, which is something I found interesting. So you might find one tree amongst 50 in a stand of trees of that species, and all the spotted lanternflies are glombed onto one tree. Now, their damage, their impact would be less to that tree if they would just spread out, but they don't. They

concentrate so they severely impact one tree or one plant or one grapevine. So that's interesting. And what else can I say? Chickens were listed among the birds that actually feed on them because remember they have to go into the soil and over winter and then they have to emerge in the spring and then they have to crawl up because they don't have wings when they emerge out of the soil and they're going to crawl up on trees and things and what do they do they pause right there at beak height so maybe another reason to think about having free-range chickens so there's a lot going on but anyway um the idea that people want more spotted lanternflies just to do that i think that would be a huge mistake because remember there's some detriment to it although you are making lemonade out of lemons because they're already here there's

not a lot you're going to do about it and you can benefit from it as a beekeeper your honeybees will find them and your honeybees will bring home that nectar and you will be able to have because it's one of the ways, sorry to be all over the chart here, it's one of the ways that beekeepers in Pennsylvania were helping the Department of Agriculture discern exactly where they're showing up because if you can't go out and physically see the spotted lanternfly, what could you do if you're a beekeeper? Send in samples of your honey from that week. And then the spotted lantern fly, Honeydew was in the honey and had markers that then they could identify and say, yep, you got them.

So what do you do with that information? So you know, you have honey that came from honeydew and the spot and lanternfly must be around because you have that. Now what do we do? You report it. Report it to who? The Department of Agriculture. Then what do you do?

Squash them. That's it. So, it's interesting. Making lemonade out of lemons. But yeah, apparently it's good stuff. I don't hate it. I'll catch them. They're really colorful, by the way.

Cool looking. Look them up if you don't already. And if you want to listen to that entire interview, I will have the link down in there, but you can also just Google Dr. Robin, R-O-B-Y-N-U-U-N-U-U-Wid interview with experts. And our discussion will be there. And don't forget to click a like.

And if you're not a subscriber already, go ahead and subscribe. Because I don't say that enough. Maybe I could get a new subscriber today. Anyway, question number six comes from Keith, who lives in Missouri. Says, I had a woman pick up a couple of colonies from me this past week, and she said she had been keeping bees a few years and was switching over from eight-frame mediums from 10-frame deeps for brood boxes.

I have ran eight-frame mediums for all my brood and supers for full-sized colonies since starting about nine years ago. As such, that was the configuration she was picking up for me. She relayed her experience at the local beekeeping store with one of the owners that she went in to get the equipment she needed. And the way she described the interaction was that she got a lecture about how it was not fair to the bees to run medium brood boxes. because I immediately thought that was nonsense,

and I was surprised coming from this long-time shop owner that I considered well-versed in all things honeybee related. And later in the evening, I started to think about what she was told and was wondering if there was any research behind it. So, off to the computer to send a note to Professor Fred, to let him ponder this, and perhaps relay his thoughts back to his pupils, on the podcast. And so, of course I will.

Because this is, by the way, I don't mean to laugh at it. But this happens a lot in anything. But in beekeeping, in particular too, because we have this, it's not a division, but I do see people really celebrated if they can win people over to the medium box method of managing all mediums.

So once again, park you with yourself. So just decide. Is it working for you? By the way, if something is working for you, it's great to share why it works, why you do it,

what you do, what the results are, how the bees manage. And that's great and other people might identify with what you're doing and say, man, that sounds great to me.

I want to do that too. Because we have this discussion. And so I keep deep brood boxes. and then I have a medium super to get my Bs through winter. And because I've landed on this and it is a method that works, I'm sticking with it. However, let me argue with myself while you watch and listen.

How many times have I gone to get a box or get equipment and I need a deep frame and I find mediums? Or I need mediums and I have deep frames. And you're running around, trying to get a hive together because you've got a swarm or whatever's going on, and you have incompatible gear. Incompatibility and beekeeping equipment is my number one frustration. This is why, you know, I bend to the will of the viewer,

and people wanted me to do top bar hives, so I did it. People want me to do lay-ins hives, so I did it. Dr. Leo Shirashkin, like a old guy, next thing you know, you're buying all this stuff and you're taking it home, you're setting it up in your B-yard. So, but what you end up with is a bunch of equipment that doesn't cross over very well. So one of the advantages, so arguing with myself now, one of the advantages to all medium gear is just that.

