The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A #322 September 5th

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

This is the audio track from Today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/hxQLSDH-PLE

Welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, September the 5th of 2025. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 32. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm glad that you're here. Guess what we're going to talk about? You don't really have to guess. Just look down in the video description. You'll see all the topics listed in order and you'll also find some useful links and stuff down there. You may be wondering about my shirt. Look at this. It says the Way to be Academy, a sweatshirt with stuff written on it. You can get it. Where do you get that stuff?

A shirt like this because it's going to get colder and you're going to want one. People hate it when they sell things. So go down to the video description, click on the link, buy my stuff. All right, so what else is going on? I'll bet you want to know how to submit a topic for today's questions and answers or for next Friday. Go to the way to be.org and click on. the page marked contact and you can put your information in there it's very easy and i know what

you're asking you're wondering why i'm not talking about the weather yet let's do that seventy three degrees fahrenheit outside right now that sounds really good doesn't it until you realize the wind is blowing like crazy that's 23 degrees celsius 7.4 mile per hour constant wind that doesn't seem like a lot but if you want to look into your beehives it actually is a lot because we also have wind gusts and in kilometers per hour that's 12. 59% relative humidity which is really fantastic that means no bearding. Lots of V-activity lots of foraging going on. The UV index is a three so you're pretty safe.

Probably get out there without sunscreen today no matter how fair-complectic you happen to be. It's going to rain off and on and cold weather is coming coming where though northeastern part of the United States. northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. That's where I am. You can go to air now.gov here in the United States and find out what the air quality is where you live. Here, we're in the yellow zone. That means no marathons for you today. And if you're the kind of person that's sensitive to particulates in the air, this is not your day to be outside. Even though it seems nice and it's windy and everything else, it's not a good day for stress.

pollen loads medium to high. Good news for the bees. Ragweed, by the way, is up. They're really high. You want to see a plant that your bees go after that they can't get any nectar from. They're just getting the pollen, which is a protein for the production of bee brood. So they're getting that pollen, medium to high. That's good stuff. What else is what's growing on outside? Goldenrod still tops the chart.

You can hear the bees are all over it. Clover, they are on the clover. That's consistent. Clover, by the way, if you're looking for something to plant instead of of a regular lawn. Clover is definitely the way to go. White clover. You can mow it off when it gets to five or six inches in height and the blossoms have had a week or so. Do you're mowing either really early in the morning, although that's hard because it's usually damp from dew or you can wait until later and then mow and the bees are not all over the clover. Aster's are kicking it in.

Aster's looking really good. Lots of those are still ahead. That's always good news. I don't like to see everything peaking and then worry about the dearth that's going to follow. Joe Pieweed making a really good showing here. Cosmos, of course, but I've planted those. Cosmos, we don't have like 300 acres of it, where when it comes to the golden rod, it's everywhere. So your bees have almost unlimited resources right now where I am. Sunflowers are also blooming, a lot of different varieties of sunflowers. We think of the traditional sunflowers that people are growing, sunflower seed that gets harvested, later. There's a lot of other stuff. Like there are perennial sunflowers like maximilions and we're in the

second phase of that they haven't even started to bloom. That's good news because we want this cascade of resources for our bees. We don't want it to run out until winter has to come. Not excited. Napweed, which is an invasive by the way. The honeybees are all over it. I also like to stare at them for a while and see how much time they're spending on the blossoms. Napweed, they're spending a lot of time on it. So it's kind of It's a toss-up. It's an invasive plant, but the bees are getting a lot from it, and I think it's nectar, because I don't see pollen in their hind legs, those that are working the napweed. So what else? Let's say you have a question on your mind right now, and you just need to talk to somebody about it. You've got a picture you want to show. You've got a video of a curious behavior that you've observed and you need opinions from your peers.

Go to the Facebook Fellowship, The Way to Be. fellowship and do it there check in see what's going on there's always someone there day or night seven days a week so I think that's all of it right now and let's get going so the very first question comes from Creoine C-R-Y-O-I-N-E says for Fred quick question I've not been able to find much info about a B quarantine yard like how to set up and introduce new hives to the regular apiary. So this is a really easy one. A quarantine yard, I don't know if there really is such a thing

as far as really isolating your bees from anything else. But here's the only time and reason that I use quarantine yards. Let's say right now I registered as a swarm collector. We're ever to go to do that. It's a website called B-S-W-A-S-W-A-R-M-E-D.org. You log in there, you register as a beekeeper who wants swarms. Now, then you get a text on your phone. Swarm in your area, three miles away.

Click to claim. So then when you click it and you find out, all right, well, it's two or three miles from me. And you go to collect that swarm. Do you want to bring those right back and put them in your own backyard apiary where all your bees are super healthy. My wife received some reports from some beekeepers in other states this year that they have American foul-brewed, three colonies in one yard, AFB.

That's a death sentence for those hives, and I don't know what's going to happen with the yard. So this is actually a really good question to be asking. Don't bring those bees directly to your yard. So I use friends and family. have a son and daughter-in-law that live, I don't know, 15 minutes north of us. They don't have bees, but they do have a big yard, so I park my bees in their yard. How long would I do that?

Two weeks, because I want to see what's going on. I will see brood, right? So let's say the swarm Adelaide Queen, which most of them would, if they're of any size. And then when you put them in there, within a couple of weeks, we should see CAPD if there's a brood disease, you're going to be aware of it. You're also going to notice if the root pattern is spotty, if the queen seems unhealthy, if the bees themselves seem in any way unhealthy. By the way, I just want to reiterate this. I know I've said it many times over, so I'm just going to refresh it.

When you get a swarm and you hive them, you have a perfect opportunity to get 96% or better efficacy in knocking out Varroa destructer mites with a single organic treatment. If you can do exhalic acid vaporization on a colony that you've just hived, don't do it right away. We don't want them to abscond or feel like things are troublesome in the box that you've just put them in. So wait until the eighth day. Why do I say that? Because that gives you a day or two before they're actually capped.

Once they're capped, exalic acid vaporization isn't going to get to the brood destructor mites. They're going to try to reproduce with the brood in your new colony in your quarantine yard. So quarantine yard really is just a way of saying, get your bees away from your apiary. If you can find anything out about who you think the swarm came from, that's always a good idea. Where did the swarm come from? Do you have beekeepers near where you live if this worm is in your yard? Because that's happened to me and the beekeeper that the swarm came from, I know him. He lives like three doors down.

They called me for many miles away to come and get it instead of just talking to their neighbor who's been keeping. bees for more than 30 years. So I thanked him at the next bee breakfast for the swarm that I collected because they were very healthy, good bees. So if you know the history, you could probably have some level of confidence, bring them home, put them in your apiary, but if you at all have concerns or questions, we don't want to spread or help spread American foul brewed, European foul brood, any brood disorders. So you know what's going on in your own yard, suckle back your own bees. So that was question number one. Question number two comes from, by the way, I had to truncate the name of this person

because the YouTube channel name, I think the name's a little bit inappropriate, but it starts with Sweetest. So anyway, it's interesting how queens kill other queens instead of working together. So this comment was on a video with the top bar hive inspection. When we did the top bar hive inspection, and if you haven't seen it, please go and watch it. after you've watched 100% of this video. Or listened, I should probably interject here that it's also a podcast. So go to Podbean or just do a Google search, the way to be podcast, listen, rather than stare at your phone or waste a lot of data.

