The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode 300, ways to control the queen and remove brood etc...

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

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

So hello and welcome to another episode of Backyard Beekeeping. This is questions and answers episode number 300. Today is Friday, April 4th of 2025. I'm Frederick Dunn and... This is the way to be. So I want to welcome you. I know it's supposed to be a big deal because this is episode number 300 and everybody, a lot of people want to know, what are we going to do special today?

And I did get questions for which I make a commemorative 300th episode coffee cup because we did it for 100 and 200 and now 300. So that's a lot of years and I appreciate those that asked and I want to thank you that coffee cup will be available for two weeks. Because it's a special edition, not a limited edition, as many people. I mean, we might sell fives of those coffee cups. We don't know. The good news is what's going on outside today? Well, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It's really hard for me to be inside right now because it's super sunny. Nice and warm.

Bees are flying. That's 10 degrees Celsius, by the way. Two mile per hour winds, which is a big shift from the big storm systems that we had passed through. And there's more coming. As much as I don't like to say it, there's snow in the forecast coming up on Monday here. In the northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part. of Pennsylvania. But it's not very windy, two miles per hour. That's three kilometers per hour, 63% relative humidity. That's good news. The bees can dry things out if there's anything still damp

after all the heavy rain. The UV index is six. Why do I bring that up? Because you could go outside and get a tan today. That's right. Why are you sitting there? Just go out and get a tan if the sun is shining. My pond is topped off right to the very tippy top. It's that overflow because so many inches of rain, of course, like so many people are getting. And the good news is I did what's called frost sowing of my white clover, and I did that perfectly time. This is one moment when Mother Nature cooperated with my instincts. So I went out there. It was going to be 14, 15 degrees Fahrenheit at night, and so I spread my white clover seed, I have pounds of it, all the little bald patches everywhere along the edges of the pond everywhere where the grass is dense for example i wanted to give

that seed a head start and then what did it do right afterwards it thawed which opens the ground which means the seeds fall in then what did it do after that it rained which washed in and closed up over the seeds which means now i did planting just by walking around and throwing things around even around my flagpole i planted clover so it worked worked fantastic we have wood ducks on the pond i know you wanted to know that they're looking for places to nest very interesting of course every time you go to look at them they fly away and uh open feed right now is being ignored by the bees and that's good news what do i mean by open feed well i've put out sugar syrup just in case they might need it a light syrup one to one and uh apie 23 the expensive stuff the good

stuff the top performing pollen substitute i put that out not one b top it. Good news though because they're getting everything they need somewhere and they're bringing it into the hives. So my wife was out yesterday looking around because I was busy, you know, doing stuff. And she could not count the pollen that was coming in. So so much going on. That's all great news. So also maybe you've got a question right now that you just need to share with somebody. Maybe you've got a picture of something going on with your bees and you need opinions. Please go to the way to be. the Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook and join if you're not already member and you can get your

questions to answer there's people that are there from all over the world including moderators from all over the world so just a great group great place if you want to know how to submit a topic or a question for this friday Q&A which happens almost every Friday you can go down in the video description and follow the link you can also go to my website which is the way to be.org And you can fill out a form on the page mark the way to be and submit your topic or your question. So it's a lot going on. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today, also that's listed in order right down in the video description. So you'll get that.

Now that's all out of the way. I don't know what my opening sequences were, so I don't know really to comment on those other than I was outside today looking at jumping spiders. The bold jumping spider in particular. I don't know how those things winter over, but they were out trying to catch flies. Their catch rate is not very good, by the way, because I wanted to video that moment. Then I was going to cut in some cool music the very moment that the jumping spider snagged a fly off the siding of the house. And all I got was a bunch of near misses. So who knows what's on there, but that's kind of what's going on.

And your questions today are going to be kind of to some degree redundant because everyone seems to be having the same spring issues. So why not? just have a spring control your queen series, among other things, but that seems to be the common thread. We're going to start right off with question number one, which comes from Leanne in Lincoln City, Oregon. The reason I ask about the queen entrance excluder is because my best hive is looking to have that pre-swarm crazy behavior. Not just first flights. So the past few days, the sun would come out for an hour and they would pour out. and many were swarming in the air, facing the hive, just like they did last year when they swarmed. I'm not an expert, but I am sensing their anxiety, if you will.

And all I want is to be able to finally harvest some honey. Okay, so this is happening to a lot of people in spring. And these are key moments. Depending on where you are, you might already be dealing with swarms. We're not here yet. We've got another week, week and a half, because we know exactly when they're going to be in a swarm we can feel it we can tell they are building up though now when you see a lot of bees hovering in front of your hive that can be alarming so i've already answered leanne because i thought that this was something that was critical time critical that she needed to know right now

so i sent my response and ways to evaluate and she does not in fact have queen cells being built here's what i think is going on you have a bunch of new bees that have emerged inside your hive They've gone through their different progression of jobs inside the hive and they've wound up on the landing board. So they transition to outdoor jobs, but they can't do it because the weather's so bad. So what happens to the moment the weather does break and the sun shines, they fly out. They do what's called orientation flights. And much as described in the question, you'll notice that your bees come out of the hive. They hover in front of it and they do these little figure eights and they zigzag back and forth and they're staring at the hive.

and then they just go back in. So now this can in some ways indicate bees waiting for a queen to leave for a swarm to happen, but in this case they're just new bees that are flying back and forth, looking around and going back in. So they do these orientation flights for a lot of reasons for want to orient themselves, thus the name, orientation flight. They're looking at landscape items, they're looking at the geometry of what's going on around the hive,

and they're identifying which hive they're identifying which hive they're come from by its physical traits. Now then there's another type of flight where they corkscrew into the air and they fly circles and they look around and the corkscrew goes up and up and up and up and they keep flying and then they zing off in some direction. So those are also orientation flights but you see individual or fewer numbers of bees doing them at a time and they're actually headed out to scout for resources and they're memorizing the landscape. Now we know that bees can navigate by the sun, that even during periods of overcast skies, that your bees can also see ultraviolet polarization,

which is pretty darn interesting. And they can navigate by that also. But do you know that they've done tests to see how your bees can find their way home? For example, let's say we had a big storm come in, your bees out forging somewhere, and it looks up just like somebody that's been out swimming in the ocean and they pop up and they can no longer see the shore because there's so much chop and everything around. So they can no longer see the sky as their orientation. More critically, the position of the sun. Now, some people will say magnetism.

