The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 316 LIVE Chat Edition, Last Friday in July 2025

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

This is the audio track from this YouTube Video:  https://youtube.com/live/XGiU7rFZXOc?feature=share

So we're live. Okay, so I don't know what kind of phase to make when this thing first comes on because it captures the very first few frames and makes that the thumbnail until later. So I want to thank you for being here. And where it is here? This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 316. This is Friday, July the 25th. Last Friday of July, that's why we're doing a live chat. So you get to be here.

Ask your questions in the sidelines. I'm also going to respond to people's questions that were submitted for the past week. If you want to know later on, of course, after the live, what topics we covered. Please go down on the video description, and you're going to see all the topics in order with associated links. It might be able to help you out a little bit. So I want to thank people for being in the live chat, but I know you want to know, first of all, what's going on outside. I'm Frederick Dunn, by the way, and this is the way to be. and it's hot out, no great surprise, but it's only 81 degrees Fahrenheit for us here in the state of Pennsylvania.

27 Celsius, 85% relative humidity. Grayson's here, Big Rob is here, and Chris is here from Rochester, and of course, the bouncer is in the house. That is Keith Spillman. So, half tracks and honey. Thanks for being here. Okay, so also light winds outside, two miles per hour. That's three kilometers per hour for other parts of the world. The UV index is three.

That's right. It's overcast. No risk of sunburns a day. So get right out there after the live chat, of course. What's it going to do tomorrow here in the northeastern part of the United States? Northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. It's going to rain and it's going to be hot, the combination of rain and heat. Saturdays are great for weddings.

So it's going to be someone's hot, human wedding. So thank you guys for joining me. So the best day for beekeeping in my particular neck of the woods is going to, of course, be Sunday. So it's going to be hot, but at least it won't be raining. That'll be good news. And what else do we have? Hive number 44 made quite a splash this week. That is that little nucleus hive that has the bees making their propolis shroud over the entrance.

And if you haven't seen it, after the live chat is over, of course, go to my. my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, and look at the most recent video post. And it's going to be that hour and a half or something stream of the bees working on the proboscis outside the hive. I've not had a bee do that yet, a bee colony. They're just doing strange things, but they're proactive and defending themselves. I think that's great. You also might wonder what's growing outside.

And because we couldn't do an opening video sequence like I normally do on Friday. because we're live, of course. I have to just tell you about it. So Clover, there was a lot of pollen coming in. And by the way, the opening sequences, for those of you who are in the waiting room, you got to see that three-minute video. And that's the top archive.

The top-bar hive is actually doing pretty darn good. And they're bringing a lot of pollen. And some people that are looking for yellow pollen won't see it because it's brown, tan, and off-white. Where does that pollen come from? That is that color. It comes from clover. So clover is predominant right now.

Milkweed, sadly, right where I am, is almost finished. So the butterflies are still going after it, of course, for what reason to consume it? They're laying their eggs on it. Their caterpillars are chewing up the leaves. And the milkweed plant is left trying to defend itself against the butterflies by poisoning them with latex, which again protects the butterfly later because now it's toxic and other things won't eat it. So anyway, linen trees are also, the little leaf linden is done. The large leaf londens, I don't know what else are called basswood trees. They still have flowers on them,

and wouldn't you know it, the Japanese beetles are all over it. So I set up Japanese beetle traps upwind of that tree and drew those beetles off of the tree in huge numbers. A little troubling to see how many numbers of how many numbers, see how many Japanese beetles. See how many Japanese beetles there were. We feed those Japanese beetles to the chickens and to the fish in the pond. All we do is drop them in hot water and they're done. So, borage is finally making a showing. Cosmos are blooming. So that's pollen and nectar from both of those plants. Maxa billion sunflowers are finally starting to open. So we're probably at 2%. And there are bees all over those two. And all hides are gaining weight. That means, uh,

They gain weight in two ways, right? They're either brooding up or they're storing honey. And I say they're storing honey right now because I look at the observation hives and the way to be Academy building. And what do we see? Borderline honeybound observation hives. There's not a lot we can do about that. I'm not going to tear open observation hives inside a building to pull a couple frames of honey. And the comb honey in there looks very appetizing.

All right. All hives gaining weight. Marigolds this year. I planted thousands of them. I'm sure six are blooming right now. It's amazing. It's overwhelming almost how many marigolds are blooming. So they are underwhelming. Also, if you don't know already, for those of you who follow the North American Honeybee Expo, which is going to happen in January in Louisville, Kentucky. I hope I said that right. I'm invited. I get to be a guest speaker again. So for those of you who came last time and made fun of me for my spider talk, you're welcome to have another go with that because I'm going to be there.

So you may wonder how did people submit their questions for the Q&As? You go to my website, which is the way to be.org, and now the page is marked contact. Who knew? You could mark a page like that. And that's where you fill out the form and send me your information. Reach out to me. Let me know what's going on. Now that you're here, if you have a question for me, I see that everyone's saying hello to one

another, that's great. If you want to get my attention and if you want me to respond to something that's on your mind, please type it in all caps. And we'll jump right on your question and see if we don't have a response that measures up. Let's see what happens. So until that happens, let's get started. The very first question is from Karen Abstract Impressions. So it says I have a question, would spring the hot hive with soapy water be a good alternative to using chemicals. Now that's interesting the way that's worded. So spraying the hot hive. The thing is, there's a video, a YouTube that I made, of course, where a couple called me, their beekeepers, and their honeybees were on the rampage. So they had several colonies of bees. They're not even

sure which one was attacking them. They're attacking their livestock. They killed their chickens. One of the chickens was so covered in honeybees that only the feet were showing. That gives you a sense of it. The other thing is their hogs were stung, their cattle were stung, hogs were off their feet. He went down the road, past the house. He couldn't even go in the house. So many bees were after him, and he was in his B-suit. So what do we do? What can you do?

Well, first, I volunteered to go there if I could make a video, which I did. And my wife came with me and sat in her car because she said someone needs to call 911 when things go bad. Well, what we got was a very interesting look at very defensive honeybees. And the next stage is we have to do something about them to protect the public. And this gets some pushback, which is interesting to me. Could you imagine a UPS truck pulling in on a hot day like today? You know, they drive along with their doors open. And if a bunch of bees flew right into that UPS driver's cabin and started stinging them,

what about FedEx? We care about them too. What about USPS? They drive around with their windows open too. So we have to protect these people. And so one of the ways to euthanize a colony is to spray them with soapy water. And the soapy water mix is one tablespoon per gallon of fresh water of, what is it? Ooh, wouldn't it be cool if I just had a jar right here?

Don Ultra Pure Essentials. Darn, I said Don Ultra Free and Clear. I think I'm mixing up laundry detergent. But this is Don Ultra Essentials. Anyway, mix that with water and it doesn't mess up your groundwater and everything because if you're like us, where we are, everybody's on a well. It's a big deal what you put on your ground. But that will defeat the cuticle on the bees. It has a high wetting ability.

It goes right into their spiracles and suffocates the bees and you can flush out all the bees. Rinse it off later with fresh water. You are in business. But here's why I want to mention this to you. I still have a question here from DC's bees. We'll get to that in just a second. So what happened is once we wash them off, you can restore the colony, we kill the bees.

What else was I going to say? I lost my train of thought completely. So that's it. Oh, yeah, safety gear. A lot of beekeepers. I don't like, I don't want to start with what I don't like. Let me tell you what I do like. I like it when people have a full B-suit, full protective clothing, gloves to boots,

because things could go bad. I don't care if you're out there in your cut-off t-shirt and your Daisy Duke shorts and flip-flops. I don't care how you normally take care of your bees. But if things go bad and you don't have protective clothing to put on to deal with it, you're just running away like Monty Python. And so you need to be prepared for the worst. Better to have it, not need it. I highly recommend full equipment.

Okay. So that's what I wanted to say to that, is to make sure you're prepared for the worst, hope for the best, as they say. All right, now we get back to the question here. Says, Fred, heavy trees are covered from the deer. That's from DC's bees. And if a last winter, you know, there was so much snow. It was so deep.

The winter was so long that deer were eating things that people said they would never eat. You want to know what a deer is going to eat. Go out to your yard anywhere. Pick any plant. Decide that that plant is the one that you like and that's the one the deer are going to eat. It's something about the universe in sync with what you want. They want to. Only they want to eat it.

So kidding aside, they went out there and ate all my sumac trees. And these aren't the poison sumac. This is really good sumac. So staghorn sumac. It's good for bees. It's good for everything. They ate all the park off. So did they recover?

Let me just say that the ground is covered in foot high sumac trees. So the trees themselves did not recover. I planted some very interesting annual morning glories on there, the ones that only bloom at night and stuff like that. And of course, as they started to wind up those dead trees, which I thought would be fantastic, trellis work for these great moon. glow, you know, morning glories, which actually aren't blooming in the morning. They bloom at night.

The deer ate them. Of course. Why wouldn't they? So no, the trees have not recovered. But from their root systems, because Sumac is pretty prolific. It's all growing up there. Okay, I did see another comment here in all caps. Let me back up and see.

Bill Robinson says, greetings. Hello back to you, Bill. And let's keep going. Trees recovered, did it. And Temp Queen is good for a couple of, Temp Queen is good for a couple of weeks. I'm waiting for my nukeen to re-Queen. That's from Linda.