Do the audio alone. So anyway, in the top of our hive inspection, I was late. The bees had swarmed and was left behind in the swarming. Now, by the way, the top bar hive inspection went really well. They did not stick any of their beeswax on any of the side walls. They didn't do any of the bad things that so many people told me that they would do. Maybe it's just, you know, first occupant luck with the be mindful top bar hive. So in a way, there were multiple queen cells, a lot of them.

A lot of people go through and smash queen cells because they want to help their bees. I don't do that. I've never done that. And here's why. I think the bees are the best judge of which queen's cell they would like to see successfully emerge, which queen would come out. Worker honeybees do a lot of strange things. First of all, they invest a lot in the construction feed and maintenance of developing larvae.

So the construction of the cell, if you see something that's got a lot of work going on, they cared about that one. Because in the same colony at the same time, there'll be little queen cells that look like nothing's been done to them and others are like the Taj Mahal. They're all ornate. They're reinforced in every direction. Not only that is like five or six bees, nurse bees parked on the queen cell. So they're showing preferences already. The other thing is we always say, or at least I often do because it's what I've been told through the years, that the first queen to emerge from her queen's cell, this virgin will come out. And they do this

piping, which by the way, recently I got the best piping recordings I've ever made in all my years of recording bees. Fantastic. They pipe around and we don't hear that. We feel the vibration through the honeycomb. And the queens feel that too. They track each other down. The closer they get to a queen, the stronger the vibration. Now, oftentimes the workers don't even wait for that to happen. You know what they do? They take matters into their own hands. We have been watching hives that had queen cells where we could see them. And I've seen a queen emerge from her cell and be seized by workers as soon as she left the cell. Now that happened to be my personal favorite queen that I wanted. She was really dark, dark banded abdomen. I was thinking

carniolan or something. Anyway, they mobbed her, they started biting her feet, chewing her wings, and just giving her heck right off the bat. Now that wasn't queen to queen combat. That That was worker bees deciding that they don't want that queen, they want this queen. So then another queen, when it emerged, they were feeding her, and they formed a retinue around her. And they ushered her around the whole hive because what she does is she goes on this big introduction tour where she gets in physical contact with a whole bunch of other bees and passes on her pheromone. So it's not always the queen that's killing them off. And the reason I'm saying this is, your bees in that colony tend to know

which queen they favor and they're going to help her along and it isn't always down to which queen can kill other queens your workers do it too we've also seen this behavior in swarms where there'll be multiple queens in a swarm and there'll be one queen that looks like she's moving around freely and all the others don't seem to be bothered by her and then you'll find a very tight ball of bees around another queen and they will not break off this tight ball it feels like a meatball in your hand And I've sat that on top of a hive before to see if they'd break it up, see if they'd leave her alone. I didn't have a thermal camera on me. Although in the future, I should probably run away and get the thermal camera because they're also heating her up, putting themselves on the threshold of death just to kill this queen. And then later you find the queen dead. And if you move her apart and get her away from them and set her somewhere else, they track her down,

and they fall back up on the queen. So they are making active decisions. This isn't just the queens, is what I'm saying. So working together, the whole point is, this is all part of natural selection for them. This is, you know, the queen that's either has the favor of, you know, the entire community of honeybees there. Or she could, in fact, be the toughest one that goes around and choose into the side of a cell and inserts her stinger and takes out those not yet emerged queens that are also virgins. So there's a lot going on, but one queen tends to be the best. There are cases where there'll be another queen roaming around at the same time.

Very rare to have two queens laying eggs. We do have the two queen system going on out there with the Keepers Hive, which is doing very well, which I just put a very interesting honey super on, not like any other honey super that I've ever put on a beehive before. And I'm just going to leave that with you as a cliffhanger. So yeah, they're designed to have one queen chosen for her genetics, her good looks, and everything else. Question number three comes up. Sarah Peters, 3277, that's the YouTube channel name.

Hi Fred, thank you for the video. This is another one where I had, I caught a queen on the ground when I did a swarm collection and I shook them off a branch into a bucket and a little tiny clump of them missed a bucket, was on the ground. And then while I was looking around, I could see the queen in the cluster on the ground. So what a great opportunity. I collected that queen by herself, left the other beads in the bucket and around the bucket. And I ran the queen over and I stuck her inside the hive. I was going to put them in. And I put a queen includeer on the front of the hive so she couldn't get out. And then I took the bucket of bees over and I introduced them then

to that queen. But what I did is I just leaned the bucket. in and I wanted to see how far their pheromones would travel how long it would take them to figure out where the queen is and then would they all go in there so with the queen include her over that entrance it also gives me a chance to stop any other queens that might be in the same swarm how to go I want you to watch the video I don't want to tell you so anyway I love watching how the beads follow each other into the hive do you leave the feeder on all winter So this question, do I leave the feeder on all winter or do I feed them all winter?

Those are two different questions. So my hive configurations remain the same summer and winter. So the hive feeders, whether it's a B-smart design's insulated inner cover that is actually a feeder shim bottom, that stays on summer, winter all year round, no configuration change. It's the Apamehive Top Feeder, which we have another question leading to that today. It also stays on all year round. It just doesn't have any feed in it, particularly when you've got honey supers on. So, yes, it stays on.

No configuration changes. No reason to alter the insulation either. Trust me, it works. Question number four comes from Frederick from Thorn Hill, Tennessee. Could you go over the back? best way to feed see here it comes fondant in the appamate feeder top on a 10 frame wooden hive do you put hive alive package in the top center can i make my own pour it into the top plastic when cool enough and if so would you wrap it in the plastic wrap and make a small hole okay so here it is

first i'm gonna show you what we're talking about because i just bought a bunch of these and i mean bought them these are not given to me so I don't have to be beholding to anyone in particular this is currently my favorite feeder because this sits on top of your 10 frame box they also make them for eight frames and they also make them for nukes they sit on your woodenware they fit just right they have these little pegs on the bottom and I'll be lined it up so they don't slide off here's why I like it from Frederick here from Thorne Hill these inserts right so we're talking about fondin. If I took, I don't know if you guys remember last year, but

I've live fondant at this time of year, so many people tried to order it and they ran out of stock because there was a run on the stuff. So some people who are handy in the kitchen, you can make your own fondant. And I was talking to the guy that represents Appamee at all the conferences. I always see someone there from Apamee, Corrhouse. and I get to talk to him about what they're doing. I don't like this design. See these little finger holds right here? See how they stick up like that? They didn't used to be that way. These are the brand new ones that I just paid for that just came in the mail and they've got these little indentations. You know why I don't like them? That's

valuable real estate inside this thing because that's where you can be putting pollen patties, winter patties, fondant, anything that you mix up. You can make your own sugar bricks if you like to do that put it right in these because you get extras of these right buy extras and don't come without you paying for them of course and you mix it up and keep it just like this let that set then you've got them on hot standby then you've got one in your hive for the winter time and then just pull out the empty or the three-quarters empty or whatever it happens to be bring your other one out and just stick it right in and see there's holes in it

those holes allow your bees to come up through here in the middle of winter and over the top of it it's all insulated now the cool thing about this is one of many cool things about it is when spring comes when the weather gets warm and you still got some fondant in there and the risk of more cold weather coming now look what we have we've got liquid feeders already here and you can fill those up while you still have a solid in there. There are no other feeders that are like this right now. There are feeders that you can put solid resources in, or you can put like the B-smart designs insulated under cover.