They navigate by magnetism because they have little ferron particles in their bodies. And I looked into that too, and there are lots of insects that migrate, for example, like butterflies, and they do have evidence that they may be sensitive to magnetic orientation. So people do test to figure these things out. Honeybees are not great. at flying and changing their directions based on the magnetic flux of the earth. So that's kind of out when it comes to the honeybees. So they're visual navigators. So then what they're looking at are horizon key points

and specific things that stand out in the landscape. So what they did is they blocked these bees view of the sun so that in other words they weren't influenced at all by the polarizing effects of the sun even during light cloud cover and what they did orient to were landscape features. So that's much more critical to your bees than the other things that leave them away from home to a valuable resource or getting back home. And bees do fly sometimes even in the rain because we've made videos of them. So it is very interesting. I think they use a lot of tools that we may not even know about. We certainly know that the smell of the environment, the landscape, and the ultimate destination plays heavy.

So anyway, I think these are just orientation flights and And that's about it. So, and that was backed up. Leanne did not have any problems. Oh, by the way, special effects. Keep the air moist down here. You might see some mist and fog coming down. And by the way, if you don't have time to watch this,

because you've got something to do someplace to be, this is a podcast. If you just Google the way to be podcasts, I think you'll find it. And then you can do your normal work and everything. Put your headphones on it. and just listen and come back later and look at the key points. Question number two comes from Wendy, Seattle, Washington.

I'm interested in using timal, essential oil, rather than the organic acids, now that I see B is crawling away from my long lang with K-wing virus. Have you used that, and do you know if it's effective or toxic? Okay, so there are a lot of things about this comment from Wendy. K-wing virus. Okay. K-wing is not generally caused by a virus. So we're going to address that specifically. So K-wing, what is it anyway? Because we have something else that I call spread wing. So when your bees are

upset, you have a bee on the landing board, that's maybe a guard bee, her mandibles are open, her forelimbs are up, and she's got this defensive posture. And they do something like with people it's called arms their arms come out and they're like ready to grapple you right bees can spread their wings and do that too but they can also fold their wings back so when they're relaxed their wings fold back so sometimes i've opened a hive and notice that a lot of the bees that are coming out on the surface have this spread wing behavior and so they're unsettled they're distressed and usually that ends up being a colony that does not have a queen in this case if we're talking about k-wing though. That means the wings instead of folding over on each other, they split apart like a K.

And they lock in that position. It seems like they can't really close them up. So what's going on? Well, your bees breathe. They respirate through spiracles. The spiracles are on the sides of their body. There are spiracles up on the thorax and one of the largest openings. The first spherical on the thorax is right by the wing. And what do you think? think goes into that opening. A mite, not the Vero-Distructor mite that we all can't stand, but the tracheal might. Because spiracles open up into tracheal, and the trachea opens into tracheols, which are like little capillaries, and it's part of the circulatory system and the respiratory system of your B. So when you have K-wing, what's happening? It's one of the indicators, not the only indicator, but one of the indicators that tracheal mites are taking up resonance inside your bees.

So if we talk about other things to look for, so we need to be analysts right now. We need to figure out what's going on with the bees on this hive, and why do I see this K-wing with their fixed and their wings don't work anymore? Because tracheomites, by the way, Verroa-destructor mite has taken the lead on every conversation when it comes to worrying about our bees and what might be impacting their health and well-being. We have tracheomites, we have no zema, we have a lot of things going on that I also want you to be worried about. I don't want you to get settled and feeling good about your colonies and think that nothing else is going on just because you delivered a solid spanking to your mite numbers. Tracheal mites.

What we do about them? First of all, they shorten the lifespan of your bees. So it's a sublethal effect. If they have K-wing already, they can't fly. They go off the end of the hive. Where do they go? They crash on the ground. This is another reason why we need to be looking at the ground in front of our hives and see if there are bees down there and if there are, what are they doing?

Because a lot of bees crawling around in front of the hive partnered with K-wing is another symptom of tracheomites. They can also have dysentery. What's that? Diarrhea on the front of the hive, the landing board. On you if you happen to be there the moment they fly out. And this happens a lot, though, to young bees. And what do young bees do when they're not well when they're sick and they can't perform their job? they self-evict. That means they go out of the hive. They try to leave. They try not to die in there and spread diseases and germs and contamination and just smell like a dead animal. They get out. So look for

all of those things. So the next thing I want to talk about, time all is not known to work for that. So the other thing is I do want to address that pulling up an essential oil, there was a student in Connecticut that got some kind of big award years ago for a time all. low dose entrance on a beehive which had a bunch of three eighths inch diameter holes the foragers going out would just brush through these holes and get a slight time-all treatment and then of course returning foragers would get a dose to and then there was all this money thrown into it and there was some commercial beekeepers that got on board and they you know hundreds of these things went out and then we got no feedback and she was supposed

to go to the university of connecticut if you know about that study if you know how it went or you know any follow-up information please put that link down in the comment section I would be very interested but so that was one area where time all as an essential oil but here's the thing when we fill around with essential oils whatever it happens to be and as oil hiss up peppermint anything we need to establish some controls we need to understand what the purpose is and what the basis is for why we've decided to use that particular essential oil because there are a lot of essential oils in use in a lot of different sugar syrup additives, for example,

that really have no track record scientifically for proving out what the claims are about it. So when we fall back on safe things, I want you to think about things like health food stores. So when you go in and you buy supplements for maybe you're a runner or a weightlifter or a swimmer, and you get these supplements that are guaranteed to give you an energy boost.

