The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 317 why did my colony get suddenly defensive?

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/mfiKApNuE64

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, August 1st of 2025. This is backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 317. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm glad that you're here. Welcome. Happy Friday. You know what? I wish we're outside right now because we have perfect weather following a recent rainstorm which is still hitting parts of the eastern seaboard here in the United States. So I'm glad you're here if you want to know what we're going to talk about. Please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order along with some related links. It might help you get more information and expand your experience here on my channel.

So if you want to know where I'm located, the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. And we have three days ahead that are going to be fantastic. And I know what you're doing. You're wondering, what's the weather like outside right now, though? Well, glad you asked. 49 degrees Fahrenheit. Can you believe that?

After the heat wave that we had, and of course it's going to warm up later today. It's going to be much nicer, and it's going to be nice throughout the weekend, so don't be upset if you're in my neck of the woods. But that is 9 degrees Celsius, okay, for the first day of August. And 99% relative humidity at rain. We got almost an inch of rain in a day yesterday,

and I realize for a lot of you, that's nothing. You wish that's all you had, because even in New York, they had cars stuck in the water out there. Lots of flooding. The subways were flooding, if you can imagine that. Anyway, we got quite a bit of rain. So UV index, I don't have to tell you, it's pretty darn low, but it's going to increase later today.

And the weather quality, air quality, is good. So there you go. It's safe to go outside. And I hope you enjoy the opening sequences today because they were videoed yesterday, and you might have noticed there weren't a lot of bees on those flower sources, those nectar sources and pollen sources that are out there blooming right now. And that's because it was cold.

Really cold yesterday. Unpleasant. I partnered with a bunch of wind too while we're talking. So yesterday was a bad day. I almost did this yesterday and then was going to launch it today. But I decided to wait and see what happens. And now we have a great weekend ahead. So what's blooming? Maximilions are blooming. Those are perennial sunflowers if you don't know,

and they grow really tall. And somehow I've got different patches of them that some are blooming now, and there are acres that aren't even starting to bloom yet, and they're over six feet tall. So you can actually create a mid-to-late-season privacy screen for your property out of Maximilian sunflowers. Cosmos, they're blooming, they're just getting started. the cosmos flowers provide nectar and pollen to our native bees as well as our managed honey bees. So that's a big bonus. And some people might say, you know, I saw this on a, you know, social media post where somebody said, those mean honeybees chase off the native bees and run them away from valuable nectar and pollen resources. And so there's a pushback against honeybees right now. It's not good.

It's not good. Because what happens is you'll see an echo chamber develop of people and how much they can't stand bees and how they're altered and everything else. But my point of view is when you plant for all pollinators and you get to go out and see how they behave with one another, I've never seen honeybees chase off native bees, apis melissotides, for starters. And what I'll often see is honeybees on sunflowers, for example, the standard sunflowers that are annuals.

And the native bees will show up and land on the same sunflower, and the honeybees will fly off. I don't see honeybees pushing native bees out. Now I understand the pressure, right? Competition for resources. Some of the native bees will be needing nectar in pollen. And if the honeybees have been out there and sapped all the nectar off of a plant and taken away its pollen, there's nothing left for the native bees,

but I say to you. The honey bees have very specific floral sources they go after. In fact, honeybees are floral constant. And what I mean by that is, for example, in the opening sequence, we had honeybees on cosmos. You also will have noticed native bees on the cosmos. Now, some native bees are specialists. They'll go to one type of flower, one species of flower only, but they also have a very short foraging lifespan. And then they're in reproduction for the rest of the year.

The honeybee doesn't access nectar and forage from all the different plants and flowers that these native bees do. So I don't think they're messing them up. And I think it also stems from a study that was done by the University of Vermont that gets recycled a lot. And so it probably needs to be clarified just a little bit in case you, as the beekeeper, encounter this kind of pushback from people who've gone native. So the study was that the bees, bumblebees in particular, were potentially exposed to and contracting deformed wing virus after honeybees had landed on the same blossoms, right? So the honeybees had to have the deformed wing virus as well, and it had to be enough of it. Of course, wherever bees walk, wherever bees visit, then they have the potential to leave pathogens behind.

And that's what happened. Now, what's left out when I listen to and look at some of these disputes that are going on, which, by the way, I personally am not going to engage in in social media because people just make it a point they're not, I find, open-minded enough to accept a counterpoint. So the study was involved with commercial B operations, and there again, the near zone. In other words, how far out from the commercial operations,

operation where viruses found on flowers and how far out did bumblebees then visit those flowers and potentially contract deformed wing virus? So then what happens is we get this concentrated area with hundreds of hives, if not more. So the impact on the immediate environment is pretty high. And then this gets assigned by people who are ready to hate honey bees to all bees in all situations with the backyard beekeeper over there that has two colonies of bees and that they are killing off and out competing all the native bees so there is pushback and i want you to be informed because i want you to have the knowledge necessary to at least give a rational statement about what the risks really are now can you overpopulate an area with honeybees and exploit resources too much

you can and the honey bees are competing with themselves largely um bumble bees for example can access nectar in plants that honey bees just can't even begin to. Take a look at some bee balm once in a while, by the way. It's called bee bomb, which people assume is honeybee bomb. But it's not really. It's the bumblebees that can get it. You have to have a long tongue. You have to get in there.

