The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 319 August 15th 2025 ready for supers and more.

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/i0_-ib1m8Ao

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, August the 15th, and this is Backyard Peakey, Questions and Answers Episode Number 319. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description, see all the topics listed in order, and some related links that might help you out with finding more information. And I hope you enjoyed the opening sequence.

Enjoy the opening sequences, by the way. It's a lot going on out there. But I don't want you to wreck your car. If you're driving somewhere, traveling, please don't watch this on YouTube. Listen to it as a podcast, Podbean. It's called The Way to Be. And if you want to look at past podcasts,

it's a whole playlist. You can go to my website, which is the way to be.org. Click on the page mark podcast. And you get it. And the questions and topics that we're going to talk about today happened during the past week and you may want to know how to submit your own you can also go to the way to be dot org click on the page mark contact fill out the form and submit your topic not all topics get talked about of course but those who i think are related to the broader audience people

just like you will do it so it's been a busy week there's a lot going on there's a lot ahead i know the first thing you want to know what's going on outside well let me tell you about the weather 79.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not that bad at all considering how things have been. That's 26 degrees Celsius. 1.3 mile per hour winds, which it also drops to zero. Basically no wind. So why even talk about that in kilometers per hour? It's stagnant, hot, humid air.

How humid is it? 71% relative humidity. So that's not bad news either because the bees are actually fanning pretty good. And I'm paying attention to those bearding, colonies. That's when your beehive has bees on the outside. And we want to make sure that they're not too full. So they're actually doing really well. We supered a couple of hives over the past couple of days. Air quality, you probably want to know about that. It's kind of bad. We're in the yellow zone. Which means this isn't the day to run a marathon. And if you has asthma or other challenges, respiratory

distress, normally, this isn't the day to go out and be active. It's the day to go out and sit. Do nothing. stare at things the way I do. Look at bees. Look at was. Look at ants. They're cool to you. So anyway, Sunday is the best rain opportunity in my neck of the woods, which is the northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. And the flowers. I did not do a good job of going out today and videoing all the flowers because I found interesting things which you saw in the opening one of the best ones being a yellow jacket wasp nest that i plan to pay a lot of attention to who found that the supervisor found that speaking of the supervisor i have his uh i have his hive tool it's right here it's got his name on it

it says queen the supervisor and it's on this retractable lanyard so he'll never lose it Yet here it is and here he is not. Now he's a thief, I'm sorry, I just have to call it. He steals all of my hive tools. So this is a test to see if he's watching today's video because if he is, come and get it. This is where your hive tool is right here. So what else is out there?

Goldenrod. Golden rod is number one. I almost had a video camera up and just recorded the bees on the Goldenrod because you hear it before you get there. before you get there. It is fantastic. And the good news is it's not even half in bloom yet. In other words, a big majority of the field is still not bloom, but full of Goldenrod ready to bloom, which is going to be our big nectar flow. Aster's are opening. I was pretty excited to see those. Those are a big nectar source for the bees. And Goldenrod, they're loaded with pollen. They are really bringing it in, which means what? They're building up.

The brood is big here in Pennsylvania. What's happening? in your neck of the woods, how would you know if you're even going to have a dearth, which is a lack of pollen and resources for your bees? Go to a website called B-escape.org, B-E-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-C-A-P-E-E-O-R-G. And punch in your information, see what's going on where you are. So white clover, still going. Bees are still on it. They're not on it in abundance, but they're using it.

Common burdock, which the bees have been really on, and I show my wife the bees on the burdock as often as I can so she won't make me cut them down and clear them out. They're on them. It's worth it. Keep them. So then we have sage and cat mint, by the way. So the bees are on the mint family plants, including hyssop, by the way. They're doing really well. Not just honeybees, bumble bees and others.

So it's a great pollinator resource in general. Cosmos, continue to bloom. Bees were all over those two at different times of the day. So for example, they seem to get on the cosmos near the end of the day. I don't know what's going on with those things. But cosmos, nectar, and pollen, they're doing really well. Sunflowers for me are just opening and people ask me, why are your sunflowers just opening?