The threshold for proving that it can do what they claim it's going to do, is very low. When it becomes a medication is when things really tighten up, you really have to prove it, studies have to be performed, and you also have to be able to describe potential side effects and things like that. So oftentimes people would decide, I'm going to try an essential oil, I'm going to do this to my bees,

and then I'm going to say that, wow, I think it really did a great job. Look at them all. They're just doing fantastic, but here's the thing. Remember that you should question everything. always say that. I like being questioned. I like entering discussion because of what I am telling people to do or when I'm doing myself, if it doesn't hold up under scrutiny from my peers, then I need to probably revisit that. The other thing is if you're going to do something to one of your beehives or all of your beehives, if you do it all at once, you don't know. By that I mean if you've got 10 colonies of bees and you do the exact same thing to all 10 colonies of bees and suddenly you have a

great year you might be saying wow because I put those little Halloween candies in there that is what made them all do so well but if you haven't split it up half with half without with all other controls being the same you wouldn't know necessarily if one did better than the other the other thing is you need to keep very strict records and you're not always permitted to do these things to your colony so So it depends on what we're trying to do with it, but K-wing virus, you know, that's an example. It's actually a tracheomite infestation on the bees. And if you want to know how to test for tracheomites, and it's a very interesting thing to do,

you have to kill bees, you have to dissect them, and you need a microscope and you microscope slides. Scientific beekeeping, Randy Oliver. He's got a procedure on there. Step by step exactly how to do it. It's fantastic. I recommend that everyone know how to do it. It's something that's fallen off the radar

because it just doesn't get center stage anymore when it comes to things that could be wrong. But I'm hesitant to say use time all because I don't know of any use for time all for tracheomites. Now, what would you use for tracheomites? I'm glad you asked. Now, there is a description for menthol crystals, which, again, I would not personally recommend.

I like to go with whatever works best with the least intervention, if that makes sense. And what they taught at Cornell, which I would like to stick with now, menthol crystals, if you want to look into that, it's temperature restrictive. So there are other things going on. You cannot use it when your honey supers are on because you'll have menthol in your honey. It'll be strong. So vegetable sugar patties are what they recommended before and what I kind of stick by now because it's very low. is it draws the little tracheomites and makes it difficult for them to find the young bees.

Otherwise, we'd like to get into their little spiracles and occupy their bodies and reproduce in the respiratory system. Can you imagine your respiratory system plugged up with reproducing little tracheomites? They're disgusting. Okay, so the vegetable paddy, let me give you the recipe. This is lengthy. It's very challenging. It's going to make sure and filter out those who can do culinary things and those that can't. So if your pen is ready, two parts, granulated sugar.

That's a standard processed white sugar. One part, vegetable shortening. Mix it together. Put it on a piece of what, wax paper. If you want to, it'll make it stay moist longer. Or you can just put it right on top of your brood frames. Start it with a baseball size piece, flatten it right out, put it on top of your brood.

That's it, it's the whole thing. And it works. Time proven. And you don't have to take your honey supers off for that. So that's what I have to say for question number two. Moving on to question number three, which comes from Stephen G. 6269. That's the YouTube channel name. Just did my spring inspection to find so much drone bur comb. Up in the feeder shim.

Fed all of it to the chicky girls and they goblet it right up. So by chicky girls, chickens, of course. We have chickens here. Fantastic companion animal for beekeepers. My chickens are all over the bee yard. I can't really free range here because there are too many fox, eagle, and hawks. Not to mention the raccoons at night. I wonder what I can provide for my five hens in their 18 by 18 run

to keep them happy and healthy. Now this is a chicken question I realize, but chickens, as I mentioned, I believe, are fantastic beekeeper companion animals. I also think just making the observations that we do during the day at how intense the chickens are about scratching up every leaf, all of our beetles and bugs and things like that that are emerging in spring, those that impact your honeybees, small-high beetles, for example. They pupate in the wintertime over in the soil.

And then they emerge in spring. And then if you've got chickens and wild birds that are going, around eating those things you're ahead of the game so you can actually benefit from the chickens so i'm going to help here with the chicken run thing good movie and by the way so if you cannot let your chickens free range and i understand completely who wants to lose their chickens you don't want your chicken to turn into a hawk or a fox or something else but if you have resident crows which i highly recommend that you do they will keep the hawks away from your chickens,

and we've done that for years, and it works really well, but this is not the case. So if you have just one chicken run, and I pay attention to people's chicken coops. One chicken run, all fenced in, you'll see that it eventually just becomes completely defoliated, that it's nothing but dirt. Here in Erie County, we have the Erie County Zoo.