I can put a fondant pack right over that center hole. But then if I want to put liquid on, I have to pull a fondant pack off, and it'll have a bunch of bees in it and everything else, and I'll put a rapid round over that or something, so I can have liquid. So now I've had to swab out feeders, swap out food resources, where it was something like this,

all I have to do is decide, oh, do I want to put liquid on it? Oh, we just pulled off our honey supers, let's say, this is hypothetical. Pulled off the honey supers, and now we need to boost them going into winter. This hive cover is already on there, and I can put sugar syrup in here, or whatever I need to boost a colony, if in fact that colony needs to be boosted. So, the center thing, yeah, This is great. If you put fondant in here, I cut them in half. I leave them in the packet. The question is, would I wrap it in plastic? No, I wouldn't. So if anything, I would put parchment.

Or I would put wax paper and cut a hole in the center of that. Two holes, in fact, one over here, one over here. And I would put my fondant pack on top of that. And now it's all enclosed, right? So it's not going to dry out. That's the biggest thing with fondant. We don't want it to dry. out. We want the bees to have access to it so they can access it from underneath. Look at the way the underside is. This is right now the most versatile feeder you can put on a beehive. And if you go to Apamee, I want you to tell them that I sent you. Go to anyone who sells this stuff. Tell them Fred sent me and guess what you get? Nothing. You get to pay the same as everyone else because I have no affiliation with these people. In fact, afterthought. Nature's image.

farm that's uh Greg burns they sell this stuff too in Ohio so you could go there and they sell the endora hives and they sell these to go on top of it and they have a hive cover that goes on top of that and they have the bottom boards that are for wooden hives and you can get an endora hive tell them fred sent you and pay the same as everyone else although you never know you know what you could you can ask for the frederick done discount and you might actually shame someone into just giving you one. I would get nothing out of it except for the fun of knowing that I sent you there and they actually had to give you some compensation. One place out of the blue gave people free shipping. That's no small thing these days, by the way.

So that's it without, you know, wax paper or parchment. I would not wrap it in plastic because I don't want the bees to have to chew through a plastic container. If you get the fond in packs, might as well talk about that. This is what those look like. you cut a hole right in the middle you don't uncover the whole thing but now look at the shape of this and look at the shape of this you could in theory fold this over you're going to compromise the package but you can squash the whole thing in here so being that this is enclosed and that you also can put plastic or you can put a parchment paper or a wax paper underneath of it cut the hole here and then you could jam it all into that little container

and they eat it all this is good stuff have a lot of funnet now this is one place where if you go to their website if you buy it through other places I can't get you a discount but I can get you a Fred 10 on this if you go to the Hive Alive website but if you buy it from another website ask them though see I want that I want that Fred done discount you guys offer and then when they say we don't have a discount you can say oh could you guys tell me what

place sells it where I could get that discount and then it would be like well you know now we think of it I guess we could give you two dollars off or something and then win win sitting there with fat stacks next question number five comes from Trish Westberger 6982 that's the YouTube channel name says hi Fred you mentioned you leave the bottom round lids on oh we're talking about flow frames said you leave the flow lids off the flow frames for your hives to clean out after you harvest at the end of the season. How do the bees have access to the area of the open lids? So and talk about that too. For those of you have flow hives or just flow frames and some kind of modified hives

because I know some people are using long Langstroth style hives that they have modified to accommodate flow frames. Horizontal bees, by the way. It's one of the companies that does that. So anyway, when you have this thing all closed up, this is accessible to your bees, both sides. The end panels are not accessible to your bees. So this question came about because I said once you've cycled this out and if you've removed it and got all the honey out of it,

you put it back on your hive, let the bees clean it up a little bit. So the question is, can they clean up these ends? So there's a plug at the bottom. right there in a channel and there's a plug at the top now we need to cycle them so when they're in the closed position this little bar at the top is down which means that during the cleanup period you could have the back cover off and bees can actually travel in here and clean that for you now they can't access that from inside but they could do it from outside they could also clean these you could also just put them on a rack at your robbing station and let them clean it up there once you're done with all honey supers on your hives and then you cycle this back into the up position which is the open or flow position on these now it's big enough up here at the top for the bees to go in and clean this long channel too so the other part of that is and i haven't done it yet the older ones i had another question that i did not include in today's q and a and it was about cleaning these up

you can soak those in a deep thing of hot water. You can run that up to 150 to 155 degrees. I checked in with Cedar Anderson, the inventor of the Flow Hive, Cedar and Stuart Anderson. And I asked, what's the high temperature? In other words, at what point would those be damaged by hot water if we were trying to clean them out? And 160 is a cut off.

That's Fahrenheit. So I don't know what that is in Celsius. But so you could avoid even having your bees clean it up. You could just dip them in really hot water. Melts away the beeswax because it's above beeswax melting temperature and we can clean the whole thing up that way. And then rinse it with fresh water and put it right back in storage and be ready for next year. So those are the options for Trish.

Question number six comes from Francis Moore. Let's see. All right. Questions as I listen. Is there a link? where I can look up the packs that you put in your empty supers for storage. This is what I do. I freeze all the frames for several days, and this year they're stacked to the ceiling in my kitchen,

not bagged up to keep the moth out. So last year I bagged them, but I got some mold and moth, as well as the moth ate through the bags. we're going to talk about that so i do not know if some eggs did not die or did not freeze long enough but i did lose some frames and the year before that my house got infested with maws that was really bad i'm a caregiver so i do not live at my house at this time so i do not know i walked in one day and did not smell good and looked at the walls and i saw adult large maas so I refrozed them. I got bug lamps and proceeded to kill everything I could find,

pulling out every frame and smashing bugs as I went. We are not talking just a few boxes. I have 35 in my kitchen right now. So if you could, give me a link. That would be great. I have them across stacked. Okay. So here's the thing. I want to talk about this because it's something a lot of beekeepers, backyard beekeepers. Small scale, you actually have a big advantage here over commercial people. that being so this question the crux of that is what are the desiccant packs these are the large ones these are wise rise i use them and feature them in another youtube video but that's what we'll talk

about they're rechargeable these are the 500 gram i want to say 650 grams and so the thing is you have a lot of ways to deal with wax mods first i want to talk about the wax moth because what francis described can happen oh man i was going to bring something down here that was really cool just forgot so here's the thing wax moths can eat plastic that's right no joke so the polystyrene the rigid caps that are put on some of my nucleus hives i had wax worms up in the insulated cap of the hive and they ate tunnels into that pink Panther rigid two inch thick foam board that you get from building centers and so I have a bunch of them they tunneled right into it great visual example of how wax moth larvae can eat

plastic so when you've got plastic bags it was just a plastic bag but as in the rest of it inside is still suitable for them to live and you just bagged up a bunch of eggs they can eat through the plastic bags. This is one of the things that entomologists discovered, which was really interesting. They had their wax moth larvae collected and in bags sitting on a counter. And then someone went back to get their wax moth larvae and they looked and the bag was empty and it had holes in it. So they thought, wow, they chewed holes in the bag. No, it was better than that. They just chew holes. They ate the plastic. They ate it. it, digested it, metabolized it, and turned it into something that was actually now biodegradable.