Well, they're not normal sunflowers. And by that I mean they're not like feed sunflowers or bird seed sunflowers. They're a wide variety and they're not huge. You know, they're five inches across, four inches across and different colors. and the bees go after those two and I love the fact that they're just now opening because they're going to fill a gap and I think that's it for the things that are growing out there I'm sure I miss something but there's a lot going on I highly recommend you take a walk and see what's going on because we're already at the point where you can walk downwind of your apiary I hope you can I hope it's the same for you and you smell the air it's full of honey the honey is being

being dried down. The flow supers. This is good news for the supervisor. His flow hive is filling up. We can see the end cells filling with honey. This is his year. It's going to happen. He's going to be so excited. And his wallet's going to get thicker, apparently, according to his younger brother. So anyway, let's get started with the questions. The very first one comes from Shaman, S-C-H-A-M-O-N-D. Did you make your bottom board? Everything looks great. I purchased the one queen keeper assembling now, and yes, the video directions are really easy to understand. I believe it's well made, fits together. This is Susan, it says. Northwest Georgia. Okay, so that bottom board that I chose to use. By the way, I should answer some questions about the Keepers Hive.

And this is not the one colony keeper's hive, it's the two colony, the two queen system that a lot of people have been asking about, because I was a post to get that thing out there early on and we just did a compilation video this past week and posted it so if you haven't seen it I hope you'll check in and see how that's going you'll also see how we put it together so I'll just answer some quick questions there about that what kind of stands did I use because I didn't explain that those are license stands a license stand handles 1,100 pounds per end so you can also make the run as long as you want to but of course you have to keep in mind the deflection and load bearing capability of the lumber that you use so we use two by fours we put that keepers hive two queen system on the license stands and one of the reasons i really like those is they're adjustable so even later on if one corner starts to sink a little bit or something you just

jack up that corner and reset the pin to a higher setting so they adapt to uneven ground really well i really like them so So we did that with the stance. The very next thing we put on were bottom boards. They did not do a great job of explaining these bottom boards. And I went roundy round to with George, who is the keeper's hive guy himself. He wanted me to have my entrances opposing one another, 180 degrees out. The big concern, of course, is that if we had them side by side facing the same direction, Then, of course, there would be a lot of drift between the two colonies.

I had big plans for that. I was going to make a divider. Long story short, I yielded. And I'm going with what the designer's intention is. We can't complain about something. If we put it together in our own way, which was my first instinct, I wanted to have both entrances facing south. Right now I have one facing south, one faces north.

And when we put the bottom boards on there, these are bottom boards that have features I want. So did I make them myself? No. Could you make them? Yes, they're pretty darn easy to make. So this is in the thumbnail today. I'm just going to show you the features of it here really quickly. This is three quarter inch stock right here on the side rails. So we have a three quarter inch space there. This has number eight screen. It looks like. It is stainless screen. covers the entire bottom. Now, I've never been a fan of open screen bottom boards. And the reason is I don't want the bees to have to control ventilation through the bottom. They don't need it.

I also know that these came out early on when people were fighting Veroa destructor mites. I want to say it came out in Florida first. They had screen bottom boards as part of integrated pest management because mites would fall through. And early on, they said the Veroa destructor mites were passive. declining at 15% just because there was a screen bottom board when the bees groom themselves or when it might just recklessly topples off of a bee for a minute they can't climb back up and get on the bee because they fall out of the hive. So these screen bottom boards enclosed work fantastic up here in the state of Pennsylvania in the

snow belt year round. So I'm gradually shifting to these and I put the word out in the past. I have friends that are always going to build them. You have a tray that pulls out. Now this tray looks like it's galvanized steel. In fact, let me find out if it's magnetic. Let me get the supervisors. Yep, it is. So there is some steel in that. It's not stainless. So it's galvanized steel. Look what I have inside. A cafeteria tray. Because this metal tray will be hard to clean. So we will be able to close this up. have a tray inside and see it fills the space and then when you come to clean it out you just pull the tray put a new tray in now my friend bill gave a an introduction to his modification to this when we were

at our beekeepers breakfast and he nests his trays in other words he puts two or three trays in each bottom board and that way when you go to pull one out and you realize you forgot to bring your replacement with you bill says just pull the dirty tray out and you've got a clean one underneath and you're good to go. So that might work. The other thing is underneath the bottom of it is the bottom of the tray. So if you wanted to add insulation to that, you could. I don't see a lot of need for insulation on the bottom of the hive. So the other thing I want you to know that I've done to this one. And I did, I got this on Amazon. So I don't know that much about the company. This comes pre-impragnated with beeswax. They say, I don't know.