And so Temp Queen, yeah, definitely it's good for a couple of weeks. In fact, I was just thinking about ordering more Temp Queen and my wife opened the freezer in the basement and like 10 packs of it fell out on the floor. So we found it, so I don't need any more. Here's the thing, that stuff lasts a very, very long time in the freezer. So once it's out and in the hive, yes, definitely it's good for a few weeks. In the absence of a real queen, it is active enough to suppress the kind of the hormones of those workers to prevent them from developing and then, of course, laying workers. And so then

they're laying drone eggs. So we don't want their ovaries to become active. And this is from Deeds VP. Hive red, is there any pliable product that could be used to seal small gaps in the hive that the bees are not sealing, something that they won't chew away or harm them? Okay. The first thing I want to say to that is gaps in hives. So one box over another box, these little gaps, and finding ways to plug those gaps. You know, in the old Navy days, they use wood wool, and they would tamp it into the same. seams. And so I'm not suggesting that you do that, but you could actually put cotton fabric in those gaps because what that would do is cause your bees to propolize it and then they would create

their own seal there. So cotton ticking, cotton canvas, cotton duck canvas. It's often sold as you can buy it by the roll 70 inches long. You can get probably castoffs in scraps. I highly recommend you go to some store where they sell a bunch of sewing supplies and see what kind of remnants you can find that unbleached muslin is really good you can tamp that in there and the bees will propolize it of course kind of makes a mess but here's the thing it would plug things up but what i wanted to say is get your boxes apart when you have the opportunity this is why i get out some things like that are handy because it gives us a chance to rework those high bodies you can also go out there with a high body that's in great shape that does come together the way it should on the box below it

and you can transfer the frames and then of course the whole colony into the new box take the old box aside put the new one on get a nice even connection marrying surface that's called and you put them both together and then while the other one's off i have a planer that i use to shave it nice and smooth so that we match the low points so those are a couple of options to do but maintaining high equipment, very important. Here's another one from Keith Spilleman. The liquid fence you recommend works great, but now I'm afraid Santa's reindeer won't come this year.

Okay, I don't know what Keith is doing today, but Santa's reindeer, as we know, that is where they get the liquid fence from the, what is that called, the slurry that Santa generates from Santa's reindeer, and that's where liquid fence comes. from so it actually works very well and Santa's reindeer don't care. Here it comes top bar update please your thoughts on size of queen cells and the viability. Okay, that's an interesting. There are two questions there. The top bar hive first of all is two colonies. So I started a really tiny one at one end. I started a sizable colony at the opposite end and for those who were in the waiting room today got to watch the three-minute video,

it was all the top bar hive. They are steaming. They are doing every, everything great. I was really glad that I glued guide strips on the bottom of the top bars, those little wooden slats that you normally put inside a frame to start your comb on. And I did rub those with these wax. And so they're actually doing great. I wanted to open them this week, but with attempts so high, I've been cautioned, of course, that comb that does not have a frame around it on a very hot day should probably not be handled but we're going to be getting into that top bar hive really soon because the activity is super promising they were bringing in pollen at a rate of 19 pollen loads per minute this morning before I came in to do this

so the top bar hive they're doing great I have 12 top bars available to them I don't know yet until I it how many they're actually using. So we're going to move on to question number two here, which comes from Elliott Saba, says, could I extract honey from a flow hive indoors to prevent dripping honey in the hive? Okay, so first we'll address the dripping honey inside the hive. When I was testing those out and opening all the frames all at once, sometimes we did it a little early and they weren't completely capped if they're not completely capped then the honey will drip out through some of the lower cells down into the hive and the bees have to keep up with it so as far as taking them off and just using them to extract the honey straight from the frame itself this is what the

frame looks like it's different from a regular langstraw frame so we took the supers off because we have to do it at the end of the year anyway so i thought let's leave the flow super on until we get about into the third week of September, then we'll pull the whole super off. Now, this is heavy. Each one of these is half a gallon of honey. So we'll take the supers off and put them all inside the building, and then we'll just harvest from them just by opening up the hole in the bottom, cycling the frames, and then having a drip pan underneath, and then we'll collect all the honey all at once, but try.

try to keep it separate, although at the end of the year, when we have golden rod and asters and stuff like that, the honey is pretty consistent. It's not like spring where each frame would have something different, or even right now, each frame would have something different, so frame by frame. But yeah, that's how we extracted last year, and let me tell you what, it's actually pretty convenient. I should say that's not the intent of the designers of the flow hive. They don't want you to pull that flow super off and, of course, harvest indoors, but you can. And you can even do that frame by frame, which kind of defeats the purpose, but let's see how to flow frame, and you wanted to pull one, and you didn't want to harvest it outside for some reason,

and you could have another one and put it in, and it's place, take the capped one out, and then go inside and harvest it. Make a display out of it. Some people have. I left them in their supers and harvested them as full supers in the garage. Also, then there's no rush. You can open them all up, in an enclosed space, and you just let them all drip out all night long and get every last drip from them. Okay. And so here we go. How much honey have I harvested?

I haven't harvested. Well, I don't know how many gallons right now. I am not a big honey harvester, but let's see. This week, two gallons earlier in the year. I'm not one of those guys that gets like 700 pounds of honey or something. I'm a very small honey harvester because I don't like harvesting honey. It depends on the hive and some hives are sitting full of honey right now. My bad.

My long Langstroth hive, we pulled 12 frames of honey. But that's because it was left over from wintertime. And so that wasn't this year's honey because they're ignoring the winter honey and, of course, adding their own. we have to expand. Otherwise, they get honeybound, as I described for the observation hives. So I'm not a honey harvester, but my grandson forces me to be. So I don't have pounds. I'm going to say it's light, like 20 gallons, maybe, something like that. But no, they're not, I don't, I have honey sitting on the hives right now. I wait for the big honey harvest to happen in August, late August, early September,

is when we really pull honey. Like, for example, the hives that have flow supers on them right now are all in progress. They're not ready for harvest. And so at the end of the year, we'll know our numbers. But I'm never one of the top, even in my B club, you know, when everybody's like, I've got 700 pounds of honey off of 12 hives. I'm never like that. I don't know why people do so much better than me when it comes to honey harvest,

but my numbers are always low. So anyway, top bar update did that. Yeah, the top bar is going to be fun. They're active. And my wife even said the other half of it was dead. And I told her to go and put your ear up to the entrance so you can listen and verify that they're dead. And no sooner did she say that than bees were flying in and out of it. So even the tiny cluster was in there.

Of course, just like any horizontal hive, it has a follower board. So we size the cavity for those bees. And it's very interesting. So, Marta, do you move bees into two queen keepers hive? Okay, I did not. In fact, I have a question today about the keeper's hive. It's sitting inside still. But the thing is, we're not going to be behind the eight ball on that because we're putting frames full of brood in them.

So it's not like starting them with a swarm or something like that. We're starting them with everything. We're going to talk about that just a little bit. Are you kidding me? It says two of my colonies are already evicting drones. Does it seem early for this? Zero mites on yesterday's count for both. I'm in western New York.

Okay, drone evictions, the only reason I can think of drone evictions, first of all, what are we seeing? They're rejecting drones or they're actually pulling drones that are in development? If you've got drones that are in their pupa state and they're being uncaptain removed, that would be unique. Repelling or just kicking drones out can happen any time. Right now we're kind of in a low point, which is interesting considering all the rain we've had and everything else,

we're in a semi-death. So they could be, we do see a reduction in drone numbers right now. So as far as why they're evicting individual drones from a single colony, I don't know. You can inspect the colony and make sure that everything's copacetic in there, that everything is good. Yeah, drones can be. be tossed at any time. I was sitting next to the really tiny nuke hive yesterday and next to it,

we had a drone rush. The drone rush usually happens when I get a queen that's been out on a mating flight and comes back and the drones follow them back to the hive and then rush the hive and then they get fed and then within a couple hours those drones are gone. So we have a lot of a lot of drones around, and if you're in western New York, you're kind of a similar climate to me. So I can't say that we don't. This is a low point right now, though, for drone populations overall in hives. So not unusual as a single event, but I would look into making sure other things are okay with that colony. Moving on to question number three comes from Kevin from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I went to school there in the 80s. All right, moving on. When feeding one-to-one, and this is one-to-one sugar syrup, by the way, and adding supplements. Can honey be healthy and apobiogics and hive-a-lide all be put in? Or should it be in separate feedings? Thank you. Okay, so that's a really important question because I am strongly opposed. to making these cocktails of a lot of different things into sugar syrup.

People seem to want to do that. And I'm going to caution you about synergistic effects and things like that. Each one of these formulas, whatever they are, if it's honeybee healthy, a hive alive, pro-health, beekeepers choice, apiobiologics, all of these different things have different manufacturers and are being sold with different claims about what they're going to do for your bees. They are not designed to work with one another. fact, some of the benefits of one supplemental feed that goes into sugar syrup may be canceled out or may become

potentially harmful to your bees if they're put together or the doses get magnified. Lemongrass oil, for example, may be a component in many of them, and then you've got a very high dose of lemon grass oil. Sometimes when people are using essential oils, they don't realize essential oils may be essential, but at low doses, if you increase these doses, you could actually damage your bees. So I never recommend putting all these things together. In fact, a lot of these things don't do what they even claim to do. So the reason I mentioned that is they're sold as appetite stimulants, for example, to get a hive kicked off.

We did extensive and continual testing on that. So what's happening is when we put out sugar syrup, one-to-one sugar syrup, no secret, bees go after sucrose. And then when something is sold as an appetite stimulant, that means it should cause your bees to go after that more so than just sugar syrup. Not true. Not even close. So the bees, even though they can smell this stuff from way off, honey, be healthy, they smell that stuff way off. but if they showed up, let's say you allured them in with HoneyBee Healthy at the recommended dose and you put a sugar syrup feeder out there and then right next to that feeder you had sugar syrup,

same water, same amount of sugar and it just did not have the honeybee healthy. Once they arrived following the odor to Honeybee Healthy, they would go after the sugar syrup exponentially in favor of sugar syrup over any of these others with the added nutrients and stuff. So if it's an appetite stimulant, that doesn't hold up very well. And so we did these tests, and I made sure because I knew that some of these companies would not be happy. But the reason I do it in the way that I do it is so that you can repeat these tests in your own backyard setting. And you can find out for yourself, is it worth spending the money? These things are expensive. So mixing them all together, absolute no, and really question everything. I will say that we

tested all of these, by the way. And next to sugar syrup by itself, the one that they went after the most was beekeeper's choice, which was really interesting. And pro-health is from Man Lake. Hive Alive is the only one that has scientific studies supporting its benefit. So all these things, you just have to think it over. Apics. Apics, they probably say api-biologics. That was formerly called biocontrol, by the way. And that was supposed to mimic actual nectar and pollen from the plants themselves. It's just one of the things that kind of gets buried because all the others have bigger advertising budgets. Maybe they have more influencers. I don't know. So would not mix those things together. Let's go back up here and see what people are saying. I don't want to

skip anybody here. Two of my colonies are already, okay, we already did that. Thank goodness. Any plans to try another non-conventional hive? You know, interesting that you should say that right now because I just got approached about a, they're not, I wanted to say tinker toys, but they are one of the plastic things that the kids all snap together. Anyway, it's a toy hive that I was asked about today. Can you use Verizon? Oxan, exhalic acid strips with O8 vaporizer 2 or other mite treatments. I'll get back to that. Why is it?

