The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A 324 September activities for the backyard keeper.

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/--Y8Qt1Yckw

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today's Friday, September the 19th, and this is Backyard Beatkeeping Questions and answers episode number 324. 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 to the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order and any helpful links that you can use later on. Also, you should know that this is a podcast. You can just Google. The Way to Be podcast and find it. If you want to know how to submit a topic or a question for a future episode, please go to my main website, which is The Waytobe.org and click on the page marked contact. Fill out the form and there you go.

If you've got something on your brain right now and you just need an answer and you want to share a picture, you've got a question, what is going on in your hive? Please go to the Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook. And there you can talk amongst your peers, day or night, seven days a week. And what else is going on? We should probably talk about what's going on outside. Oh, look, 74.3 degrees Fahrenheit, pretty sweet for the end of September here in the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania.

Things, of course, are going to be different probably where you are, but that's 24 degrees Celsius. 1.8 mile per hour winds, so basically no wind, but if you want to know it in kilometers, that's 3 kilometers per hour. Seventy-three percent relative humidity. The beehives are covered in bees. So what we call that when there's a bunch of bees on the front hanging on the landing board, up underneath the hive visor, for example, it's bearding. And they're drying the honey down. The air is thick with honey still. Extended nectar flow here. So 73% relative humidity is not as good as last week. It was much better, much drier, but no meaningful rain in the forecast.

Anyway, UV index is 6 here. So nice and sunny, pretty decent pollen income. Remember now I'm rating the pollen, not for allergy levels, which are low, by the way, but pollen availability for your bees. It's coming in heavy. So I'm going to call this a heavy pollen time. and Sunday coming up here in the northeast is going to be the hottest. 78 degrees Fahrenheit, probably round that up to 80.

Who knows what's going on? Air quality is good, so that means the fires, wherever they're happening, aren't polluting the air here too bad. And the nectar flow is on. People are reporting gains. Although I have to say we had a gathering this week and talked to our beekeepers in the area, and most of them are reporting lower than average, China yields and we're in a minor drought so we haven't had enough for any

things for drying out and flowers for example like Cosmos really prevail when it's dry out there so I know what you want to know what was going on in the opening sequences of today's video I basically featured one flower variety and what is it marigolds so the marigolds are doing fantastic this time of year and I've ignored them in the past I never planted marigolds before as a pollinator plant and there are things that you should probably know because the ones that my wife planted are three and a half four feet tall which is pretty impressive those were the ones in the opening sequences today pollinators are

using them but then I try to do a little research on those and they're supposedly according to the research I did not very good for pollinators that the best ones are the lower ones those with fewer petals and more of course of the pollen anthers and the nectaries in the center that are accessible to pollinators like our honeybees. But the honeybees were on them. Goldenrod remains strong. So lots of heavy golden rod because I have semi-wetlands where I am. So the drought or lack of rain hasn't really impacted the golden rod. In fact, it may actually be serving to concentrate the sucrose that's out there. And Maximillians are just now starting to open. Cosmos, again, we have

really large cosmos collection. Those are popular with a lot of pollinators, not just the honeybees. We do see butterflies flying around. So those are doing good. And so putting out pollinator-friendly flowers and plants is just good across the board. It doesn't have to be just for honeybees. Sunflowers are still open, still going well. And of course, the old standard white clover is doing great.

So the other thing is, just since we're opening up here, I want to remind you that a lot of plant and seed companies are offering deep discounts on their seeds. I would buy those like I did an hour ago before coming on because I want to make sure, you know, and take care of my own needs. But seeds are discounted. This is a time to buy them. Buy them when they're cheap. Buy them when people are not thinking about it. Because in spring, all of a sudden people wake up and think I want to have a garden. And that's great. But the seed, varieties that you want either may not be available in the quantities you want and so on. So I did get seeds today. And what else? I think that's just about it. We should probably get started. So the very first question today comes from Wendy. So question number one, Seattle, Washington. Hi Fred, is there a way to tell the age of an egg by looking at it?

I transferred three brood frames from a struggling hive Monday and on inspection of the donor hive I couldn't find the queen but I did see eggs so there's some things about eggs I want you to know and seeing eggs doesn't always mean the chapa queen either but in the opening the thumbnail today see these this company by the way is called aperture apiary and this is worker bee development so when you're teaching and want to show kids they like models and things like that so here on the end day one when a queen lays an egg that egg stands straight up now of course what we're looking at here is not

oriented right it would be like this roughly 13 degree angle but the eggs that have just been placed are harder to see for the beekeeper because we're looking straight down on the egg which means that little egg is pointing out at you now a day later it's at a slight angle roughly 45 degrees and on day three it's laying flat on the bottom just like it says day three there so aperture apiary makes these this was not a gift i bought these so i'm promoting them out of my generosity and good nature so anyway yeah that's how you can tell and then after that the eggs hatch you know when i was new to beekeeping i wanted to video every stage of growth and development

and i wanted to get a video of the moment the egg hatches it doesn't it basically absorbs the egg, it's anticlimactic. There's nothing cool that happens. It just turns into a larva. So that's what happens. It consumes the egg casing, becomes a larva, starts getting fed by nurse bees and off they go. But yes, you can tell.