This stuff is super interesting. Now I'm going to, of course, I'm going to answer this question. It's wise dry, so now I'm going to move on to tell you more about the wax moth because I want you to understand things. So they have the ability to eat plastic and polystyrene. They can chew right into it. Digest it. And they actually are being looked at as a potential.

method for disposing of plastic material. My stepfather, when I was growing up, was a doctor of biochemistry, and he did a whole bunch of enzyme research, and he was at the St. Louis University School of Medicine. I used to go to that lab all the time and just sponge in as much information as they could. They were training enzymes to eat plastic back in the 70s. Now, that sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? Because if you get these enzymes, they start feeding on plastic and they can break it down into something now that's biodegradable that just becomes good for the earth and usable to plants and everything else part of the ecosystem that sounds like a perfect world but what if a plastic consuming munching dissolving enzyme gets

on a plastic that you don't want it to eat think of the things that it could destroy so it never really took off, which was really interesting. The way he explained it to me, you could train them, those enzymes to eat any plastic, any plastic. That's fascinating stuff. Okay, so back to the wax worms. Here's the thing. The wax moth herself does not eat anything. So wax moths, their whole job as adults, is to find another moth and mate, and then produce waxworms. They're going to lay eggs, eggs are going to hatch. Now, I've also mentioned this before to other people, that if your hives are not well-fitted,

that wax moth does not even have to get into the hive. All she has to do is deposit her eggs in these little cracks between your hive bodies, and now they can get in there. This is why you bag your stored gear, or you put it in hive-butler totes, and you bag the hive-butler tote, because we don't want these things getting in. Now, you do need good conditions for those eggs to hatch.

So it's not enough that she just lays the eggs. Here's the other thing. I mean, if a chicken drops a chicken egg and it hits a certain temperature, we have 21 days from egg to adult. Isn't it interesting? It's the same amount of time that you have if a queen bee lays a worker egg and it's from egg to adult also. 21 days.

Coincidence? I don't know. So anyway, once she lays the egg, if it's really cold outside, it could take that egg over 30 days to even hatch, right? So here we are near the end of the year and the northeastern part of the United States. We have a huge advantage up here when it comes to controlling pests like this. Now down south where it doesn't get cold enough, it might be an issue, but here's what I want you to know. Do-to-do, if you take your frames and you need to put them in a freezer, because we hear people say,

I had it in there for weeks, I had it in there for a month, freezer space is valuable. space. So I'm going to give you an alternative, which involves wise dry or any other desiccant pack. Okay. Because it can take the place of a freezer. All we need to be is cold enough for them to die. So in other words, if you get your temps down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 6.7 Celsius. You only have to do that for four and a half hours. They're done. You don't have to leave them any longer. So now you can free up that space, but don't bring them back out into an environment where another wax moth can access them that's why we have to bag them the wax moth herself cannot chew any plastic if she were inside and survived and laid eggs and the eggs hatched

those can chew your plastic so once we've cycled them in the freezer like that bag them up that's it you're done you're safe if you can get it down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 12.2 Celsius you only have to hold that for three hours if you can can get it to 5 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 15 degrees Celsius you only have to hold them for two hours now here where I live once winter sets in your stored gear goes for a free cycle anyway so and then all through winter there aren't going to be any wax moss scooting around ready to go so that's the thing they're pretty much safe the other part of this is we don't want mold we don't want mildew to develop on our frames inside these containers that's where why's

comes in. Now let's say you couldn't put them in a fridge. Here's all you have to do. When I have my dehydrating space for honey, it drops down to about 26% relative humidity while I'm drying honey, which takes it down about a percentage every 24 hours, right? It's a small space. Fans are blowing, stuff like that. But if you put desiccant packs after your hives have been, your frames have been extracted, you let your beads clean them up because I like you to cycle that back and now we put cleaned up frames because frames that have been cleaned up and put in storage can still have condensation form on them and therefore condensation is moisture, moisture potentially is mold because there's also sugar there that mold can feed on, right? So we got problems unless you

bag them up and if you can get them down from 32 to 33 percent relative humidity, not only will mold not form on those frames at that humidity level, thanks to your wise dry packs commercial scale you can even begin to do it you'd be talking about a building so um the other thing is at 32 and 33 percent relative humidity the eggs can't patch it's they're too dried out they can't survive in that low moisture environment so you've basically satisfied what would have been necessary in a freeze cycle putting them through so if you can't do that but you can get a bunch of wise dry packs or those buckets i forget what they're even called but anything that will get that humidity level down humidity sensors are very inexpensive you can get those at pet shops and everything else

and just see how low you can get it to do a test first and that's long-term storage for you nothing's going to eat because the larvae isn't going to hatch if there are young larvae in there and you get that humidity down to those levels it's going to dry out and die in there so we're going to kill them So that's it. Low humidity increases their development time, and it leads to high mortality. 32 to 33% relative humidity.

Dead wax worms. But then they can't recycle any of your plastic, so you decide. Question number seven comes from Bee Marshall, 52-53. Probably talking smack to each other. Come over here and I'll shank you. So many of we're talking about the bees again and my above average recordings of multiple queens piping and beeping, quacking to each other.

Since she begins on vibration rather than hearing, I'm guessing the piping levels travel through frames. So the worker bees react at all to the piping. So here's the thing. Vibrations in a hive, get reactions from the bees. One of the things it's fun to do because I am recording these audio escapes, I guess you would call it, because it's like surround sound. And I've done a lot of research on contact microphones and things like that. If you want to get clued in on kind of how we're getting these sounds,

a contact microphone means that it's picking up on sound from an actual membrane that's in physical contact with the source of the noise. So if you want to start researching that stuff, you can find them. So then what happens is while we're recording this audit where, while I'm sitting there recording the audio, doing this, drinking coffee or whatever, probably hot chocolate soon if the weather goes bad. But while I'm sitting there, we're also watching because we're creating video and audio at the same time. So when we hear the quacking, even though it's really pronounced, it's really loud. I consider and hear it.