It's all the same size frames, all the same size boxes, all will be compatible. So the shift being done here is going also from 10 frame equipment to 8 frame equipment, and then going to all mediums. And one of the reasons that I don't do it is because I have noticed that when I'm taking apart, boxes so whenever we're breaking things up i do notice that when you have a deep brood box you can contain 100% of your brood in that deep brood box so and one of the ways you contain them is what we talked about earlier which is a queen excluder on top of that deep brood box now without that i found that even uh leaving them open to expand as they will if i put a medium

box on top of my deep brood box, there's a little arc that goes up into it of brood, right? But the rest of that medium box, which is the second box from the bottom board, they fill with honey and then it gets capped and that establishes what I refer to as the honey bridge. Then everything above that are mediums, unless it's a flow super. And then the flow super is a large super. It's another deep box, right? So with the honey bridge, I don't need to use the queen excluder and off we go. Now, if I did, and by the way, the configuration historically,

the way it was shown to me and the equipment that you bought here in the northeastern United States was always a bottom board, two deeps, which are supposed to be both for brood and resources to get them through winter, and then you had mediums above that. That was pretty much the standard setup. So then if you went all mediums,

when you pulled that second bottom, box you gave it a twist you pulled the box up nine times out of ten you just tore all the brood right in half so what happened is you have kind of this softball side not softball soccer ball sized brood three-dimensional going every direction right so it wouldn't fit into a deep or a medium by itself so if we have a second medium above that now we have the brood going right up into both boxes when you pull that second box I guarantee you just tore it into all the brood. That's one argument, right, against. So the argument for is, well, you wouldn't pull those two bottom boxes unless you had an issue.

You pull frames from the top one and you start looking through there. The other thing is three medium boxes equals two deep boxes. Is that right? Three mediums equal two deeps. Which means you need more equipment, more frames for the medium. more boxes, right, than if you ran deeps. I understand people have physical limitations when it comes to lifting things off. This is why we're shifting to eight-frame boxes,

and for some people, five-frame nukes are a compromise. However, let me argue with myself. When you do five-frame nukes, they fill those five frames with brood. It arcs well up into the second box, which is 10 frames of brood now. So then you are tearing them apart no matter what, but they're deeper. And now we have all deeps. So you could do all nukes, all deeps all the time. The medium boxes, which some people just like for the reasons I described,

you have all the same equipment, all the same boxes. The compatibility is you're never hunting around mixing and matching. They're all going to match. So can you keep them in both? Yes. So let's continue to argue. with ourselves let's be let's be pro deep right what are these boxes called langstroth boxes who is that lorenzo langstroth oh let's go to the original designer let's take that part so we went to the original

designer did you know the langstroth hive is patented now the patent probably expired or something because there's no way people would just steal his design and just copy it everywhere but it's US patent number 9300 from October the 5th of 1852. So Lorenzo Langstroth patented the Langstroth hive. How many medium boxes did Lorenzo Langstroth use in his hives? None. The supers were also not medium boxes. They were all deep. So if we're arguing with ourselves, are we trying to stay faithful to Dr. Lorenzo Langstroth,

nine and one-eighths of an inch deep boxes? So there were no mediums. So that's something that came along later. And I don't know why it came along later. Maybe they fill them better. Maybe they pull them one by one. If you don't want to lift the honey supers off or the boxes are too deep or whatever,

pull the frames individually. You can do a lot of different things. But I say if it's working either, way the president of my club she only uses medium boxes and wants everyone else to do the same because it validates her practices and i just say if how you're managing your bees is working well and you want to ignore lorenzo langstrass original intent original design original premise and practice then go with mediums do what you want do what serves you let's just do everything you want to do kidding aside medium boxes are fine deep boxes are fine it's up to you for me it's a deep brood box and all the removable boxes above that will be that's where the mediums will go if at all

and at this point in my life at least still now i can heft off full honey supers i know that it's not something everybody can do and so you're just going to have to go with what works for you and i do know that again talking with dr He is going with eight frames, but he's using deeps. And I don't know. It's not out of, he didn't relay any deep conviction about, get it, deep conviction, about whether or not deeps would be better than mediums, but I do know that you're tearing into your brood, guaranteed with medium depth boxes. Shallow depth boxes are usually for cut comb and things like that.