Now, one of the reasons I wanted to mention that not all eggs are from, you know, the queen. You might have a laying worker. So you would see little clusters of the egg on the side of the cell and not all the way down at the bottom. you also see kind of shotgun pattern hit and miss all over because they just kind of put their eggs wherever they want to and so they're often clustered don't go all the way to the bottom and spread out

all over the place but if they're consistent and you have a really predictable steady pattern that's concentrated which makes a nurse bee's job easier then you'll see them in the middle and then you know that you've got a queen that's been in there within the last three days so that's good news so I hope that answered Wendy's question. Question number two comes from Pamela and it says I would like to get the Apisalas smoker that you showed. A little hesitant to buy it right now though because I thought I heard they were coming out with a new design. Do you know if this is the case? I also wondered if you've tried the stronger vapor yet. Thank you. Okay. So the Apisalis it plugs in. It is a battery powered VAP system. So there's really no smoke, even though we're calling it a smoker. And I just used it

on the top bar hive inspection that I just did. In fact, I haven't used my actual smoker for a while. The vape system from APA Sala works really well. This is going to sound like an advertisement. It is not. So what happens is they are coming out with a new one and you get this fluid that you've put into it. and I did a video about it so you can go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Donan. In the top right-hand corner, you can type in Apisalis, Apis-O-L-I-S. And you'll see my review of it, so it shows all the features. So what's coming out that's new is not a new system, but a new oil, a new mix. It's supposed to give the exact same reaction as smoke.

But the thing of it is, I've never had them not get under control with the current formula and I do not have the new one so I ordered it I'm waiting for it in fact I ordered another vape unit because what I'm going to do and I bought it they didn't give it to me so I'm gonna load one with the new oil one with the existing oil system both delivery vape systems identical and we are going to as the colonies get a little more testy near the end of the year and they do, we'll do a little bit with the one and a little bit with the other and see what kind of reaction differences we get from the bees. So, I mean, why would they bother coming out with a new

formula if the old formula was all that we needed? So apparently even they think something stronger is necessary. Because I think some of the early responses were from people who kept highly defensive colonies and had to revert to actual smoke. And there are air. areas that won't even allow you to have a lit smoker because of high fire potential. And you can blame beekeepers that have been careless in the past who put smokers in the back of their trucks and drove down the road only to have their smoker reignite and light all their bee equipment on fire and then they're just blazing a trail down the highway. So there are parts of the world, not just the United States, but there are parts where you can't

have an ignited smoker or a source of combustion and that's where something. something like a vape system comes in. And let's not ignore the fact that they're super convenient because you turn it on, you use it, you're done, you turn it off, you put it away, you go. Nothing's hot, you don't have to put it in a case to close it up. But let's say that you did want to keep your traditional smoker. Don't forget these smoker pellets that work really good.

The switchgrass pellets, for those of you who are uptight about your smoker after being lit going out 20 minutes or an hour into your, inspection process in your apiary and then having to relight it so the switchgrass pellets from urn seeds that are sold by the northwestern Pennsylvania beekeepers association that is the best smoker fuel i have ever used and it is a fundraiser that benefits a non-profit which helps with honeybee education so i did my plug for that and the apisalus unit as soon as the new one gets here you know the unit itself should be the same the formulas are different so I'm going to be doing some further testing with that but I would say if you're on the fence about where when to get one

get one so just go ahead if you want one you're going to find out super convenient uh one of the guys I was talking to Brian Cooper from Castle Hives uses the Apisala smoker exclusively he no longer has a smoker that you like. So he's another person you can check in with. He likes them. He uses it all the time. His is all grungy and dirty. Mine is clean and pristine. All right, moving on. So the smoker doesn't change the formula does. Question number three. Comes from Kathy Hathaway says here. I'm going to ask you where did where you had all the damaged trees from last winter from the deer. Did you end up losing all those trees that they Okay, so what we're talking about is on my property here, and it's a very good pollinator tree, by the way.