This thing has an interesting smell and it was very difficult to find details about the company. But I will show you some things that I did. See the screws that are right here? Little panhead screws. Why would I put that there? Well, how often have you put your entrance reducer in and had it push in too far or you're trying to align the bee box on top and it gets shoved in too far. These are stops now. It's not going to go anywhere. So that's handy.

The other thing I thought was pretty cool, and I wrote the dimensions on the front of this, this is only open to 5.16th of an inch, so it isn't even 3 eighths of an inch in height. So this opening is ready to stop bumblebees. It stops European Hornets. It stops mice from getting in. So I think this is actually going to be.

be a good year-round opening and what's the width of it four inches so i like that and i'm going to leave it that way for kicks and giggles but i use that as the bottom board for the two queen system with the keeper's hive we put them side by side they matched up perfectly and then of course we connect the two together so they don't shift apart and because we use the license stand and we use two by fours to run across that you set things on you can put angle brackets on the outside and and screw them right down so it doesn't go anywhere pretty darn cool so that's it for the bottom board to not build it myself but I want you to know just look it over carefully here easy to build once you know the dimensions I think even with

the sheet metal we've got some tin benders out there that could make this themselves very easily and the bottom you can see that they've got little struts in there that hold it together so I like it it's pretty cool and I have a bunch of them out what leads me to think these are being made in China is first of all I can't find much about the company that's selling them on Amazon the other thing is we look at a couple of different companies selling the exact same thing configured the exact same way so you might want to get one bring it to your friend who's carpenter savvy and have them build per sample which means you

provide this thing exactly the way it is tell them you want those panhead screws put in there too to stop the entrance reducer from sliding in and just ask them to build one just like it for you and if you're building your own i wouldn't have this little tiny notch in it i would only have the wide notch and i would center it just for kicks there so that's everything about the bottom board we use two of them they matched up great If you want to see how that works, we're going to talk about this later in the fluff section, but you can look at the video. It's a compilation video that shows from assembly, painting, I don't show myself painting it, but you see it painted, finished, put in the bee yard,

and then all in one video, we also install the bees, and then we see how the bees are doing. So it's a lot of fun. Had a friend come all the way in from New Jersey to help me do that. She is also a Cornell University Master beekeeper, and did, did a great job helping out in every way, made it go by really fast. So I hope you'll take a minute to watch that video. It's not very long. And let's see what else. That's pretty much it.

But that bottom board gets my vote. That design in particular, whoever makes it, that is a great design. Oh yeah, one thing that someone said was that bottom board will rot fast or something like that. It actually won't. And here's why. Because when water pools on the bottom of that hive in the middle of winter or when we get those weird warm-up days and water goes down the inside, sidewalls of your hive and collects on the bottom with a solid bottom board, it's critical that you tip your hive slightly toward the bottom board entrance in wintertime so that water doesn't pull inside, it runs out the front.

Now, because this is the keeper's hive and we have two systems in it facing 180 degrees out, the whole thing had to be absolutely level. So we need a screen bottom board because that will collect the condensation in the bottom. We can pull the tray and get rid of it. So if you have condensation that runs down the sidewalls, the tray insert might not collect all of that. That's going to be great at collecting the debris and the varolmites and things like that that fall down on that tray. But you can also pull, of course, the whole thing out and just clean it. So it's good to go.

Empty the water out. Put it right back in. And you're in business. Good system. so that prevents rot. I think that is going to last a very long time. Question number two comes from Nicole. Hi Fred. Is it okay to mix or use Hive Alive with protein feed? Thanks.

