The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 315 thermal treatments and why do some people hate the Flow Hive?

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/vq7paeA4toM

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, July the 18th of 2025. This is back at beekeeping questions and answers. Episode number 315. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm glad that you're here. Thanks for joining me. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today,

please look down on the video description, and you'll see all the topics and related links listed below. If you want to contribute a topic or you have to, have a question please go to my main website the way to be dot org click on the page that says contact you fill out the form and there you go it might be in one of the friday q-nas if it's some kind of emergency i do try to answer those i spend a lot of time every single day responding to questions so the topics that we're going to cover today were submitted through the past week by people just like you So I know you want to know what's going on outside.

And right now it's not bad at all. 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 24 Celsius, not raining. No wind to speak of, basically one mile an hour. So it's really nice. The other thing that's really nice, 61% relative humidity, which means the bees are not bearding all over the front of their hives. And UV index is 8, which means, yes, you can go out,

you can get fried today. So, sun tan lotion if you're hanging out, instead of sitting here staring at your computer, which I highly recommend, you go outside and engage the world if you have really nice weather. This is great weather, rainy day stuff to have. The thing is, let's say you're driving down the road.

You're on your tractor. You don't want to wreck it. You don't want to be looking at your phone. It's a podcast through Podbean. What's the podcast called? The Way to Be. You can just Google it. We're on IHeart Radio and all the other carriers.

So I hope you listen. And the opening, let's talk about, that lots of things are flowering out there and I did have a request last week from a viewer who said wouldn't it be nice if you labeled the flowers so I did just for you so outside right now the bees are on white clover and we've got a decent amount on the clover but that's not the predominant source for the bees milkweed is taking over they are all on the milkweed and why wouldn't they be because that's got a high sucrose content up to 80%, so I'm told, don't know for sure, but if the bees are making the choices based on the high sucrose content of the nectar in those flowers, milkweed is winning by a long shot. I was surprised today to find out that max a million sunflowers are starting to bloom right now. So it's down in the western field, there it is, and there's honeybees on it. So there's enough of the blooms to get the honeybee attention.

Cosmos are just now starting to bloom. They're decent nectar and pollen plant for the bees. The other thing is hyssup is blooming. So we have several varieties of hyssop, and there are a lot of native pollinators on it. Bumble bees and others, some solitary bees. And here's the thing, not one honeybee was on the hyssop. So what's that mean? It means that they have other choices right now.

The other thing that's cool, hydrangeas. The pinky winky cultivar is also blooming now. lots of native pollinators on it no honeybees yet and common mulein that's the really tall stuff with the yellow flowers on it and the fuzzy leaves that can be used for wound dressings and things like that honeybees are on that so actually i don't remember having such a good crop of mulein in the past it's a volunteer it's already here it's nothing that we planted and the bees are on it marigolds are just starting to bloom no bees now My goal is with the marigolds, I might have overdone it because we planted several thousand of them. I want to keep the honeybees out.

Not the honeybees. I want to keep the rabbits out. And if it works for woodchucks, good for that too. And if it keeps the deer off of my stuff, good for that too. Because the sunflowers, not the max of millions, but the annual varieties of sunflowers are yet to bloom. And once in a while we go out there and don't we see the tops eaten off by the deer who just browsed through. So if marigolds can help with that, the other thing is liquid fence does work, but I have to get out there, considering the fact that we had all this rain. They say it holds up okay after a rain, but you have to get back out there to spray again.

So you need to reapply that stuff about once every week and a half. So I'll be out there tonight with that because there are things that don't want the deer to eat. Black-eyed Sousins are everywhere, several varieties. So it just comes up on its own. really tall this year with all the rain we've had and everything else so three and a half feet pretty average and lots of native pollinators on it i have not seen a honeybee on black eyed susans yet so that's about it and one of the things that you're going to notice here in the corner of this video throughout my q and a today is a long-running video of the bees on the entrance of hive number 44 if you don't know what that one is

It's a colony of bees that we just established this past week because it was an underdog queen that was being ignored by a swarm of bees that had shown favor to a queen that was mated, and I highly suspect this queen in hive number 44 is not yet mated, although I did see one bee in an hour and a half of observation that did have pollen on its corbicula. Definitely pollen. The others are scrubbing around with things stuck on their hind legs, on their corbucula like pollen, but I highly suspect it isn't because they're using a lot of propolis. And what are they doing?

For the first time ever in all the hives I've ever had all the years of beekeeping, I've never had bees form on the landing board of a hive and create their own entrance trout. They're not just reducing the entrance. and shaping the entrance, which is what they're clearly doing, but they're also shrouding it. So they're creating an extension onto the landing board, and that's what you're looking at up in the corner today. And I have over an hour and a half of that recorded,

all recorded this morning, by the way. So if you see pollen coming in, let me know. It'd be very interested. But the rest of it is probably propolis, which shows upon their hind legs. We can often think that they're bringing in pollen, which would indicate that they have brood to feed when instead it's really just propolis.

But the pollen is very distinctive. And what is propolis? I might as well stop and say what that is in case you're new and don't know. Propolis is what the bees use to close up entrances. Cover screens that are in areas that they don't like. They close up venting and control venting throughout the hive that way.

And they also paste it all over rough surfaces on the interior of the bee hive. and it is medicinal for the bees. It makes a healthier hive climate. But clearly they can use it for engineering as well. So super interesting. Let's see what else. Want to make sure. And let's just jump right in with the very first question, which comes from David in Amarillo, Texas. So David's a frequent commenter and longtime viewers. I'm glad to see a question. It says sometimes a hive starts out gentle, but gets defensive as it grows. I have one such hive now. Four boxes tall, so moving it is not feasible, and I don't want to euthanize it. However, I live in the city with neighbors,

children, and pets all around me. I am adamant about keeping neighbors safe from my backyard hobby, so I managed to requeen the hot hive, which wasn't easy, but now I'm worried about waiting 30 days before the new genetics even begin to change their temperament. Here's my cockamamie idea. Could I set up my shop vac early in the morning and begin sucking up the guard bees and unemployed foragers on the assumption that these are the ones following me to the house trying to sting me? After about an hour or so, the remaining bees would be mostly housed, nurses, and so on,

and the new queen's genetics would soon dominate. What are your thoughts? Okay, so my thoughts are general and the description of the hive. Okay, so this can happen to any backyard beekeepers. So pay attention backyard beekeepers because what's happening is your colonies are building and we've been expanding by adding boxes. And this means more bees, more resources, more of everything, which includes more guard bees. Now, we've all been out there.