They've got a chicken run in their chicken pen, in the farm animal exhibit area, not one blade of grass grows in there. So what I would like you to do is create two fenced-in paddocks coming off of your chicken coop. So if you visualize this, here's the hendora that you pop open and your chickens go out, they go down the ramp and they're out in their pen. I want you to have an intermediate pen. And then from that you have two more chicken openings, right? So then we have a paddock over here, a fence down the middle, a paddock over here, and they're both enclosed. So you rotate, you let your chicken sew, you open it up, and they go into the paddock over here,

and they work that soil, and they work all that grass and everything else, and you would, of course, seed that area, things that are really good for your chickens. And then before they get a chance to defoliate it completely, the following morning, you open or a week later, you open the other one, and that way they never wear out the soil, they always have greens to eat, and you can continue to seed. and so we create separate paddocks that your chickens have access to or not. I've seen some really interesting chicken runs where they even make one that surrounds a vegetable garden

and make sure the bugs and things never make it to the vegetable garden. I think that's kind of cool and they're completely covered like hoops. So there are a lot of options. I highly recommend if you like bees and chickens, the bees don't attack the chickens. Doesn't matter what color the chicken is. My chickens are seriously not bright. and they will walk right under they don't eat live bees they don't eat dead bees which is super

disappointing to me yet here they fed the um the grubs so if you've got pupa and you're using drone comb as a method for controlling for road destructor mites which is a long time honored way to do this chemical free and to get especially this time of year to get a significant number of road destructor mites under control. Getting your drone brood out of the hive before your drone emerges is a great way to do it and your chickens will eat those.

And chickens are cool because once you condition them to eat something, they all do it. Here, copycats. Moving on to question number four comes from Tom from Rochester, Washington. High freedom in the Pacific Northwest. We had a cold, wet winter,

days were very limited until the last couple of weeks because when it was cold it was raining. So if it got if it warmed up it was raining it was cold or inside so kind of an endless dead loop which a lot of us can relate to this year I have a lay-ins question six out of seven hives have survived winter that's fantastic by the way but I have problems with two hives one appears healthy but tiny 2,000 bees and there is a queen present and a small amount of brood. They're foraging, but not in great numbers. Number two has good bee numbers, and they are foraging, but they appear to be queenless. Queen not spotted, no brood, no eggs, no pollen coming in.

Can you recommend a way to join these two lands colonies? Yes, I can, and this is my thumbnail for today. Getting your queens under control. So here's the thing, they're lands hive. So what do we have? When we have a lands, which is a horizontal hive, it comes from France, the DeLands hive. And so we've got a couple of them and we want to combine the two. But we want to find out, first of all, is, are they really missing a queen? Really? Is there one there? So let's combine them together, and here's what I recommend you do. These are plastic queen excluders. I don't use them because I don't think they're great and I don't know. have a long history with queen excluders I kind of avoid them in general but the reason I bring it up

they're plastic they're easy to cut what do you have in your land's hive you have a follower board the follower board is designed to expand and contract the number of frames accessible to your bees while as far as your bees are concerned the entire hive is that size so when we're starting with a small colony of bees of course we only have three or four lanes frames and then there's a follower board and the entrance of course is in there. Now as they progress and as they fill out those frames we move the follower board away from the entrance and we put in new frames for them. The follower board is a fantastic template. It's usually just solid wood because it also in the wintertime would act as an insulator for that area where your bees are occupying the space.

Now what you can do is you can drill holes in it, big holes like you're making doorknob holes in a door and you can cut pieces of queen excluder. This one obviously has been used. It has propolis all over it. So you cut these sections and you just cover one side of your follower board. And you use your follower board as a template. You can make another one. And then all you're doing there is you're combining the two.

And the reason I recommend combining these frames but using a queen excluder is because clean excluder combo follower. board is we want to sequester the bees that have the queen on one side and the bees without the queen on the other and with this method of combining the two you don't have to use newsprint things like that has been my experience that when we're combining colonies that are sizable that have numbers of bees with them it's not a lot of resistance they kind of joined together so fast it was like what was the point of the newsprint so i've stopped using it and i've not had any big one war is going on. But if we use the follow board and the queen

excluder, here's what we are guaranteeing to ourselves. We watch both sides to see, first of all, the bees should ultimately, the nurse bees in particular, would migrate through and join whatever side has the queen and the brood. The youngest nurse bees will be attending to the brood. And any currently covered cells that you have, so pupating bees, as they emerge, they'll pass through the queen excluder and again join the area that's got the brood. Now if they don't, and if you ultimately find that you do have eggs there, then you realize that you just missed your queen because it can often happen this time

of year. Just because we look at one colony, they're doing really well, lots of pollen coming in, another one doesn't, we don't have eggs and things like that. This gives us a chance to do two things. One, we join the colonies together, so we are benefiting from the workforce. We have a single entrance so they have to pass through the queen excluder to get to and so they're also benefiting from communal warmth that they're generating together and we will know if we have a queen on both sides of the queen excluder and if we do we've got two separate colonies now you have a two queen system potentially and if you're going to maintain them as a two queen system you would open another entrance on the other side with the other queen or you can just combine them completely ultimately once you've

figured that out. Then you just pull out the queen excluder. Let's say you did only have one queen and then they all just joined together and your queen excluder is back in your storage area and your solid follower board is back including the frames that you want to include in your new combined colony. And that's just one of many ways to do it. I'm personally just recommending that that's what I would do. If you have any drone cells that are capped and they're the other side of the queen they won't be able to get through if that's not the end of the world either because they wouldn't be going out for nine days we can have two weeks anyway so then when you pull up your queen excluder open the hive for inspection they would fly out so the next question number five is from

betsy rockville maryland please tell me about clipping the queen's wings if i did that what would happen if there's not enough room for her to lay eggs so if there's not enough room to lay eggs that means that you should expand and put a super on the hive or add frames or depending on the hive configuration that you have make more room for them but this does hit on an area of discussion which is another surprise surprise polarizing discussion among beekeepers should you clip your queen's wings on one side we mentioned chickens earlier on if you want chickens not to be able to fly over a low fence you clip their flight feathers on one side of the chicken not both sides one side and then they just pinwheel back to the ground and they can't jump your fence.