The confree, for example, that we have right here on our property, the honey bees can't really get down through the flower itself. And so the bumblebees also are lazy sometimes, and they chew holes in the side of the blossoms and bypass the pollen anthers, and then they feed through the side, and they revisit the same hole over and over, and guess what, that opened it up to the honeybees. Honeybees are great exploiters of sucrose, and they zipped right in there, and they're visiting those openings. So I make videos of things like that. Are the bumblebees being out matched by

the honeybees? No way. So anyway, Cosmos, that is like they're all mixing up on there, and the sunflowers haven't started to bloom yet, the standard annual sunflowers. Ironweed is blooming right now. That's a wetland plant here. Grows really tall, seven, eight feet. That was in the opening. Clover continues to be a main staple. And when we see the pollen coming in, by the way, which is a lot of fun,

sit down, look at your landing board, see how much pollen is coming in, and you'll see that your bees are on the rise, that their populations are building because the environment is starting to respond here in my neck of the woods, probably different for you but as that goldenrod starts to open up and these all the other plants that happen in fall start to bloom also so we have a big astor bloom and there's so many different varieties of asters once that starts that's like the dandelion broom in spring it kicks off swarming again that's why we have a second swarm season here that's going to be part of my clothes out but when you mow the clover it helps it out instead of just letting it go to seed because

new clover blooms within just a couple of days. So if you can mow in segments and do it late in the day so that most of the bees are not on it, I've gone as far as to think about for the mowers to have some kind of blower on the front of the mower which scoots the honeybees off the flowers as you're coming along. Because it's not a feel-good moment

to be mowing a field and see bees on flowers going under your mowing deck. So maybe there's a solution to that. So like I said, Goldenrod is starting to open. And the marigolds that I planted this year, thousands of them, they are unimpressive. And so I think I made a mistake. By blending them in with cosmos, borage, and other plants, they're not doing a very good job, or maybe it's just still too early.

Maybe they're still going to make a showing. But that's what's going on outside. That's what's growing on. And the bees are just terrific right now. They're in a state of increase. So be ready. We'll talk about that more at the end. So if you want to know how to submit a topic to be considered for a later episode of The Way

to Be, all you have to do is go to the way to be.org and click on the page, mark, contact, fill out the form. Also, some people have gone to that form and written a book, like many, many paragraphs. It takes me, I'm not complaining. I mean, obviously, you're the reason. that I'm here doing this but if something is many paragraphs I scoot that to the side for later so if you could help me out by just giving me kind of the bullet points the bullet statement about what it is you want to know or if there's even a

question in there if you're just sharing that's fine but I just don't have the time right now to read an extensive statement about what's going on where you are I do my best but that just doesn't work out very well bullet statements Anyway, and that's it. And if you want to get something talked about or you want to share a picture, you want to show a video of some behavior that you need, you have questions about and you need other beekeepers to chime in, the way to be fellowship on Facebook.

You can go there. And that's it. Let's get right into question number one, which comes from A-R-M-D-2-R-D. That is the YouTube channel name. And it says, for the two-keeper hive, what are your thoughts on the divider in the spaceer box? Do you think it is a required piece? And what are the requirements? What, if any, are the benefits of the divider?

Okay. Doing this tomorrow, by the way, I know I've said that all summer long. The two-keepers hive, the two-queen hive system by the keepers hive, is it has a divider board. First of all, two full-size, ten-frame hives, side-by-side, deep-rood boxes. They're set. They're ready to go. Then we have a queen excluder on top of that.

It's set. It's ready to go. And then we have a standard 10-frame deep box on top of that, but it has a divider in it, a very thin. It looks like about a quarter-inch plywood divider. A couple of things about this divider. One is it doesn't go all the way down and get into direct contact with the queen-excluter that's there. So there is some space for movement underneath of it, which I don't completely understand. And then, of course, the point is that now above that, right, is when your bees will mix together in the honey supers and produce this bonus crop that's sure to come this year. With all the rain and everything that we've had, I expect to have a huge fall nectar flow, which I'm kind of not looking forward to because I'm not big on honey production, but I'll do it.

I'll do it for you. So what's the point of the divider? I guess it's so that each colony has its own honey resource. above the queen excluder going at the very beginning and then of course they mix above that but I don't fully understand why the dividers there either I mean they could just mix it up right then but I think it helps to extend the queen's pheromone on one side or the other up through a honey super before mixing those pheromones up completely in the honey supers above the second box that's my best guess I haven't spoken in detail they're called the Keepers Hive

they have their own YouTube channel, they have a lot of tutorials there. If somebody knows why that divider helps, or if you found that it didn't make a difference on Earth, I know that some of you out there already have the two-queen system. This is the first year with it because it was part of a fundraiser, so I purchased mine and donated to the fundraiser and ordered the two-queen system. And then later learned, you know, from a lot of people that have done two-queen system side-by-side with a central shared column up the middle. that they grow wicked fast.

In other words, you're going to have to be a very active beekeeper with those colonies that you have to kind of assess and balance out and keep track of both of the parent colonies down below. So that's two queens, two full colonies. And I guess if one starts to get uneven, you have to share resources with the other one or boost the weaker one or be mindful that one could go queenless. And if they do that, you're going to lose your workforce into the one that's queen right. and it becomes kind of a mess. So it's not a passive way to keep your bees.

But as I said before, I'm 99.9% sure that we'll be making a video about that tomorrow. That's right. Saturday. We'll be doing it. It's going to happen. Guarantee it. We're going to make a video about it,

and it's going to be a lot of fun. But I don't know. I still don't even understand myself how the bees get along in honey supers and why they naturally migrate. back down to their own you know brood sides and things like that but it's all yet to be seen question number two comes from w r a d 8292 which is the youtube channel name just had some high winds rain blasting through tonight everyone is strapped down well but i just had a thought

what will i do if a tornado goes through and damages my hives i can't fathom 12 hives being tipped let alone what you have have you ever thought about this and do you have a plan? Okay. I actually think about this a lot. Every time I look at somebody's beehives or their apiary, their backyard, because I don't visit, obviously, a lot of commercial operations. I'm a backyard guy, and most of the people that I interact with are backyard or sidelineers.