So part of the problem here is from David and others sometimes, what they consider to be a hot hive, a dangerous hive. Often we find out that's two or three bees that are just after you and the fact that they come after you the minute you're out of your car in the driveway can be a pain, right? Literally a pain when they sting you, but they did compliment you because when they sting you, nine times out of ten, they die. So there are things that we can do, but as they increase in numbers, it means there's more guard bees available, more available to launch an attack. So they could defend the beehive in larger numbers. So sometimes when we get a colony that small, which most of mine are, as they grow, you'll notice that they can become more defensive even when you're going through them

and stuff like that. So let's think about the parts that are under our control. One of the things is where is the landing board? What direction is it facing? What do the guard bees see? So when you're walking into your B yard, if you're met 50 feet away from the hive by a guard B, one of the very first things you can do is obstruct that field of view for the bee. Particularly if you live in a neighborhood, stockade fences are fantastic for causing your bees to fly up and over. And guard bees almost never fly off the landing board and circle the hive looking for something to defend because that would be a waste of their time. So what they do is they sit on the guard spot on the landing board itself and they're watching for other bees coming to the landing board or anything that gets their

attention so if you can block their field of view then you can reduce that defensive behavior so another thing is too i was talking about of all people came in reynolds we were talking about different large hives and things that you could do with them and not just relevant to this particular question but it came up that large colonies can get out of hand and be difficult to work with because the bees are all in the way. This is why we like to get into our beehives in the middle of the early afternoon, so to speak. That's because we want as many of those foragers out and about as possible. We don't want to be interacting with more bees than we need to when we're taking our hives apart.

So a great time, if you're trying to figure that out right now, would be from 1 to 2.30 in your backyard. It'd be the sun is high. It gives you a chance to see things better down inside the hives. So there's that. And the other thing is, as I mentioned, forages throughout about because some bees, most of them, in fact, will leave on foraging flights and not return for hours, depending on where those resources are. So once you get in there and you find out, first of all, make sure the colony is healthy, Queen Wright, everything else. And there is a treatment for those who treat for Varro destructor mites.

If you want to treat a large colony, there is a treatment that's only suitable. for heavily populated colonies of bees. And it slows production during the initial treatment, and that is formic pro. So if you were thinking about treating for varroa destructor mites, and you've got a colony that's on, you know, it's really expanding, really getting big, and we want to check that while treating for proo destructor mites

with very high efficacy, then this would be a great time to give them the double treatment of formic pro. that would be one thing. Now the other part here is what do I think about just putting a shop vac out there and sucking off the bees that are coming in and collecting them into your vacuum cleaner and drawing them away from the entrance. I don't particularly like that idea very much. I think that we must have other beekeepers in our clubs that could benefit from some extra bees. So one of the ways that you can distract those bees and collect bees that are in the the foraging phase in your backyard in your city apiary is you can set up a queen on a stick

simulator which means you don't have a queen so what do you have instead queen mandibular pheromone so it's temp queen those little noodles that you get from better be you can probably get them from other places but better be is where i get them the price has gone up they used to be five bucks i believe they're seven now so you get two of them for seven dollars you zip it zip tie it onto a stick put that out and the a flight area in your apiary and you will collect a bunch of foragers onto that because they think they found a queen and they glom onto it so rather than just vacuum them up and destroy them i think putting them on that sick and then putting them in a transport bag which can be a 600 mil

honey strainer that just has a zip tie on it or a way to draw the string down because once it's on there and once you get this little cluster of bees several hundred of them you can zip tie that over it and transport your whole stick off to your other apiary that needs more bees and then you just open them up there and let them find their way to other colonies of bees or you can actually park it right on the landing board after it spent an overnight somewhere else and this of course is far away from David's apiary here and then you turn them loose and it's been my experience that they will go right into other hives what's their situation? They're full of resources because they're foragers

and they were going to attend to what they thought was a queen and we fooled them. So that's another way rather than vacuuming them up, which is just a loss. And then while you wait to see what the genetics are going to be, now splitting and expanding is not what David wants to do. So those are just a couple of ideas

that I was thinking about. And so that's it. Let's move on to question number two. Question number two comes from Blizzard the Cat. That's the YouTube channel name. I planted a bee-friendly garden in the front and backyards of my home in Oklahoma this year. I plan to start beekeeping this coming spring, which will be 2006. I've been looking at reviews on so many, all in caps, kinds of hives.

I'm so interested in flow hives, but have seen so many scathinges, comments about them in forums, reviews, etc. I see that you're very positive about flow. Our winners here aren't severe like yours, however, there are short times. Our temps do go below zero degrees Fahrenheit. We have very hot summers, and do you think a flow hive would be a good choice for me as a beginner? I've been learning as much as I can about Becare and have taken online classes from the Ohio State University Extension. I've seen people accuse flow users as being neglectful of their brood boxes. I know not to do that. I've seen people say the bees won't fill the flow supers. Have you ever experienced that? It's a big investment. Do the flow supers last? I only plan to

have one working hive. And I really want to do things in the best way possible. I appreciate your thoughts. I was going to let this one go because the flow discussion seems to be, it's something that most people have made up their minds about. But I'm taking a gamble that the people that watch my videos and listen to my podcasts and watch this Friday Q&A are still open-minded. So here's the thing. It would be no secret if you look at my apiary, which has a variety of beehives. Okay, so everything from Appamede to ivory bee-hires. from Israel to, you know, horizontal lay-ins, you know, long-laying, and we've got, of course, the flow hive. And I've had the flow hive since 2015. When did it come out? 2015. And the thing of it was when it first launched, beekeepers everywhere had strong opinions

before it even became available because they were kicking off of Hunter Razor. So I listened to what people were saying, and I thought some of the things that the people were saying, and these aren't small-time beekeepers. These are people with big followings. We're saying it's trash, it's garbage, it's a lie, it can't work. So that was the initial thing, was they were basically calling out saying smooth advertising. There's no way that works. There's no way this thing functions.

And being me, I just thought, huh, I wonder, though, maybe I will just invest in their, fundraiser, their Indiegogo campaign, I spent like $465 for the flow super alone. So this is just the flow super that has the frames in it. I did not buy the full flow hive. Because I thought a lot of people, of course, if you're on social media, everyone sends it to you along with their opinion. This is garbage. What do you think?

Check this trash out. What do you think of this? And I thought, whoa, you tried to lead my opinion. with that opening statement. I even had someone greet me at their apiary. Fred Dunn, oh, Flohive, this is garbage. Let me show you how I make bees. I take care of bees.

And I just thought, well, now I'm associated with Flohive exclusively because that was 2016 and 17, and I've been keeping bees since 2006. So what happened is, and this is what happens a lot with beekeepers and why I'm going into this so far, is that this doesn't just happen with flow hives flow hive took off because they made it look too easy so and that was the argument a lot of beekeepers back then in particular and even now want people to know that beekeeping's difficult it's challenging it's complicated you need to know a lot and the argument then was that they're making it seem like a

you know, plug-and-play beehive. You just go out there, you put your bees in, next thing you know, you open the back, you get your honey out, and that's it. And the risk is, and this is what was being called out early on, that beekeepers would get it, misunderstanding that you don't just put bees in it, and then just go out there and harvest honey from it. First of all, you'll harvest too much honey because they made it too easy. That was the thinking. And then, of course, your bees won't have anything to get through winter on. Which happened? By the way, there are still very, I don't know, heavily high traffic view videos about that concept that were made by people that realized the viral potential of the flow hive and did, in fact, take all the honey off and kill their bees and then just stopped sharing about the flow hives. So they got what they wanted out of it. And this happens, though, this is the reason I bring this up is

it doesn't just happen with flow hives. It happens with new beekeepers. New beekeepers often get really excited about what's going to happen when they get a beehive. They're going to get honey from the bees. And as soon as you have a beehive when you start out, those of you are new, I'm sure I have friends that go, do you get honey? Do you sell honey? Do you have honey?