So I know, and I'm looking at the readout from the various microphones that are in there, and I'm just making sure that they're not clipping, which means they go to the maximum amplitude, which would mean that I'd have to dial those in, and then I'd have to make a note that it spiked and clipped at that point, which means we lost quality. So while we're watching, I look to see what the bee behavior is. And the bees do react to piping queens. Not all the bees in the hive react.

It's the bees that are on. Remember I said that some of the queen cells that the bees are favoring will have nurse bees all over them. I used to think that that meant that that's the one that's about to come out. That's the one that's about to emerge from her cell and I'm going to get it. And then over here, this ignored cell doesn't the top pop of it and doesn't a queen come out of it. So anyway, when she vibrates inside because we hear the sound, they're only feeling vibration because bees cannot hear the sounds. So when they feel the vibrations, not only do they freeze for a moment,

I've even seen them grab it and vibrate back. It's kind of like the queen is knocking from the inside and they're responding from the outside. Yes, I'm here. You out there? Yes, we're out here. Should we come out? So the other thing I've noticed too is if it doesn't beep for a while and I'd never hear the workers beeps. The vibrations, the gripping of the cell and the vibrating of their bodies against it doesn't create a sound that I've been able to hear.

So, but they feel the vibrational. because then you'll hear the queen respond from inside. It's almost like they're checking to make sure that the queen is still viable and alive in there because they do these vibrations and the frequency of that behavior increases as you near the emergence of that queen. Another interesting part is if they want another queen to emerge

but they don't want this one to emerge, they will continue to work on the outside of the cell while the queen is in there trying to uncap it, they'll be going along and recapping and even using their bodies to hold it shut. That's interesting and weird. So how are they deciding what to do and when to do it? But do they react to the vibration.

Yes, they do because it's an acknowledgement in a way of announcing that you're still alive, that you're still viable, and then the workers also vibrate. And I call them the cheerleader bees, but I don't really understand what they're doing because I'm not as deep as some of the behavioral scientists. that are out there. But yeah, they react. The rest of the colony, business as usual. They don't

even care. It's not like they all pause and then go back to work after the beeping. They just don't. So, interesting stuff. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Question number eight comes from Ross Wagner. I'm using the all-new APMA feeders this fall. Oh yeah, so we're talking about, see everybody's talking about these feeders. Not everybody, but, you know, a lot of people. Appamate to feed this fall winter insulation-wise, I use metal tape over the vent holes. So let's show that. We're talking about these vent holes around the periphery. Now don't forget, this is also sitting on the wooden top of a wooden hive.

So we do not see all, these are not all open vents, right? And through some of the Apamee feeders, there are vents in this area. this particular one the hive top the big one like this does not have vents in these other ones i'm glad to see that those went away didn't like them in the first place so they propolized these little slats here so russ wagner does tape on them let's see over the vent holes then puts double bubble over the top of the feeder and then a hive lid i have all be smart insulated inner covers and top covers So the B-smart, just so you know what we're talking about, just happen to have one here. This is the B-smart insulated inner cover,

and then I put a medium box around this. Then I use expansion foam around the edges. You might notice that I made my own wooden block here with my own plug, because you know what happens? There's a black plastic plug that goes in here, and that black plastic plug that closes this up requires me to get in here with my hive tool to pry it out so i just made my own wooden blocks sticking on there now i don't have that problem at all this is where my fondant sits right so anyway

with double bubble put the cover on which really makes a good tight fit and the double bubble underneath it if i attach the double bubble to the underside of the apomai feeder with holes for feeding entrances would the bees chew it up so i I'm glad that question is being asked. So what would happen here is Appamea feeder, double bubble covering the whole bottom, except for cutting a hole here and a hole here so they can access your fondant in winter

or maybe even having a hole up here and a hole up here just at one end because at both ends, they're still accessing the same reservoir here. So if your hive is slightly tipped, the access is going to be to the low one so they can get all the syrup that you have in there. But I personally would not put double bubble under this as insulation. Here's my thinking.

I lay double bubble over the top, and I use BMAX, which is a polystyrene cover. I also have the APMA covers, but those things are expensive. So if you're putting this on a wooden hive, I also put you can put a regular telescoping lid on it. You can put BMAX on it, and you can put it. you can put the B-smart Design's white plastic cover but you'll notice that when it comes down it stops right about here it doesn't cover the full depth of it so just to help you out I am creating double bubble caps and I did quite a bit of reading about the aluminum tape that kind of utility workers are using and they seal the stuff up so I make a cap with the double bubble two layers tape the corners to square them off and make sure they drop below this joint which is right at the top of your hive box so I wanted to go below that by at least three quarters of an inch this does not look good in your beehive it looks pretty janky as the teenagers would say but I don't care because it's functional and by putting two layers on it I don't care if they even have time to propylize this now rather than have an insulation underneath I have the installation over the top which does what? It also passively warms some of the syrup you have which by the way should go away once we get into these freezing nights and it should also help them access and be in a

warm space when they go after the fondant or sugar brick or whatever you put in there. So insulation over the top who cares what it looks like we go about function. Now could you leave that on when summertime came? Of course you could but your supervisor is going to show up. and he's going to point out how that doesn't look too good and all those other stuff. So I also have B-Max covers coming that I ordered through BetterB. I don't have B-Max beehives, but I like their high R-factor super stout polystyrene outer covers. And so I'll have two layers of double bubble under that. Form the corners with the aluminum tape, by the way.

and I did some reading on that aluminum tape, and I'm testing it this year, so I can't give you a practical description of how well it holds up in the weather, but I'm told from people that do utility work with those that even exposed to the weather, the adhesive works fine. I also wanted to note, does the adhesive work on wood, does it work on all these other things?

And that's yet to be seen. I don't trust these people. I want you to question everything, learn about it through practical testing, destructive testing if necessary. So that was question number eight. Moving on to question number nine. Comes from John Menacol.

Say again, what is a good preservative for one-to-one sugar syrup? Thanks. Okay. Sugar syrup by itself, one-to-one sugar syrup. This is part of the fluff that I'm going to talk about at the end of today too. But just right now, we don't want our sugar syrup to spoil. The black mold that forms in there, I used to ask this question to get no answers.

What's so detrimental about the black mold? Like if it forms at the edges, what's wrong with that? They would just tell me it's bad for the bees. What exactly? Anyway, don't be difficult. We'll just make sure there's no mold. So you can keep mold out of your sugar syrup. The most basic thing is bleach.

Now, I did my own bleach test, right? So a teaspoon of bleach per gallon will keep mold out of your sugar syrup for how long? I don't know. because I didn't put it in my long-term test. So I can add Honeybee Healthy to sugar syrup and at one teaspoon per quart and get six months out of it.