Doesn't hurt the chickens. Doesn't hurt the queen. I've seen some very interesting commentary about clipping Queen's wings, how they die, how they're deformed, how the bees reject them and kill them. None of that has held up scientifically. None of it. We talked to Paul Kelly, University of Guelph, up in Canada,

and they routinely clip their wings. In fact, it's part of his toolkit, and so I just want to talk about what the benefit is and what the drawbacks might be. So first of all, it gives you some control over the queen and the genetics that you have. It does not stop a queen from swarming and leaving the hive. What it does control is how far she can go when she does. So if you're one of these backyard beekeepers like me, who checks your bees every single day, who's out in the bee yard every single day,

then the chances of you finding a queen on the ground if she were to swarm out, then the chances are high and you'll be able to recover the queen and put her in a nucleus hive or something like that. What you avoided doing when you do that is, first of all, you know the swarm happened and what colony it came from if your queen's marked and things like that. But now you've got the bees did not leave with the queen. When she's on the ground, that the numbers of bees that stick with her are not very big. You know, a couple thousand bees maybe. You won't be getting a prime swarm to stay on the ground with a queen that can't fly.

Sometimes she just goes out to the front of the hive, stays on the front of the hive, and there you go, you can collect her easily. So when you have a clipped wing on your queens, you're going to keep them around and you're not going to send them out to your neighbor's apiary, for example. It doesn't mean that the next queen that you're going to keep them around, queen that emerges, they often replace your queen with multiple queens. It doesn't mean that they don't have what's known as after swarms, particularly since you didn't do much to reduce the population of the hive because they couldn't leave because the queen wasn't fully flight capable. So when you do that

and you collect your queen, it's perfectly a choice of your own, but I just wanted to kind of settle the discussion where it kills the queen, the queen loses hemalymph through the wings, things like that. Once the wings are developed and they're out and they're fully extended, the queen's fully mature, that no longer applies. As far as the bees recognizing that she's somehow deformed and then they turn against the queen and kill her, that also is another, it has not held up. In fact, I need to set up an interview with Mr. Kelly one of these days because he'd be great to talk to, and I think he's near retirement now. So the two answers the questions, one, Clipped Queen, personal choice.

If you're, of course, producing bees and you want them to seed an area, if you think they're going to go out and move into good areas to live in trees and things like that, then you don't want to clip your queen's wings. You want them to be able to fly completely. Their percentages of survival are often very low when they leave your apiary and your control. Question number six comes from Brian, 9-1-3.3. Hey Fred Brian here from central Missouri really like your chicken videos. I have Buff Orpingtons and Plymouth Rocks good birds. I do have a B question. Can you do a

Demery method on a long Langstroth hive? Mine is much like yours. How would you go about doing that? So the Demery comes up a lot. George from the Keepers Hive constantly brings it up to me and there are some good videos on the Keepers Hive YouTube channel that we'll show you the Demery method, the Demery split. And this does work in a long Langstroth hive, and I'm going to go back to what I just described, which is follower boards with queen excluders on them and the ability for your bees to transit through them. So what we're trying to do with the demureteree is decongest your brood area. Give your bees the impression that a swarm has happened.

That a number of bees left in your brood area, your nursery has suddenly shown up with a bunch of new space. So with stacked vertical hives, you may have frames of brood up above a queen excluder and you leave your queen and all that down below. And so with the queen down below and the frame up above, they empty out the frame above and the workers just join the workforce and go back through the queen excluder. And once the risk of swarming is over, then you restore things. you remove the queen excluder and you're back. Now that's an overly simplified version of what the Demerie method is.

Go to just Google it on YouTube and find a Demerie, you know, demonstration. I don't do a lot of it, but it would certainly work easily with the Langstroth Hive also. Very easy to do. So it reduces swarm instinct. That was question number six. question number seven comes from peter long time viewer and frequent commenters so i appreciate peter and the rest of you as well

this is related to um the melissa dr melissa otty interview that i did yesterday and posted yesterday so if you haven't seen that i wish you would take a look in a way it says she has 5,000 needs 17,000 what can we do so So there are some viewers that didn't like that interview and some that did like it and others that don't like the idea that somebody uses the internet to try to earn money for a project. So Dr. Addy is trying to publish a book. Not easy to do on your own. It tends to be expensive.

She has co-authors as well, including people like Dr. Marla Spivak, a lot of people that are really prominent, well-known. And it deals with natural methods of selecting for varroa management among your bees. So the colonies that are uncapping, recapping cells that might have varomites in them. And then, of course, using that tool to identify colonies that are strong, that demonstrate this propensity to keep varroa numbers low on their own without treatment. And so she has a compilation that she's trying to publish as a book. So the reason we bring that up is it ends on the 9th of April, which is coming right along. And I'm trying to get through my Q&A today because the supervisor is on his way out.

I don't want him to come in and erect my conversation. So trying to get things done here. But now, I like to support studies and things like that. You should also know that when I talk with someone that's trying to publish a book like Dr. Adi is. I'm not getting a piece of the pie. I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign just like anyone else. We vote with our dollars, the things that we think are important, and I would like to see the book happen.