Because that becomes the mark of a successful beekeeper, right up there with whether or not your bees survived a winter. So there's no shortage of people that collect bees, put them in a hive, and draw off almost all of the hunting. the first year. So the problem is and was that it does make honey accessible so it comes down to a judgment call on the part of the beekeeper. Would you draw off that honey just because it's sitting there and it's ready to go? So I try to share another method with it here in the northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania because we have cold winters and our bees need honey to get them through winter, which means a couple of things. One, the way the flow hive is set up, it's not set up for cold weather. It's set up for New South Wales, where the inventors are,

Cedar and Stuart Anderson. So the thing is, they have the brood box, they have a queen excluder, and then it goes directly to a flow super, and then they, every single Tuesday night, will show a video that's live in their apiary there in New South Wales. And usually it involves harvesting honey while they talk about it and this goes on all year round so this is very different from here in my neck of the woods so when i bought the flow super first of all i wanted to put it on a really strong colony of bees because the other part is uh bought one the bees don't touch it they don't put anything in the flow frames and things like that so i waste of my money and they don't do it it doesn't do the way i expected it to do so here's the thing um often when you set up your beehive

and you set up a brood box, it is a single brood box, eight or ten frame Langstroth brood box, which is what it's based on. And no matter who you are and what kind of hive you have, if you don't fill that brood box before you put on a honey super, they're not going to fill out your honey super for you. If you put a package of bees in a brood box and then throw a deep, which is what it is, you throw a deep super on there right away.

They don't work it. regardless of what kind it is. So that kind of disappointment and that kind of rhetoric goes around really fast because it doesn't live up to advertising hype, which is, here's your hive, put bees in it, harvest your honey. That is a fast forward look at it. You're not harvesting your honey probably until the next season, until the next year when they have pollen and nectar available and your colonies are growing larger. So what I tried to share with people, and I have a piece of, page on my website, which is the way to be.org. The page is called the flow hive experience.

And it shows just using the super. I explained all of my observations, good and bad, and show you how to use it, because what I needed to do here was have a medium super above that brood box that would be something the bees store all their honey in, and then that becomes their winter survival resource and if they filled that so we have a deep and a medium once they completed the medium or we're 80% done then we could add the flow super now what are we asking our bees to do we're asking them to fill a deep box so if you don't have a colony that would have filled a deep honey super nine frame or 10 frame length draw deep or an eight frame langstrot deep they also are not going to be to fill a flow super it's not a way to concentrate honey each one of those frames produces half a gallon

of honey and there are seven frames in a flow super that sits on a 10 frame brood box so these are all things that needed to be considered so does it work it absolutely works did i ever do anything to prepare my frames so that the bees would use them because they are a food grade plastic and I did not, and they sealed them up anyway. So right now, of all the hives we have out there, so when you look at my apiary, every hive does not have a flow super on it. So we don't start the year with flow supers on.

The other thing is, at the end of the year, they come off, just like any other honey super. They're taken away. And what's left on is a medium box that is full of honey, about 47 pounds of honey that will get my Bees for winter with a surplus based on last winter, which was really long. So I found the sweet spot for me here in this part of the country

with our weather that I could have the deep brood box, the medium super, and then that's all I needed to get them through winter. So if the colony never completes that second box, like last year we had a weird dearth about this time of year, we didn't get enough rain and we didn't have enough resources for the bees. So in my area, a lot of people made almost no honey. That would not have been the year to put a flow super on. So my recommendation and the reason I know that

Billsard the cat is new, would I recommend? So you just started a beekeeping, you just took a class, and is this the hive you should buy? I would say no, it isn't. Because I want people to understand the biology and getting their bees for a year, and I don't want the emphasis to be on how they're going to draw off their honey,

which ultimately is going to be a thing. But one of the big selling points is, because there's a bunch of flow ambassadors out there too. And one of the selling points is you won't need an extractor, you won't need uncapping tanks, you won't need all of the equipment to process honey if you have a flow hive and the flow super and on you go. But that has not been my experience.

You still need an extractor, you still need an uncapper, you still need honey processing. And here's why, because the flow super doesn't go on every hive. It only goes on select hives for me that are doing extremely well, than have high populations, and that are runaway honey producers. Those are the ones that I put a flow super on. The others get normal processing, which is why I need both styles.

Now, my wife, if she had her choice, we would have nothing but flow hives in our apiary. There would be no other hive design out there. Keep in mind when we say hive design, it really means super design. Because the flow hive bases are all standard Langstroth bases. The opportunity made really well. They're cut with lasers. They fit together well, which did not happen the first year, by the way. So they've been through some material changes, processing changes, and things like that.

Even the flow frames have been changed a little bit. So let's talk about who's it for? It's for somebody that understands, first of all, that has the money because, let's be honest, there are people that have disposable income. They don't care what anything costs. They'll buy every gadget that there is in beekeeping. So part of it is a return on your investment, right? So in other words, when would this flow hive pay for itself?

Well, it takes about 18 months for one to pay for itself if you had good honey years and they produce plenty and you could bottle and sell it. Now, one of the things about this is the unique method of processing honey, which means we don't have to pull hive apart to get the honey off. This is another sticking point and a benefit. So stick with me for a second. When you're taking off the honey, you look through the ends. So you have panels on the back of it that let you see if it's been all sealed up. And if it is, there's a very good chance.

It's also capped. We also look at the ends, so the number one frame and the number seven frame, because remember, there are only seven flow frames up there, even on a 10 frame Langstroth brood box. So when you look in those are capped, those are good to go, because it's another thing that some of the biggest experts in beekeeping were out there saying that looks like runny honey. That is garbage.

That is water honey coming out of there. And I just thought, if you haven't put a refractometer on that, how do you know what you're saying? Because what it is is it's at in-hive temperature. So it might be 97, 98 degrees in your flow super, maybe even a little warmer than that. And when you draw honey out of it, it's going to pour pretty good. So you can sit right there in your B yard behind the hive where it comes out and test it with a refractometer right then and there. And I have never had wet honey coming out of there that required dehydration once it was capped inside those flow frames.

So that went out the window as a concern. So the other thing is, what are you not doing when you're processing honey from one of these supers? You are not smoking it because you're not driving the bees out. You don't have to use an escapeboard. You don't have to open the hive. It's business as usual in the front of the hive while you're sitting in the bag. That does look like it's ridiculous and couldn't possibly be going on. But it does, and it is.