And then I can, talking with the people at Hive Alive, we can put the Hive Alive Syrup in and mix that two teaspoons per gallon and that will go a year. But on the prime, practical side of things are you storing any sugar syrup that long I keep it in squirt bottles because I use sugar syrup in squirt bottles sometimes to control the bees on a super hot day rather than smoke although recently I've been using the Apisalis smokeless system

which has been working really good to the point where I wonder why I've left that thing on the shelf for so long but anyway spraying sugar syrup and leaving it in a bottle so I've got Honeybee Healthy, Beekeeper's Choice, pro-health, all at the recommended dosages in sugar syrup bottles, one-to-one sugar syrup, all hanging on a rack, waiting to see the mold develop. And none of them have it yet. So then there's another tier of testing your sugar syrups. We're about to get into the end of the year. And so if you've got any of those, they all work for, you know,

On a practical level, are you going to need it to go more than six months? Probably not. Some people, like me, just like the idea that, well, this is the best. So I'm going to use that. This will go longer than all of them. So there's another thing. If you're trying to attract bees to a robbing station, what's the number one additive you can put in sugar syrup to get them out there right away?

You can put Honeybee Healthy out there. So if you put Honeybee Healthy in sugar syrup, something about the lemon grass, the overwhelming smell of it and stuff like that, bees zip right in there, you get yourself a robbing frenzy. You can barely fill a hive top feeder with it without drawing in bees. I just want to dye in your sugar syrup right away. So the interesting part is that with the hive alive added syrup, I don't get that reaction.

So the robbing frenzy doesn't kick off with hive alive. The colonies use it. For example, hive number 44 that is doing really well, against all odds is being fed one-to-one sugar syrup with hive alive at two teaspoons per gallon. And they are booming. They're doing fantastic. Whatever modern dictionary terms I can assign to make you think that they're way above average because they are. Okay, so because that's the other thing, we're improving their microbiome with that stuff.

The other stuff hasn't yet proven any of that. So if we're looking at the cost of things, so if you're penny pinching and deciding, if you just go with Honeybee Healthy, you're going to reduce that. If you're even cheaper than that, bleach. It has to be bleach that has nothing in it, not laundry bleach, disinfectant bleach. Nothing added. It has to be bleach. That stuff works too. And the bees will use the bleach. If they're given all these other options, all the ones that are just named Honeybee Healthy, ProD,

choice bee keepers choice you know if you put all that stuff out the bleach is what they will use last when it's in sugar syrup but if it's water just water with no sugar syrup and the water bees are out there they like the chlorinated water which is interesting to me and now this time of year they're after the salted or mineralized water more than others and with all the honey the nectar flow that's going on right now they have a huge rush on water and in the rain this was interesting to me because we were having heavy rain yesterday the bees were flying through the rain to go to the hose bib on the house to drink water from the dripping hose bib now that water doesn't go through any filtration so it's

coming from a well that has high iron content so for whatever reason you could hear them at that little hosebib waiting for the drips to come out so actually cracked it a little bit adjust the right opening so that it would create more drips for them because they were covering it in the rain so they have very specific water and liquid you know desires needs whatever is going on there and i know i said a bunch of stuff that has nothing to with mold but uh that's it it all pretty much works the same sugar syrup by itself you can have mold in it at the end of a week and depends on how warm it is and everything else the lighter sugar syrup the one-to-one mold quicker than two to one so the

higher the sugar content the less risk for mold that's the end of question nine on to question number 10 which comes from Michael Moore the documentary filmmaker all right I know it's winter while you're feeding them dry sugar but is there any added benefit to feeding them dry sugar versus liquid if it was hotter I mean so is there any benefit to feeding them dry sugar versus liquid no and this was from a video that I made a long time ago which showed the bees were actually discarding the dry sugar out of the hive they didn't want it didn't need it weren't going to use it so when you put sugar syrup on that either use it or they don't, they make use of it much faster.

It's 10 to 1 fondant to dry sugar, and I'm sure even more efficient when you're providing them with sugar syrup. So the advantage in the wintertime, though, dry sugar has an advantage over syrup because we don't put syrup out at all in the wintertime because when it falls below freezing, you're done with sugar syrup.

But those aren't just the two things that you can offer. We have dry sugar. We have sugar bricks, which dry sugar turns into just from the moisture that collects in it. And often people will say, well, it has a terrific desiccant capability. Dry sugar will dry out your hive and turn the dry sugar into a sugar brick. Yeah, 1% of its weight. 1%. So it's really not a good desiccant.

It does, you know, become kind of a sugar, break a sugar candy on its own through the condensation that forms, but it's not really going to dry out your hive. So don't fall for that. There's no science. Okay. Now, the fondant, though, that we showed, if you can make your own fondant, if you can get hive alive fondant, has the dose that also reduces nozema in your bees. So, but if you can get fondant on there, that is much more accessible and beneficial to your bees. than a dry sugar or a sugar break now if you have if you're in an area where it's not freezing your sugar syrup is always going to be the best choice if your bees can do

cleansing flights and they're not worried about that and it's not freezing where you live then a heavy sugar sugar syrup can be fed as your emergency resource why bother with fondant you know the fondant is probably more expensive and by the way the five pound those come in two pound it some five The five-pounders lasted all winter last year with some left over in spring. So if you're trying to gauge that. So that's the end for Michael Moore. Last question of the day.

So if that was question number 10, now we're on 11, which comes from Hunting Lady. It says, I removed a swarm in an apricot tree today, Thursday. It had been there since Sunday, and the homeowner was very fearful, but it was simply a feral colony. My question is, why was there no buildup? There was not a speck of comb being made. The queen looked okay.

I really need to order a queen muff for marking. By the way, if you don't know what that is, queen muff, you can catch her queen, put your hands in there, and then you can mark the queen or transfer her to another cage or something without her being able to fly away. Better B sells the best one. I usually have it down here,

but it's at the ready out in my garage. So anyway, this worm is going in the side of my double keeper's hive. Two have already succumbed to wax moths in that easterly side. Wax moths, man, I don't know. I'll be able to provide them with drawn comb, but why haven't they started building? Could they be a secondary cast-off for a large colony? And this was a virgin queen. They're a little over a gallon of bees.

Okay, so there are a lot of reasons. And what she's talking about is sometimes we find a cluster of bees that's been there a while on a branch. You know, swarm comes in. You forgot to register with beswormed.org. And the homeowner who's got the swarm on their property doesn't know to report the swarm to be swarmed.org. Because if we can just get that word out, they don't end up staying on these branches forever. So anyway, often we go and we find out the swarm's been there for three or four days, which lets us know, guess what? They didn't have any places to live.

They couldn't find an adequate space to move into. So they settle where they are. And sometimes they all build full comb, you know, not frames, but they're just lobes of honeycomb right on the branch because these bees are ready to build comb. That's what they generally are able to do. So what happens? Because if you look closely at the video I just did. of the entrance of my top bar hive, the front of it is peppered with little specks of honeycomb

because the swarm stayed on the front of it for the longest time before they would even go in. And those workers that had loaded up on sugar, not sugar, but usually honey from the hive they departed, they are ready to build wax. It's what they instinctively do because they would in nature be moving into a cavity that has no honeycomb and they need to do it.