I would like to see a lot of people get on board with finding integrated pest management methods that may not require strong treatments to help get your varomites under control and also actively select for better traits of colonies of bees that could make it with very little intervention on the part of the beekeeper. So that's what that was about. If you haven't seen that interview, please watch it. I think it's worthwhile. There's a lot of interesting things going on there. Now we'll move on to question number eight. This is from James from Newburgh, New York. I want to change out my four-year-old comb.

That's a worthy thing. Anyway, in the brood box, but it will always be in use with brood. How would you ever be able to swap out these frames? Now this is a common thing that comes up. We do want to rotate out our honeycomb. Why would we do that? Well I was taught and it was very well grounded based on studies. What kinds of studies? Well the study of what kind of contaminants build up inside the beeswax comb

that your bees use for what? For brood? And if ever the other, And if ever there's an area that we should have clean, it's the nursery where we're reproducing. And what happens is, this is happening in four years for James, but the general rule of thumb was every five years we wanted to cycle it out. Pesticides and stuff that are used in the environment end up in the beeswax. And even things that we don't even use as beekeepers shows up in our beeswax. one of the things being kuma fos. So treatments, this is a kick in the pants.

Treatments that we don't even use, maybe you're an organic beekeeper. Things show up in your bees wax that you know you've never used. But what happens when bees swarm or when they take off and forage or don't come home? Swarming bees, for example, are prepared to make new beeswax, but where do they get it through their own metabolism? So depending on what colony they've come from and what the management price, were in that column in that colony in that apiary they bring it all with them the other thing is

pesticides that are used to agriculturally can end up on flowers which will be's visit pollen that they feed to their babies and things like that so the comb just becomes a concentrated mess of every potential toxin now in nature what would happen is that you know a colony would end up empty for a spell after so much buildup occurs in the brood area and then the great recyclers would show up like wax moths would lay eggs and then that wax moth larvae wax worms would be able to consume and cycle out the old comb but when we have managed colonies that's unlikely to happen so now it's up to us to cycle out old comb keep it fresh keep it new without taxing your bees too much.

So I practiced the 20% rule. So two out of 10 frames I would target for removal. Now we come up to today's question from James. What do we do? The frames are always have some level of development going on. So we can't just pull the frames. We'd be sacrificed in the brood and we don't want to do that. Aha.

This is something that we've brought up time and time. Again, this is a queen isolation cage. If you don't have one, if you're dragging your feet, there are so many uses for this. Now usually we use it to collect a queen and we put a queen inside this cage. Now this happens to be a two frame, two deep frame container. Now in this case, we're not going to put the queen in here. We're going to leave the queen outside of it because we're trying to empty a frame of brood. Now, it's unlikely that you would have deep frames, deep boxes up above.

because if you did, you could just move the boxes up above, queen excluder in between, then they empty out the frame from brood, and it gets put back into service as a honey super, or you're then able to remove them and swap them out for new frames. So in this case, we take the brood that's on those frames, put it inside this queen isolation cage, and the queen's outside the cage.

So now she can't lay it up anymore. So now she can't continue to produce brood in it. you understand already that this is a near perfect system so enough talk about that so we've got them in there and somebody will say well what if some of that brood is drone brood then if it is and the drones are capped and they come out what did i say earlier the drones are going to take a while to be fed to be cared for to mature and to strengthen themselves before they can become drones that should fly and mate with virgin queens like they're supposed to. So if you keep them in there for a week or so, you're good to go.

I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but it's handy that it did. So there you have it. Four-year-old comb, put it in a cage. Those cages are super handy. I'm just saying it. Can't say it enough. Where do you get them? You get them at BetterB?

Do you get a discount? If you get a Better B if I send you there, tell them I send you. Pay the same. Is everybody else? I get no kickbacks. Better B does not be. pay me money. I wouldn't mind if they did, but they don't. So moving on. By the way, we're in the fluff section now, which is my favorite section. Not that the questions aren't

cool. They are. They're very cool. See these wooden frames with queen excluders. I mentioned before, but now we're in spring management. Within the next couple of weeks, we're going to be looking into our hives to make sure we don't have queen cells. And when we get into the first week of May, we're going to have swarms. Trust me, we're going to have swarms first week of May. here in the northeastern part of united states northwestern part of pennsylvania these are queen excluders with wooden frames that you can set on the landing board right in front of your hive why would you do that well you just installed the swarm how excited have you been in the past to install a swarm early in the spring when you needed one really bad because you had so many losses

and then uh two days later they're gone they're back out on a tree how annoying because they rejected the space, you put them in, but Queen Excluded, wooden frame, landing board, up against the entrance, the queen can't leave. Our goal is to get her to lay eggs. Lay eggs, those are anchors. And we may have egg anchors, the nurse

bees will stay, and they won't leave, and now you've got your swarm. Forever. And then you take this off. Now, I have found that I didn't even have to clamp this to the front. So I could just set this on there. The weight of it was enough. And then when do you remove it you remove it at night after it's done its job or early in the morning before they start

flying if you remove it after they start flying then they get confused so because you just modify their entrance configuration or remember what i said earlier landmarks physical shapes are the most important things to be is when they're orienting so these work really well i tried to get better be to carry them and they won't so where do you get them dat d-d-d-n-tie-n-tie-t go there get these landing board queen excluders so many uses and if you've got the big dials on the front of your nucleus hives for example the nukes that I like to you know promote even though the guy that made them is no longer with us he crossed over but they have a dial on them for queen excluder dial so that just keeps the queen in so that's got controls built right into it very easy once I

have them up and the queen goes in keeper there tell she likes lays eggs. Let's see, oh, this is cool. This is my shout-out for today because it's timely for spring. Now maybe if you're in the deep south, this doesn't apply to you, but these are called seed bombs. This is something that I've enjoyed for a long time. There, I just, you know, for kicks, I googled and looked for seed bombs, how to make them, what they should be made of, things like that. So I found a channel. Today is my shout-out. The channel is Gardner Scott, G-R-D-D-E-N-E-R-S-S-E-S-E-S-E. What's the title of the video? How to make seed bombs in parentheses seed balls So he's got the recipe shows you how to do it yourself in fact the cheapest clay I never thought of this before