You sit in the back, the bees are coming and going on the front, the landing board, the entrance. They are even cleaning up drippings and stuff on the inside of the hive while you're processing a frame. And I also ran it through what you would call a shakedown test. In other words, let me do everything wrong that a new beekeeper might do. One of the things I did not like seeing, but people just get innovation happy, and they start running tubes off the back of it. They run them all into a manifold, and they run this manifold into a bucket and say, look how cool this is. You know what it reminded me of is those dairy machines.

where you had push-button farming up there in Crasbury, Vermont, the first time I saw it, at the Rowell Farm, actually, if you're from that neck of the woods, they had push-button farming, and they had these glass pipes, and all the milk was going through, straight from the cows, straight through these systems. So you weren't hauling milk pails and things like that. It was all done, and that was in the 70s. So that was called push-button farming. And it reminded me of that. We put it in a manifold, and everything is going together. into the bucket and I just thought to myself, oh no, I can understand why people think that's a good idea. And let me explain why it isn't because frame by frame as your bees, look at the resources

I described that are going on outside right now. The bees transition from one nectar resource, one floral resource to another in groups. And not just that. When they're bringing it back to the hive, the storykeeper bees are also putting it away up in the honey. cells, right? In your bees' wax cells. And so they cluster these together and it moves in groups, which means frame by frame your floral and nectar sources are different, particularly in the spring. So you get a chance to get almost nothing but clover honey out of one of those frames. And then so it goes to other nectar resources. Where if you run it all together and put it all together, you just blended it all and made it into one flavor. It's like those kids at the

soda fountain when I was a kid too that ordered they called it a suicide but that was a coke and a seven up and a sprite and a fresca and all this stuff all together into one cup and I just thought yuck so don't do that to your honey you get a chance to keep it separate so the other thing is it's not going through processing so there are no contaminants being added so I'm going to address that too that means the particulates from your smoker are not in there it also means that the particulates that would pick up from a strainer are not in there. Particulates from the beekeepers outfit are not in it because it goes straight from the frame through a tube into a jar. And the way I do that, it has a 90-degree food grade elbow that goes into a three-quarter-inch opening in a

recap mason jar lid, which just happen to have a three-quarter-inch hole in it. So even bees flying by couldn't even begin to land on or touch the honey that's coming out of the hive and going into the jar. And then I interviewed a honey Somolier from Australia. And they had done taste testing on honey from flow hives and other processing methods. Same resources, same region, same crop, same year. And then they had all these expert taste testers. taste the honey and blind identify which one was their best and there was one absolute winner and it was honey that had been processed through process through this flow frame

the other way that that was proven out also i don't know if you've ever heard of the north american honeybee expo it's coming up in january and also thank goodness they invited me back i present at the north american honeybee expo and i'm going to be there again in january I'm super excited that was very generous on the part of Kamen Reynolds and his wife Laurel who obviously decided to bring me back so I'm going to be there again But one of the things that happens at an expo on that scale and I say it as if there are others because there really aren't It is the biggest collection of Honeycom competition people. It is the biggest collection like the judges that were some international judges and national judges that were there to judge honey products, came out and gave an explanation about the entries and everything else to the group at the Honeybee Expo.

And like I said, this was by far the largest collection of contributors for honey and honeybee products of any competition they had been to. So this is massive. Now, the reason I bring that up is for those who don't like, and I'd be shocked if you're even still listening, if you're one of the anti-flow people but listen um the dark honey category which means uh all it is is taste and scent so these master judges looked at that and they picked the winner and what did the winning honey come from a flow hive so and probably for the same reasons these honey solmolyes decided that it was good is because it is lacking all of the secondary contact and exposure that normal honey processing includes so if you're kind of a

purist and you're trying to get that out because another thing people often throw at me and I say it like that because they bring it up as accusatory they'll say again as if I'm the guy right which I am not but they'll talk about microplastics that come from flowframes there are none none in fact If you wanted to go after them, and a lot of people do, trust me, there are people just dying for them to fail. And I don't even understand why that is. It's a great product. It's just another hive.

It's just another way to get honey. There have been terrible ideas in honey harvesting mechanisms and automated systems and things like that. And this is one of the ones that works. So in order for the microplastics to get into your honey, It has to have a wear surface. It has to be liberating itself through temperature or through grinding or the contact that would chew away at that plastic. And right now it is not. And you can test it.

You can blind test it. Buy honey, get honey from people that have flow hives and send it off for microplastics testing. That is something I pay close attention to. What is one of the top ways you can guarantee that you get microplastics into your bees, microbiome, into the bees wax and into the honey produced by the hive. If you're one of the people that puts micro fiber clods inside your hive in contact with your bees up on top and in your top box in order to trap

those small hive beetles, you are 99.9% guaranteeing that you have introduced microplastics into your bees, digestive system, and into every part of the hives function, the beeswax and the honey. Because that did get tested and that did come out 100% of the samples had microplastics. If people were using micro fiber claws in there as a means of trapping small hive beetles. Please don't do that and have that anywhere in direct contact with your bees because people will often even say that and the bees will rough it up and make it even a better.

trap for the Beatles because what are your bees trying to do remove a foreign object so for right now I've not had any evidence that flow supers with their food grade plastic frames have been liberating particulates into the honey that could then show up in tests or in your body right and if you're anti-plastic you clearly don't want one it's that simple often people because I get the comments almost for the same people with great regularity. They hate plastics, don't promote plastics. We don't need more plastic. But oftentimes, in my opinion, the plastics perform well and do something that wood or other materials just can't do. So you can avoid plastics and you can set up a

completely holistic hive situation. You can have wooden frames. You can have foundationless frames you can have all wood components you can go without using anything that's been synthesized so there are routes for doing that but now we're talking about this so um for the beginner so again i say it's don't spend the money because you don't even know if you like bees yet and last thing i want is you to have this flow super sitting in your garage or shed somewhere because the other thing is i've come across people who bought them and never put them together. So I even had my grandson, so I did this test to, it wasn't last winter, it was the winter before, he's nine now. I gave him a flow hive and a flow super. He had to put that together. So I wanted to see can a child do it? Because today,

you know, one of the things it's missing is that kids don't build models anymore, which means they can't follow these kinds of instructions, you know, part A to part B, part B to C. And so on and so kids that used to build rebel models like i did when i was little we learned to inventory all the stuff to make sure all the parts were there and then we cut them and then we filed them off and we put the pieces together in order and this seems to really challenge people today to where some people just do not want to put anything together and they won't the ivory beehive is an example of a hive that took me two or three days to put together just because it has no hardware it's all joint and glued up material.

So I had to wait at every stage for the glue to dry to set, which again takes me back to early modeling days when we had to wait for the glue and the parts to finish before we could fine sand, paint, and finish and attach and make this thing. But if you don't like putting things together, you're not going to want to buy one because you do need to put it together. They've done everything they can as far as they can.

I mean, think about shipping. You're not going to ship one already put together. So that's another stopper for some people. You have to use a screwdriver and glue and you have to square things up. So that results in some people, never opening them. So have I experienced the resentment for having one? Yes, I have. I've had people walk out of presentations just because I showed a picture of one and said that I use them.

walk out, which is very interesting to me. There are a lot of people that decide that they like a certain kind of beehive, and they want to form a club around that kind of beehive. And then the last thing they want is anybody with any other kind of beehive showing up to do what. I don't know. Keep bees. Talk about it. Maybe it threatens the way they keep bees.