Staghorn sumac. And it's on a list of trees that deer don't eat. But didn't the deer, last winter, with the extended winter and the deep snow, come through and eat the bark off of it? Yes, it killed the stand of trees. They're still dead. It's a conspicuous stand of dead trees. So I had this genius idea. I'm going to use those sumac trees to grow morning glories.

on and I get all the elaborate morning glories. They're really cool ones, including the one that blooms at night. It's white and it's a moon glow morning glory and all that. How do you think those did? I'll tell you ahead of time. They didn't because the deer came by and ate the morning glory vines all down. I'm just venting right now. It takes a lot to get me frustrated, but I'll tell you what, the deer, mm-mm-mm. And here's the thing. So it's not a loss. But, you know, if you want to find out what the deer are going to eat on your landscape pick out any plant any tree any bush shrub whatever decide that that's your favorite plant that's what the deer will eat i'm just kidding but only halfway because there's sumac everywhere in the environment on the bank of every river in these deep ditches

the deer weren't even touching it and they come to my yard and eat it the good news is it's very bushy around the sumac so there's new sumac coming up from the roots. It's very resilient. It's coming right back up and it's a very sticky source too. I need to look into that. I don't know if bees can get propolis from sumac. It seems like they should. But Stagromagumach that stayed dead. Did not work as trellis work for my morning glories. I'm not giving up on that. So I'm going to do that again next year. And for those you have dear problems, the number one thing that works for that, is liquid fence. It's the best stuff ever, but I just don't keep up with it. I'll do it again.

You know, the season carries on. Question number four comes from, it says Al Big, 437, but I bet it's big Al in real life. It says yesterday I caught a late season swarm using a bucket too. So I did a video with the grandkids where we used the trash can on the end of a long telescoping pole and brought in a bucket of bees. So anyway, it was a very large swarm. I'll go through the hives to see which one it was. My wife saw them swarming and called me. I was able to catch them after work, put them into a hive. This is while I was doing this, I went over to get a few frames out of some empty boxes.

I've had sitting in the bee yard, only to find out there were eggs, larvae, and capped brood on the frames. I'd say a swarm moved in recently. This has been a swarmy season for me. I think that makes at least five or six that I've caught. So for those of you who are thinking about, and I used to pay attention to this all the time, and I used to share about it, right here, just like we're doing right now.

You know, swarm traps, where to put them, how far away to go. Because statistically, there are definitely advantages to certain heights and certain distances from an apiary to place as warm traps and you can catch a swarm. And that's great. I've stopped doing that.

I don't see myself ever doing that again. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I have too many bees, which I do. But here's the thing. If you can just clean out a dead out, and there will be dead outs next spring. So clean them out, clean up the frames, have everything out of it, set up the hive, put a small entrance on it, like 3 eighths of an inch by three inches, something like that. And what happens is scouts find it. They check out the space.

If it's a single deep 10 frame langstroth box, it's pretty much ideal. And they'll move into eights. and because years ago, you know, same thing, as described here by Big Al 437, you would just walk out into your bee yard and there it is, a colony of bees and a hive that was sitting empty. I had the state inspector out here, and he was inspecting everything a long time ago because I haven't seen a state inspector for many years. And he just said, oh, what's going on over there? And I said nothing.

That's just a stack of beehives. He says, nope, there's a colony. And they ended up getting inspected, of course, because he was there. I didn't even know it. They just moved in. Bees love to move in where bees have lived before, and you can take advantage of that and not have to lift a finger. In other words, set it up on a hive stand exactly where you want the colony to be

and have the entrance place where you want it to be with a reduction on it the way you want it to be, and put frames without food or honey or pollen or anything like that. Leave it empty. you will get volunteer bees. The other thing is if you do collect a swarm and it's already set up like that, you have a place to install your swarm. That's my favorite thing to do,

is just install swarms in existing hives. Have them all set up ahead of time. It works. So I recommend no more swarm traps. If you sell swarm traps, yes, more swarm traps. I don't know. So I think your old hive equipment is it. It works great.

Question number five comes from Diane and Warren, New Jersey. This is I planted some max a million sunflowers. Great choice. Perennial. They do fantastic. And I planted them last fall. Some of them are now over 10 feet tall. And they've started to bloom. They're wonderful. Question on maintenance. Do you cut them back to the ground? And if so, what time a year do you do it? So here's the thing. Mine are just now blooming too.

And I have two types for some reason. I planted half an acre of Maximilian sunflowers that only get to about five feet in height, but they also are already done blooming. But I also have the sunflowers, maximilions, that are well over six, seven, eight feet tall, and they're just now starting to bloom. This is exactly what we want. We want these blooms to cascade. So when some are shutting down, others are opening up,

and this creates a steady nectar and pollen resource. for our pollinators, primarily the honeybeats, of course. So about cutting them down, I never do. I've never cut them, never mowed them. And it could just be because I'm lazy, or if somebody's hassling you about cleaning up an area where you've got a bunch of maximilions, for example, you can pull out the card that says that you support pollinators,

and they would argue with you and say, yeah, but your flowers are dead. And then you say, yes, but those stems are valuable to a lot of wildlife. In fact, pollinators, including solitary bees, will live in those dried-out stems. And the stems are pretty significant. You could even bundle them together and make things out of them. But for wildlife, in all seriousness, it is a fantastic resource for a variety of insects to winter over inside those hollowed-out, dried-out stems.