So they're either starved, so they don't have the resources are ready enough to expand on building home where they are. Also, when they don't have the question here, could that be a virgin queen? If it's not a mated queen, they have a tendency not to invest in infrastructure, even though they're with her, which seems weird. And if they're just low on resources, or if it's too cold, which I can't imagine where she's from, that it would be too cold. But that's another one, unless it's in the 70s,

80s they tend to not have the warmth they need to work up honeycomb so then once you get them into a cavity the things change and we could certainly feed them a light sugar syrup to get them going but this is an area of concern when you're doing inspections on a colony maybe it's a swarm that you hived and they're just dittling around and not really expanding they're not building comb they're not investing in the space that's a point of concern you may not have a made it Then all of a sudden when she returns from having been made it, all of a sudden, they all kick in and start, of course, building and expanding the infrastructure and getting going. So what I do in those cases is, since I'm having a swarm, this time of year, I would feed them sugar syrup. I know this is an area that's divided with a bunch of natural beekeepers and Hansoff and Darwinian beekeepers.

and I feed the bees light sugar syrup. So we're in the fluff section. I want to talk about this. So in answer to the question, I think it's likely a virgin queen or those conditions exist. And you may see a change once you start feeding them. So in the fluff section,

what I want to talk about is here we are at this part of September. We have time. We can be helping out the bees that we have hived that were late season swarms. We can help them by boosting them. And they did talk with Natalie B from Be Mindful, who did the top bar hive because my top bar colony is they're starving. Let's be honest. So she agreed that they should be fed. So what did I do? Thank you. By the way, for all of you, everybody wrote comments in about how we could feed. And I was trying to adhere to

their philosophies of not feeding and they're in Texas and being completely holistic, no sugar syrup, nothing like that. It's kind of in their compact that they wrote up of the rules they follow. But I, in the meantime, got these easy feed packs, which come from hive alive. It has a dose of hive alive in it, but we were thinking about the follower board and places that we could put a feeder in because the top bar hive really wasn't configured for that. But then when I opened up the space between the two colonies at opposite ends of this top bar hive, bees could come through just pass,

even though that follower board was built by me and with the highest tolerances, the bees could still pass through on the edges and explore the space because I was in there, which means light got in there, which means they're inspecting it, which means then I could take this, take pins and poke holes in the top of it lay this on the bottom inside the hive and i put two of them in there

because they are in jeopardy and so then i close it all back up and that's where we're at and then i received an email from natalie b from be mindful who's talked about their new designs for frame feeders for the top our hive so here we go was ahead of the game and somebody else made a comment right on my video too says hey what about those easy feed packs couldn't we just put one of those on the bottom and I had already done that so great minds think alike so we've got easy feed in there at the top our hive I'm gonna do everything you can for them I just can't stand to kickback and say yeah well if they make it or not I mean look what was going on at rain yesterday we have high winds today we have

cold weather coming I want to give them every chance and since I have the stuff sitting around and I can do it I'm gonna do it so pollen patties here's the other thing in the past I've never put pollen patties on I listen to people like Randy Oliver scientific beekeeping I listen to Dr. Jamie Ellis who's in another neck of the woods down there in Florida the bee lab at the University of Florida and they're they have opposing views of feeding but keep in mind they have different climates that they're raising in. But I do listen to both of them. And Dr. Jamie Ellis, the question was whether or not it would even be beneficial. In other words, if you're going to put pollen patties in a beehive, they're

expensive. I mean, look at, we talked about the pollen count at the beginning of today. We have plenty of pollen coming in. When we look at these landing boards, pollen is coming in. But I want to give them an added boost. Maybe I'm over-managing them. So I am using because this came out last year the hive alive pollen patties which are 15% pollen. I put those on the hive that we did with all the grandchildren. So it's a late season swarm. And one of the reasons I also never did in the past is because how did you have to put the pollen paddy in? He had to pull a hive box off.

He had to put the pollen paddies straight over the top of the frames where the brood is. And it has wax paper on it. And then they would come up through the frames and they would come up through the frames. and they would consume it or they would be forced to haul it out of the hive if they didn't want it. So maybe it's laziness. I just didn't want to smash it in there. I didn't want to have to put a shim in there if there was no room because you also have to cut away all the comb that's bracing between the two frames to put your pollen patties in.

What would have been talking about today? We've been talking about the Apamehive Top Feeder and that center pack. So what I did was I took the hive alive polypies. pollen patties two at a time put them right on that hive and do you know it's completely gone that with the grandchildren and we put that out there we put them in a box that had like no resources in it so they really have to do all this work themselves so sugar syrup pollen patties and the pollen the problem is i don't have 20 colonies and i did 10 with and 10 without I'm only doing it to colonies that we're establishing now.

So the ones that have been hived in the last two weeks, because we're late in the year, and these are hives that we would not be investing in otherwise. I can tell you that those colonies are incredibly healthy. I can't say that they wouldn't be without it, but they're going to endure the upcoming cold snap and the rain that we're going to get, and they're not going to lose a bunch of brood,

and I'm not going to go out there and see what I recently saw, which is a colony left to themselves, that all of a sudden, when the cold weather came, it dropped into the 30s here already, 38 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit. I couldn't wait to get out and look at landing boards the following morning. And when I did, I found one landing board strewn with drones, dead and dying drones.

So, of course, I made a video about it. And the yellow jacket wastes were there just cleaning them up, getting them out of there. And so it was very interesting, but you know what? I could have saved all those drone lives by putting pollen patties on that hive since they do have the Apamee new style hive top feeder. I could have. I had nothing in the central feeder on that hive. I could have put pollen patties in there because when those proteins are absent, that's when your bees start freaking out because, well, freaking out as a huge. human response, but the bees start economizing, let's call it that. And so what they do when they don't

have a lot of resources, they don't build home because that's a surplus thing to do. They don't, they start backing off on what bees are going to be fed inside the hive. So the drones are first. They start starving the drones. Then the drones have to go and look for a place to live, but it's the middle of the night. I don't know if you realize how frequently a drone honeybee eats because this is the other part when you sit and think about well that was just one overnight why would there be 50 dead drones on a landing board in one overnight well if they're not feeding them every 15 minutes adult drones are harassing nurse bees to be fed every 10 to 15 minutes and so they're kind of keeping their fuel up. So if they ever need to fly out and go to a drone congregation area,

they don't have a lot of time there. So they have to fly there as fast as they can. Loiter for five or ten minutes max, fly back to another hive. They go to any hive they can get to and they beg for resources. And if that drone goes an hour without any resources, without any food, they can become so lethargic. They can no longer fly. Think about it. So when these nurse bees decide, resources are low, temperatures are low, they're going to preserve the queen, and they're going to preserve worker brood. These drones don't get fed. And then you'll start to see the drones just cluster together in a corner, and then the bees eventually start dragging them out, and by the morning, they're dead. So that was interesting.