I don't know. I know people are angry about the cost. It's expensive. So just get. a flow super if you want to try it out see how things are going and the other question how long does it last this year i get rid of the original 2015 um flow frames so i have the boxes i have the hives that's what that's a these are flow hives back here flow supers um so i just got rid of those frames this year because i don't have a really good way to clean them up after many years of

propolis and bees wax and all that use because there are parts of of it that your bees can't get to. So I always have plans for methods, testing out different methods for cleaning these up. And I have a plan this year. But I threw away the oldest ones finally. And just because I need the space. And so I still plan to use hot water to clean them up. 147 degree Fahrenheit water.

Just to melt the propolis and bees wax right out of it. And see how well that cleans it up. See how much agitation that takes. So I hope this helps. I know I gave an awful lot of time to that discussion, but it is an area with so much pre-establish prejudice to the point where if you have a mentor, some people are told by their first mentor that this is something that you should not get. Here's why. But it's rare that that person speaks from personal direct experience with the product. Okay. And do, do, do, do, do. That's it. So go to my, if you want to see videos of it, realistic videos that are not, you know,

just to show how cool it is and how, you know, quick and easy everything is. It's called the Flow Hive Experience and it's on my page. All the YouTube videos are there and you can see step by step. How it goes together and everything. I assemble them. I do everything. Okay, question number three comes up here from Gary 5172. Fred.

Have you ever did a salted sugar syrup test to see how much salt to add per quarter? of sugar syrup that the bees prefer the best okay so this comes out of I've done a lot of testing water quality salts salinity sea salts and even pink Himalayan salts which are not sea salts they're just pink Himalayan salts because years ago people were all over me about the bees need it and everything else now I mixed it with water so we had to establish a control first of all which was the water that the bees were prefering the most that time of year because what bees go after changes through the year so it often came up why didn't you do sugar syrup in there why did you just do fresh water and salts

because sugar syrup here's the problem we have with it bees go after sugar syrup so then it gives you an opportunity to put into that sugar syrup anything else you want your bees to have because they are such fiends when it comes to sucrose demand that if it's a high sucrose product, they are going to consume it, and that's your opportunity to sneak a bunch of other stuff in there. So I don't want to force-feed bees salt, because if you do the research and check into the studies that have been done, there are levels of salt, which can be detrimental to your bees.

So if you're force-feeding the bees, if you're putting salt into a sugar syrup, bees that don't care about the salt will consume it because they want that carbohydrate so bad. That's why I did not do it. Because in the research that I did, the one teaspoon of salt, which is what I arrived at per quart of fresh water for the bees,

that was what they preferred more than any other levels. So lower levels of salt, they did not consume as much, higher levels of salt, they did not consume as much. Turns out that's a good idea. Because higher than a teaspoon per quart, could be and has proven to be detrimental to your bees. Therefore, we already know that any liquid that's got more than a teaspoon of salt, sea salt or otherwise in it, and the bees consume it, that is their limit.

If it goes higher than that, there are detriments to the bees' health. So we would never go over a teaspoon. So if you feel like you absolutely have to put sugar syrup with salt in it, you're forced feeding them the salt. I prefer to give it to them in the water because at the same time we're offering the water that has the sea salt added or the Himalayan salt even. We did Celtic sea salts.

We did all the best stuff. If you're wondering, without having to look it up, Morton sea salt was number one for the bees. And lucky for us, it happened to be the least expensive as well. So once you do that and you have that control, we also offer the bees fresh water without any salts in it. So this would, for those of you sitting there, the wheels are turning. I just want to get salt into my bees.

Let's say you just have to do it. The easiest thing to do is to mix up sugar syrup one to one with a control, which is the water that you're going to use in both. Mix up two batches sugar syrup one to one. Add sea salts to one at the teaspoon per quart rate. Put them both outside by side. Give your bees a choice because now they can get the sucrose with or without. What are they going to choose?

Because I also did other studies in the backyard with honeybee healthy, pro sweet, beekeepers choice, all of these additives with your sugar syrup, which are designed to be appetite stimulators. So if it's a stimulant for appetite, that's the only claim they were making, then the bees are supposed to go after that and take in more than they otherwise would if none of that was added. So I also had the sugar syrup with nothing added. No essential oils, no honey be healthy, no pro-sweet, no bee group of choice, no pro-health, all that stuff. What do they choose first? The sugar syrup with nothing added.

That holds true today. Okay. So if you're relying on what the bees choose, we already know. So I just want to bring that up because so many people still write and say, do a study with sugar syrup with salt added and I just don't think I have no science to prove that that would benefit the bees better than having the salt available on their own somewhere so question number four comes from Mark Kingeroy Queensland Australia did I say that right Kingeroy says what are your

thoughts on thermography thermography to control Varroa okay so it's not to control varro is to kill them. So for those you don't know, thermotherapy is heating up your bees and your varroa mites to the point where the varomites can't stand the heat and they die, or the varamites can't stand the heat and they lose their reproductive ability, and it's just shy of a temperature that would kill or profoundly detrimentally impact your honeybees. So I reached out to somebody else on this too an entomologist a very well-known entomologist but it did not get permission to share his name here because we talked about it if it works why isn't everybody using it and he said that is exactly right if it works why isn't everyone using it and this comes around so i understand for mark

this is in australia and so australians are looking for you know chemical-free methods to kill varodistructamites who wouldn't why wouldn't that be the best That's why I looked into it myself years ago, and I spent the bulk of this morning researching it again to see if there's anything new. Because the idea of using heat and really establishing a parameter where heat will kill something that we want killed, but not kill something that you want to live. So this goes all the way back to the 70s where they were doing research with this, and that's not because we were doing varro-destructor mites, but they did things like they were killing a bed bug. and things. So killing bed bugs with heat was easy other than the fact that you had to drape an apartment or drape a room where the bed bugs were and basically cook the bedbugs to death. Now, the easy part of that was they only had to establish a parameters of an absolute kill and

they needed a dwell time. In other words, everything in that envelope had to be at that temperature to cause a thorough and complete kill. This is a challenge. with beehives. So when they were coming out and I've seen them, you get a bunch of engineers together, they come out with a system, it's going to heat up the beehive and you're going to kill the varomites because the thinking is you're going to get up to a lethal temperature for the Varrodistructor mite not so hot that you kill your bees. So you might be wondering at what temperature do varroa mites die? Well, 40 degrees Celsius to 47 degrees Celsius, which is 104 degrees Fahrenheit to 116 point six degrees Fahrenheit. This will kill varroa destructor mites. Adult honey bees exposed at length to these

temperatures 116 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius can be detrimentally impacted. They will die at 122 to 123. So we have between 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit and 122 degrees Fahrenheit as a safety zone, right? And that's 50 to 51 Celsius. So here's the thing. The problem is, and when a company did it and they put out this video on YouTube, I jumped on it and wrote to them and had all my questions and concerns. I asked for their scientific evidence, for their published papers if there were any. I asked questions about the parameters. I asked about stratification inside the hive. I asked about stress testing the bees and if longevity the bees were then impacted at all these questions and here are the questions that they answered.