I'm drawing a blank. Come on. The plastic little cubes that the kids all stick together. What are they called? All right. I am just drawn a blank. Anyway, can you use varoxan and exhalic acid strips with OA vaporizer or other mite treatments. No, you should keep your mite treatments separate.

In fact, even if it's the same active ingredients, so if acylic acid is what you're using, if you're using varoxan or something like that, while varoxan is present in the hive, don't hit them with like your exhalic acid vaporization also because it's also exhalic acid. We've just increased the dose. If you're using varoxan extended release anyway, you don't need another treatment. So you don't need other combinations. The other thing is pay attention to other treatments and see if there is even a withdrawal period. And I know sometimes people get very relaxed about it because it's an organic treatment.

It's considered a soft treatment. And so then people feel perfectly content to put in these huge doses. And I strongly recommend you follow what they say they have that has been approved for dosage. So combining different treatment delivery methods with the same oxalic acid, I would say no. I would stick with one delivery method and wait until that has finished. Make sure you still have a mite issue. And then if you need to try it with something else, if you're broodless, there's almost nothing that's going to outperform exhalic acid vapor.

If you have brood and all those different stages of development, then the varoxan strips, the reports are really solid on varoxan. Also, you don't have to worry about the temperature parameters that you do with formic pro and things like that, which are also organic acids. But no, never combine treatments. Why can't I think of it with the kids are? I'm thinking of harvesting some honey frames, but I have some frames that aren't fully capped over.

Can I get my bees to cap it faster? Now, there is kind of a hang fire on that. The bees will move on, like you'll see, three quarters of a frame that's all drawn out. all capped and then you see a bunch of open cells. I highly recommend if you do not, we just did this with our own club. I had everyone to get together bringing all their refractometers. Then I brought in a misco refractometer, which is inspector level, inspector calibrated.

And what we did is say we calibrated everyone's refractometers, the manual ones. And the reason everyone I feel like should have one, because there is a false confidence that once things are capped, that the moisture level, are good. We've had capped honey that's been at 20%. 20%, you know, you have a strong potential that that is going to ferment. Somebody else showed me that they had bubbles in the honey in the cells on the frame, and that was fermenting honey. So a refractometer is not very expensive, the manual ones. And if you belong to a bee club, I recommend you talk, whoever's in charge of your bee club into ordering and owning a MISCO or any of the high-quality calibrated inspector-grade refractometers.

And then you bring in, everyone brings in their analog refractometers, and they calibrate them to that. So that then they can know what their moisture contents are. Because the reason I bring this up is sometimes there's a frame with mostly open cells. And you can put a pipette in there and test that honey and find out that is actually very dry. So it's pretty darn interesting. We have to consider that inside your hive, your bees are hovering right around 65% relative humidity, which means they can still dry down the honey.

And so they can actually get a pretty dry even before they cap it. The fact that it's uncapped doesn't mean that it's not ripe. It means that they may be still adding or planning to add to that cell that they're storing honey in. The other thing is sometimes I've seen, especially at the end of the year, or when you hit a dearth or something like that, you'll see a cell that's only like an eighth of an inch deep and it's got a cap on it.

Well, that means they're finished and there's no more nectar coming in, so they gave up and just capped it. And remember, too, that they're using honey to produce the caps. So it is interesting, but having the ability to test it before it's finished and that doesn't mean you can't pull that frame,

particularly if your colony is looking like it's about to be honeybound. I think that's what's going to happen this year. I just like the question earlier, how much honey did you get? I don't pull honey. I'm really terrible at it. I don't keep up with it. I have an extractor. I've run it a couple of times this year.

And I don't even count how many gallons comes out because I just give it all to my wife. So I leave too much honey on the hives during the year. And so I need to pull more off. And I'm not following even my own advice, which is to prevent it from being honeybound, go into your super and pull fully capped frames and drop in your drawn, cleaned out, uncapped frames, right? So because we have racks of frames that have been extracted that are cleaned up by bees that are ready to be put on hives so we can super up. And it's just a lot of work and it's hot and sometimes I'd rather drink coffee.

So you can pull frame by frame. In fact, use a hive butler tote. That's what I highly recommend. So some honey frames, some frames aren't fully capped. You can find out some of those not fully capped things are pretty daggone. What do you want to say? They're still good. So Kathy says, for an apiary split, once the frames are selected from different hives,

do you place a mated queen in or allow the new diverse hive to create a queen? So for the apiary split, and I think we're asking about the super spores. So here's what I do. I go through the hives and look at the ones. Right now it's easy to see which ones are the most productive because right now with the humidity and the heat that we've had, they're wearing their bees. So we have a lot of bearding on our hives.

And it didn't make a difference whether the hive was insulated, not insulated, horizontal, vertical. It didn't matter. They're wearing their bees. So those are high producing colonies. They also have high numbers of bees. We can look at those on the outside. Another thing we took advantage of while they were outside their hives like that is we took queen marking pens and the bees were all lined up just holding their position there, particularly early in the morning while it's still cold.

We just lightly touched all their thoraxes and we put a color associated with each hive. And that way we could see later what kind of bead drift we had going on. There was a lot of bee drift going on. So these foragers are dropping in on each other, the different hives pretty willy-nilly. But when he comes to the split, because that's the question, we inspect the hives. If we have a hive population hive that also is producing queen cells, that means they're going to get rid of their queen. That becomes the queen that's the candidate for my super split.

So whatever frame that queen is on, I pull that frame with the queen and put a right in a hive butler tote with a screen cover, put it on there. We have a second hive butler tote for the second colony split because this is what we're working up to. This is for the two queen system for the keeper's hive. But this is the method. So then we go to another colony and I find the most capped frames I can find. So let's say seven out of eight or seven out of ten frames, seven, eight or ten, whichever size brood box you have. If they're fully involved in brood production, I go for whatever the maximum,

caped cells are, I pull one frame that's capped, put that in with the queen, with the other one that I just got. So that's two frames, capped. Now we've got 6,000 bees on one frame that we just pulled once they emerge from their cells. Go to another colony that's the same, a robust colony. And by the way, when we do this, we're not just leaving them with an empty space. We're putting in drawn cone so they can go straight to work on that. and the queen can continue laying. So we keep everything in the same order.

We're just robbing them of a frame of brood. That frame of brood will not impact that colony on that scale. So we go to the next one. And if I have triples that are nucleus highs, five deeps and three levels, every single level has brood in it to some level. And then the top one is mostly honey with a little arc of brood going up into it. So I go right to the second box because now all I'm doing is harvesting workers unless I come across more queen cells. The next colony while I'm doing this that I come across that has queen cells, I hunt that queen, pull her, start another hive butler with another super split in it.

Because she is being kicked out anyway and I am saving myself having to collect them off of a tree branch. I also draw a frame of brood from them. and then I replace those frames with drawn comb so they are ready to go. And not just that, the bees don't freak out about it. These are, it doesn't even make the hive super defensive and these are large colonies. So then we go along until I get at least four frames,

which includes a frame that has the queen on it. And then if I get three full frames of capped brood from three separate colonies, that is more than six. Let's see, that is six. that's like 16,000 bees. We've got strong colonies ahead of the nectar flow that is yet to arrive. So those are super splits.

That's, I hope that explanation works. Now, worst case scenario, we're going around the supervisors with me. He's got his bees sit on. He's got his queen kit with him and everything else. He's nine years old. He's dying to get a hold of a queen. Let's say we don't find a queen cell. Now what do we do?

Well, now we are going to have to pull one of the strongest colonies queens. And this way, I keep my colonies small. I realize that sounds counterintuitive. I don't want giant colonies of bees. I just don't. So if I need resources for a weaker colony, I can pull a frame of brood. I can remove their queen, and they can produce another queen from the eggs and larvae that they have that are young. If they don't have eggs, we can't pull them.

but I'll pull the queen then if I can't find one that already has queen cells under production, I'll pick a queen that's doing great things and that will become part of my super split. And then now they're set back because they have to make a new queen. And we know that 75% of those matings are successful. Statistically speaking, that means 25 out of 100 of those queens that fly out won't be mated. And so you'll have to keep tabs on them for the next couple of weeks to make sure they make that replacement. So I hope that makes sense. And what will happen then is we're kicking off another colony that's full-blown.

It's ready to go. They're going to start foraging early. That's what happens to when you basically populate a colony with a bunch of nurse bees. People get panicked because they see that it looks like an inactive colony. The landing board's basically vacant. There's not much going on. And that's because we have very young bees in there. And the foragers that tend to show up for that colony are.

from other colonies. They're drifting over. And so then what happens is these younger bees accelerate through their tasks inside the hive so they can kick in and start gathering resources for the colony to sustain it. But it works really well. And thanks, Ross Wagner, for $10. I appreciate it. Would you prefer to cover winter with one full, let's see,

you prefer to overwinter with one full cap super over two brood boxes or a third brood box that is mostly resources okay i'm just going to oh yeah legos thank you why i couldn't think of legos so yes the strange hive configuration or unique one is a lego beehive that somebody wrote me about this morning I don't know that I'm super excited about it, to be honest. So yet to be seen. But anyway, for Ross, would I prefer to over winter one full cap super over two brood boxes or third brood box that is mostly resources? Okay, my winter configuration is one deep brood box, one medium super.