This is handy because I just did a live stream with Hive Alive last night. They invited me to talk to them and give a presentation. It was very brief about winter preparation for your PIs. And of course, that is a wide. topic depending on where you're living in the world they're in Ireland for Pete sakes they were up at 1.30 in the morning for this so I will put a link down there you can also just go to the YouTube channel which is marked Hive Alive and it's the current video there so if you want to see what we talked about I

learned some things there so the good news was about this can you add protein feed I learned a lot of things about what can be added and what should not be added and its compatibility with things like Honeybee Healthy. I'm going to leave you in suspense. Why? Because I want you to watch their video. There were, one, two, three people from Hive Alive on the chat. And so we also fielded questions from people, but there were a lot of very good things. And I asked questions myself, even though I was the guest presenter, I had questions about hive alive, fondin, syrup, how can we use it? Where can we use it? Is there a risk of overdosing? And can we add other things to it? Some things, yes, some things, no. So I'm going to let it come from

the horse's mouth. Darra, who's the man. He decided what's good, what's not. So I hope that you'll watch that. But there are some proteins that can be added. So I'm just going to leave it to them I don't want it to come for me because if the information changes I want them to of course link and expand on that question number three comes from Tom McMinville Oregon I was watching your video this morning and you were talking about bee weaver and is a varroa sensitive queens and I had purchased bees from our weaver so I looked them up and they are neighbors with their house just almost adjoining each other any comment on whether it's their bees are the same i did purchase two queens because of rosa sensitive comment and i'm

wondering if the ones i had purchased earlier in the year could be the same okay bee weaver and r weaver b weaver b-weaver b-e-weaver b-e-weaver b-e-e-wea-e-a-v-r that's where i get queens when i buy queens through the mail from there so um r-weaver they're related they have different methodology as far as how they're keeping and raising their bees how they do selective survivor stock comes from bee weaver the others are treated and pretty much routine commercial treatment of the bees so the genetics are not the same so if you want survivor stock and all those years of genetics that have been worked up by daniel weaver and his team there then it's through bweaver.com b-e-wea-e-we-r and i know this has been confusing for people in the past but once you get on the

website and see what they are you'll find out that they are very deep different. So if you already bought the Queens and you got them from R. Weaver, I just hope they work out well. Those are just not the ones that I get. I've done several interviews with Daniel Weaver, by the way, and I spoke with one of his top employees while I was down at Austin, Texas, because they invited me there to their State Beekeepers Association meeting and their annual conference. And it was great to have these little sideline conversations, and I did video those interviews. So if you want to look at that video you can also learn more about how they manage their genetics including temperament and things like that so that's the end of question number three r weaver b weaver different same family different methods completely separate

companies question number four comes from julis julys in ravina ohio hi fred my double nuke swarm today they bivouacked in a black cherry tree about 25 feet up I scrounged up some old combs and put up a swarm trap, baited the swarm commander. They were scouting it heavily when I left. I will check in the morning to see if they went in. Okay, now that's a big cliffhanger. So it's really not a question, just kind of what's going on and what they did. So this is why I want to revisit something, which is a lot of fun, and I'm going to put out a video about it this weekend.

Let me just tell you what happened. So I have grandchildren, I have four of them. Three boys, one girl. And to the two nine-year-olds, moderately, of course, we know the supervisor. He's all bees all the time, day and night, sleeps it, thinks it, eats it, he knows stuff about bees. So we know Quinn, the supervisor, is on top of things. His other cousin, his first cousin, which hangs out with him all the time, he's moderately interested in bees. Now we have the other grandson who's six, he doesn't care about bees at all.

he slaps on and things like that so he's out then we have the three-year-old granddaughter who never talks about bees other than my wife when she's babysitting her makes her watch me on tv with the bees now what has this got to do with what's going on here well this 25 foot up swarm by the way from julis here in ravina ohio we had a swarm in the tree about 25 feet up the very top of the tree tree, a goner, a swarm you wouldn't even touch with a 10-foot pole because that 10-foot pole won't reach it. But don't I have a cathedral light bulb changer? It's a heavy-duty pole that'll extend all the way to the top of that tree. What do we want to put on the end of it? A trash can. So we put that wire trash can that we've been talking about and using several times. It is a handy, lightweight piece of gear and it works

fantastic. So all the grandkids were here. Saw the swarm. End of the day. They're all eating ice cream cones and stuff. Eating our food. Wasting our time. Making a mess. And I said there's a swarm. I'm going to go out there. I'm going to get it. Does anybody want to come with me? So the two boys, of course, Johnny on the spot, we're in. They run out. They get their B-suits like firefighters getting ready to jump on the truck and zip away. Rabbit deployment. Doesn't the three-year-old out of the blue? She's never done this before. She's going to comes running to the door, tells grandmother to get her B-suit. She's going with the boys.