And what happens here is they just ultimately decay and become part of the soil. I don't need to mow them down. Now, before anyone else asks about it, when it comes to my cosmos area and where I plant, you know, annual plants. So, of course, the Maximillians are perennial. Once they're in, you never have to touch them. I'm really happy to have a big stand of anise-hisnop now that's, I just broadcast the seeds and they've been growing and expanding through the years. Fantastic. But so the things like the cosmos and marigolds and the annual sunflowers, I let them stay as they are all the way through winter.

And then when spring comes, I go ahead and I mow the whole area down tight. And I keep it cut short. And then when we know for sure that we're out of the risk of frost again, then I'll till that area and it's acres. So I till it, plant the seeds, and then I'll, off we go again. So some I do, some I don't. But that's it. Leave them for wildlife because they really are a huge benefit. Even some wildlife hides in the stems and everything, uses it for protection in the wintertime. So you could even, if you wanted to cut them down

and still benefit wildlife, you can make a brush pile and then things will live in the brush pile. And that would be great. So one thing I want to talk about robbing season is coming. It's coming soon here in the northeast. It may already be where you are. But there's some new stuff that came out. Randy Oliver did research on these robbing screens. Most of you have seen this. I've shown you the Cirrusel robbing screens before. And part of the study that Randy Oliver did showed that the bees, when they were leaving and there were robbing screens on the hives, they weren't doing a very good job of finding their way home, and that it was causing bee drift to other colonies in your apiary.

So what's out brand new right now, and if you're watching me, you're the first to see it. See what's going on? There are benefits to watching and listening to this channel. So this is the Be Smart Design, new robbing screen based on Randy Oliver's research. So the thing of it is, just to compare the two, if we look at the backside of it,

bees that are trying to rob a colony, follow the smells going into the colony, and this includes wastes and hornets and honeybees and bumblebees and everything else that's going to need. Carbohydrates going into winter, they all need it, that's why they get desperate, that's why colonies get robbed,

even other honeybees. So they smell it, and they go to these holes. Now, the way, this is the original robbing screen. So this is the first one. So then we would have this and it would open the top and your resident bees would go up here and out the top. And then Randy Oliver discovered that bees were foraging and then they come back. And even the resident bees were following these holes and trying to get back in the hive and weren't figuring out how to get in.

And then they got frustrated and what do they do? Drifted to other colonies. So there is a new version of this, which is that better bee, no great surprise and uh you can also just go to the be smart website i suppose but you won't see these listed yet so this one here is some of the thinking because they changed the configuration or you did the beekeeper when there was robbing or during robbing season now and that made it unfamiliar to your bees they had to reacquaint themselves at the entrance and so on so when you look at the back side of it this is actually a shrouded area so it's a little tougher and there's a

central entrance. So this can set right on the landing board and you can have an entrance that stays open. So the other thing is instead of, oh, it's robbing season, let's put these on. The intent is then to rather leave these on your hive, have it there and not just put it on because of risk of robbing. And then use this main entrance. And then, of course, there are options. So if you didn't, if you wanted to open it up more than that. The other thing, is there's holes that are larger than before there's a little vent shield here so that when the smells from the hive are coming out and you have one of these open this little shroud here prevents the smells from the hive from coming up through this hole and encouraging robbing through that

hole so it's actually pretty interesting now if you wanted to have a wide open opening you close the middle here and then there's these little legs that flip down and when these little legs flip down now the thing sits on your landing board and you have a three-eighths inch opening the full width of your landing board and the cool thing about that is european hornets can't get in that three-eighths inch blocks mice and bumblebees can't get in so that's kind of cool then let's say you're going to transport your hive or something you can use this as a transport deal because now ventilation is increased through larger ventilation holes and an additional ventilation row up here. I don't work for BetterB by the way and I

don't work for Be Smart designs and I do like those places however anyway and then you can close it all up tops closed bottoms closed you can leave it here and transport your hive and have better ventilation into the hive so I think I covered the ground there the other other thing is if you've opened one of these top sides and it seems like your aggressors are starting to figure it out you close one side and open the other side and give the resident bees an advantage do not do that in the middle of the day because i even know that when the foragers are out when they come back if you've changed anything even a couple of inches they try to go in where they used to go in and they don't figure things out very well and then of course according to

Randy Oliver, scientific beekeeping, they instead of figuring it out, just go to another hive that's easier. Let's fix for that. Put one of these on all your hives. That'll mess them up. Then they have to go. They'll recognize this and they'll know how to get in or out of it. And then other people, let's argue with ourselves because they always say question everything. If you had other bees and other hives. So let's say, let's do that fix. Put it on every single landing board. Well, guess what we just did? Didn't we just educate every B in the apiary that's going foraging? Because if they all have the same entrances,

then they all have these alternate, you know, just in case of robbing entrances, then what would happen is when they go to another hive, they already know how to get into it because it's the same configuration on their own hive. So I'm going to talk you out of putting them on every single hive and say only put these on high-risk colonies. Put it on at night.