So there again, what do you think? So once again, to the viewer and the listener, what do you think about that? Should we hold true to what Dr. Lorenzo Langstroth intended with his original patent? Or should we go our own way and just do what we feel we want to do when we're lifting off boxes? But as far as it's bad, let me just say this, it's bad form for a salesman of beekeeping equipment to pass judgment on, I realize some people are brand new to beekeeping. They walk into a bee store. They don't know what to get.

They've been told they need to go and get a beehive. They want a beehive. They walk in. The person behind the counter is going to have a lot of influence on that because usually the people behind the counters have a lot of experience. It's their business. And I'm sure they sell everything. So they would be selling you more gear if they told you to buy medium equipment.

medium-depth boxes the seller would be profiting from that more than if they talked you into deep boxes and since they were suggesting deep boxes i think it's worth hearing them out you know and then you decide and get what you want you're the customer so you decide what you want but i hope that uh i've come across clear on that that really if it's working i wouldn't worry about you don't have to win people over so of Question number seven comes from Renee from Klamath Falls, Oregon. My hive swarmed after only having it six weeks from a newt. Now I see lots of drones coming into the entrance. Is that a good sign or a bad sign? Okay, so drones, lots of fun. This is what I've learned. I've been doing this for a while.

We used to, you walk out into your bee yard and you hear a swarm. You just know it's a swarm things are happening. It's so noisy. One of your hives is about to betray you and leave, even though you're giving it a flawless environment in your deep root boxes, and off you go. But then you get closer, and what is it? It's a bunch of drones.

It's a drone rush, that's what I call it. So what's happened is, and we should know the history of each hive, but my grandson, the supervisor, was here yesterday, and he pointed out a swarm. And then we had this discussion about if we had not been here, we wouldn't know that that swarm occurred. So we don't always know what's going on in our hives unless we're landing board observers,

which is very important. And we figure out when they're queenless or when they've produced a new queen and that we can kind of schedule that. Because I ask them, what can we do now that we know that this colony is swarmed? What do we have in that box is available to us that could be very good utility-wise?

If we had another colony that doesn't have a queen, for example, right? And they're queenless. They can't produce another one. They don't have any more eggs to work with. I have a hive like that right now. We could go in that hive because we're guaranteed to find queen cells because they just swarmed. They swarm ahead of the new queens emerging. We can pull frames of brood with queen cells on them and fortify a colony that is queenless right now. Oh, wait, can't. Why? Compatibility. It's the layens hive. It's one of the two layens hives that we have. That's queenless right now. So I can cut out a queen cell very carefully,

take it over and stick it on the brood frame and hope that it takes and let that go. But it's easier to swap a frame that's already got the queen cells on it and let them produce their own. But anyway, the drone's coming in. This is my experience. Your Virgin Queen has likely flown out for her mating flight. and she's coming back.

And on her way back, she's still being chased by all these drones. Maybe it's a drone congregation area. Maybe just a bunch of drones that happen to be in the air that flew through that pheromone stream because drones have the best sniffers in the air. They follow Queens. And so she could be coming back from her mating flight. And one of the ways that we validated this and not just a one-off, time and time again.

When you see a drone rush on your high, it has two potentials. Okay. One is, if you know the history, then you know that they produced a replacement queen and that this is about the time that she would be making her virgin queen flight that she would go out and mate with drones

and come back and then there's a drone rush. So that's one thing that is pretty easy to predict. And then you look a few days later, there's eggs in there. Bonus, that validates what you were observing. The second one is a whole bunch of drones flying in front of a hive And they're hitting the landing board They're coming in they're going out and everything else

And what you've got there if it's a queen right colony Is that you've just got a bunch of drones emerging So they're resident drones that when they're four days old Three or four days old and older We'll be zipping off to parts unknown They'll be hunting their own Virgin queens And they'll be leapfrogging all over to different hives around and hitting up the nurse bees for food and resources. And by the way, drones need

resources from Queens constantly. Like, in other words, if they're flying somewhere and it's an hour without being fed somewhere by a nurse bee, they're bombing. They're losing power. They're losing the ability to exist. They'll die out in just a matter of hours. So they can't feed themselves. You've seen them make weak attempts at drinking sugar syrup and things like that or trying to, my grandson tries to feed them honey, their little tongue will come out, but that thing is dead in a matter of hours, no matter what you try, unless there are worker bees there actively feeding the drones.