None. So they wanted people to buy the system and they demonstrated it on a YouTube video and half the bees were outside the hive. So as soon as they turned it on and got it running, the bees were outside the hive. So what are they treating? brood at that point. So then what's a potential detriment to the brood? So where the sensors are inside your hive, unless you've got fans blowing and you do, there will be stratification inside the hive. So your sensors should be wherever the extremes are going to be. So that would be high in the hive. If you and I were talking to, we're trying to put one of these together and we want a bunch of people to use it, then we would see that wherever it gets the hot. It's just like a chicken egg.

incubator. If it's 102 degrees at the top of the egg, we're at 98 something down at two-thirds down the egg so that we're not destroying the embryo, right? So it's kind of like that inside the beehive. Now, what are the bees doing inside the hive while you're elevating this temperature so that you can kill the burrow destructor mite at its lethal tolerance, right? So when you do that, if there's stratification, your bees are fanning as fast as they can. The bees are moving. air as much as they can and the bees are moving out of the hive which I see is a big problem because bees moving out of the hive if they've got varomites on them those mites are okay what is the length or duration of the treatment inside the hive in most cases it's about two and a half

hours so you have to spend two and a half hours on every hive you have to control stratification in the hive because we want to make sure that the brood gets the hit that it needs and that the bees inside get the exposure they need to save the bee kill the mite without being detrimental the queen i would probably remove my queen for this two and a half hours it becomes cumbersome it becomes complicated and in the reports that i read it does not have a hundred percent efficacy by the way they're claiming an effective kill rate in line with exhalic acid treatments and organic acid treatments, which would include phormic and exhalic acids. So if they're in league with that, and if the efficacy is about the same,

then 82 to 98%. So we have a 96% efficacy in a broodless period with exceal. With salic acid vaporization. The advantage of this stuff is it will kill under the brood, under the capped brood. So if it kills varomites that way, you're in the realm of formic pro, which would also do that. The systems are expensive. Now, if you go to look for one, and I encourage you to, look for thermotherapy units that are designed to kill varodistructor mites, and you won't find a lot of them on the market. And when you do find them, they're very short on justification. You know, in other words, what has happened? Is there a scientific group that picked it up? For all the years that the concept has been around, because it's a clean concept. Bring up the temperature.

It seems obvious. In my opinion, you would have to have your entire hive inside a controlled climate, you would have to have very tight tolerance control over the temperature that's going to achieve, and you would remove your bees' ability to make it cooler where they are. So the bees would be under tremendous stress during that. Now then the other part of it is how much stress, you know, is there stress damage and all this other stuff? So for the thing is, I'm going to invite people because there's so much research on it. None of the research that I can find convinces me that it's the way to go. We have members in our own B club that have one, and I don't think they're using it anymore, but they said that it did very well. And a lot of people

are not counting mites before and after treatment. That is surprising to me because I don't think we know how well it worked unless you establish that there is a mite load to begin with, do the treatment, post-treatment, do another mite count. And that might count would have to happen right away because within apiaries there is drift. But if you had 10 hives, you know, you're at more than 20 hours of treatment time just to do it. So it's expensive. It requires a source of electricity to do it. And it's, in my opinion, not terribly efficient when your bees are evacuating the space during treatment. So I think more needs to be visited on that and also the people that make these systems need to be able to. If you or I were getting together, we were going to sell one,

we would definitely fund a study. I would want to get science on our side. Now if the studies were done and the results were not as good as they needed to be, then that's maybe why people don't talk about it. I'm not suggesting that studies have been done and that it didn't do well. but the research and the work that's been done has not proven that it's 100% effective. So, once again, that is not something I personally would jump on, but ask the people that are making them lots of questions first. And ask for demos. Look, see what's going on. You'll find out not very satisfying.

Question number five comes from Annette from Ontario, Canada. let's see I am at the point that I want to learn more about the bees but taking a master beekeeper course isn't an option for me do you have some suggestions for books websites and other options for deeper research thank you in advance so for Annette in Ontario everyone goes to their favorite sources for additional information And I can tell you that when I go to, I watch YouTube. So one of my favorite YouTube channels to go to that I highly recommend everyone check out. It's the National Honey Show, which is in Great Britain.

And what that does is they bring in guest speakers and presenters from all over the world. Often they talk about cutting edge concepts as well as completed research. And that leads me personally into other areas of study, review, and evaluate. So in today's day and age, looking for books is also fairly challenging. I jump on every book that Dr. Thomas Seeley publishes. So if Dr. Thomas Seeley wrote a book, I get that book right away, which deals heavy with animal behavior. And it's just very good knowledge, which then can lead you into other things.

So then we go to periodicals. So for years, I have subscribed to, B culture and the American B Journal. And so what I want to say is the American B journal is if you were going to get one, sorry, B. Culture, American Bee Journal is the one that I personally would recommend. Although if you've got the time and the money and you don't care, I would get B Culture and the American B Journal together. I know Eugene, who is the editor from the American Bee Journal,

and I know that they vet the information and the authors and the way it's written in articles and things like that before they're published. And I'm not saying that others don't, but I think the wickets are not as tight. So getting a periodical and looking at the articles and things like that, that will then kick off further research, which is what it does for me. I'll read a paragraph in an article. that's interesting to me that doesn't seem, you know, completely vetted out, which it wouldn't be, it'd be an exhaustive or overly comprehensive article if they did.

And so that leads me into other areas of study. And Annette mentions the Master Beekeeper Program. Those programs are very different. There is no national standard for becoming a Master Beekeeper. So I personally looked for one that had a really good reputation that required study. I wanted to take courses. I wanted the courses to be difficult. The Master Beekeeper course from the Dice Lab at Cornell University is what their testing program is what the Eastern Apiculture Society

modeled its testing programs after. So if you're trying to learn or study some of the master beekeeping programs are not necessarily out of reach. What you can do is University of Florida, for example, the Bee Lab, there they have a whole bunch of levels of study and the good news is that today no matter where you are and in this case Ontario Canada there are a lot of course materials online available to you for studies so of course I have to talk about my own home state here Pennsylvania so Penn State University also has an entire series on honeybee studies so you can take courses online interact with professors

entomologists and of course I don't like the classes to be too easy but a lot of them are very easy very digestible and you can take those courses so Penn State offers a bunch I also have to say that I'm one of the instructors for another online program called the beekeeper.org and so that has a bunch also of resources for you and once you subscribe to a lot of these whichever ones they are if you log into an online program like that that's tied up with the university or brings in experts, you can get, it's almost like a subscription to where you have access to all course materials for a year or however long it is. So that's one of the drawbacks. I did not like about the Cornell University program is while you're taking the course, you have access to everything. You can

download, publish papers and all of that stuff. At the minute you're done, you're done. So you don't have like a year more to do it. So that was a two-year program. You don't still have access after you're done. So it's like you're harvesting everything you can, knowledge-wise, while you can. And so I do look for advanced programs. University of Florida, as I mentioned, another great one.

So I would say if you're going to go online, Penn State, University of Florida, are the top two for me as far as constantly updating their curriculum, constantly soliciting entomologists for new material and updating resources for beekeepers. So, hope that's suitable. And if you're listening right now and you're watching and you're on your computer and you want to type down in the comment section, put down a really comprehensive program that you found that gave you, you know, data that is ongoing, that's fantastic, or maybe a subscription base.