And so when I see a bunch of hives on what looks to be soft ground, and they're tipped in all kinds of directions, what I call drunken hives, I worry about that because it wouldn't take much. you can't stack much more on it. It's already off of its center balance point before they would just fall over. So there are a lot of things. And if you're a new beekeeper and you haven't yet set up your beehives, this will probably be helpful, I hope.

But think of how soft or firm the ground is that you're going to put your beehive stand on. And I say a beehive stand. Here's why. I also see that some people buy the wooden beehive stands, which are just three inch, thick piece of wood with a nice sloped landing board they set that right on the ground that doesn't work for me on many fronts one is the ground has to be super level i have sloped ground

everywhere here so like you just go up in my eastern meadow and you look back and you're looking over the rooftop of my house so the slope is pretty steep here pretty consistent which is great because water doesn't pond here it runs off so that's helpful um when you set A wooden stand on the ground. First of all, voles and moles, mice will move right under it, easy access for them. Expect to have ants move again underneath of it and also expect to have accelerated degradation

if it's just wood of your bottom board. So those are reasons not to set your hive straight on the ground. The other thing is access by predators. With the number of skunks we have around here where I live, if I had a hive sitting on the ground, it would be visited by skunks nightly. You wouldn't even know. They would just be munching away on your bees,

and your bees will be upset. More to talk about on that later. But when a tornado hits, and there's no shortage of videos about tornadoes, high winds, heavy rain, and things like that happening. So let's think about the things we can control, right? You're not going to do anything if 160 mile an hour wind hits your property. You'll be lucky to get out of that with your own home,

let alone your honeybees. So the best I can do here is, you know, it gets a little tense when we get these high winds. We're talking 64 to 65 miles an hour. That really bothers me when it's been raining for a long time because now things are softened up. And I also worry a little bit about trees falling on things. I've planted over 250 trees here since I've lived on this property. And I tried to plant it where we have a prevailing wind out of the west. So the trees that I have to the west are planted far enough from my house that at mature height,

if they fell, they would not smash my roof. So I planned it that way. That's why I have dwarf trees and things like that closer to the house. And the tall maples and walnut trees and things like that are further away. So when they're mature, if they fall, they don't smash my house. So we think about the apiary too. So what's preventable? If you're in an area, let's say you've got a foot of water everywhere.

What would be the damage to your beehives? Are your hives within a foot of the ground? If they are and you get flooded and it kills a bunch of your bees and put your brood under water, that was preventable. So I'm going to explain what I do and all of my landing boards are 16 to 18 inches off the ground. It's convenient that that helps out with flooding. It is necessary because that's the maximum height that a skunk can jump up and scratch at the landing board and eat my bees. and I don't mean passively eat a couple of bees and move on. A skunk will stay at a bee-eye once it targets one

and gets the bees to come out in the middle of the night, which gives the skunk the advantage. They will munch on your bees for hours at a time, day after day after day, until you walk around and get wise to the fact that your grass is smashed down, that something is happening. There's muddy paw prints all over the landing boards

and the stand that you've got. So it's a bonus to have your hive higher off the ground. Now, stability once it's high off the ground. This is also why we've done a lot of experiments with different hive stand configurations. Those that you make yourself pretty darn cheap to make your own hive stand, and I've got lots of videos showing you how to build them. One of the cheapest and sturdiest hive stands that I have out there are the iron teaposts. And I'm talking about teaposts just like for fencing.

You can drive those in the ground with a posed hammer, and you can put metal conduit, which is designed for a metal. electrical conduit outdoors galvanized metal conduit and you use u-bolts for whatever method you choose and you strap those conduit to your t-posts and that way you can put them any height you want and you can also level them up just by hammering one post a little lower leveling it up and so on you get the point there's a video about it shows how to do it you just go to my youtube channel frederick dunn and up in the right hand search you type in hive stand do it yourself or T-posts or something like that.

You'll find it. Anyway, those, you can weed-wack under them. Ants can't climb the post because those T-posts are very easy to smear with grease or anything you want to keep the ants out of your beehives. That is, it's going to take some work to install. Some people can't hammer in a T-post, so get someone that will help you do it. Highly recommended. So those are really stable.

That's not going to rip out of the ground, no matter what. and then with those cross members built out of metal electrical conduit, you strap your hive to those. And now they don't go anywhere. So high winds, everything else, you don't even worry about them after that. Shipping straps. Very important to keep your hives together. The last thing you want in a high wind situation or any other rough weather situation is to have your hive fall off and come apart when it's on the ground. So the next one is, which of my...

hives let's go there which of my hives have fallen over in windstorms well I'm not going to call out B-smart designs but is the only one that I have that's a prefab hive stand therefore the footprint is just a little wider than the beehive itself those are plastic b-hive stands so the B-smart design stands and I got the very first ones that came out I think that was in 2015 somewhere around there it's been a while and I didn't do it right so I have to put myself on report okay because I like those to put a platform on which is an old worn-out bottom board they are become an integral part of the B-smart Designs stand and then I just tote that around it's lightweight

it's plastic and you sit it next to other hives while you do inspections and you park your stuff on that extra stand and then of course if you read the instructions which a lot of people do not do and you You can fill those stands with water if you're in an area that doesn't freeze, but where I am, it's going to freeze, so I don't want to have to drain it later. But you can also fill those B-smart Designs stands with sand. They have a hole already in them. You can pour sand in there, close it up.