So drones can be in a desperate situation in a very short amount of time. So anyway, it's one of those two things, and the behavior is very conspicuous. When it's a drone rush, following a queen bag, they're just pouring into the hive. If it's drones that are new orientation flight, because let's say you don't know the status of the queen inside the hive, but they're doing these, they're flying around and they're orienting to the area, and then they're landing again and going back in. Because with the drone rush, following a queen back,

they're there for a while and then they just leave. So once again, if you weren't there to see it happen, a couple hours later, you wouldn't even know that it occurred. So you wouldn't then know to look for evidence that your queen is now laying. But for me, it's a really good and positive sign. So that should help. Question number eight.

Comes from Teddy from Saugus, Massachusetts. Am I saying that right? S-A-U-S-A-U-S-G-U-S-G-Sugus. Anyway, I got a report from a swarm from B-Swarmed last week. So B-Swarmed. By the way, this is really important. This is a website. where you register as a beekeeper

when you want to receive alerts about a swarm that's reported from the general public. So it is spelled this way. B-S-W-A-R-M-E-D-D-D-O-R-M-E-D. The reason I want to be really specific about that is there's another website called B-S-W-A-R-M, and it stops there.

Someone sent me, They were really upset because they thought they were going to report swarms and also to get themselves on the list to collect and receive alerts for swarms. So that would be be-swarmed, B-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D.org. That's the one that you register with to get swarms. The B-S-W-S-W-S-W-Sight was even offering services to kill bees. So they were ticked because they thought that the thing I was endorsing was, offering services to even kill bees. So it's not.

Those are two different companies. Anyway, so in Brookline, anyway, a photo showed the swarm on a lawn not clustering off the ground. Do you think the queen was injured or does this happen occasionally? And yes, it does. So there are times when you find a bunch of bees on the ground. Here's what I've noticed. If you watch, and I recommend that you do, the University of Wales, wealth has a lot of education videos. Paul Kelly is like the head guy there for all of their field

work. And one of the things they went over, and boy, did the viewership get angry. And here's why. He was clipping the wings on the queens. And there are people that have a very holistic approach to beekeeping. They don't want anything. They don't want paint marks on the queens. And that's okay if you don't they don't want the wings clipped on one side and that's okay if you don't um but when somebody else did it was remarkable because on something like that i do look to see what the commentary is i look to see what people's thoughts are and i've noticed that people are not very passive about it they're impassioned and that queen is dead in two days because you clip the wings things like that I just said, oh my gosh, that is not right.

Because what it does is it unbalances the queen. So this is a mature, mated queen in production, clipped wings, one side unbalances her. If she tries to fly away, she's going to end up on the ground. If this is an educational institution, and this is an area where students are always around and they're always studying, the queen flies out because it doesn't stop them from superstitious.

the queen. It doesn't stop them from producing queen cells and pushing the existing queen out because that is standard reproduction. What it does do is keeps those genetics from spreading out other than drones that that queen produces. So if the queen took off, she's not getting very far. So there's two reasons why, in my opinion, they end up on the ground. One, their wings are injured because even bees will turn on their own queens and chew their wings sometimes. We've seen that. So the queen just tries to get away. She goes on the ground. She smells like a queen. Other bees join her. But we find that the clusters are half-hearted. You know, it's a cluster of the size of this coffee cap that if you weren't walking around out there and didn't see

that little cluster in the grass, you wouldn't even know that they were there. But when you see a cluster like that, usually it's either an injured queen, a queen that's too heavy to fly very far or it's a queen that is too heavy to fly in other words it was premature she flew out and tried to go with a swarm but she was not lean enough to do it so if you collect a queen out of a beehive that's in full production she's laying eggs she lays eggs right in front of you and you pick up that queen and you're looking her over and she does kind of a little hop skip flight onto the grass she can't get very far anyway they make it about 10 feet max they're just too heavy So you can go and pick them up.