If they're nucleus hives, it's three, five-frame nucleus hives, unless it's really tiny and it's a late season swan. that I collect sometime in September. So once they're at triples, that's the end of it, and that top box comes off in the fall, and the second box is full of honey. That's pretty much it. So these triples or this description of mostly resources, I'm trying to keep my brood down in the bottom box this year. We're experimenting because I have dropped in queen excluders early in the spring to get my

queens down early and get the brew down early so they could backfill. We're kind of running into a problem if we had multiple boxes because they were starting to occupy the center box and not moving all the way to the bottom box. And they didn't want to rotate those hives. So by putting a queen excluder in and putting the queen under the queen excluder into the bottom box, the nurse bees and everything, of course, followed. And as the bees above emerged, they moved down too. But then as can often happen we get lazy i get lazy and i did not pull the queen excluder out so they all stay down there so i should have pulled the queen exclude all the top boxes now with honey so my configuration is only two boxes if they're standard

eights or tens so this is a judgment call everyone's going to have to make early on i did think that bigger was better and i had three deeps and then i would have medium supers on top of those and I created these super colonies and there were ultimate failures in winter and one of the reasons they failed is because there was so much moisture inside the hives because there was so much honey inside the hive as well and because there's so much honey the bees weren't covering it so the population of the colony kind of condensed on themselves and they formed their winter cluster and then we had all of this unattended space above them so then when the warm mornings would happen where it hit 32, 33 degrees on a sunny day and it would be in the teens at night.

We had condensation forming on top of the stored honey that was capped up above the cluster of the bees. And then of course it would condense and drip onto the bees and there'd be a water issue in there. So the other thing was that we're never going to get through all of that honey. And that's when I was venting the top of my beehives. And so that was early on. So now we size each colony for the size of the population, knowing what the winter population is going to be. The genetics of the bees that you use for that type of thing play heavy. And so when I started getting cold tolerant bees and started using and cycling back locally adapted stock, my colonies ended up being much smaller.

And so the queens respond to dearth quicker and cut back on egg production facing a dearth. They also cut back on egg production when winter arrives, when the resources in the environment start to dwindle. Where before, when I first started out in 2006, I used Italian stock because that's what everyone used. And they were huge honey producers, massive amounts of beeswax and everything else. Great producers, but they also had these giant clusters going into winter. And the queen never seemed to stop laying. She would just keep producing. And that's why back then we would go through 70 to 100 pounds of honey to get them through winter.

But there again, we had to keep them. I should have kept them. Size right. But I was thinking already had to spring and more honey production. And honey production, I can safely say that with 10 colonies, I produce more honey than I do now. And that's because it was Italian stock. They were supersized. And they were prolific.

And they required a lot of feed and resources. to get them through winter, and they did not hold up well against the varroa destructor mite. And that was before exhalic acid had been approved. I was treatment-free, and I just did everything I could as far as integrated pest management to keep those things under control.

But that stock, they're still top honey producers, so any of the Italians. Let's see, so, Ross, I'm sorry. I kind of went all over. Do you think your live feed would be stable if you were walking through the apiary? So that's a great question. I have gone live from my, and I used Wi-Fi repeaters that I put out there so I could get a quicker speed out there. And I think I could actually do it because it drops to three megs per second.

Is that right? Yeah, that sounds right. Megabytes per second. So what about which is kind of the minimum. And then if anything happens, it cuts out. It's almost too much stress. So what I've done is I have been out there before gone live just to show something that was going on, but not sat down and done like a Q&A live out there.

I can do it when I do my pre-recorded Fridays, but live in the apiary. I need to rethink that. I was also using a tablet back then, which I haven't broken out for a long time. I can probably do it with my phone, but when I do it with my phone, I can't see people's comments. So that's interesting, but it is, it's doable now thanks to, thanks to the network that we have because we were part of that rural expansion and connectivity that happened during COVID. Before that, every Friday, I had to drive to a nearby town and spend two hours in someone else's driveway uploading my Friday Q&A's in their driveway every Friday. So now, finally, I can do this.

what I consider Sam Comfort as a guest as one of my experts. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know a lot about Sam Comfort. So I shoot me information about who that is and what he covers. And I consider all people. So Top Gear, thank you for $4.99 for the Super Chat. Let's see. So I think you can overwinter a single frame when I, get to South Carolina. Do you think I can overwinter a single frame? Okay, I will say this. I'm going to rely on

the entomologists, which are super smarties. The minimum number of bees to maintain the use social cluster of bees, a single frame. So let's look at a deep Langstroth frame that has brood on it. Roughly 3,000 per side. So we've got 6,000 bees. And I was sold 5,000 bees as the minimum. So depending on the size of the colony, you could probably get away with a two-frame, heavily managed colony of bees. But overwintering, man, that's anybody's guess because that's very climate and that's very related to exactly where people are. And so I personally wouldn't try a two-frame, but I would really insulate that if I were going to do it. I just don't have personal experience with that. Tommy Chu, have you pulled frames and used the crush method of honey removal for your two

lands hives? I would hope you have. It's been a couple of years since you got them. Okay. So for the land's hives, I got these big bags, the 600 micron bags, and the 400 micron bags. And cut them right, cut all the comb out, put it right in those, and crushed in strain them that way and it created a drape so I could raise the temperature inside the drape to 110 and we get a lot of honey and now the frames are all sitting there so yep that was really good

that does work so it's easier I don't have an extractor for them so that's what I have to do or make cut comb they are good for cut comb they have vertical wires going through them and you can still get the two by fours and there's a four by four cassette that you can get but the two by four is you can make those cuts and get them between the wires so there's a lot of things you can do with them let's see what else remember if it's for me it has to be in caps do you think okay so overwinter a single frame when i get to south carolina so that south carolina talk to south carolina of beekeepers. I used to live in Charleston, South Carolina. I did not keep bees back when I was down there, but I would reach out to others who've done it and see what they did, how it went.

DC's bees. Fred, what proboscis trap would you recommend? I want to maximize my Caucasians output. Okay, I haven't done anything with propolis traps. I've done evaluations of pollen traps. As far as propolis goes, oh, let's, here's what we do. Okay. Propolis traps, see, I think in my head about a pollen trap that the bees go through and it scrapes off of their legs, but that doesn't work. Propolis traps are actually like screens that attach themselves, you attach them to the interior walls of your hive and the bees build propolis on them. I think you put them in the freezer and then you snap them and then the propolis comes off, flex them, and it snaps off. So Dr. Merla Spivak is the person I would go to, the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. because they did a whole bunch of research and evaluations of propolis traps, of course,

which were designed to get the bees for propylized as much of the interior of the hive as possible, and then the bees would benefit from that medicinal aspect of it. So if I understand right, you're wanting to increase propolis in the hive for the bees, not harvest propolis. So the Spivoc Lab published papers on it, and they describe exactly. exactly which propolis traps they use. And then, of course, later they partnered up. Dr. Marla Spivak got involved with the folks at Premier, which produced the Propola hives.

And you may not know that if you go to the North American Honeybee Expo, they're always like one of the biggest exhibits there. And propola is from propolis, and the law part is Marla Spivak. So it was propolis and Marla Spivak's research. but that is an interior roughed up surface, but there are also propolis traps that you can put. And Brian Schmidt, I'm not going to say what you just wrote, but I agree with you.

Okay, so moving on. So thank you for advice about leaving the supercells on one of my hives approximately three weeks ago. They have raised a new queen. Yay! See, I gave good advice, and now I have $4.99 to show for it. Thank you so much. I'm glad that was helpful.

Okay, and Maro 499. Always very generous and I really appreciate it. So DC's bees, thanks for it. I'm planning on getting some probal hives. I rough up my hives for production. So yeah, a lot of people chimed right in and said they rough up their hives and things like that. And anything that makes it look like, it's an unfinished surface, a surface that needs work. I have rolls of cork that I thought would be cool.

It did not work. when I was fooling around with it. But now, because one of the small companies that I like to support is Greg Burns, and that is Nature's Image Farm, and they have the Endora Hives. So I've set up a bunch of those. So I'm kind of hitting a lot of things with their hives. One is that it is the propyl hive, so it's designed for propolis, and it's working for that. The other thing is, so what he did is, I guess, he's partner.

up with Premier and he does that immersive treatment. One of the things that I noticed about that is if you have a heavy wax, I don't know what all they dip wax boxes in, the hive boxes in that are pine. But once they have that wax coating and everything, if you're setting these up and if you're doing what I try to do as much as I can, which is set up a beehive in my apiary that's ready to go. Frames are in it.

the entrance is reduced it's a single box so it's eight or ten deep brood box by itself and it just has all the beeswax and everything in it no stores no resources no bait just the propolis and stuff that's already in there those treated boxes get occupied very easily so if you've got a beeswax capability if you can rub the interior of your hives with beeswax and you can get them to smell like propolis and stuff like that, they're occupying those. I don't set out swarm traps at all anymore, period. And they did a lot of, I spent a lot of time figuring out where to best put a, you know, a swarm trap.

And I didn't need to because even this year, they're just moving in, set up the hive, put it next year other hives, see if something doesn't occupy it, because that seems to work. do to do thanks for Sam Comfort has developed low-cost hives that are highly productive. He is an excellent beekeeper, highly respected. I will check him out. Sam Comfort.

Okay, so when extracting, and there are a few dead bees in the strainer, will that have any effect on the honey? And that's from Den Bee. It does not have an effect on the honey. Here's the thing. That's why we use screens and strainers and 200 micron strainers.