Let your bees reorient. The other thing is, often you hear people say that if you want to change a hive's position, change the landing board direction or location or something like that, that you should stuff a bunch of sticks and things to change the entrance so your bees are pushed into doing new orientation flights. You could use this in that way also. Move a colony, change the entrance. middle of the night put one of these on doesn't have to be the middle of the night you know just after the bees are all in and then when they come out in the morning

They have a new entrance that they fly out and they look at and they start doing their figure eights and they reorient and they see it and then they know that their new configuration looks like this They're taking it a step further some people are painting these with big dramatic lines and hash marks and things like this. I'm taking it a step further some people are painting these with big dramatic? I'mharmes and things like that so to boil it all down my take on it is to have these at the ready because that's the problem if you don't have them and you see robbing it's almost too much to stop so we want to prevent robbing so when you go out and you see that your colony is under defended reduce the entrance that's number one but once

robbing starts it's hard to stop it that's when you can drop one of these on the pins come with it push those pins right in and put this in place on that colony and save them. It takes days, if not weeks, to completely rob out a colony of bees. Even when the frames of honey inside are covered in robbers, it takes them a long time to get it done. So you certainly have time to react.

So tell me what you think of it, and you can only get this right now if you're watching this or listening to my channel, because I heard from Better Bee. because I was talking about it, because I wanted to know if I mentioned it and somebody wants one, can they get one? Well, I dropped all my stuff from Aperture Apeary.

You have to, if you're going to buy a robbing screen from Betterby, you have to put in it Fred, oh, just code word Fred, F-R-E-D, all caps. And instead of selling you the old one, which you can still get, you will get the new one, what you get now. and then what do I get for giving you this great discount code and access to it Fred I don't know if it's a discount code I think it just means you can get the new one without having to wait for the old stock to go away and then I get nothing so except knowing that it helped you so that's a good part

so there you go go to BetterB get the new robbing screen type in code word Fred all caps FRED and take one of those your bee club and show them something that nobody else has yet. Now I don't know, maybe they'll be available to everybody in a week. Maybe you only get one week of being cool. I don't know. Moving on to question number seven. This comes from Grace Homestead 1355, which is a YouTube channel name. It says, hey Fred, you notice that the bees are more gentle. I'm working with bees that I've caught local in my area in a top hive.

So yes they are, but here's the thing. It's the top bar hive, okay. And what happens is it's the way we approach inspections because not just the top bar hive, this is the same for the Lans, the Long Langstroth, and the top bar hives. These horizontal hive configurations, what do you think is different about that

when you're going in the hives compared to a standard Langstroth vertical configuration? When we go to do those inspections, you know, we puffs, at the entrance we puff smoke at the top we pull off the outer cover we pull the inner cover if there happens to be one and most of mine have that and then what are you doing you're going from a covered protected colony of bees to poof wide open air for all of them so it's a sudden exposure which triggers your bees and they have to defend the colony so i think they're more high strong when we do

vertical all open all of a sudden inspections now one of the ways you can mitigate that of course is laying cotton duck down over the top of it some kind of canvas you can put a piece of reflectex or you know double bubble on top and you can keep the areas you're not working covered but i do notice and i have inspections coming up this week too even though we just did the top of our hive they were so laid back that it was a pure pleasure to work with them and you feel definitely overdressed if you're wearing protective equipment while you're inspecting a colony like that.

So the thing it is, we're pulling one frame at a time and then we're sliding it over and connecting it with the other frames and they're calm because they're calm and covered. And then so only the frame we're actually engaged with is the one that's exposed if we're doing it right because we don't kind of fan them out down the line as we're looking at them

we inspect one, we pull it out, and we slide it over. We take the next one, we look at it, we slide it over and connect it to that one. So now they're, again, under full cover. And I think that helps keep the bees calm. Aside from your movements, which should be nice and calm and fluid and slow and even and laid back. And sure, because I just did a little vape at the start and that was it. And I did a little vape at the other end of the top bar inspection and that was it. I did no more control smoking or vaping on the hive.

So they are more laid back and I think it has to do with them being exposed. The other thing is sometimes if I have to transport frames or resources or change resources, I put them in those hive butler toots. I know some people don't like to hear them even mention that, but I do. And here's why. If the queen or something is on there and they get off the frame, they're in the tote. They're not going anywhere else. so it's a portable container that keeps them enclosed because air passing through the frames if you're just

taking them out and leaning them on the side of your hive for example they're exposed and that means that other bees can come and get to them wasts and things that are in the area that fly through that scent trail come up and they get on the frame so i highly recommend finding some way to cover your frames while you're doing an inspection protect the bees protect their resources while you're doing inspections. This is going to be even more important as the year ends and robbing risk is increased.