Not all the hives had that. So the colony that we established for the grandkids, we fed them. We're giving them every nutritional benefit. One-to-one sugar syrup, pollen patties, they're strong as if nothing bad had happened. So we can intervene. Now I understand the Darwinian thinking. We could raise Spartans and see which ones survive. And those that don't, we just let them die off or strong.

struggle along and see if they can pick themselves up and carry on like sugar syrup here's the other thing because I was so excited about the Appomat feeders I went to their website and I wanted to leave feedback so I went to the hive top feeders and I wrote my feedback in there about what I thought about the design there there were people that left feedback there that had pictures of their feeders and they said kills bees like crazy In other words, they were very unhappy. I noticed that people had dead bees in the open reservoir area

that your bees don't even have access to, which was interesting to me. So I looked at that and I gave that some thought because I don't have any dead bees in any of the Appamea feeders. Aha, what's the difference? I think I am feeding them a light sugar syrup, which is one-to-one, even less in some cases. Now, I don't know if you've been around to see the open surface area

of heavy sugar syrup. So when you mix up two to one, which I'm just going to tell you right now, I'm never making again. I just don't. It's not even worth it. Not worth the effort to make it. So I'm using one to one. It's a light sugar syrup. If you've seen bees fall into it, one to one, they buzz around. They can climb out of it. Watch two to one. So you fill one of those reservoirs with two to one. I guarantee I could do this experiment tomorrow. could take one of these hive top feeders because they are divided into two sides and when we look inside of these things we can see the reservoir but we also get to see where your bees are coming down and feeding on the syrup let's give you a close-up of that so the bees come down in here and in the pictures that i saw this little

trough on the inside of this cover was full of dead bees if i'd had this one with one to one and this one with two to one this would be the side with the dead bees in it because once they get into that two to one they can't get out they get it on their bodies they're sunk they're done and regardless of how many social media videos you've seen of bees saving bees because they love each other it's not true they'll push each other right into the soup and they'll just drink their own syrup and go off in their happy way and not even try to save the bee that's struggling that just needs a one of the six hands that they have to reach out and save them.

So, the light sugar syrup, no dead bees. We talked about this years ago with the rapid rounds and everything else. The heavy sugar syrups and the bees were getting stuck in dying the rapid rounds, and we put the sock over the center, which gave them a better footing, which meant when they all rushed the sugar syrup, they couldn't shove each other into it. Same thing, though, heavy sugar syrups, more drowned bees. light sugar syrup one to one or less, sometimes 1.5 water to 1 sugar.

They're still getting the carbohydrate boost that they need and they're consuming that rather than storing it. Not to say that it's safe to do that when you have honey soupers on, please don't. But they metabolize it quicker. They get it and there are no dead bees in there. None. none of them so that's what I came up with on my own as to why I was looking at what I'm thinking of here so the other thing is this coming week this is it this is your this is your time you know

they're going to be making the fat-bodied winter bees in the Northeast and they need to be healthy and we need to get the varroa mites out of there if you're treatment free then you're just doing everything you can screen bottom boards pulling your drum brood out whatever you need to do if you're open to organic treatments. This is your time. Number one, if you've got it, Formic Pro. I don't use the two pad system. I would use one and then the second dose after that. And then someone may remark that, but that's only 20 days of coverage. And it doesn't treat then the mites that are underneath the cappings. Well, in that 20 to 21 day cycle, all of your varodistractor mites are eventually ferretic or dispersal phase mites, which means you're going to get.

most of them. Number two is exhalic acid vaporization. If you're doing that during, remember if you've hived a colony recently and they're set up in a new hive, your chance to knock out your varomites, one shot, one hit, they're done. So, but now if you're treating with axelic acid vaporization because it's cheaper and you're not going to use the Formic pro, then you have to hit them about every five days the treatment cycle is. five cycles five times wait five day cycles five treatments so every five days so now I've got 25 days of coverage I think that's overkill I've never had to do that but you need to have a way of checking your mites so having trays that pull out having

bottom boards that pull out that you can clean before you start your treatment cycles see what the mite drops are you should see the initial heavy might drop within 72 hours of your first treatment and then with each subsequent treatment you should see fewer and fewer mites falling. Hopefully you don't have any infestations, right? I've never had an infestation, but I've had friends who've had profound infestations. I would have nuked those hives. I would have, I don't know, double formic pro, you know, given them the two-pack hit, opened everything, vented everything, gone with what's called the real shock treatment that they offer. So because we have cooler temperatures, we don't have to worry about these high temps,

creating a high volatility situation with your formic acid. And then the last one is varoxan. Everyone's putting them in. Everyone, well, people that have had them, it's kind of the buzz. Everyone wants to know how varoxan's working out. And so they put four strips in a full deep and two strips on the second one. And so that's your max dose for the colony. and then they can leave them in there for an extended period.

That's an extended release exhalic acid vaporization. I get, you know, really good reports from one person that says it worked absolutely fantastic. They can't find mites anymore. And then another one that it really didn't do anything. They had so many mites and a mite count and then it kind of stayed that way. So it's kind of, I don't know, because I don't see them do the treatment. So I don't know. I have to take people's word for it.

If you've tried varoxan this year, how did you use it? How did it work? And of course, follow the instructions. I see some interesting configurations going on. But anyway, so those are my top three. Formic Pro works the best this time of year. And then, of course, exhalic acid vaporization. If you spend the money, you've got the portable tool, then get out there because that's easy. Very easy. We're not pulling boxes apart. You don't have to go back in and get it. it later and we're backyard beekeepers so we're not treating a hundred hives if you had to do a hundred hives it's a big investment but if you only have 30 or 40 like me then you just go out there and you go one to one to one and you can do the entire apiary in a morning five days later see what

your mite drop is do another one i might get away with three treatments and then have no more might drops because the mite counts are already low to begin with and i can't explain why although it seemed like they were really low last year. We'll see what happens. I don't know. So I wish I could give you absolutes when it comes to mic control. I just can't. Clean all your traps and bottom boards.

So if you've got, hopefully, I am eventually turning over to all-screened bottom boards with removable trays and the bottom board is enclosed. These are not open-screened bottom boards, they have removable trays. Eventually, all of my hide. will be this way. And then you need to inspect for queenless colonies. We're coming up on the end of that the opportunity to go queen right. Because people ask me all the time, should I be pulling brood from this hive and stoking up this colony that's falling behind? They seem queenless. Is it too late to make a new queen? I would say yes. I wouldn't even bother. I would not weaken a colony to boost a failing colony.

your way ahead if you don't let them get to the failure point and you feed them something some people don't like that but I do I'm going to feed my bees because I have it I'm going to use it and it's going to help them I'm going to look at the weather port and I see that we've got a cool down and rain and three days of problems in the middle of a major nectar flow I am going to feed my small struggling colonies that adjustment established I don't want them to die so that's it for today I want to thank you for watching I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead I hope everything is going great with your bees and if you have questions please write them down in the comment section of this video if you have questions about conditions in your hive

then please go to the way to bee fellowship which is on Facebook and that's pretty much it. Have a great weekend. Thanks for watching.