In fact, this is really interesting to me that we have a local store and the local beekeeper who's been here for 100 years, even puts it right on his labels. They expect to see bee toes, bee feet, bee pieces, bits and parts in this honey, it's raw honey, it's coarsely, you know, strained or whatever. But bee bits and pieces were in it,

and people bought it like crazy. It really doesn't matter your honey is, anti-bacterial, antimicrobial, it's a disinfectant basically. And unless people are off-put by discovering some little bit or piece, I personally would screen it out and not have it in my honey. But does it ruin the batch of honey? No. D.C.'s bees, Fred, how does the copper dip affect the dip? How does the copper dip affect the dip? Do you know? I don't know. Oh, that's the, new one. So there was one also we're talking about again nature's image farm. They had one that had a very dark finish on it and it did have some copper in it. And I don't have one of those.

All I have are the the normal heavy wax dipped ones. And so that's it. Does stagorn sum I provide B forage? Yes, it does. And it provides you can make a great tea with everything. But yeah, bees go to it. Have you ever used a product called B4. Grooming aid. I looked at the bee gem. It came out early people, jumped all over that. And for those who don't know what we're talking about, the bee gym was designed that your bees could rub against it and groom off the varamites on their own. Did not perform very well for the people that I know that tested it. So it seemed like a really good concept. You know, it's kind of like if you had a cat post or your cat could rub and groom its fur and get things out of its fur, bee jim for the bees.

The people that I know that use it, so this is second end information. It did not help the bees reduce the varroa destructor mites. But I would expect to see or hear more about it if it were more effective. And maybe they're doing changes. Maybe they're updating and upgrading. Because bees definitely, once they discover something on them, try to groom it off. And so it can be a challenge. come up with something because the bees would propolize it and things like that inside the hive.

But anyway, I don't personally have experience with it. All my information is secondhand on that. All right. Question number four. Man, it's five o'clock already. This is from Chad in Ona, Florida. It says, I accidentally kill my queen while trying to release her out of the queen marking device. It took her head right off when I slid open the door.

I have a resource hive that I can pull the queen out of to replace the one I killed. Do I need to wait a few days before I introduce a new queen? I don't have a queen cage or an introduction box to slowly put in the hive, so it will be a direct release. Thank you. So for the people that are listening, if you're new, direct release is an advanced thing to do. And killing your queen, chopping off the head. I just happen to have a gizmo here.

It's called the queen pen, which is interesting to me. And this was at the North American Honeybee Expo. I don't know if you've ever seen this device. But it has a queen marking cage, which is the one-handed queen grabber. And this slides in here. The whole thing is to get your queen in here. And I think this is not what Chad described, but it's the one. he chopped the head off his queen i'm wondering if this wasn't the type of thing that was being used

because it does have that little guillotine space there people often need to transfer their queens out of one of these and it goes right into this here so you open up the cap where the queen can come out you cover that of course with your finger put it in here on top this should already be in And then the other thing that was interesting about this, this one you have to put your finger in to open it up But then you would see your queen go down into here so if you cover this with your hand These go towards the light So they would go in here and then once the queen was clear you would close it off With this thing

Then once she's in you can slide this out Push this up and then mark your queen Then if you're gonna introduce her to your hive This is a this could be a direct release system but if you needed to transfer her into one of these and put your candy plug in there which goes into this part right here there are all kinds of recipes online how to mix up your own candy plug everyone should have a bunch of these if you're a beekeeper um the other thing is some people like the hair curler style i have a bunch of these two i really like them i carry them on my belt

i leave it open all the time because when you see the queen you don't want to be trying to snap this open then you get your queen in you close it up and now we have control of the queen but i do want to mention let me mention this name of this company hidden hollow honey.com makes that thing but it's on my video of the north american honeybee expo i thought it would be great to mention that see if anybody's used it what kind of experience they have so anyway the direct release question you have to make sure the bees are going to accept it so do you have to wait so several days. Your bees are aware that they've lost a queen almost right away. They get unsettled. They start scurring all over all of your surfaces. When you open up a hive and they're

overly active and they are examining every nook and cranny of the hive and they make a whirr when you open it and they're unsettled and a little bit disturbed, they're missing their queen. This happens fairly fast. So earlier on we mentioned honeybee healthy. That is one of the claims that have been demonstrated to work really well. And they have different levels on their bottles of Honeybee Healthy regarding what you're going to use. And one is a drench. So the drenched level is four teaspoons of Honeybee Healthy per quart of one-to-one sugar syrup. So when you do that, what you're doing is we're distracting the bees when we're going to do a direct release.

So we're going to spritz them, guard bees especially. I like to turn guard bees into treats. So when the guard bees watch you and they're looking at everything you're doing, hit them with a little bit of sugar syrup with honeybee healthy on it and all the other bees dog pile them because they want to look them clean because they're full of sucrose right now. So this spritzing, and you can also spritz a little bit on the queen that's going in there and make her appetizing to them, it reduces their alarm status

and also makes them more accepting. So that has been demonstrated over and over again. So you can do it now. When you're introducing that queen, we need to, you have to have some device that you're transporting her in. So if it's queen clip or whatever else, we want to put her right on the brood area and see what their behavior towards her is. And if they're all up there trying to feed her and no one's acting up and trying to double their abdomen in to deliver a sting, things like that, because they have to bite a whole of the queen and deliver. over a sting in there, but their behavior, their attitude is frenzied. So if they're doing that or if they're trying to form a tight clump, even around the cage,

then they're not ready for that queen. The second reason I bring that up is often if they're not ready, I want you to be aware that you should probably look around to see if there isn't another queen in there. You can have a queen in there that's not even mated, or you can have a queen that they've decided that they're attaching themselves to. Now, a mated queen has a pheromone advantage in the hive. That's where the drenching with the honeybee healthy comes in. But if they have another queen, we have to make sure that she's not laying,

that she's not, you know, in competition already, pheromone-wise with what you're trying to introduce. So unless they're scurrying around acting queenless, I would search for another queen. If they are scurrying around and looking unsettled, they're very quick to accept a new queen. And sometimes I've even dropped in a queen mandibular pheromone noodle just to see how they treat it.

And they try to feed the noodle, which is interesting to me. They're not the sharpest knives in the drawer. They're acting purely on pheromone, and they're trying to care for this synthetic pheromone called temp queen. So finding out if they're hungry for a new queen. And then the temp queen gets superseded by a real queen that's been made. So when you put her in there, they show a favoritism. They don't get defensive.

They show favor for a mated queen. So that kind of works really well. But I recommend the drench method, honey be healthy for chat, if you're going to try to introduce a queen to a colony that's recently being queenless. Do to do. Banks fair queens over winter. So this is DCBs. D.C.'s bees.

Have you use the easy-peasy equipment. and have you ever banked spare queens over winter? The good news is I haven't, but I've worked with some of the top inseminators, for example, here in the state of Pennsylvania, and they use that stuff. And banking queens are very successful at it. It's amazing to me how long a queen can be banked, unmated and mated.

Those are very interesting things. And those are great questions for people that are queen breeders, specifically, because there are some parameters to consider. And of course, the way they get kept, there's humidity levels and everything else are special incubators and stuff that I don't personally have. So I've not done it. Oh, so this question is interesting too

because I've been in touch with someone about this. Will your top bar hive survive with no reflect tax? So the way this top bar hive is made, thick wood, it's got an airspace. and then because it's made from Be Mindful down in Texas. And so it has that airspace, but guess who I was in touch with recently, the person that makes the hive hugger, and they are friends with and have been in touch with Natalie B.

And so they sent me the insulation board for that top bar hive from Be Mindful. So they're going to have an insulation thing on top of it. It's still in the box. I haven't opened it. But I won't be putting reflectics on. This stuff is supposed to be even better. And I'll be putting that on there to see how they do. This will be the first winner with the top bar hive.

But I have no reason. Looking at the configuration, the way the sides are, they have a point that comes up. And then the top bar sits on that. That is the thinnest area. And it's in the sides, not the top. And so I think the top has plenty of wood. And we're just going to see how it goes. but I do have those insulation blocks

and I'll be putting those on. So, remember if your question is for me, all caps, please. So as far as how it goes, we'll find out. Direct observation. Okay, so direct release, question, I'm not going to get through

all these questions today. We're already zipping along here. This comes from Ed, Connorsville, Indiana. Swarm in July, let it fly. Just found a swarm July 18th. They were building cones. and on some fallen tree branches and had three loaves with some capped brood. This being an untenable situation, I set out to get them in a swarm box.

I sat a storage bin below them and started to cut the comb off, looking for the queen. I took the comb and rubber banded it into a frame. There was capped brood in the comb. And when I cut the second piece off, the large clump of bees fell into the bin. I looked for the queen again, but no luck, more capped brood, and some lulled. larvae. The last piece of comb was a much smaller and on the outside facing if there was some dead larvae. I'm guessing that it was exposed to heavy rains of previous days. And I got them all in the swarm box, but left them near where I found them, planning on moving them to my property soon.

Is there anything I should do to help them get established? So the reason that I accepted this question and wanted to talk about it today is because often I see people collecting combs established colonies to collect the comb. And when they find other than, you know, one of the first things they like to do, I guess because people are interested in it, is they bite the comb of honey. So if you've cut that away, honey is dripping on everything. It's a big mess. I will defer to Mr. Ed. And of course, that's Jeff Horchoff and Randy McCaffrey, who's dirt rooster, they separate out the comb that has brood in it and the comb that has honey in it for good reason. The honeycomb will drip and leak on everything because you've disturbed

it and disrupted it and that can kill your brood really fast. So the only comb that they frame up is the brood comb, which means that when you put them in the hive that you're putting them in, So this colony, this is different than a swarm because they're established on these frames often exposed, as described here. So when you put them in the frames, put them in a hive, you could feed them. There are some people that don't like to feed anything. You just want to see how they go, and that's fine if that's what you want to do. Heavily populated hives get straight to work. You can run into three or four days of rain right afterwards, and it doesn't mean that that will be their demise.