Now we have a heavy, substantial hive stand. The thing is, you want to do that exactly where it's going to be. So then the other part is the hive sense. some people use cinder blocks and things like that cinder blocks can be knocked over by animals and other things too so if you have livestock i don't know if you do but we're just thinking about that i used to use cinder blocks i have stopped doing that however if you use cinder blocks and you can run four by fours through them four by six this room and things like that i again recommend that you put those blocks up you know a standard cinder block is eight inches so we need two blocks high to get your landing boards off of skunk range.

So the next thing is with hive stands, anchors. So this is called, I don't know if these are called augur style or whatever, but I did write the specs on this. This is a 16 inch anchor that you screw into the ground. And then you can put a shipping strap over the top of your whole hive, the stand, and everything else. And you need to be aware, though, of things like frost-heave, in spring so once these things are cinched down onto this frost heave when the ground swells up

and then shrinks back down you'll either put a lot of slack on the strapping depending on what time you did it and then when it shrinks back down you put a lot of tension on it again so you need to be aware of that kind of thing but i would use these to anchor the stand and then of course strap your hive separately to the stand itself so but you can do this any way you want i use these for a lot of different things i have um grand monkeys that come over they have swing sets and these are anchoring down their swing sets too so when they really get swinging crazy the swing set won't tip and lift out of the ground so there's lots of uses but these twist augur style anchors are really good and by the way i wrote the um ratings on it it's a 16 inch and it has 425 pounds of holding force

which is 193 kilos and this one is by vortex i probably got this and this is by vortex i probably got this at Home Depot or Lowe's or something like that. But so ground anchors, another way to hold your stuff steady. And if you add heavy water, it's not going to wash your stuff through. Water moves. If you've got moving water, it doesn't take a lot of it to move substantial things. So if you've got the ability to strap down like that, that would be good to go. And the other thing is the most stable hive stand that you can just buy ready to go.

the physical weight of it, the way that they're built, and the angles of the legs really will take a lot of loading. And that is the Lysen stands. They're kind of expensive. They used to be like $110. I think the last set that I bought just a week ago, I think I spent $145 for the set, and that included shipping. And that was from BetterB. But if you just want to Google it and look them up, They're called Lycein, hive stands, and you set up your own two-by-fours between them, and they're designed to hold multiple hives. And I think each stand is rated at 1,100 pounds, so it's way overkill. And then what you can do is anchor those to the ground.

Nothing is moving. Those hive stands, nothing is moving. So, and this is another reason having things off the ground. I'm just going to mention chicken coops really quick and sheds and things like that. All my stuff is off the ground. rodents do not move in under buildings that have ground clearance. They just don't. And your building is going to last longer.

And again, if you had flooding or high water situations or even spring snow melts and things like that, when these buildings are off the ground, you can need a lot more use out of them. Because you're not going to have insects chewing away at the foundation and stuff like that. That's all I'm going to say. So getting ready for tornadoes, just get ready for bad, heavy weather. The other thing is consider prevailing. prevailing winds because you want to make sure that you're not broadside to the wind. If you've got long hives, like all of my horizontal hives, the lands and the long-laying stroth,

and now, of course, the top our hive, which is doing really well, by the way, very interested to check into them soon. They're all set with their long axis parallel with prevailing winds. So that way we're planning ahead to make sure that these things don't get blown over. If you have other solutions and ways to anchor things and make your hives more stable, every time I see a backyard operation where the flooding amounted to like six inches of water, which I understand it's no small thing, but even a minimal hive stand would have taken care of that. Your bees would have been just fine,

but they set them on gravel on the ground and level them up or on a concrete pad, and then you lose your brood. The workers can move up into your top boxes, assuming you had other boxes, but your brood is a sitting duck in the bottom box. Question number three. It says, not a beekeeper, but a curious watcher of various bees. This year, there appears to be many more bumblebees and a wider variety as well. We'll have corn tassels soon, and that will bring in the honeybee.

Small apiary, maybe a couple of miles away. Bumblebees go after a variety of flowers where I've noticed honeybees are more specific. Just some ramblings from northern Wyoming. Well, it's funny that this comes up, and this is why I included it in today's, because I want to ask you, do you see a lot more bumblebees this year, the normal here in Pennsylvania? Let me tell you something. We're seeing bumblebees gathering by the hundreds, which is something I've never seen before. We have 14 species of bumblebees right here in the state of Pennsylvania alone.

Some of them are really tiny. Some of them are huge. Some of them are eating into the wood. I had a carpenter bumblebee. chew a hole right into the side of a beehive. In fact, it was one of the premier beehives that has the deep cut handles on the side. And I didn't notice it until there were little piles of sawdust next to the hive. And I thought, huh, that doesn't look good.

And wasn't there a female bumblebee that chewed right into the side panel underneath that handhold and created a little gallery, which means there was like almost no wood left? for the interior they will chew your beehives what you can do about it nothing because that's very rare but i have i have had bumble bees chew into the side of hives these are the carpenter bees and usually if it's painted they don't do it i have had them chew into eco wood treated beehives but it's untreated wood for those but the other thing is when you put out frames and things like that at your feeding station your robbing station we want to call it to have the bees clean them up they were covered in bumblebees this year so

that was interesting so yeah we've had high numbers and here's the interesting thing too these really large bumblebees what is more frustrating well a lot of things probably but you're sitting there you're drinking your coffee you're looking at an early morning beehive and you see the biggest bumblebee you've ever seen land on the landing board and walk right into a hive and And that's annoying because it's going to go in there and eat a bunch of stuff. So I thought I would wait and see how long it took to see the bumblebee come back out. After it ate a bunch of uncapped nectar. Probably it's in there, unripe honey.