She's going to see bees. She has never put on a B-suit before. She has never gone out to the B-yard, never cared. And here she is out of the blue because we're talking about collecting a swarm. So what do we do? We made a video about it. A very candid, casual, easy-going video. Let's all go out there.

And that 3-year-old was out there in her B-suit. This close to the bees, watches us bring them down, did not lose interest, no short attention span theater here, engaged, staring at them, yelling about bees and how cool they are. This was a moment that just came out of the blue. So the supervisor took note and he said, grandfather, I think we have a new beekeeper here. And I have to agree. If this is a trend, if this is just the beginning, this is like a child that maybe never, talked and all of a sudden one day starts using full sentences. Now all of a sudden this three-year-old is some kind of beekeeper, at least be interested person. And so that video is going to come out.

We made it. I handed off my phone to Quinn. He made some videos. My wife made some videos. We took some photos. And so we'll get the whole thing. And I demonstrate how to get your bee out of a tree that high. And of course, we hived it. We did everything else as a late season swarm. Why don't we get such a big swarm by the way well the ivory beehive has been wearing its bees for days the thing is chocka block with bees there's 15 frames in there it's the barrel-shaped hive it's always full of bees and so they were bound to swarm at any time but it generated what would be like a prime swarm it was large we put it in a single deep 10-frame langstroth with a medium already on it all drawn comb all ready to go they're in it they stayed they liked it do you think the boys were interested in watching it go in

the other one o're Ryan he's queen's age he comes over so Ryan look at ladies bees going in here how cool is that he goes cool is that it then can i go play now that they had their B suits on you know what they were doing they were killing yellow jackets i don't even know what to say so that's it you got something that high look into that trash can method watch the video this weekend by the way i love that pole here's why so because i'm not going to do a lot of narration on it so i might as well tell you right now we put the trash can on the pole and extended the pole all the way up and so you can stand there with the pole on the ground no lifting you're not holding it on with your shoulders you're not straining or stressing and so the whole time we sit there with it sitting on the

ground we just send the boys out to look at it. Tell me, are the bees leaving the branch and going into the trash can or are they staying on the branch? What's happening? They left the branch. They went in the trash can. We got them down. And then we got the kids to look at them and we put a queen excluder on top of the trash can so that they couldn't fly anywhere else, even though they didn't try to. And this way, the kids all gathered around like it was some kind of honeybee campfire and they just stared at them. And we could see the rest of the bees coming off of the tree branch finding their way down through this wire, trash can, which is fantastic because the pheromones just pass through it freely. It's not like a bucket.

And because the pheromones are passing through freely, bees are coming from all directions just congregating onto it. And it sounded like a swarm in the air because the remaining bees were coming down and doesn't the three-year-old sit right in the middle of it, just like it happens every single day for her. That was a moment that I wanted to share with you here today on YouTube on the way to be she's on her way she can have anything she wants in my book okay so question number five this is from Eric Cox Creek Kentucky buckwheat I used it as a cover crop in the garden I didn't think the bees had any interest in it until my wife noticed they were all over it around 10 a.m. They would work it for about an hour and then leave you mentioned at one time you

didn't see bees on your buckwheat so I thought I would say you our observation. So my buckwheat, which I planted this year for the first time ever, is spread out everywhere on my property. Right now it's like two or three feet tall. It's actually pretty darn good and it's loaded with blossoms. I don't know if this is the second round. In other words, the first round was done. It's seeded. Now these are the second round from the seeds because we frost seeded it and we had blossoms so these can't be those original blossoms. So I think it's just going on its own now. So it's reseeding even though it's an annual plant. The honeybees are still not on it, but you know it browses it, the deer. We have an abundance of deer here and they are in your face.

They don't care and they're eating all your stuff. But I will keep an eye out. If I see honeybees on the buckwheat, I'm going to be very happy about it. I'm going to make videos. I'm glad it's working for Eric there in Cox's Creek, Kentucky. Thanks for sharing that is working great. So buckwheat's grown. It's doing all the good stuff. Question number six, which, by the way, is going to be the last one for today.