It simply means they don't have the resources they need to keep even capped brood alive because they have to burn calories, generate heat, and keep them warm. 94 to 97 degrees. So even when you have 80 or high 70s and the temperatures outside, your bees are burning calories to survive. So depending on the time of year, if you put in feed for them and they don't use it, then they have what they needed and they can reject what they don't. If you do not put something in and they do need it, you will see bees. bees coming out of the entrance unable to fly off of the entrance. And so this has happened before where you have a new setup where it's primarily brewed.

There aren't a lot of resources and something happened to earth or whatever else. And the bees flying off the landing board just buzzed like they're trying to fly and then they fall to the ground. And sometimes people will ask, they have a disease or they poison. What's going on? Their tongues are out. Everything's going on. So one of the ways we can find out if the reason,

that they're doing that is lack of resources. If you could put a quart of sugar syrup inside that hive and you would be amazed by how quickly they can turn around and they go and pass this resource onto one another, just like a bucket brigade only is trophylaxis. They're going tongue to tongue and they're feeding one another and the energy level shifts. And the problem is when they're at a state where they don't, don't have the energy to forage, they can't recover. So other people may say this is Darwinian beekeeping, and if they can't recover, then we don't need them.

So you're also managing them. So for me, if a quart of sugar syrup is going to revive the colony and get them right back into business so they can start foraging for themselves again, that's what I do. So what you should do in this case, also I think the quixen is probably there. I would leave it just as described here. The queen will find them if she's not in there. You'll know right away if they're missing because as I described before, they'll be searching for her. They'll even look outside the hive. They'll scour the area looking for their

queen. Hopefully the queen wasn't damaged during the removal of the placement of the frames because when we're managing and handling and rubber banding brood frames, we really need to get highs on the queen early so that we don't destroy here. The good news is if you still have eggs and things like that on those frames because they were in production, they can then recover if they have the number of bees necessary to continue to feed and keep them covered and keep them warm and protect the new colony. These are all challenges. And so there's no one-size-fits-all kind of answer to that. but I do pay attention when people are doing these cutouts

and how they separate resources from. Now, the other thing is they did pull honey. So you could, if you found a way to present it to them so they can use that resource, that could be good, but it wouldn't be where it can drip down on the brute. So you have honey, you can feed that back to them. It is there, honey. You could crush and strain it, put it in a jar

with holes in the lid upside down, not over the center of, that inner cover but to an end to a corner because the center if warm air causes that to force out of there and they're not keeping up with it honey dripping down will wipe out a lot of your brood if it drips over it they just can't survive it so let's see do do to do to do to do to do to queenkeeper okay oh yeah yeah yeah so this comes from sunny this is question number six from North Lima, Ohio.

So I know you have a two queen keeper hive and don't know if you added bees yet. I haven't. And I wanted to let you know something I discovered with mine. I noticed my bees are going under the divider area of the brood box. I don't know if they can get to each other or not. You may want to check yours to see if they have clearance underneath to move from one box to the other. I can't do it because I'm full of bees.

I just recently added the bees to the second. area and have to wait to get there to see if there's still two queens just the thought i thought i'd let you know so here's the thing i did look at it of course and i saw that when i put it together because the way the queen the two queen system is for the keepers hive get a full colony on each side of it there's a common spacer underneath and then there's a queen excluder on top they both go through the queen excluder as far as the workers go when they get on top of the queen excluder there is a divider in that first box and it's a 10 frame size box. That divider is off the queen excluder enough for a worker to get under it. The reason I don't think that's a big problem is because also when they go up above that

divider and the next box is on, there's nothing keeping them divided anymore. So they are going to be mixing it up in the area where they're storing their honey and resources. So I did notice that that's an opening there and I don't think it's a problem because we're already merging our workforce. up in the honey super and it is above the queen excluter. These are all things that will be determined because I asked George, you develop the keeper's hive and asked them, you know, we're merging all the workers in this central box with two colonies apart from, and they're just together in the honey super.

And as answering me says, oh, they just all get along. Well, that's to be seen. I mean, clearly a lot of people are doing it. This is not the first time a hive has been put together that has multiple colonies contributing to the same honey super. So it is interesting to me. And again, we're doing the super split method that I described earlier. And I just need a break so I can do that.

And then we'll get things cooking there and we'll make these observations. But yeah, that space is there and they can. Once they get above the quinoxluter, the workers inside the hive can mix it up. They can join together. In theory, you know, the bees in your apiary, it's been said that about 20% of the population, of any given colony in your apiary is not from that colony, but rather a result of drift throughout your own backyard apiary. So it's very interesting yet to be seen, but they've been doing it. And it's been working. So I guess we have to follow their lead on that. And I don't see a

big benefit in extending that divider board down so that they don't have space to cross once they're over the queen excluder because they're going to mix it up anyway, just a good. queens can't get together this from comes from Khalid greater Boston mass this is I have a question about was I discovered a wasp nest about 150 feet away from my hives in a gap between my wall and roof there seemed to be a good number of them I'm also seeing a good number of wass at the bird batch which my honeybees used I'm guessing bird bath and for now they both seem to share the water but I'm concerned for my honeybees what do you recommend I do should I try to eliminate the wast nest or do something around the bird bath to avoid was there okay so bird

baths just like open feed stations and things like that robbing stations where you might put out equipment so you basically clean it up we see waspumble bees hornets honey bees ever they all share the same areas there's no fighting there so the same thing with the water resources they get together at water resources and there's no fighting there i did make a video of a couple of of yellow jackets pulling apart a honeybee on the landing board of a beehive. But as it turns out, it was already a cast off honeybee anyway that was dying. And so they're just getting the protein from that to feed their larvae. I'm always cautious about the pushback on wasps, even though I've killed was nest in the past, no question.

It depends on where they are, you know, what they're doing. Are they threatening people too? Other than that, they're incredible pest control. So these yellow jackets and things like that, if they're well away or if they're just merging with your bees at bird baths and things like that, I don't consider that a problem at all. I actually want them around because the things that they're scavenging and collecting and eating and killing replaces a whole bunch of pesticide use. So I'm a fan until they start attacking the beehives. And then that happens at the end of the year when the wasc colonies are at max strength. and that's when we help our bees by reducing their entrances

and making sure that they can easily defend their colonies. I have not seen a yellow jacket, wasp group, overtake a colony that was strong and healthy. If we have these wide open landing boards, we are encouraging was to go in because when it's cold in the morning, the wasps can get in when the bees haven't even started flying yet. They fly colder than the honeybeats do. Now, in Washington state and places like that, the WASS situation is entirely different, and

they're going to have to do things to defend their abuse. But here where I am, it is not enough of a benefit to where I would kill them. Question number eight comes from Vicki and Perry County, Pennsylvania. It says my smoker lid gets scumbed up that I can hardly get it open sometimes. Is there a way to keep it working smoothly or a maintenance I can do each time I use it? I've heard torching it to burn everything off, but that weighs propane and seems like a bunch of extra work since I don't use propane torch on my yard things. So here's the thing.

When it comes to your, don't close your smoker. When it's really hot, you can open and close it because your propolis and everything else that's in there, the creosote that builds up becomes glue later. So if you close it and it cools down, now it glues. lose itself shot and can be a pain. The thing of it is, and by the way, the smoker pellets that are at the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association, the switchgrass smoker pellets, people are buying those and using those, and we appreciate that those are supporting outreach programs, education for beekeeping.

That stuff puts out a lot of creosote. So at the end of it, you want to just leave your smoker open. some people scrape it with high tools or they leave it closed up because they put a cork in it because they're saving the fuel for the next time and says you're going to ignite it with a propane torch anyway heating it up with a propane torch so that you can open it again is just par for the course I've never seen someone really spend a lot of time cleaning them down now I do clean the whole thing now there are people that will say use oven cleaner and I like to use the chimney cleaners it's a little soot remover that while your smoker's hot,

you put a little bit in there and let it just smolder in there, and it dissolves away all the built-up creosote, just the same way it does in your wood stove or your chimney. And those work, if you've got so much buildup, the smoke isn't flowing well. But as far as just the problem of, you know, you can't open it because it glued shut, leave it in the open position or just as other people,

I don't know, I don't have anything to add to, what you've already been told other than using your propane torch at the beginning as you're lighting your next batch heated up and then it'll come off again so question number nine this is about mouse cards comes from pete says so what's your take on mouse cards do you use them i think i'm going to have to start putting them on all my eyes i'm finding more and more mice and mouse poop on landing boards it seems i would want a metal one let me know what you think okay i don't use mouse guards at all, none zero. And that's because we did lots of mouse testing. I like testing mice, shrews, voles, moles, see what they can get into, house mice, deer mice, all of it.

I even went the extra yard and interviewed a small mammoth biologists to validate what I thought was true about these mice. They can't get into a beehive that has an entrance that is three-eighth seven-inch high, period. So when people look at bottom boards, by the way, when you buy a kit, a lot of bottom boards are reversible and you'll see that one side is three quarters of an inch and the other side is what three eighths of an inch which happens to be b space they also call it the winter side so for the winter side i leave that on all year round so my entrances when i build them when i make my own stuff they're three eighths of an inch high now could a mouse feasibly sit out there and chew and chew and chew and ultimately get through into the hive they could and they do that when it's uh an abandoned or a dead out or a low-performing hive. The other thing is I bought copper tape. Copper tape is interesting stuff. You can form that right to the edge,

the top edge of your entrance. And mice won't chew it. They have an open, rooted rodent tooth system. So if they go to chew it, if you have fillings, you ever take aluminum foil, make a little ball of it and chew it and get that little electric shock through your fillings. It's like that for the mice. If they chew on copper foil, they won't chew through it.