And then, of course, it would bring its friends, who knows, never came back out. And so I thought, wow, that's a rip off. I wanted to get a sweet video to share it with you. And then what happened? I forgot about it later. Then we're doing a hive inspection, and isn't it on the bottom dead? So the bees took care of it, but it also occurred to me a bumblebee that size cannot get into the hives that have the three-eighths inch entrance reducers. More and more I'm going with three-eighths of an inch.

Now there are smaller bumblebees, true, but that tiny bumblebee, those little ones, they have to make up for it in numbers. These really big ones can go in there and take a lot of resources as a single bee if they can get through. Now that happened to be a nucleus hide that had the little round hole that was cut in half. It was able to squeeze through that, so it's a little too big maybe where the horizontal entrances are 3 eighths of an inch. They can't get through. So they don't even try. Good luck to the bumblebee. So and the corn tassel reference here, a lot of you will note that corn does not need honeybees to pollinate.

That's true. But our honeybees and bumblebees and others are getting. pollen from corn when it tassels. And you might be interested to know, a little side note, tidbit, in case you're one of those smarty-pants people that likes to know things that other people don't. When you're looking at an ear of corn and you see all the strands of corn silk coming off the top of it, how many strands of corn silk are there? One for every kernel of corn. So, interesting. But your bees will be bringing in pollen from corn. We found out that was not detrimental to my bees here because we were part of that study for the pollen to see if they were getting neon

Acidenoids, which people call a Neonix, and see if that was going to be detrimental to the bees. It wasn't bad at all. Moving on. Question number four comes from Carol Ann. What do you think about the newly approved OAV sponge treatment? I don't know anything about a new oxalic acid vapor sponge treatment. Randy Oliver recently did a discussion about varoxan. So they are testing that.

any extended release exhalic acid method, but that we would leave the V off because it's not vapor. So the exhalic acid extended release materials, sponges were tested, shop towels were before that, sponges were withdrawn because the composition of the sponges were a problem. If there's a new study, please let me know if you know what it is. I'm going to count on my viewers to cut me in on a new sponge treatment or delivery method. But I know Varroxan is kind of the talk of the town right now because it's kind of a saturated cardboard You bend it over I think it's one for every three Frames of Brood whatever the label says is what you will follow and it's an extended release

So the reason we bring that up is it's part of my closing for the fluff today and that's not where we're at now But it's coming up if you're going to treat for Varroa destructor mites it's an organic treatment. You should be thinking about doing that now If you've got a varomite build-up issue, if you're treatment-free, you won't be. You'll be monitoring integrated pest management. But that's all I know about is the varoxan. If you're looking that up, it's V-A-R-R-O-X-S-A-N. That is the latest thing.

And I was at a conference, and some people were very opinionated about that, saying that it doesn't work. Others said it's the best they've ever seen. Randy Oliver at Scientific Beekeeping, go to the website, read about it, see what the parameters of his studies were, and see what his findings are, and then you can make your own decision. None of that stuff is cheap.

But as far as new sponges, I don't know of any. Question number five. Oh yeah, I was talking about in a recent video that my queen excluder had a top and a bottom, when you flip them over, blah, blah, blah, the new ones don't. And Jack ES9 XQ says, there's a top and a bottom to a queen exclute. Whole string of question marks here. My metal excluders have no indication of top or bottom. How do you tell? Okay, so this gets us into queen excluders, which are a lot of fun. Fantastic tool. I'm working on a video for my presentation that I'll be giving in the upcoming North American Honeybee Expo, which are methods for controlling and directing and lying to and

misinforming your queens to get them to do what you want them to do. But queen excluders Years ago, I stopped using queen excluders on my hives because they were impeding the honey getting into the honey supers. In fact, I opened one hive in the queen excluder, a plastic queen exclure, was almost 100% closed up with propolis and the bees weren't even going above it. So they used it as an interior cover. And then I thought, that's it. Plus, I did open air tests with plastic again, queen excluders. the most popular ones at the time. And we established a feeding station late in the year,

and then we put the queen exclator on top after bees were habituated to coming there. Bubble bees showed up, honey bees showed up, wasps showed up, and I wanted to see which ones could get through the queen excluders. And I was amazed to see the amount of effort that honeybees had to exert to get through. A lot of studies have actually been done on queen excluders who knew.

There are new studies. on queen excluders. Now here's the thing. If you look up, just go to YouTube and type in queen excluders and see what you get. I highly recommend you go to one by Bob Benny. So Bob Benny reviewed queen excluders. He talked about that. And he's the one, so this is a metal queen excluder. This is his number one choice in queen excluders. If you look at this, if you look across the top, these are all on the same plane. The spacing of a queen excluder is really important, but then if you look at the bottom, these cross pieces that are welded to the top, they actually extend down below. So this becomes the bottom, and the smooth ones with the cross pieces not sticking up above become the cover.