I'd be happy to check it out. And I'd like to also hear from you to see, do you know, subscribe to bee culture or the American Bee Journal? Do you even subscribe to those anymore? I did a kind of a survey a while ago. How many of the people that are listening or watching even have bought a book on beekeeping in the last five years? And it was less than 50% have bought a book on beekeeping or read a book on beekeeping. So moving on to question number six. This is from Barb from Clover, South Carolina.

Says, I lost my hives last winter. I have two medium boxes of honey in the freezer. I have two new packages that I'm feeding sugar syrup and pollen patties to help them get going. They're doing well, and could I give them the honey in the freezer as the dearth continues? Don't want to introduce any diseases. Thanks, as always.

So when it comes to disease and honey, This is why we don't take frames of honey and give it out to other people. But within your own apiary, in your own backyard operation, where you are aware of any brood diseases and things like that, you can feed back your own honey to your own bees. I see no problem with that at all. However, if you have honey in the freezer and it's capped and it's good stuff and it's ready to go, I highly recommend you extract, process it, and take it for yourself.

And then get those frames put back out once they've been. extracted into that hive with those new packages and then I personally would continue with the light one-to-one sugar syrup feeding to those bees to keep them going give them the energy that they need to do to get out and do what needs to be done because I highly recommend that method rather than feeding them back the honey you can but to me waste of honey because the other part of that is they're kind of proven to build out more comb faster and brood up quicker if you give them the light sugar syrup this time of year.

So up to you. One's cheap. One's really good stuff. But there again, I would extract it and give it back. Now, if there's any chance that you've got sugar syrup already that you were feeding when you lost your bees and that that's part of the honey composition that's in those frames, then yes, feed them back. Let the bees cycle that through again. I think that's good. Question number seven. This comes from Dennis. Burlington, Iowa, says I'm a third year beekeeper. I have six layens hives. I've never gotten a package-bought hive through the winter. So this year, I caught swarms in the local park and vowed to be treatment-free. I also wanted to disturb them as little as possible. I put all 20 frames in the hive with full foundation and would watch them all on cameras. all done well but they have all swarmed within the last two just this week have my hopes for any honey flown away with them okay so it sounds like Dennis is following dr. Leo Shirashkins and the book beekeeping with a smile which is about lay in's hives because this idea of

treatment-free not getting into your bees and he recommends inspecting once a year I think putting all 20 frames at once because these are the same hives that I have here. That's a huge space for a package of bees. There is a follower board in there. And I would, once I hive a colony of bees, I would, in increments, expand that space available to them rather than give them the full 20 all at once. But the chances of getting honey the first year, year with a swarm that you collected in spring, some of these prime swarms are enormous.

So I can't make that call without looking at the colony and seeing how far along they are. I can say that my bees in the layens hives can get through winter with just four frames of honey and the rest broods. So four frames of honey beyond the brood itself is more than enough to get them through winter provided you've insulated the top of your layens' hives. and I hope that it works out that you can stay, you know, treatment-free. It's been very hard to do that. And depending on where you're located, this is in Iowa, you can be impacted by other beekeepers around you. So I do recommend, because I also know that with this method, if you're following beekeeping with a smile,

there is no counting of varroa mites and things like that either. There's just trying to keep your bees well and looking at them once a year, which I personally don't recommend, and the reason is we like to identify if a colony's queenless. If you haven't inspected or you're not looking at them to know that that might be occurring, then they can be very far along in dwindling or dying out or having a problem before you're ever aware of it. One of the issues I have with that book that was written, Bekeeping with a Smile, which I have, is that it was pre-verroa destructor mite.

So there are other things that could be happening and diseases that could be vectored into your hive. And I think that today we might want to at least take a glance at them every three weeks. So would have you dash your hopes of honey? Well, being that they swarmed already, mine swarmed too, but they generate massive swarms. And when you look at the hive, it's as if they didn't swarm at all. You could still, it just depends on what's going on case by case if they're capping the honey. but I highly recommend closing up the space, sizing it to the colony of bees that you have, and then making additional frames available as they expand.

And that's true no matter what hive configuration you have. So wish you all the best on that. Question number eight comes from Wendy from Seattle, Washington. It says, I have a question about how long is too long for a long lang. Well, there is no such thing. It's too long for a long lane. So it says I recently moved a colony from one end of a long lang into a vertical lang. Worried the divider between the two colonies in one long lang was not secure enough to keep them apart.

Then added the nine frames removed plus four frames of resources moved with them. Now the long lang has one colony with 29 deep frames. and 18 frames of medium super on top for my honey, those will come off and peak roof put back on in the fall. So it sounds like one of these hybrid long Langstroth hives where they also have vertical boxes. I don't do that at all. So that creates kind of a different situation.

But anyway, says I'm worried that 29 deep frames may be too much for the Queen Faramount to circulate. it's huge that can happen and also I had openings at both ends of the hive and I'm unsure about which entrance to close off now that there is just one colony so in this long Langstroth hive which sounds huge closing off one entrance or the other and the reason this is important is because the ventilation coming from that entrance if you've been following me for a while I don't like to have ventilation coming from any other spot except the entrance And so when we have a hive that's got multiple entrances, multiple event spaces, and in this case, because there were multiple colonies in there, but now it's one. I would look at where the most brute is focused, and the entrance that is closest to that would become the entrance. And then where the honey and everything else is spread out, I would close off that entrance at the other end. when you have a single entrance your bees naturally migrate their brood toward the entrance the honey and resources that they're keeping for winter get pushed farther away for the entrance

whether it's vertical or horizontal makes no difference that's how they organize themselves so that's what i would do i would look to see where the most brood is you also have an opportunity to rearrange brood so you could open keep one and entrance open, close the other one, and then shift your frames around and try to keep your brood organized the way it is wherever it happens to be, but I would pull away the frames that are not brood and migrate your brood frames toward the entrance. You could put a couple of frames of kind of multipurpose resources on it and then start with the brood frames. That's just personally what I would do and then have nothing but, you know, your expansion frames after that. I would

have some drawn comb right after your brood that's comb and honey kind of a hybrid mix there because that also makes them feel less congested and it gives them a place to store immediate resources that they're bringing in i've never i don't know how many frames my long lang even has but 29 sounds high so if you had 29 that would be the equivalent of three deep langstroth boxes so when you think of it like that that's a lot of space your bees could fill it but the other reference here that am I thinning out the queen's mandibular pheromone that can happen with population more so than the space that you have so if you've got wall-to-wall bees in there i would keep an eye on your bees in particular the brood and adjacent brood frame areas to see and make sure that they are

not building um swarm cells so that would kind of be your indicator too and so that's it for that Your follower board allows you to scale it up or down. And once again, I feel like when, because I've seen those where people are using vertical highs because they also get the question, can I put a flow of super on my long length or a hive? And I personally wouldn't. I would just keep those with your vertical arrangement unless you get with horizontal bees, who he does a lot of custom work. And you have a segment in there cut out specifically for flow frames right where.

you would normally have honey frames because it has to be modified they don't fit exactly where a standard langstroth deep would be but i did see that they did that horizontal bees dot com he did a custom job for work like that but kept it all horizontal so there weren't vertical stacking the point is not to have to lift supersoff so don't forget to insulate your covers where the lid closes and the the two surfaces, the base box and the cover come together. I use now, and I wish I had done this years ago, I use double bubble as gasket material in there. So any irregularity at all, where it comes together, it gets closed right off, no venting. You already have coverboards there, so it's a closed space, but by adding that gasket material between the boxes, you just eliminated

airflow and you made it even better as an insulator. Now we're into the fluff. okay so the other thing is too I had people do an experiment which is incomplete by the way it's only been for three or four days so the people that are already responding to my experiment are premature and not following my instructions because I wanted you to do this for seven days minimum and that is putting out water for your bees and a lot of people are commenting that their bees go to their pond or their bees go to their swimming pool or the bees go in addition to that I'm asking that you put this out because I have a pond that my bees are all over it.