And it is not super common, but it does happen occasionally because I found them. And if you go and sort through them, you're going to find the queen because it's the only reason they would congregate on the ground. Unless you have sprayed sugar syrup or something and got on the grass, you can see a cluster of bees there. But when there's a queen out there, you can just collect her up, look her over. And if she's attracted to others, chances are she's mated. And one of the ways to get them out of grass and stuff like that, it's easy to collect them, is if you're using one of the beavaks. So the two bevaks that I use are the Colorado BVAC, which is pretty handy. But you do have to plug it into something.

And then the everything BVAC, which is in a yellow seven-gallon bucket with its own battery and everything else, has a backpack, you can carry it around. And that's something you could leave in your car all the time and have at the ready. In the event that you happen to come across the swarm somewhere. and the battery lasts a really long time and you can it's very easy to vacuum them up and as you go when you start along the edge you can look at their behavior and eventually you'll see the queen and if you can avoid vacuuming up the queen that would be pretty darn helpful although I have not yet killed or profoundly injured a queen in any BVAC the potential is there so if you get a chance to just

vacuum them around the edges and if you find the queen put her in a queen clip of some kind these are really handy and bring her back and put them in the hive now don't try to stick her back in the hive that she came out of if you can determine which one that was because they've already decided to reject her and you can force the hand on the part of the workers inside that hive and they will turn on her and they can destroy a queen it was pretty funny I saw a cluster of bees I was trying to install bees, a swarm of bees. And sometimes when there's a swarm and it's sizable, you get virgin queens along with the queen that they're actually following. So they're kind of like

tag-alongs. And sometimes you'll see a concentrated little lump of bees in that and they don't seem to be moving a lot. They're kind of tightening themselves up on each other. And on these hot days, it doesn't help to pull up a thermal scan because you know what's happening there. They've found a queen that they don't like that's in the same. the swarm group and they're killing her. So they're actually cooking the queen. So they're heating her up and they're putting themselves in jeopardy while they're doing it. They're cranking out so much heat. They're burning the selves out and they're suffocating her just by physically tightening the group around them. Imagine yourself in the bottom of a dog pile. Go back to second grade

and they all pile up on you and all the kids jumping on the dog pile think it's hilarious but to get at the very bottom, can't breathe, getting the air pushed out of them and everything else, and it's not a fun experience. Now, I don't have a personal experience like that, but I'm just conveying it that this is what's kind of happening to the queen, plus they're heating her up, plus they're cutting off her air supply, and they just want to kill her. And I had a queen that I picked up, and it felt like they're so tightly packed, it feels like a meatball, for lack of a better description. It's pretty dense, pretty solid. You can hold it in your hand, and then I was just passing them back.

and forth trying to get them to break apart and you know they were so intense about it because i did see part of the queen's abdomen i didn't notice there was a queen in there and then when i did finally get them all apart the queen was you know dead on the landing board with her feet in the air and everything else and so i collected up that queen just decided to save her for later but turns out she was a drama queen what she had done to save herself is she fainted so i'm just going to guess that that's what she did because it's happened before when people are marking queens that they they think they killed the queen she died she lays there and her feet kind of fold over and they think what did i do to my queen i don't remember any trauma she's dead well keep an eye on that one because they just pass out sometimes

and the next thing you know here i have this queen that i save from the meatball and i have her by herself and she's still alive now and she can go into another hive that's queenless that will accept her that will like her, that will appreciate her for the queen that she is. And so, yeah, it happens. I just gave a long story for no reason, but there are a lot of different things going on with queens. And clipping in queen's wings, whether you approve of that or not, does not kill the queen.

Question number nine comes from Tina. Honeygrove, Pennsylvania. That's a cool name for a city. Honeygrove, if you're a beekeeper, you might as well come from Honey Grove. Anyway, at a recent club meeting, the subject of facial recognition came up. Could you please give your input whether honeybees have the ability to recognize their keeper? We have heard many talk about the topic, but we would like your take on the matter.

So that means we, there's more than one person that wants my opinion. So this is exciting for me because it's an area that I think is really funny, because bees can recognize their keeper. There are people that actually, see, don't be one of the people that makes fun of people that say things like, my bees, know me. It doesn't mean they like you, they can recognize you.