Now, and I rewatched Bob's video because I wanted to make sure and give you guys some good information but I also want to make sure to give credit where credits do. Bob Benny definitely has seen a couple of queen excluders in his day and uses them on a commercial scale and so I have this for training. I don't even use this one by the way. But he talked about the bee space underneath so you've got a box down here. You've got the backs of your frames from the box below and your bees can move freely underneath the queen excluder and that accelerates their efficiency through the hive. And of course they can go through these fairly easily, but these are not the ones I use

But I wanted to show you these all of these are round and When you're lifting these with your hive tool always lift the edge only don't reach in here and catch these and try to lift them up because You can mess up the spacing and end up with queens where you don't want them and just for those of you who are looking at queen excluders and getting all scientific about it you want to know what the most effective spacing is that's the open space between the bars 4.2 millimeters is the top performer now I'm going to take it to the ones that I use and why I commented in the video about it this one does not have a top or a bottom because it these cross pieces are integrated on the same plane as the longitudinal wires so this in my opinion is much stiffer than the other one that I showed you. And then during Bob Benny's presentation, he said,

yeah, you know, the wooden framed ones are a thing of the past, and, you know, they're not very popular, but they went out into a shop because they sell stuff all the time, and he went to pull one of these to show it, and they were sold out. So not popular yet, sold out. So anyway, I like these wooden ones just because seats better. There's also a bee space above and bee space below so that your bees can move around. If they want to build burric home and things like that on it, that is perfectly fine with me because these are easy to clean. You can heat them up and melt the honey right, not the honey, melt the bees wax right off of it.

And I wanted to show you this oddball. This is called the Everything Hive Tool. So if you just Google it, everything, Hive tool. It even has a little hammer on here, which is kind of funny. I've never used it, but there's a wing nut on there. You can remove the hammer. So, but what it has is see the little grooves here. These are your queen excluder cleaners. So this goes right on the rails here and look, it matches perfectly. So the spacing on this perfectly matches the queen excluder here and you can just clean it off.

Now, have you used it for that? Have I? No. because again, all you have to do is hit it with a hot air blower and melt the beeswax right off of it. Wherever that happens, and propolis is the worst. But that's the everything hive tool that has that. Also, it has this little notch in it down here. That's for cleaning out that groove in your wooden frames. So it has lots of tools, lots of good stuff.

But anyway, that's it. So the bee spacing, there is a study. I will link it down in the video description if you want to go deep on what the impact was on whether there was honey reduction but there again keep in mind that the reason I got out of queen excluders altogether was because of the plastic ones that the bees were just gumming them up I have not had that same experience with the metal ones and so that one I don't know if I mentioned I get that one from better be no kickbacks no affiliate just they have the ones that have those flat pieces and of course the entrance queen excluders they also have it see the reinforced bar here and it's so it really doesn't matter what direction you put them but it was bob benny that uh i learned that from that

there was an up and a down and a way to align those so that's it question number six comes from mike in wakashaw wisconsin says uh let's say let's say let's say see I read that when queens mate the sperm is stored in layers there is no study listed now there were articles named and the author of articles and the publications and I'm not going to do that because we want to just talk about the topic so we don't you know call people out but anyway there was no such study listed I never heard of this but have you you've been at this a lot longer than I is as accurate it would seem to imply that all the bees will be from one drone until this layer is used up and then completely different father your response would be

appreciated so didn't this send me down the rabbit hole my first thought was to last minute reach out to dr. David Peck at better be an entomologist Cornell background he would have the answers to this stuff too but I also had instrumental insemination that I went and videoed. So we had the top inseminators in Pennsylvania, demonstrating that. And they talked about this. And it was very interesting. And I did do research. What happens? In other words, this is going to tie into the question coming along right afterwards. I think this is knowledge for the sake of knowledge. So when a queen mates, so we'll just go there. Queen does her mating flight. Sometimes it could be more than one flight.

and she's going to mate with several drones how many drones 15 drones 20 drones multiple drones if you don't know drones are male bees so and they actually mate so when the queen gets mated with these drones they deposit their sperm into the queen now the question is where does it go now the interesting part to me was the people that were doing instrumental insemination so that means they're harvesting it from the drones and they're injecting it into the queen it takes hours for that to migrate into the queen's spermatheca. Most of it is discarded. So same with when the queen mates with drones on the wing. So a lot of it gets discarded and it moves in through her reproductive system at a slow pace until her spermatheca, which looks just kind of like a little

teeny tiny white marble. And when it gets all milky, that's when you know that she's been mated. So Of course, if you're dissecting a queen to look at it, and it's not a great way to say, is it made it or not? You don't want to open up a queen and look at her spermatica to find out. But it is interesting that they're in clusters. So it says here, stored in layers. I don't know about layers, but in my head, I thought, yeah, but once it gets into the spermatika,

it must just all be a big soup, you know? And then when the queen is producing her eggs, and when the egg gets to the point where she can fertilize the egg, she decides to fertilize the egg or not. If it's not fertilized, that becomes a drone, large cell. If it gets fertilized, it becomes a worker, small cell, worker cell. So, and she releases volume, not specific sperm. So what I learned was a really good queen that's mature and has been doing this a while,

produce an average of two sperm per egg for a worker. So then the thing is, are they organized at all? Are they clustered? And they are. Big surprise. They're in clusters inside the sperm of theica, which means that when a queen is producing her eggs for different workers in different groups on a brood frame, that there's a very good chance that a bunch of those would be clustered as full sisters, which means same drone parent, same queen, obviously, because she's producing the eggs. So the genetics are much closer related in clusters, which means then as they emerge as adult bees, they know each other through pheromone. And so they cluster together. They may even forage together. This is really interesting stuff. Because this leads into another thing. So layers,

I don't know. Clusters, yes. And you can go to, do this, go to Google Scholar, and then just type in Queen Spermathica clusters, and then see what published studies come up and you're going to find out it's more than you ever wanted to know. But it's true. They cluster. I don't know if it's in layers, but this leads me to, that was question number six.

this leads me to question number seven. This comes from Chris O 684. That's a YouTube channel name. Regarding that super aggressive hive, went back and watched the original video. Scary. Did they say whether the hive was gradually becoming more aggressive or did it happen quickly?