So I'm glad I watched the video Is kitty litter so like dust free clay kitty litter you know without the odors and everything So what's the premise what am I talking about talking about guerrilla gardening? I'm talking about picking the seeds the plants that you want to see around your neighborhood. Now, I don't know you if you get caught and you get in trouble. Let's say there's a vacant lot somewhere, you know, in your town, and it just grows up with normal weeds, thistles, whatever. You have a chance to make these seed bombs.

Load them up, carry them in egg cartons. That's what I recommend. Not that I know, but if you had egg cartons, the 24s would work. Carry all your little clay seed bombs in there. When do you do this? At night. When weather-wise? Well, after threat of frost and before a big storm series comes through, which is happening a lot here this year in the United States.

So let's say you look at your weather forecast and your meteorologist or your climatologist is telling you that you're going to have three days of rain ahead and you need to get out there tonight. Seed bombs. I mean, you just toss them around. The stuff that you want, the stuff that you want for your bees. And then what happens? It rains on it.

The dirt clod, you know, the seed bomb starts to dissolve. It settles into the soil. It protects the seed and it germinates and grows and you can make as many of them as you want. Anyway, it's my shout-out for today. The other thing is in celebration for the 300th episode of questions and answers for backyard beekeepers. I did design the coffee cup. There will be a link for that down in the video description. So I want to thank those who asked for it. It is a decent coffee cup. It's going to be available for two weeks and it will go away forever. And so if you use the link. Now one of the things I don't like, not about the coffee cup, let's face it, it's above average. The images on it are above average. It's 100% original. It is a special edition designed by yours truly has pictures of live bees in focus on the coffee cup. I just don't like T-spring. T-spring is the print on demand, you know, so in other words, I didn't have to make a hundred of them. and then take an order and ship it out. These are print on demand. So they do T-shirt, sweatshirts, you know, carry bags, ball caps, whatever.

But I notice they're expensive. So I would really like to find a print on-demand service. Maybe you have, you know, a company in your basement, your garage, your attic someplace that's cool. And maybe you do print on demand. And you do coffee cups on-demand. stuff like that you're looking to partner with somebody on a YouTube channel I am just looking for somebody to take my designs and not rip people off in the amount of money they charge for

shipping the turnaround is really slow I'm not saying the T-spring is bad at all I'm just saying I'm looking for something and if you know a good print on-demand service or you are yourself a print on-demand service maybe you got a friend it's super artsy and they just want to make a living silk screening shirts and stuff and they just don't get enough work out of it they're working with Etsy or something like that please put a link i will check them out i'm looking for other ways to go so anyway also since this is the 300 episode i want to thank my patrons i almost never do that fred you have patrons yes i do those are people that just thank so much of my channel and the content that i put out they're willing to make a monthly donation to help me

long and it does help it's very good if you notice i don't have memberships on this channel i don't charge you anything for anything so you could watch everything i do for free right on time you don't have to wait for it we have no memberships not anything wrong with those who have memberships i just don't want you to have to deal with it guess what else i don't do i don't do mid real commercials because i want you to be able to focus on what i'm talking about and i want you to be interrupted so patrons patrons, Patreon, patrons through Patreon, make donations helps a lot. Can you imagine if every person, I mean, I know this is really important to you, that's why you're sticking around this long for the fluff section.

What if just every person who subscribed paid 50 cents a month? Do you know how many fat stacks I'd have? Do you know how many pizzas that is? It's nothing like that. I clearly, I don't even get over $100 a month. month but that's okay every little bit helps and I just wanted to say thank you for those you who do it and where do you find out about that let's say I sparked your curiosity you go down in the video description below and you look for the link for Patreon and you click on it

and off you go second week of April inspect every day northeast of United States these are my people you need to be aware inspect everything you're going to have to go through and do an evaluation of every colony just to see where they're at just to make sure you're ahead of them because the last thing I want you to do is lose your colony through a swarm give it to one of your neighbors that you know you don't like and then you're out of bees we don't want that we want you to keep your bees and remember this year we're doing the oh yeah the keepers hive they have their store is open so they did their fundraiser remember we mentioned fundraisers earlier I contributed to the keepers hive and I got the two queen system you can get your own

you can even make your own you can look at it see how it's made make your own probably not a good thing to be telling you that if they're trying to sell the keeper's hive but the kits are out there double queen systems are supposed to be super productive and they are available okay they didn't ask me to say that just notice it so here we go and uh things are going to shift i'm telling you right now the other thing is uh reduce your colonies so if you have big colonies going into fall and winter and you've got triple deeps double deeps things like that consider shrinking those down now because when your bees occupy smaller spaces now we don't want to make it so they're out of room keep in mind they're in an expansion phase of the year but when they

have smaller spaces they film quicker it's really interesting so the tall stacks of nucleus hives do really well but i've got some that are three high and i only need them to be too high right now not as in too high as in wow that's too high as in two the number okay So reduce them for the size of the colony that's in it, if you're going to continually manage. Now you've got an apiary out somewhere else. So I will say that I have a satellite apiary in a neighboring town. 100% loss of bees this year. 100%.