So with that Topper hive, yeah, that was smooth, easy going, laid back. They did have a new queen, by the way. So for those of you are wondering about that, when I did the last inspection, I said we would do a follow-up in 20 days. That proved to be untrue. We did the follow-up in 18 days.

because I saw such a shift in the amount of pollen coming in that I knew I had a mated queen who was producing a lot of brute. And so when we looked in there, they were completely calm, very laid back, no rush, and they're investing in infrastructure, which is something queen-right colonies do. If they were still missing their queen, they stopped investing in honeycomb and expansion

and drawing out new comb and things like that. And I was actually amazed that they, put brand new drawn comb on every single top bar that I had put on and as an afterthought when I did that last inspection I just tossed a couple of top bars on there and so they had 15 top bars and guess how many top bars have honeycomb on them now 15 you should look at the video it's impressive it's all brand new stuff and I actually had to add two more because the way the feeder that came from be mindful fits it sticks up in the top and the center thwart on the lid

interacted with that and wouldn't let me close it so now I had to add two more top bar frames and then move it down so based on their past two weeks of performance they're going to draw a new comb on even the new frames because this is partnered with we've got a great nectar flow still going on we have hot days ahead. That's key. If we had temps in the 60s, they would not be prone to draw a brand new cone. But we have this combination of a nectar flow, nectar coming in, and warm enough temps and space that they need to fill, and I bet they're going to do it. The other thing is at the other end, we had a tiny cluster of bees, which was my insurance policy. Now we're on the spot because

we have two colonies of bees, each with a queen, each laying, each in production. Now one of them has to be nursed along. There are a lot of people that are frustrated by that and go as far as to say it's irresponsible to tell people to nurture and culture along a small cluster of bees that has no hope of surviving winter. And the thing is, in the past, I've just ignored them and done silly things and just put them in a box because what did you have to lose? And then to find out in spring, they're still alive while what we would consider healthy, vibrant, robust, colonies would expire in winter and these little tiny underdog nothing late season colonies still alive so now I have a lot of fun nurturing them along and I understand the frustration with me I get it

because if you are trying to make a living with bees and a lot of people are this is why I cop out on that and I want my audience to be backyard beekeepers who are just in it out of the pure joy an interest in honey bees and trying to keep them going so they can be in close context with them and observe them every single day if they want to and see what they're doing and see what they're out and about doing what they're on because I don't need to earn money from the bees. I don't need them to produce honey for me so that I can sell it. Now the supervisor's got a different plan. He wants to sell a bunch of honey. He's turning 10. He feels like he has to, you know, he has to make his way in the world and he's going to do it apparently on the backs of bees. That's fine with me,

but I'm not in that zone. So my point is, if I can get a little colony through and it's going to cost me some sugar syrup or some hive alive or something like that to do it, I do it because there's a great amount of satisfaction for me personally. Seeing that colony go from, you know, five or ten bees wandering out every half hour to 50 or 60 bees coming to go. and seeing them really thrive in these tiny spaces. And that's where the top of our hive right now is providing me that fix. And I think it's a lot of fun. And they are.

They're very mellow, easy to work. So the next one, question number eight, it's not so much a question, but 21st B, which is now 21st B tack 1. If you don't know who they are, they were at the North American Honeybee Expo, and they create these frames. which follows something I've always wanted to see in a plastic foundation frame. And that is ice a cut corners. In fact, I call the videos, let's cut corners with frames.

And that's because your honeybees cannot chew through or shape a plastic frame or a plastic foundation. They can't. They can't migrate through them, so now they have to go through going around the size or underneath. And when a cluster of bees in the wintertime is moving along, if we have to spread the cluster out to go over around under a frame, they don't do that as efficiently as they do in the way that they would normally make holes in their own natural comb. So 21st B, now here on YouTube, 21st B-1,

they have holes in the corners, and a couple of them even have a hole dead center in the field of the plastic foundation that's heavy wax. And now your bees can have the option, as I've said many times before, close it up or leave it open and use it as an egress route and or for ventilation even. So what we've done is what we've done,

what they've done, and I have zero connection. I just want to let you know. I am not, you know, asked to promote them or anything. They have these holes already in their frames so that the bees can choose to use them or close them up. And so, but one of the reasons that I wanted to mention them is I'm going to give their channel a shout out. So it's 21st B-1. And when you go there, you should see, you know, B-frame manufacturing and stuff like that. Because what happened is, and this has happened to a lot of

people, they got hacked. They lost their channel. Could you imagine building up a YouTube channel, investing all the time and effort in creating content, collecting subscribers, you have to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers on YouTube to monetize your channel, and then that's going to yield a tiny amount of income that may offset some of the cost of producing content for YouTube. So they got scammed. They lost their channel. Somebody stole it.

And when that happens, you have to start over. So today I'm giving me a shout out to 21st B-1. I'll put the link down to the video description. And I want to invite you to go and if you supported them in the past and maybe just haven't checked in on their channel for a while, let's resubscribe to them and help them rebuild their base and to get going because I think it is a big deal. J.C.'s Bs out of Ohio,

He lost, I think he had like 40,000, 45,000 subscribers. I don't know if you understand what it takes to build that kind of subscriber base, but he had somebody contact him and give him an offer to review a camera or something like that. Click the link in the offer to see what it was about, and they stole his entire Google account. You imagine that? So he did get it back. So there are routes to get this back, but you have to work through Google.