Hey, Fred, if there have been any actual studies done on whether or not bees can recognize the face of not just their keeper, but individual human beings. Because what would be the practical purpose of a honeybee having the ability to know the facial features and the organization of your eyes and your nose, your mouth, your eyebrows, your hair, and everything else. What would be the practical benefit? It doesn't have to be one. It's cool to know, and there was a study, and it reinforces

the fact that bees do, in fact, know your faces. Not just bees, but yellow jacket wasp can too. And this is not just through scientific study, which we have to back it up, but it is also based on my personal experience because I'd like to do backyard experiments that are fun. And my bees know me. Like my bees, that seems silly to say that. But last summer I spent an inordinate amount of time studying Yellow Jacket wasps. And by study, I mean staring at them, drinking coffee, doing nothing in particular, setting up a full cinematic video rig with lighting and everything else.

And wouldn't you know when I first got up to, I'll get to the bees. So when I first got up to these yellow jackets, what do they do? They did what yellow jackets do? They attacked me. Storm came through, blew their yellow jacket, cellulose nest out of a tree. And so I picked it up like any good person would. And when I flipped over one part, there were still a bunch of yellow jackets under it. So then, of course, they get defensive and they attack me.

So then I thought, wow, could I just sit and let me. see how they would restructure themselves. Would they piece together this yellow jacket nest? And so I found a suet feeder, you know, the cage, and I stuffed it all in there. And then I hung that on a tree branch, a Don Redwood tree, because I thought, let's not put this on an ordinary tree. Let's use a Don Redwood tree. And I put them in there, and then I said about watching them, because they will start to put themselves together. And then I, of course, reached out to end up. homologists who specialize in vespidae, right? And because I want to talk about these wasps and stuff. So, of course, once again, it's an interview that you can watch and listen to.

And wasps recognize the faces of other wasps. So a curious thing happened. I sat by these wasps pretty darn close every single day to get my video updates. It didn't run 24-7. the equipment, I put markers on the ground, so I would set my equipment up at exactly the same spot every single day, and then it would document their progress. And in the end, I would have this cool cinematic collection that apparently nobody cares about. So I got super close-ups. I get the best audio. You can hear them chewing and working the cellulose. It is above average, like I can't even describe. But the part I want you to understand is, what I learned about Yellowjacket was, is not only do they recognize each other's faces. In other words, if something happened to a yellow jacket, it goes out,

it gets something on his face, a little mark or something that changes its appearance just a little bit. Now, they look all the same to us, that's just a yellow jacket face. But that one comes back with a slightly altered appearance, it gets rejected right away until they realize that it's one of them. And so it wins them back over and then it gets accepted. Honeybees are largely pheromone base. So they recognize things based on how they smell. But they also have eyes. They have five eyes. They have compound eyes. They have simple eyes. And they're going to look things over. So the wasps eventually got used to my being there. And I could sit this close to the wasst for hours at a time. And they just went around me like it was no longer there.

They got accustomed to my being there. The honeybees, I did my own test. And I'm going to link it. So if you want to read about the studies of how honeybees could recognize different faces, but it was reward-based. So in other words, it's not like, oh, I like Jill or, oh, I like Fred. You know, they see and recognize whether or not there's going to be a benefit. Now, this is where it would have some practical aspects, right? If they recognize a face, it's associated with bringing them resources. then that's worthwhile, right?

So whether that's an animal or a bird or another insect, like the spotted lanternfly or something like that, their ability to recognize this animal, whatever it is, and its traits would benefit the bees because if they get a benefit from their proximity to that animal, then they would, of course, benefit from being able to identify it as different from another one that did not provide them with any resources. So what I was doing is I came around, I'm just going to use this as an example, but I had test tubes.