Any insights as to whether the kind of aggression typically ramps up over time, giving you a chance of prepared to deal with it, or can it happen essentially overnight? So here's the thing. Think about what we just talked about. The queen went out and she got made it and that's the other thing which is really funny to me when people buy a package of bees and they install it. These are the most gentle bees I've ever seen. They're just the best. I just love working with them and then you ask them how long have you had them? Oh, about 12 days. Okay, you have not met the bees yet that are in that colony because the bees that came in the package are not from that queen. So you are still waiting. The queen has to lay those eggs. Those legs have to develop. They have to emerge at the end of that 21-day development.

And then you'll see nurses, and then they have to work through their different stages of labor inside the hive, and then you're going to meet them and know their disposition when they get outdoor jobs, landing board guards, things like that. That's when you can get what some people see as a sudden, change in attitude. This is why record keeping on your peas is so important. And now if we tie this into the idea that in the sperm of pica, they're not even just randomly organized. They are in clusters,

which means that you may also have a normal behaving laid-back colony of bees. And sure, there are other triggers that I'll talk about, but let's just talk genetics alone. If they're in clusters, and then the queen is laying up, how many, Eggs does she lay in a day? 1,500, 2,000. If you sit and watch and do the calculus on that, and you count, watch the queen lay an egg and move on to the next cell.

How long did that take? And then she goes onto another cell, parks in there, lays an egg. How long did that take? And then we see the rate of lay, and you can decide and figure out for yourself how many eggs could she possibly lay in 24 hours. It's, you know, basic math here.

So then once you figure that out, then you'll know that there's not. No way she laid 1,500 eggs. She's good for 1,200, maybe. So anyway, moving on. That's a great exercise for kids, grandchildren, kids that are under your feet that are in your way. You can send them to the observation hive and have them count queens laying eggs. If they can't find the queen, don't let them come back out until they found her and have made their observations and give them calculators. Anyway, you're going to get numbers like a gazillion, million, billion, eggs. That's how many she laid. Moving on. So now the eggs will emerge.

at the end. So three days after that egg is late, it's going to hatch. It's going to be a larvae then, and then it's going to go into its pupa state, and then it's going to emerge on the 21st day. And out she comes. She's a passive little nurse bee because they are doing nurse jobs. They're toughening up and they're maturing. And then it seems like all of a sudden the colony changes attitude. And really what happened was they got to that stage. So now we've got a thousand bees that are at the same stage of growth and development as one another and within the space of a couple of days two or three days You've got four to six thousand bees that are all at that point where they become Guard capable and forging capable and that's when you can suddenly feel like your hive took a turn

Because those genetics are now showing themselves So that's one thing that you want to consider is what's going on? reproduction-wise in your hive. The other thing is, something else can happen called usurpation, which is practiced by Africanized bees. That's where a queen flies in. You've got a colony that's not well defended. They take over the colony, kill the queen,

and just secure all the resources, and the hive can seem to have a change overnight through usurpation because the visa flu in there are massively defensive. And so that could happen. Difficult to prove, by the way. Then there's harassment of the hive, which can give it a turn. It can make it more defensive. Harassment, by the way, could be from you, the beekeeper. If you're checking your hives every three or four days, I ran into a beekeeper and I asked how long. They asked me to look at their bees. When's the last time you're in the hives yesterday? Well, when did you go in the hives before the day before? Well, when did you? They inspect their hives every single day. These are not my mentees. These are not people that I trained. But you want to drive away bees and cause an abscond. I can't think of a faster route than to be in your hives too frequently.

So that's harassment, by the way. You can make the bees testy. They haven't forgotten you. They're very defensive. They can't sleep at night. Raccoons can clamber all over your hives and cause a problem. Skunks, as I mentioned earlier on today. Will harass your hives by scratching at the landing boards in the middle of night when your colony overall should be resting.

Bees don't sleep collectively. They sleep individually. They need a calm period when they're not maximum defense. So skunks and things that harass them at night can mess it up and make it so they're stressed. They also don't forage as well. They don't live as long. They're not as sharp as the otherwise would be, much like people. If you don't sleep well, you're not clear-minded.

You're not ready to go. Bees are the same. My semen can harass the landing board and put them on alert. So anyway, hornets during the day harassing them can cause them to be overly defensive. That little tiny colony number 44 that we are paying attention to because they created this very interesting shroud of propolis over the front, which by the way, they are maintaining. They're touchy. Like anything lands on that landing board, it gets met by two or three minimum guard bees right there at the entrance. They are on full alert.

I'll be very interested to see what their disposition is as they mature. So anyway, you just have to pay attention to everything that's going on. That colony for that couple that was keeping those bees and they have a lot of beehives. That one particular colony had a distinctive difference in behavior and was killing their livestock. So just picture this because people were saying things like, I just swab out the queen. well there were so many bees on her chicken that you could only see the chicken's feet think about that that's a lot of bees after a chicken my chickens free range they go through my apiary several times a day

i have some of the dumbest chickens you've ever seen and they just mope around they look in entrances they stick their next way up so they can look at landing boards they're all over the place they wander underneath the hives, and bees don't pay any attention to them. I've never had chickens attacked, and they're all different colors, by the way. So we have buff chickens, who stands to reason that those would be ignored.

We have barred rocks, which are dark and banded. We have minorcas, which are black. So it doesn't matter. They don't pay attention to chickens. So if I had a colony of bees, that one day, out of the blue, after all this normal routine with livestock and everything else, just one day started attacking everything.

That colony is not going to be in my apiary for very long. If I found a chicken that I could see nothing but bees and the feet of the chicken sticking out from them, the colony that they came from would be euthanized. Period. They just would be. I don't even give them a day to change their attitude because when I went there to deal with them, they came right after me and my camera and everything else.