And I think you understand it's an enormous corporation, getting their attention, getting yourself back online and proving that you are who you say you are. You have a hard time eventually having to prove to them that you're not a scammer somehow. So all I want to do is give a shout out to 21st B. And let's try to help them out. It costs you nothing to subscribe to someone's channel just to help them out. and see if we can't get them going again. So, and those frames, that's what that's all about.

And I just want to caution you too, because a lot of beekeepers, let's face it, are older people. Shocking but true. And there are some things that you should avoid. Now, maybe you don't have a big YouTube channel or a big Google account or something that you have a big investment in or losing your Instagram or something like that. But getting hijacked is a sick feeling.

So I always recommend to people, if you're getting an offer or something comes to you in an email, never click inside the email, go to the company's website, find out if that offers legit. You can even go on different AI programs. Just say, does this seem like a scam? And then they will tell you about the wording and stuff. Things you may be overlooking that lets you know, whoa, that is a fake or a mirror website or something like that because they're getting very good at faking people out.

And I worry about that every day because people try to hack me several times a day every single day, which ruins it for me because I know that I'm ignoring people that are legitimate. I'm ignoring friend requests and things like that from people that are probably honest, good people, but I'm so skeptical anymore that I just reject or don't have anything to do with it. because if I'm not sure about who there is or what this is about, I don't click it. I don't. So that's the bad end of it too. Decent people are getting caught up in the mesh of us being worried. So anyway, we're in the fluff section, if you haven't figured that out yet. I don't want to just rant or vent about this, but I think it's terrible what happened to 21st B.

And let's try to help them out. Anyway, so, if you've still got honeybee colonies that are, lightweight so please go around and investigate all of your hives the standard practice at the end of the year is to feed two to one sugar syrup and so um i think you're at an advantage if you can figure out well ahead of time so even while there's still a nectar flow on as there is now where i am if you can find the colonies that are light that are trailing behind that don't look like they're going to do well if you can intervene on their behalf early it'll say that's a little it'll say that's save you money. And it's a difference between helping someone out that's a little bit hungry

compared to trying to now help someone out that's starving to the point where they can barely walk. So with the honeybees, if we keep these colonies along and we provide them with these little energy boosts of just sugar syrup. And if you want to go to the extra yard, it's sugar syrup with hive alive in it. And there are a lot of other. There are strong microbials super DFS. There's something called rocket fuel. There are all these other things out there, but let me just suggest that if you only do the minimum, which is provide them with surplus sugar syrup. So when it's rainy or when it's really dry or there's a dearth and the colony is just creeping along, you'll find out that you can get them to recover pretty darn quick. And if you wait until the end and do the tutel,

one sugar syrup to me that's a ditch effort that's a uh you're trying to get them to store resources but if they haven't already done that on their own until the last minute then they've been trailing along for so long that to get them all of a sudden kick in and do all this work is not easy and i understand the argument it makes sense that they're drying down less they're doing less work but you will have more dead bees in the feeders and uh you're resuscitating at the end rather than keeping them healthier right through that last stretch, which I think is working out much better. Here's the other thing. The light sugar syrups, the one-to-one, is encouraging and keeping them comb building if you have space that they're still yet to fill. Because what you're going to

need them to do, we have the pack down coming up. We're going to be shutting down our colonies for winter, and we are going to start sizing the spaces to match the numbers of bees in the hive, which means getting rid of dead space, unused space, undrawn foundation, things like that. So you would pull partially drawn comb or partially full comb of honey, for example, and replace it with a full comb that has, or a full frame that has capped honey. So we want them to have maximize resource, minimum space going into winter. For me, that's a single deep with a medium box on top. that's it and it can seem daunting because and this is why I'm telling you now because

we're going to plan ahead you can tie this in as a single activity so as we get to the end and we start drawing off the surplus honey the final draw here in some parts of the country I realize there is no honey this time of year you're in a you're just trying to sustain your colony mode here we have a heavy nectar flow which is also why we have these late season swarms and so now we're drawing drawing off the honey and we're going to pack down the hives all at the same time all at once. And doing it by yourself can seem very daunting even with only six or ten colonies. So for me, this is going to be an all-week task next week.

And once we've extracted honey from the frames, we'll put them right back on those colonies because they won't start to refill them. They'll clean them up and then they'll store the honey and we'll pull them off again. your other option to doing that is to set up a robbing station somewhere as far away on your property as you can from well if you've got you know 30 acres just 100 yards is fine so get it as far away from your beehives as possible set up your robbing station and please make it a consistent robbing station so this year i put up the most formal robbing station i've ever had because in the past I would forget that I put out a whole box full of honey frames for the bees to rob out

and then of course the raccoons come through in Germany they're called wash bears which is pretty funny but they come through and they eat everything so and they pull out your frames and they smash up all your comb and when they do that your bees don't want to use it particularly if it's ever been used for brood it's very fibrous and if animals can get to it they'll smash it and ruin it. So what I have is a series of closet racks, I guess they're called. You know, it's the angled metal that's got the little hook on the end for the closet bar, for the clothing bar that hangs on it because they were rated for 30 pounds a piece and I mounted them to the end of a shed and I spaced them the exact distance of Langstraw frames.