Because I've got things to do. The weather's really nice outside. It's hard to be inside on a day like today when things are happening in every direction. So anyway, the last question. Question number six comes from Donald from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster, widely known for our Amish communities there. And we have Amish.

all over even where I live so so they got this notification below how would you cover a hive says I'm worried about overheating the hive I have an info sheet on the aqua do it pesticide I don't even know what that is if you want to see all the info provided says you're receiving this email because there is a pesticide application scheduled for August 14th and within 500 feet of your address so if you are hypersensitive, please take extra precaution to protect yourself during this event. Stay inside for approximately 8 p.m. until 11 p.m. It's not a bad time of day, by the way, 8 to 11. That's not terrible.

Keep all the windows closed. If you have an apiary, you may cover the hives as an extra safety measure, but we will not spray within 500 feet of your location. Okay, so here's the thing. You can't just walk out there. at 8 o'clock at night and throw screens on your hives and protect them from a spray event. You need a day's notice because you need to go ahead and put your screens on your hives for the entire day, which means the night before.

So if you get a notice at noon that they're going to be spraying at 5, you've got foragers everywhere. You can put a screen, but you're just blocking all the forages from getting back on the hive, and you're keeping those that are already in-in-in, but the bulk of your forages are out. and about and will be exposed. So but by APM I would hope most of them are in so if you got a late notice you could wait of course until the last minute and put them on get as many bees in as you can. Now the easy thing to do the concern about overheating your bees. This is a time where I would suggest venting your hive if you're going to close up a fully productive fully loaded hive we better hope that

that there's no bearding going on outside and stuff like that. It complicates your ability to close it up. This is a robbing screen. This is made by B-Smart Designs. Here's another one by Ciracell. It has more venting in it. The other thing is, once you put these on, keep in mind your bees can handle a lot.

It's not the best conditions for your bees, but bees that have ventilation, even tiny ventilation openings, can really move the air around inside and keep themselves going. OK. So the idea that you're going to suffocate your bees is probably pretty reduced. If your bees are in direct sunlight and the day

that they're going to spray is going to also be on a hot, clear day, then you may want to provide some shade for your bees. And for back-air beekeepers, this is possible. For those that are commercial, of course, with hundreds of hives, you get a big issue on your hand. I would hate to have to provide hundreds of bags over your beehives. The next option is you might have screens for your honey drain. So if you've got 600 micron screens, which are bags, you can also get what's called paint

strainers if you don't already have them. And I realize if this is happening immediately, you don't have time to do this. But I'm saying this, it's a multi-purpose tool. If you've got a honey strainer that's 600 microns, 400 microns, and so on, that's. used to strain paint you can just use thumbtacks or push pins to put those over the entrance of your hive and just use it to make sure that they can't leave and that gives you maximum ventilation maximum air movement and it doesn't tear it up it doesn't ruin it and then when the event is over with and it's safe again and it's dry then you can just pull those back off those are very inexpensive these will also help you with robbing and one of the advantages is of

of course of a robbing screen is you can do this you can close up a hive for transport with them because the bypass is on the top you can also uh close it off and limit the exposure so that it is in fact a robbing screen so at the end of the nectar flow that's when there are a lot of foragers out and about that are running out of resources in the environment so what do they do they're idle they turn to theft and one of the biggest threats to the beehives in the apiary at the end of the year are other bee colonies they will overwhelm smaller colonies in a microsecond because they have a fast workforce and they will turn into robbers the other thing is the pressure from what we found out at the edge of the woods in the last couple of days here the yellow jacket wass at the end of the

year so your last harvest we're also worried about those those attacking. So having something like this, a robbing screen, no matter which one, this is the Cirrusel version, this is the B-smart Designs version. Having those on your hives will make it difficult for the bees that are doing the robbing. The initial scouts are the ones that we don't want them to get past the guards on the landing board. We don't want them to get in so we redirect them and make them find their way through kind of a labyrinth. So loss are bad at that, by the way. Bees are very good about it. If you want to know if the bees hovering around your beehive are robbers or residents,

where are they approaching the beehive? The sides up under the cover, up under the bottom, which is another reason why I don't like those open bottom screenboards because all the smell of all of that great honey that they're drying out is going out through the bottom of the hive and you'll see bees and everything else bees hornets and wash hornets are was all wass are not hornets they'll gather on the bottom trying to get to that and because they smell it and it's right there skunks will scratch at the bottom of your hives too if they can reach them and everything is attracted to that scent so we would like that to come through the entrance only where the guards are that's just my two cents on that so because we're in the fluff section here uh survey responses by the

way. If you go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, there are surveys there for people to answer. So you may be wondering, well, Fred, what are the results of the surveys? You can go and look at them, of course, but I'm going to read them to you here. So I invited people to participate in a backyard watering experiment, which is where you use pure, filtered water, whatever it happens to be, PUR, Britta, whatever you're drinking water is, the highest quality water you can put out. I asked people to put out glass, like we put pie plates out, and then of course vinyl, which all vinyl is plastic, all plastic is not vinyl. So we had vinyl bases from planters and things like that.