They just avoid it. So it doesn't even have to be really thick or really durable. And so, again, we've tried it with other different metal treatments to make that leading edge right there. And we even created 3 eighths inch standoff gauges. So if you go to your hardware store and you look where they sell. the wooden dowels you'll also see that they sell these little square dowels too square stock that's out of wood and you'll find that some of it is three-eighths by one of those and you've got your own feeler gauge for creating entrances that are exactly three-eighths even tiny shrews do not get through

that so that's why i don't use queen excluders the entrances are the same year round one of the things that people brought up with that colony that's building all the propolis in the outside of it they said good luck putting your your metal grid on there to keep the mice out in the wintertime and I said, ah, I don't have to because the entrance behind that propolis is only three eighth of an inch high and is three inches wide. And so that's it. So if a mouse gets through that, they're going to be frustrated to find that the entrance is still too small for the mouse. Lots of testing, 100% confident if your entrance is three eighth of an inch, no mouse is getting in there. So I don't use mouse cards.

And I'm glad that was brought up because while the weather's warm and the weather's nice, it's a great time to be shifting things around. And that's it. Okay, question number 10 comes from Susan Brand, which is 5398, YouTube channel A and Mr. Dunn. Have you noticed a problem with keeping the plexiglass clean? I was told it was very hard to clean the inside glass without scratching it because of wax buildup. Your thoughts, please. Okay, so here's the thing.

This is about observation. hives, and this was a comment left on one of my observation hive videos. I do not like plexiglass windows on any observation hive. Do I have them? Yes. This has been a problem for a long time. Bees put brace comb on it. They put bees wags on it. They put propolis on it. And how do you clean and everything that you want to use solvent-wise to dissolve away propolis and beeswags on a glass surface can't be used on plexiglass. Even alcohol will cause surface clouding and crazy on plexiglass. So what did I do? I steam cleaned it. So I took 100% cotton cloths. I made a video about it. So if you want to find the video, you can go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick done,

and type up in the search block up there, Plexiglass cleaning. So I use cotton cloth. I put the steamer right on it, the steam goes through the cloth, onto the surface, and absorbs all the wax and everything else while you rub it clean. It was the best method ever. The problem is you need a steamer to do it. So I have a really old Wagner steamer, and it works fantastic. But if you are building an observation hive, I highly recommend you get tempered glass, make it with that so you can scrape it with razor blades, clean it with any solvent you want, and it's safe. So, Plexiglass, hard-know for observation hives. But if you do have that, steam, clean it.

That works. Question number 11, John Menacall, and Annapolis. At our local club meeting, a member proclaimed that spotted lanternflies are coming. Remove honey supers. Thoughts, okay. Spotter lanternfly. The state of Pennsylvania is the ground zero

for the spotted lanternfly moving in. into this country because somebody had to buy stones for their patio from overseas instead of getting them domestically but that's beside the point cats out of the bag so spotted lanternfly is here is this bad for beekeepers are good for beekeepers would you take your honey supers off because somebody saw spotted lantern flies where you live i say no here's why spotted lantern flies are going to feed on plants that your honeybees cannot you're going to provide a nectar flow at a time and place that your honeybees normally cannot exploit for sucrose what they're going to get from the spotted lanternfly is honeydew what's honeydew honeydew honeydew is an excretion that comes off of the spotted lanternfly

while they're feeding on things like grapevines while they're feeding on things like the tree of heaven which by the way is an invasive tree and should be munched away anyway so here's the thing spotted lanternfly honey do gets into your honey becomes honey honey honey do honey is it bad is it good. If you've tasted it, it's a strong honey. Here's why it's good. It's among the most medicinal honey that you can get anywhere in any price. Would it even be better than manuka honey?

According to the scientists, they're able to evaluate things like that. Yes, it is. So would you do an interview with anybody about the medicinal properties of honey? Yes, I would. And I have Dr. Robin Underwood. You can look at the interview with expert series on my website, the way to be.org and look at interviews you can watch. And that's what we talk about, the medicinal

properties of honey. And specifically, the markers found in honey-dew honey, making it one of the most medicinal honeies you can get. I want to step further, talk to another expert, Austin, Texas, about the research and value of medicinal honeies here in the United States. It is amazing stuff. So what I run around is described here and say, take your honey soupers off, spotted lanternflies. I would say, no, put your honey supers on. Get maximum benefit from your honey if spotted lanternflies are around. You are making lemonade out of lemons because while in agriculture,

they're having a problem with the challenges of spotted lanternflies, which, by the way, is waning a little bit because I did follow up on that. they're finding out we have lots of wildlife that's adapting to the presence of the spotted lanternflies and they are feeding on them and my chickens for example a spotted lanternfly has to go through a period in the soil much like small high beetles to you if you've got chickens constantly foraging around and scrounging up and eating things that are coming up through the soil and my chickens will eat anything they see another chicken eat and they eat japanese beetles out the wazoo if my chicken could fly, those beetles would not exist. Right now, anything 14 inches or shorter to the ground

is fair game. Anything above that is out of reach of my chickens. But for John at Annapolis, Maryland, that is a bonus, not something to run away from. So please look into the science of it. Now, if you hate the taste of it, there's nothing I can do about that. But as far as quality honey, it's a boost. Smoky, sooty. heavy dark excellent healthy fix you right up everything is wrong with you all right maybe not everything that's wrong with you because some of you have a lot wrong okay moving on number 12 this comes from peter from more or lessville vermont says watching with great interest as per usual question in a torrential downpour of which we in the northeast seem to get more frequently,

how much of a colony can be lost due to drowning? Okay, so downpours, here's the thing. Downpour is different from flooding, so let's take that. We already know that all of my hives are elevated. So you'll never see my beehives sitting on the ground. So if we got a foot of water here, my bees would not be flooded out. So that's one bonus. Even my outbuildings are elevated.

All my chicken coops are elevated. There are three chicken coops. They're all well off the ground. And that's, by the way, so mice and rodents don't move in underneath of them. It also provides a place where the chickens are run under in the event of a sudden rainstorm or if a hawk flies over, things like that. Let's move on. So beehives are off the ground.

That's step number one. They're on solid beehive stands. Step number two. When it rains down on them, they all have really good covers on them. No upper entrances. They also are tilted toward the landing board. Now, when a hive tilts toward the landing board, even slightly, that means when there's a driving rain or when there's a bunch of rain drenching your hive,

it's not flowing into the hive. If you have a solid bottom board, water can go into the hive through that entrance, and park itself inside your hive. You have a high humidity situation and a lot of water inside your hive. Now, if you have tilted towards the landing board, that water runs right back out and does not pond inside your hive. If you have a screen bottom board, which I highly recommend, then water inside the hive would go into the bottom board,

into your removable tray, overflow the tray, and flow out of your hive. So then the tilting wouldn't be so critical if you have a screen bottom board. The other thing is we use hive visors here on most of the hives. So the hive visor prevents pouring rain again from directly hitting the landing board. And then, of course, flooding water into your hive. And the only way the water is going to build up inside the hive is if you're tilted, wonky, and if you're tilted towards the back instead of towards the front, the way I've tried to get you to do for many years.

So, and then the next question is, you know, bees and water, how long can they last? Once your bee is in the water, they're in jeopardy. It depends on what the temperature of the water is, too, by the way. And your bees can do about five minutes and still be recovered from water. Beyond that, they're going to be a loss. So that's something to pay attention to. If you've got a nice roof on your hive, you could extend that out. I remember, Vino Farm years ago, put these big corrugated tops on his roofs.

And all I could think of was, wow, that's a lot of sail area. Like really strong winds. it would catch that. So I'm a big fan of putting some kind of shade or some kind of extension out that protects your landing board. So for Peter, full disclosure is my cousin, by the way,

up there in more or less, Vermont. All right. So by the way, I do have to acknowledge that I just got a super, oh, nature's image farm, tag on it, speak of the devil. You know, we talked about him earlier,

and I made the mistake of promoting his stuff. Now he gave me a bonus today. Have to be nice. Thanks, Greg. We really do appreciate it. And for those who you don't know, that's Nature's Image Farm. We were talking about earlier about the treatment of the Endora Hive

and their partnership with Premier and all that stuff. Now he's there. You can say hi to him. Thank him for me. We're on our last question for today. Number 13, which comes from Diane, Warren, New Jersey. says so the article on strange white crystals in the latest ABJ got me thinking I'm a two-year beekeeper and for at least a decade I've been a certified organic farmer

I have two questions when you take your summer harvest do you leave a medium super behind for the bees or do you take it all and let them fill a new one during the fall flow seems like it would be reasonably easy to save a few frames of honey for the summer harvest to supplement the fall box. Okay, so if the flow is not good, I would either keep the frames in the freezer or freeze 72 hours in store. So here's the thing.

Historically, this is what I've done. The deep-rood box and the medium super in spring. The medium super gets filled by the bees in spring during the spring flow, which is why I don't take a bunch of honey off in spring. That way, no matter what happens through the year, extended dirt, anything else, They've got that honey super and it is full. And they tend not to utilize it because they continue to either subsist on the flow that's coming in or they bring in a slight surplus.

And then above that, that's for me. That's what I take off. So at the beginning of the year, they have about 47 to 50 pounds of honey. And that sustains them like when winter shows up, that's all they need to get through winter in a single brood box with that above. so I don't ever take it all off and leave them because the question of feeding comes in and we do a lot of talking about feeding and sugar syrups and that is only for me to kick off a small swarm, a colony that would otherwise be in jeopardy. The rest of them are not fed. So that resource that they build up early in the year is there for them. And so that's what I do.

So I never take off that box. those who pull a bunch of honey off and then wait for the end of the year and count on that last surge of resources to backfill everything. I don't take that risk because it's just too much stress for me. So, oh wait, I want to pause this comment here. And Darlene Hoggett here says, Fred, I followed your advice early this spring and my bees are doing great. Thank you with two exclamation points.

So thank you for saying that I said something that was right. And then here it says, how would you feed honey as an emergency feed instead of hive alive in spring? I'm in zone 6B, a bit milder than you, or is this just a ridiculous idea? On one hand, Hyvali feels like an ultra-processed food. On the other, I was not adverse to balance. minerals to improve my soil, so maybe I could be okay with it.