Okay, moving on. So we answered that. Question number eight, last question of the day. So now this came as a tip to me. This is from a inspector, Carolyn. It says, was listening to your most recent question and answer episode. One of the questions asked how to put gunk, how to not gunk up your smoker, and I learned a great trick from a fellow apiary inspector that works great.

We put a sheet of paper under the lid. smolders the smoker out and prevents the build-up of creosote under and around the lid. That paper then gets crumpled and burned into the smoker the next time we light it. And so I thought that was really interesting. I must not understand how to crumple paper into a smoker. So if you have ever taken a sheet of newsprint or whatever it is and use that to put your smoker out and then to keep the creosote from sealing your smoker lid to the smoke. body and it worked for you this did not work for me so I tried it I used newsprint and it actually was more difficult to open and close the smoker but if you tried it maybe explain better how are you just crumpling it in there and it just it's used as a

stopper I don't know it didn't work in the smoker that I used too that's the other thing some smokers might be tighter fit than others because the paper when I put it on there actually created a very tight seal on an otherwise easy to use smoker. So if you've done that or you want to try the paper method, please do and then write a comment down and tell us how it worked or did not work. See how that goes for you. So we're in the fluff section for today. If you're in the northeastern United States, state of Pennsylvania, my area, get ready to super those hives because they are ready to get nectar. There are unemployed bees piled in every single hive. We looked at my grandson's flow soup,

wall-to-wall bees and the super everything is sealed all the joints are ready he is going to have a bonanza of honey this year unless something really dramatic happens we're on our way because the golden rod is starting there's something by the way golden rod is not all the same there are a bunch of different varieties of goldenrod there's something called early goldenrod it is blooming right now the rest of it is kind of in reserve all of this flowering is about to happen please super super your hives. Inspect for swarm cells is your last chance. We all get caught off guard. I include myself. I don't spend enough time inside the hives. I do a lot of staring at landing boards, which is a lot of fun. But we need to get into the hives and see if they are making queen cells, you're going to have to take some action now. You have to assess the colonies if you do not want them to swarm. If you don't care about swarming, late season swarms are probably very high on the list of why your colonies do not survive winter when you have these high winter number losses the varrode-destructor mite gets put right at the forefront of all of that but i think a lot of people

based on what we see in spring a lot of people may have had a swarm late in the year and the queen that they replaced the swarmed out queen with never got adequately mated did not make it back because also what happens at the end of the year is the predators on the wing are increased there are a lot more than any other time of the year. So colonies that requeen at the end of the year on their own are in jeopardy. On the best day, they have 75% success rate. And at the end of the year, let's just reduce that success rate even more than that. So you'll have to track them. And I'm just talking to you as if I'm your mentor right now. So you want to inspect for swarm cells, make sure they have room to expand. Try not to have your bees swarm this time of year.

and if you haven't done mite assessments you can do that with removable trays you can do that with bottom boards with sticky boards with things like that clean all your trays removable bottoms and things like that and get a sense of what kind of mite load there is over the space of the next five days see what's going on if they're grooming off or if they're dead and dying mites or if you spray that with pam cooking spray or smeared it with basaline or whatever and they stick to that mineral oil works too then you'll be able to see if you have very pyromites in there and those colonies will need your attention. Now, if you're treatment free, we're talking about pulling out drone frames and things like that of high might count colonies. So screen bottom boards with a collection system underneath, that is passive, mic control. Bs groom them off, in it goes. If you've got these, the drones, and so some people need to pay attention, if you're going to be treatment free, that doesn't mean management free. at least not in my book if if I'm responsible for you and the actions that you're taking it means use every integrated pest management method you have under your belt

short of treatment and for those that are doing treatments this is the time to do those too if you've got organic treatments if you're going to use formic pro we have cool enough temperatures in the coming days that you could do that we also have the axelic acid extended release so that varoxan that we just talked about and you can do the dribble and you can also do excelic acid vapor. So all of these things are here, but varoxan is going to outperform vapor if you have brood present.

Level up all your hives. Just do the maintenance that you can while the weather's good, while you can get out there. Make sure everything's good to go. Trave them down, get ready for storms and things like that. And watch for wasp pressure, because along with the end of the year, we are getting bigger colonies of wasps.

I found one inside my way to be economy building, and it was one of the passive wasps, so they're still there. But their numbers are increasing, and it kind of surprises you. You just walk in a, whoa, I never noticed that nest before, and it's big and populated. If they're yellow jackets, you could be in for it. But right now we're going to watch for yellow jackets on your landing boards, and the best time to observe that kind of pressure early in the morning,

as early as you can get out there, just as sunrise has happened. you will be able to see which colonies are getting wasp pressure and in my book that's a colony that needs to be inspected another thing that I'd like you to have at the ready are robbing screens if you don't already have those try to get robbing screens have them in your kit have them available because by the time you see a colony that is actually being attacked sometimes a colony that's robbing one colony can end up getting robbed at the same time It's a really interesting dynamic, and you might think, whoa, they deserve it because there are robbers too,

and the robbers are robbing the robbers and blah, blah, blah. Well, we want to shut that down on all fronts. So if we can put robbing screens on them, pay attention to that. And that is it for today. So I want to thank you for watching and listening, as always. And hopefully we've got other videos that are going to be coming up in the next few days that you're going to find very interesting. So I want to thank you for being here. and please leave your comments down below and go to the way to be.org and click on the page mark contact

if you've got a topic that you would like to hear more about or you've got a question for me. Thanks for watching. Have a fantastic weekend.