And then we put rocks of the same type in each one. I wanted everyone to do this for seven days. And then report back, was there a preference? So people responded within hours of the survey going out. So did you do it for seven days or have you already been doing this ongoing? It made me question the results that I was getting because I think they half read the answer and just said, don't use plastic. So the options were the plastic planter base was visited the most and emptied quicker. 7% of respondents said that.

The glass drinker was visited the most and emptied quicker. 27% said that was the case and then of course the final option was there was no significant difference in water consumption between glass or vinyl 57% said no significant difference so I hope the tests are ongoing because these are very different from the results I'm getting in my own backyard so I put out glass pie plates I added more today. We have the vinyl bottoms. So the bases from the, they're just like, if you went to the garden center and you bought a pot that had a separate bottom for it,

they're plastic or vinyl. And that's what I put out there. And that still has water in it every single day. And the glass drinkers are emptied every single day by the bees. So my resolution. results are different but 57% said it doesn't really matter they don't care okay so we're gonna retire that the next one is what are your favorite honeybee publications and this surprised me do you know that 63% of my viewers do not

subscribe to any periodical none zero zip bee culture the American Bee Journal nothing in fact some of the comments were like YouTube all the way I can't disagree. I would say YouTube is a great resource. I'd check it on myself. I watched a whole documentary about ants this morning, for Pete's sakes. Okay, so the American Bee Journal led the group. 19% of respondents said the American Bee Journal is it. B culture, 14%. So not a huge difference, kind of split there. And then I don't subscribe to any 64. And I subscribe to a publication that isn't listed. So 4% have a different pub. that they subscribe to.

There's entomology and all these other publications that are good to have, but I was really surprised. The other thing is how many people have purchased books? We did that survey a while ago. Fewer than 50% purchase or even read books about honeypeas. Another thing that surprised me because I like to read stuff all the time. I was talking to Jeff Orchoff, Mr. Ed, he doesn't read anything. he just takes his own advice and does everything perfectly without flaw well he's almost as good as dirt rooster

which is randy mcalfrey so mr at is almost as good as randy so let's see survey responses that's done top our high video is coming up that thing is loaded it's very active they're doing great things in there i can't wait to see what kind of i hope it's great when we pull the top bars up i've been avoiding doing it while the temps are in the 90s because remember that the frames aren't there the top bar just has honeycomb down and of course everybody wants to send me their own observations which they're saying that i'm going to find out that they have attached themselves to the interior side walls even though they're angled 30 degrees or whatever the angle is we're going to find out and i'm going to use a really long bread knife and i'm going to pull away the follower board and we're going to go from that in and work

our way through and if they are attached we'll just carefully cut them away Keepers hive I already said that that's there you can watch that video if you have questions please ask away happy to answer those and the nectar is incoming so just a reminder check your hives they could be headed for being honeybound if they are you're going to want to super those right away and then of course this warm video with the grandkids it's just a feel-good video to watch it's just fun there's not a lot of technicality in it and uh the boys were all there good to get that video going so i want to thank you for being here with me today i hope that you have a fantastic weekend ahead and that everything is going well for you and your bees thanks for

watching your gloves off don't put your fingers in front of my lenses okay get over there i can see the bees now if the queen's in the basket yep the other bees are going to go to the basket and they will leave that There's still a little bit more. Do you think they're going to the basket or they're going to the tree branch? I think they're going to the basket. Okay, Quinn, bring me your camera? I didn't know if you wanted me to zoom in. No zooming, that's okay.

Okay, yep. What do you guys got to say? So this is the way to be. This is the way to be. What else? This is a way to come. It is. So Orion and Quinn, how high you think this is.

Okay. Thank you.