So the hive alive, it depends on what we're talking about. I don't put hive alive on in spring. The hive alive is an emergency backup. It's kind of like your emergency kit in the trunk of your car in the event that you end up in a ditch in a big winter storm, and you need resources. Hive alive, the fondant goes on top of the hive. And the reason I think it is really good that Diane brings this,

up right now because I want you to know if you use the font and if you put it on and those who have used it have had very good results with it including me so I did the the tiered addition like I only did it for three hives the first year six hives the next year 50% of the hives last winter so we can see consistently are they benefiting from that and they came out with the five pound packs which is what I'm using now and I know that those are expensive. But when we put those on, that's an insurance policy for the wintertime. If they get through the honey stores that they have and they're at the top underneath that inner cover and they're in their last throws and they've used their resources and they're starving out one frame away from a fully

capped frame of honey, which is a huge frustration for new beekeepers because what they've done is they've created an anchor situation. They have brewed in late February, early March, and they're clustered around it, and they've used all the honey resources around them, and they can't break that, or they won't break that formation to move into the number one or the number 10 position to get honey resources.

So what do they do? They starve in place. So having a fondent pack directly over the center of the hive, it's better than dry sugar, which I used to use. I used to do the mountain camp method, and I used to take a rapid round feeder and fill it with four pounds of dry sugar, and they would go up into that, and they'd use that.

Can that sustain them? It can guarantee their survival. It sure can. But the fondant, they're taking 10 to 1. In other words, because there were people early on, the owner of Be Smart Designs even said, hey Fred, you know, it takes them 40% more energy to use up that dry sugar than if you fed them something else. And I'm thinking, where did that 40% come from? What are we talking about? Which led to backyard experiments, which led to observing bees

getting resources from sugar bricks, from dry sugar, from fondet. How do we know how long it takes them energy-wise to get the resources they need before they fly away? time them. So how much time do they spend working away on a sugar break, for example? And I took ultra macro video sequences of them working on dry sugar. And it was really interesting. So the thing was the fondant came out and fondant's been around a long time. I'm no chef. I can't make fondant. Maybe I just don't want to learn to make fondant. I even have the chef outfit, if you can believe it or not. I don't make fondant. But when Hiveolive came out and they made their fondant,

and it was so conveniently packed and all of that stuff, we put that on. Now, the reason I mention it is I don't want you to put that on, let's say, you know, last week of September. If you put your fondant on, what people found out is the bees migrated up through their honey and everything else and clustered under the fondant, early before winter even hit. So what we want them to do is cluster, start using their resources, cluster low, mid, lower third of the hive,

and then they've got all these food resources directly above them. And we want them to migrate through that. And during my discussions with Dr. Leo Shirashkin, he said they go up a millimeter a day. So you could plan, you know, where are they going to be? Well, that seems to be a variable because we don't. know how insulated hive was, we don't know how many bees are there, we don't know whether consumption rate's going to be. But a millimeter a day seemed like a pretty decent average. So we want them to cluster low and then once the cold weather hits, open that top cover,

it's shielded. We're not going to lose all, we're not going to chill all your bees. And then put your fondant pack on there because if they get to the top of that hive, midwinter, they'll have a resource that will sustain those bees and help them with nozima by the way so better than other resources that i know of right now it's the top stuff out there so that should be it for that so yeah but feeding back honey if you want to um i did experiments with honey feeding it back okay so once the weather gets cold, we can, the bees can feed up in those spaces without creating a bunch of brace comb and feral honeycomb all over up in there because it's too cold for them to create comb now. So if you've created an insulated pocket up there, you could put the honey in a freezer pack.

And the reason I say that is because your bees can feed because we did this testing. Not we, I did it last year and created a bunch of videos. of the bees feeding through little pinholes in Ziploc baggies that were rated for a gallon, but we only filled them to half gallon capacity, and then we can safely feed them honey back to them. Because the bees would put their little proboscis through these pinholes and yellow jacket wasps, European hornets, bald-faced hornets, which are religious yellow jackets,

none of them could exploit that resource. and because I was testing it open feeding before I put it inside a hive, I didn't want to take the risk that it would leak down into the hive. And I've had a honey mess on my hands. So we put those little holes in it. We do it a one inch grid, two inches in from all the fringes. And now we have a pack that we can set up there of honey that the bees can go up through the central hole

and over the top of this pack and feed on that. So the holes are facing up. It's important that I tell you that. This is not holes down on a grid or something. They're facing up. The bees go up through the center hole. Get over there. Feed on that honey.

Now, that has to happen in cold weather. If you do that, for example, if you did that now, you took off your outer cover, you've got a feeder shim up there. You set these on the inner cover. If you did that right now, you're going to have honeycomb all over that area up there. Because it's warm enough they're going to build up there. This is why this is a cold weather emergency resource that you're feeding back to your bees. The honey will not freeze.

So even in freezer temperatures, honey is still honey, and they can lick that way better than dry sugar, for example. So if you've got it, yeah, feed it right back to the colony that it came off of. I know I gave you a long story on that. Yeah, that's right. I like what Bun Hellsings Legacy is saying here. They add holes in the corner of the inner covers. So they put liquid feed there where the bee brood underneath. Yeah, for hole sauce.

Yes, that's true. And this is, so you guys, here's one of the things. People probably don't understand that inner cover, that center hole, that was never a feeder hole. That was designed as part of a B escape. It had a little insert with clips on it. It was a bee escape that was already there. It doubled as an intercover and then could later be put underneath a super and your bees

would go out through that. It was not a feeder hole. Putting feed directly over the center of your hive that is liquid will ultimately drip down on its own into your hive. So now if the bees can keep up with it, they can consume it, but you are force feeding your bees. So we did all of those again. Backyard tests, easily repeatable.

and that's why if you're going to have these feeders have them off center so they're not directly over your cluster unless it's a fondant or if it's a solid feed of some kind that cannot drip directly down on your bees it's fantastic for that so you'll be surprised to know we're done that was the last question if anyone has a question okay homesteady arms home steady that's interesting newbie here this winter will be my first winter should I be insulating any part of my flow hive aside from the inner cover mid-coast main zone 6 okay so flow hive is no different than any of the other hives and if you insulate anything insulate your inner cover create a feeder sham so that you have the option of providing another resource up there one of the big frustrations for me this last winter that went on and on and on is that i didn't have a way to feed some of my beehives that had obviously hit their limit so they were all at the top if you don't have a feeder shim on the decision's already been made for you there's no way for you to feed or supplement your bees regardless of what's going on weather wise so have a feeder shim

And then so once you put it up there, we need to insulate that feeder shim. And then the space that it's in needs to be covered with a second insulation layer. The way that double bubble or reflectics, whichever one you use, the way it works is by capturing a dead air space. It's a reflective surface that contains air that your bees will use that will be a heat capsule up there. And all we're trying to do is prevent condensation from forming over your bees in the wintertime. Because there is secondary heat coming off of those bees and it can accumulate and it hits the dew point on an interior surface. We want that due point to occur on the side walls. So insulating the top of your hive.

So the reason I bring this up right now is because I get a lot of questions about the amount of insulation, how much insulation to the need. we have here heavily insulated hives Lance hives are heavily insulated The Appamahe hives are heavily insulated We've had lice in hives They're heavily they're polystyrene hives And then we also have just a standard wooden three quarter inch Pine hives we've got cedar

We have all these others and then we have the long Langstroth hive Which is full dimensional two by stock And now of course going into this coming winter, we will have the top bar hive, which is also thick, two-by-stock. So did we see a big difference in hives that were insulated on the sidewalls compared to hives that were not? And we had blizzard conditions. We had an extended winter that went on and on and on. People lost their hives out the wazoo.

The guy that used to be the president of my beekeeping organization lost out of 105 hives, they had five alive. that's a lot. So losses can be profound. And those hives were positioned down by earned seeds. They had all these resources. So anyway, the way your hives are configured, if you do not put an insulated inner cover on your hive, that is number one.

That dropped the consumption of winter rations on my hives by more than 30% consistently. They never even used this 47-pound medium, super that we talked about. My colonies did not finish consuming even their hive live fondant pack, the five pound pack. So insulate that intercover. That's pretty much it. Sidewalls up to you. Well-fitted hive equipment is critical. And that's pretty much where I stand. So the land's hive insulated with sheep's wool works great. Did they outperform non-insulated sidewall hives?

No. So the other thing is my observation hives took a major hit. They're not designed to be out in the weather anyway. So I am building insulated panels for those this year, but those are small hives designed for observation. And I was spoiled because they were getting through every winter. Last winter, none of them made it. So Dan Weaver says, Fred Howard, the supervisor's honey sales going.

He just got a fresh load. And so hi to Dan. He got a fresh load of honey. So his clients were satisfied. We're talking about Quinn, who is my grandson. And he is a businessman. There's no question. So honey sales are good.

If you can get him to open the door, he's got 100%. Tom's tumblebees, Fred, have you ever used invert sugar for your bees? I don't. I have in the past purchased them, so those who are wondering what is invert sugar. When your bees get sugar from flowers and things like that, it is sucrose. So the bees have an enzyme in their honey crop, and they will convert the sugar. sugar. So it's called invertase. So it's an enzyme that acts on it and creates, take sucrose and creates fructose and glucose. That's invert sugar. So the question is, wouldn't we just like

to give them already invert sugar? And I don't think it's made a big enough difference to justify getting that. The bees do that well on their own. And so if they have access to sucrose, which is their natural, that's naturally what they would be finding. They invert that themselves. So I think they're good to go on their own. And I want to say that didn't pro-sweet have some level of invert sugar already in it, but I also think they had other ingredients. So that's pretty much it.

I think they can do it. So I want to thank everyone for being here with me today. We went two hours. So I think that's good enough. And I hope I answered those who had questions that were pressing on them right now. And if I skipped over you, please make your comment or post your question down in the comment section below this video. After it closes, that will open up to you. And I just want to thank you all for being here.

And I hope that you benefit from the channel. And if you're not a subscriber already, you're invited to subscribe. So I hope the weekend ahead is fantastic for you and your honeybees. Thanks for being here. Thank you.