So they're in a series, and if each one will hold 25, then we can stack frames spaced apart from each other in the open air, off the ground, so critters can't get to them, and they're eye level for you, so it's easy to deal with, and you can see what's going on, and you just cycle them in and out of your hive butler tots, or you take your deep boxes out there and transfer them right into those boxes. But the good news is if you forget that they're out there,

they're up off the ground, they're out of reach, of skunks, raccoons, possums, anything else that wants to chew up your stuff and ruin it for you. So this is the first year I've done that and somebody might be saying, well, make a video, show us what it looks like. Well, right now we're using it with the supervisor because we're trying to find bald-faced hornet nests. So just to clue you in a little bit to what my life is like, when we put up a robbing station like that, it becomes a source of interest and it's an area where the kids all get out there and we see all these different wasts all these different bumblebees because let's face it honey bees are not the only thing that like

honey so it does have a bunch of honey bees on it but it's all fanned out because of the arrangement that i just described and we can see where everything is so the fun part is finding out where these nests are for some of these um kind of more angsty wasts like this the bald-faced hornets. They're distinctive. They're black and white. So our plan this week after his birthday party, of course, which is coming up, we're going to knock them out with CO2. We're going to put dental floss on them. And then when they wake up, these are the bald-faced hornets. When they wake up and fly off, we'll have a six-inch stranded dental floss trailing behind them while they go home. And then we'll take a group of them that we still have, and then we'll knock

them out, you know, we'll go in the distance where we see it go, and then we'll wake them up with their dental flaws on and we'll see where they fly. And then we'll get closer and closer until we find these nests. So it is kind of like bee lining, which Dr. Thomas Seeley talked about, which with his special box where we would overfeed honeybees and then open the box and let them fly out in the direction they flew is the direction they would go because they had more honeybees. they would feed them and then when they came out they would fly and then you would find a nest. Now here where I live, when you try that bee lining and you want to find wild bees, you end up in somebody else's apiary.

So it doesn't work here. Probably was fantastic in the Arnott Forest. But anyway, all that from talking about feeding. So anyway, don't forget that I just published the Top Her Hive Inspection Update. For those of you who want to see that, I started that earlier today. next week final harvest already talked about that robbing risk is going to rapidly rise at the end of the month have a plan ahead of time because it's a terrible thing if you want to know if a colony is just busy or being robbed so i call it robbers or residents and stand and look at it what do you see what's going on if the bees are

coming out and and wiggling their abdomens and adjusting their cargo that is a criminal they just rob that colony they're leaving full. The other thing is, robbers are dirty. They leave little bits and pieces on your landing board, so you'll see little bits and pieces and chunks of wax and propolis and everything else just strewn all over the place. The other thing is they don't wipe their feet because they don't care about keeping the hive clean.

So you'll see little brown dabs from little damp feet that have been walking through everything while they rob the colony. All of these things are important to notice. Robbers don't clean. if they're dragging stuff out, you know, dead bees and stuff and dropping them off the landing board or flying off with them, then those are resident bees. Robbers just take stuff and go. So be prepared. I do recommend this as your robbing screen. The new B-smart Designs robbing screen at BetterB and just use Fred and you'll get one. You have to pay for it. It's not

a discount. It's just you get the new version instead of just buying an old one. The other thing is last year, we got hive alive fondant. I put it on most of my hives. Hive halive fonant packs. They had the two pound ones. They went to five pounds. The five pound packs, my colonies, even the largest ones, never consumed at all. But the colonies that had them on there was a great source of comfort for me because they made it. Those who did not have it, that was my first thing. If I looked at in January and they were all the way up underneath their inner cover and I realized that that hive did not have a fondent pack on it I knew they were going to be in trouble and I was right so overall statistically and this is just reporting

from beekeepers they lost an average of 20% of their hives those who were using hive alive fondant packs on their bees and winter 20% losses instead of 50 which is my state average 50 or 60 for Pennsylvania Keeper Robbins and Long Langstroth, Keepers Hive, inspections are coming up this week. So those are the videos that are coming up. If you've got a question for me, please don't forget, go ahead and write it down in the comment section below this video. Or you can go to the way to be.org and click on the page mark contact and you can submit your topic there or submit your question. It doesn't guarantee that I'm going to talk about it on a Friday, but I will at least read it and see if it might have broader appeal to people just like you.

So I want to thank you for watching. I hope you have a fantastic week ahead. Sunday here in the state of Pennsylvania is going to be the best weather day for working your bees. Things are going to change fast. Thanks for watching. Have a great weekend.