This is not one of those, but, oh, like this. This is a translucent, of course, plastic. If you're giving stuff to kids to catch bugs in, these plastic screw top test tubes are the best. Anyway, I put clear sugar syrup in this, one to one. Took the cap off. Made sure that honeybees were able to sample the sugar. sugar syrup and then they would go out and fly away and there are a lot of tests and things that you can learn from this how far do they go how long were they gone when they come back to

they bring their friends and they do and so pretty soon instead of three honey bees coming back to this you've got 10 you've got 15 all right and eventually you have to hold it at an angle so your sugar syrup is a great summer project by the way teaching kids they use of all the syrup and then they come back to it right now change your position bring somebody else out give them test tubes because you get these impacts of 10 or whatever give everyone one of these but only one of you has this has the syrup in it and then change your position and then i don't mean go a thousand yards away change your position by 10 feet 15 feet let your friend stand around you and everybody's got a test tube hold the test tube in the same hand all the time pretty soon the bees come straight to

to me go straight to the hand that's got the test tube with the sugar syrup in it and then they fly away each time they fly away shift but eventually what's going to happen is there'll be so many of them coming there will never be a point where they just absolutely fly away so now you have to go walk through the garage or go through some building and then get in the dark and then they'll fly out and go to the light and then they'll leave now you go out a back door in another direction come up a different place and show up in a different spot and see if they don't come straight to you again not only do they come straight to you but once you get rid of this test tube it's gone not only do they find you but they go to the hand that would have held it so that's recognition of an individual because those who never had resources for

them are just ignored so they definitely recognize the features of a person now in the study that i recommend you check and do because it's kind of fun they use photographs and the study was if you want to look it up yourself i'm going to give you the information it's the The Journal of Experimental Biology in its volume 208, issue number 24 of December 2005. So it shows how they used, they actually used photos of faces because they also learned some things about what confused them, but the funny part was, too, it confuses people.

They took these photos and they also flipped them 180 degrees. They had a hard time recognizing the same face once it was turned, 180 degrees, chin up, right? So, but they did recognize distinctive faces, and so they can remember you, they can recognize your face particularly with it's associated with something beneficial, because otherwise, how would you get the behavior from the B to show that it could discern one face from another, even though your position would change? And the other interesting part is if you change your location in predictable, established increments every single hour that you go out there, eventually, let's say you shifted every five or ten feet with your resource,

and they came to you and fed, and then ten feet came to you and fed, ten feet came to you fed, and then you disappeared altogether. They would go to where the next spot would have been. So in other words, they're showing up now at the ten feet beyond where you last were, that's been your practice to shift every 10 feet. So if you're looking for fun experiments to do, I don't know what the benefit is to know it, but yeah, they can pick you out.

And they will know you. And this is why sometimes I tease my wife about it. You know, I can sit in the bee yard, I can be out there for hours, I can walk around, I can be next to the bee landing board and everything else. My wife can walk out there and be stung in five minutes. She's new.

She's different. She has a lot of hair. you know i mean who knows what the reason is but they definitely react differently to different people and if they have had a good or bad experience so maybe you're the one that was in there and you drop the lid smashed a bunch of bees it's not just the way you smell it's the way you look too so they're rejecting you on every front so that's it we're in the fluff section for today i want to thank you by the way for joining me and uh verify that your colonies are currently queen right going to run out of time here you're going to want to make sure that they are and you want to

recover quickly the quicker you notice that there's a problem with your colonies brood and the quicker you remedy that the fewer bees you're going to lose the stronger the colony is going to be going in a winter so again sunday will be the hottest day here so if you're trying to process honey or you're trying to work some frames or clean out that dead out that you've been ignoring all this time that would be the easiest day to work with propolis bees wax and everything else i highly recommend you scrape and save all of that uh for those of you who have been after me for the keeper's hive two queen system it's underway i have two more you have to put in your own bottom boards for that so i've got it together and it's painted and all i have to do is put it on the

bottom boards which are arriving on saturday and then we're going to implement that next week and it's not going to be at a lot of lag time because what i'm going to do is pick colonies that are comparable in strength and size. And I'm going to fully occupy both sides of it, and we're going to see how much honey we're going to get out of it. So the two queen keeper's hive system is going to go out in the B yard in the coming week. Topar hive progress. We had an abscond.

They totally departed that topar hive, and I reloaded another. People made suggestions, and I do appreciate them. They were like, get out of torch. and flame it because the problem is it's a brand new wood and they don't like it and all this other stuff so i appreciate all those suggestions didn't eat them because ultimately i used my queen in cluter and i put a queen in and it got a sworn to move in and they have been working every day all day ever since so the top of our hive is in progress it's working well not going to mess with them yet but that will be coming up we're going to look to see how they're building things up in there without supplemental feeding or anything else

We're just letting them do what's on their own. Also, speaking of expanding your colonies, look at them to make sure they're not getting honeybound, put your supers on ahead of time, have them ready to go. If you're running out of equipment, time to get some. So, and if you don't want to lift off your honey supers, go ahead and pull capped frames of honey.