They are in the moss. They love it. That's where they go for water. But I also, for kicks and giggles, put out a glass pie plate. I put a flat rock in the middle of it so your bees can land on it. I filled that up with filtered water. I also had the base of a planter. So that also looks like a pie plate, but it's plastic.

Put the same type of rock in the middle of that, so they have a place to land on it. And to this day, they're emptying the water. water in the glass plate, the pie plate, and the water that's in the plastic bin, they drink out of it, but it's not at the same rate. So what I was trying to suggest, and I hope you'll go to my YouTube channel and go to the social part where you comment on things, there is a survey there. And so what I'm asking people to do is put out glass pie plates, put a flat rock that, of course, stands proud of the pie plate itself, so your bees have a place to land. And the, the same kind of water in both. So if you've got a britta or if you've got a pure water filter system

or whatever you clean is, reverse osmosis, whatever you have, the water should be the same in all of these vessels. And then I put it out in the shade, actually. So I just wanted to know RRB is showing a preference for water that's coming out of a plate that is glass instead of a plate that has plastic in it or vinyl or whatever they're made out of because who knows what those planters from Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, wherever you shop, wherever your garden center is, I don't know what they're made out of. But it occurred to me that there must be something going on because the bees are going for the glass for sure. We know the glass is inert, that it's stable, that nothing goes into it. And so the feedback I got already, and again, there's no way

you did seven days before I got the feedback. For the most popular response, 55% of the respondents out of 33, there was no significant difference in water consumption between plastic or glass. The next state below that was the glass drinker was visited the most and emptied quicker, 24% of the people said that. Plastic planter was visited the most. That's 9%. The vinyl planter base was visited the most and emptied quicker. 12%. So the winner, aside from no difference, is

glass drinkers. All right. So please continue that and you can go to my YouTube channel. You can participate. You can report your findings, hopefully, after seven days. You can also shift the position. So in other words, once they've started drinking and you started to get results, two or three days into it, shift, trade the positions of them to see if the position had anything to do with it also. So it shows a very cursory, backyard thing just for fun, kicks and giggles.

and it should be fun to do. So please participate. And you can change your answer. If you came in and answered already once, but you didn't complete the study, or you're just saying that they're going to a pond. Even if they're going to a pond and they have other resources, please put it out there.

Okay, so things to look for this week. Inspect for Queenless Colonies. This is the time of year where you have a chance. We have time. They have resources. They have a lot of brood. They have a lot of stuff going on. if you can catch it early that they have lost their queen you can still get them to replace a queen

remember 75% of your virgin queens make it but that also means 25% may not come back on all or may not get mated so inspect for brood disease make sure your brood is healthy check the root patterns and things like that we want to know what's going on because what's going to be happening next month they're going to start the bees that are being developed next month are the ones that are ultimately going to create your winter bees the month after that so this is the time we need to keep them healthy now hopefully you're doing my counts and you have low mite issues to deal with because you're still in the treatment zone for those that are doing treatments um the organic treatments on the street the top three right now in my opinion are for organics again is form

Proxalic acid vaporization and if you don't want to do vaporization because of the potential respiratory risks and things like that, varoxan is starting to look pretty darn good and varroxan is a long-term extended release exhalic acid formula that can be used while honey super zirond in my state check with your state to make sure that that's approved and you can get those in because we want to get our colonies healthy if they challenge right now we want to get them done for the same reason I just described well ahead of the bees that are going to be producing the brood that is going to

produce our fat-bodied winter bees so level all your hives and conduct repairs so look across your bee yard it's you know the weather's nice everything's good this is the time to look for gaps and stuff to see if you've got any lazy drunken hives things like that and set of them We also just thinking ahead to heavy rains a lot of us have had heavy rains already but look at your landing boards during the rain. Are your hives slightly tilted? It only takes a little bit towards the landing board so that when the rain is pounding on the front of your hive it's not draining into your solid landing board. We want it tilted to go

away. So doing that while the weather's warm and nice is so much easier and and insulate all your covers summer or winter makes no difference once your insulation is on keep it on I saw a comment this morning that someone does not like to use insulation because ants and earwigs move in between the insulation and the hive itself so depending on how you're putting your stuff together I use predominantly for the long length not long lankstroth but the regular langstroth hives

we have that B-smart designs insulated inner cover and ants have been able to get into those through that little back vent entrance we stopped the ants from getting in and we stop the ants from chewing and excavating the insulation material by wrapping with a single layer of just Reynolds wrap aluminum foil the other thing is I was at the building center and I bought copper tape that stuff works really well too so to keep them out of your polystyrene the other thing is by using double bubble as gasket material where it presses down nice and snug the ants can't even get in

so I plug the vent holes because I don't have any in the top part of the hive so just looking at gaps and creases and things like that and hopefully you're not dealing with ants but summer and winter we benefit from insulation on our hives I have not wrapped my hives so I don't have some people historically used to use Tyvec or they even put roof felt around their what they call tar paper around their hives just to cut down on drafting in the wintertime i've never done that but i understand why when you put that up you end up with a bunch of ants and everything seeking shelter underneath that wrap so whatever you put on your hive just make sure the gaps don't have space for ants to move in mostly they're just occupying the space

they're not doing anything to your bees so earwigs don't do dittily to your bees either So level them, insulate them, insulate all covers, consistent water availability. Just make sure there's fresh water for your bees always at a consistent location they can count on. And also, don't get carried away. We're entering a time frame depending on where you are, where robbing risk can be high. Colonies are getting stronger, they have more numbers, they have more foragers, and this is the time when they are pinging landing boards. If you sit and spend time watching landing boards, even the video that's been playing throughout today's Q&A,

The guard bees engage scouts from other colonies at a pretty regular interval. So we do have scouts checking into other colonies, other hives, trying to find out if they can get past those defenses. They will rob each other. It's a lower risk when you have a big nectar flow on. But right now we're a little bit transitional. So before, you know, the next big nectar flow kicks in, this is when we have strong colonies, big colonies, lots of foragers, and they can start robbing out another hive. And once that starts happening, they can lose their resources so fast, their defenses are down,

they lose their guard bees, and you can have a problem. So this is why I don't open the hives completely. I keep those entrances reduced because they can still process their honey. That's it for today. I want to thank you for joining me. I hope that you got something useful out of today's Q&A. and please consider submitting a topic or a question of your own by going to the wayto-be.org and clicking on the page marked contact. Thanks a lot. Have a fantastic weekend. I wish you well, you and your honeybees.