And now that's a dramatic pause because it was only one colony. They were the meanest bees ever. We're not even worried about it. Now I have another apiary satellite location. 100% survival. 100%. survival because it's one colony in the backyard of a friend so you see how percentages work anyway so reduce the hives get them down to the right size have your

equipment ready to go ready to expand because when they do expand if you don't do it in time before they are jammed up then they're going to swarm on you you can do things to help reduce the swarming preventity, but they are going to swarm in some cases. So what are you planning this year other than the gorilla gardening, the seed bombs that I'm instructing you all to go out and do unless you get caught, then I don't know you. So what are you planning for your bees? Are you doing perennials, annuals, where you live? What are your bees on the most? It's really interesting. I am planting so many things this year. The other thing is last year I've always lost, you know, when I planted my sunflowers,

because we're doing acres of them. That's a big investment, time, money, and everything. Sunflower seed is not cheap. And then only to have rabbits, woodchucks, and deer, just munch my sunflowers. I used liquid fence last year for the first time and it works great. I get no cut from them. It just is the super stinky stuff that happens to work. I sit in my golf cart and I crank up. the sprayer and I just drive along and spritz areas to keep the deer out and it worked. So I was just a little late yesterday doing it but it definitely worked. I'm doing it again this year. The other thing is how because I get these questions from people they actually want me to settle

people's hash which I think is really funny the idea that people would even listen. You're getting in an argument at your B club, your association and your fellowship and maybe you quote something that I've said or you quote something that you think is right. right? And you just get torn apart by these people. First of all, they won't even talk to you. They want to kick you out of the club over it because they're all treatment free and you're thinking about a treatment. Or they definitely believe in treatment and treatment free.

Those people are, you know, loony tunes. I can't take a side for you. I can give you information, but here's the thing that bothers me the most about people that make statements on the way out the door. Teenagers are famous for this. My own teenagers used to say random things, deep philosophical things on their way out the door and then slam the door. Why? Because they're so afraid that you would have a combat. They're so concerned that you would have a well-reasoned response that might change their viewpoint. So instead of having that threat hanging over their head, they just make a statement, they make an accusation. They make an

and out the door they go. So there's no risk of losing their standing. My position is different. I'm open to all discussion. Unless the discussion is entirely unreasonable and completely not plausible, and I really hope, and that's the premise of my channel, by the way.

I try to give you information about things that I would never use in some cases, information about practices that I may never apply in many cases. But if you are going to make a viable argument for or against something, you need to be informed. So let's say you totally didn't believe in some methodology or you thought something was flawed. It doesn't hurt you to listen to the entire thing and hear all the points made. How did they arrive at that? How do they validate what their claiming is right?

is that doable and is it doable where you are and is the benefit worth the investment so in other words time money resources and then the benefit to the bees in this case does it pay off should you be threatened by someone else's viewpoint i say no no stand right up to it because if your premise does not hold up under scrutiny then you probably need to look back at your own standing. It doesn't help also to manufacture statistics and everything else. So we also need to be honest and accept when things go wrong and get into the analytical parts of why things went wrong. Sometimes it's completely out of your control and that's okay. People love to criticize. So I don't know if you've

looked in the comments sections of different videos on YouTube, but there are some people that just love to tear people down. So one of the things I learned is that some of the things that make us the most angry when somebody says something to you can often be because it was actually pretty close to the mark. It could actually be almost true. So a criticism that hits the mark could actually make somebody pretty angry. If it's way off, it's way wacky doodle, then we don't care. You know rubber glue. I'm rubber, your glue, bounces, sticks. You know what I'm talking about. So I highly recommend listening to all viewpoints. Some because I interview people on my channel and some people like to say pretty terrible things. And if it's a personal attack, a personal insult, you're just going to go away because it's not productive. There's no room for negotiation in there. There's no reasoning opportunity in those comments. But if someone just makes a criticism or an observation that's contrary to the viewpoint that the person being interviewed has, that's okay.

because there's still room for discussion, and that's the room I want to retain is open-mindedness towards people's practices with bees. It will make you a better beekeeper. Often what people learn first, they learn best, and then they lock onto it. So then when they hear someone else, another beekeeper who says, yeah, well, that actually doesn't work, and here's why.

Listen to the here's why, because all they heard was that doesn't work, and that's a criticism and that's personal. Now I'm going to get mad. Don't. Hear them out. And if their position that's contrary to yours doesn't hold up, then you're still good. You're still good where you're at. Keep doing what you're doing.

If it works, it works. Hard to argue with that. But I just wish that, and a lot of my viewers are like this already anyway. You can straddle multiple worlds in beekeeping philosophies, practices, and be willing to change. if something looks better than it used to and something will work better on behalf of the bees, the environment, and you. I know I am not preaching to you. I'm just this I'm venting right now because I don't like the statement slam out the door you know discussion. So the last thing I want to say to you is please subscribe to my channel. Of course

subscribe. I'm going to keep the information balance. You're going to get both sides. All opinions are welcome unless they're completely wacky doodle, then, you know, obviously I'm not going to do that. These are people that think of something to say and that have given a lot of thought and effort and put into practice or have scientific backing behind what they're hoping is true and what they want you to understand. So that's what we're doing. I hope that you have a fantastic weekend ahead. I hope that the weather holds, but it won't hold for me here because we're going to get snow again. So what's that mean for us?

Let's make sure that our bees are cared for, they're sized right, and that you're doing everything you can to pave the way for them to work. Don't get into your beehives unnecessarily. They don't like it. Plenty of pollen coming in, plenty of resources coming in. That colony is good to go. Keep your gear ready to expand.

And I hope that the things we cover today in the Q&A help you out. Thanks for watching. Have a great weekend.