Because once they're capped, your bees are hesitant to use them anyway, and be ready to process them out and get them right back on your hives. Here in the Northeastern U.S., in my neck of the woods in particular, going into August and into September, we'll be hitting another big nectar flow. So it's up ahead, and this is kind of an easy-going time. If you want to know if you have a dearth, a historical dearth, where you live, go to a website called B-Scape, B-E-E-S-C-A-P-O-R-G, put in your location, and it will let you

know what your dirt situation is you may not have one we don't have one here we don't have a complete dearth what we do is we have an area where we don't have as much nectar coming in and as much pollen coming in as we do other parts of the summer but from spring right into fall we have a continuous resource in the environment for our bees here so it's a good area so the hive butler toats if you don't have them look into them by the way i use them to transport my water snakes i know that was very popular with people uh there were only a handful of people that wanted to let me know they were unsubscribing because i showed water snakes northern water snakes in particular non venomous i put them in my hive butler toads and transported

them that way it turned out to be very handy so if you need to catch or a clip because this will happen at the end of the year because you're a beekeeper people will say things like uh i have bees in my tree and they've been there all summer long and now i need somebody to come and get them where are they they're hanging on the branch what it's a paper wasp nest heaven forbid bald-faced hornets if you have a hive butler tote you walk out there you open that tote you clip that branch off you drop it in the tote close the tote up put clamps on it to make sure it stays closed now you can transport them easy peasy put snakes in there anything you need hive butler toads fred five is a discount code why do i give you that because they give you a five percent off what do i get out

of it nothing I don't even get a free hive butler tote out of it they're great tools don't set your frames on the ground while you're doing your hive inspections please don't it is so easy to just keep your frames in order put them right in a hive butler toad and also while we're talking about that have extra beehive stands in your apiary I have extra stands and here's the reason. Why should I be sitting my frames on the ground while I'm doing inspections of my hives? Your bees are going to be much calmer. If you can keep those frames oriented, you pull a frame up out of a hive, you're looking at it,

keep it upright, put it right in that perfect index of a hive butler tote which never wears out. And you keep all your frames in order and each one you inspect and put out and move over blah blah blah in they go they stay calm you can even put the lid on them if you want to they have a screened lid and a solid lid and uh every time i use it it is the easiest way to do things let's say we're doing things like earlier on i mentioned uh you want to pull a frame of brood for example or you want to pull a frame that's got some queen cells on it you want to put that in another colony that's queen less transporting them from one hive to the next can be an area where you're you mess things up. I want to encourage you when you're pulling a frame of brood that has a queen

cell that's capped or partially capped or ready to go. Don't be tipping it in all different directions. Don't bump it and knock it around. Set it carefully. Keep it upright. Put it right in your hive butler tote. Put the lid on. Carry it over there. Bring the resources that you need. Get the frames out of the hive that you're putting it in. Put those in your high butler tote. Swat the frames out. Take those back over there. Because no matter what happens, if you get interrupted, whatever's going on, you have a place to organize them. It is the best way. Your frames can't even swing and knock around because there's little fins that stick out that hold it in position.

If you've got a queen cell that comes out on the bottom of your frame, and you put that in the high butler tote, it has a space underneath. There is nothing else like that on the market. I'm telling you, I'm trying to tell you good equipment to get. I don't have a link for it. I don't have an affiliate for it. They were nice enough to give you the viewer 5% off Fred 5. Ask for more if you want.

See if they give you a bigger discount. I don't know. And work that out because there's no code. I get nothing other than I get to support a company that's making something that I like. That was it for question number nine. So I hope you have a great holiday weekend. And I want to thank you for spending some of your time with me here today. And I hope you have a fantastic independent state.

and that you don't blow yourself up with fireworks and things like that and you don't set things on fire and think about your pets and animals and don't blow things up next to them and just have a fantastic weekend thanks for being here with me and i hope you have a great beekeeping week ahead thanks for watching