The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode 302 spring management tips and more.

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/hBU_Lz5xtTo

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, April the 18th of 2025. This is Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 302. I'm Frederick Dunn and This is the way to be. So I want to thank you for being here today. There's a lot going on. And if you notice, the temps are rising and that's really fantastic news.

I know that's what you want to know first, right? Otherwise, if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, Please look down in the video description below and you will find all the topics in order. We have quite a few today. Most of them related to spring management of honeybees in your backyard apiary. So it's timely. But it is 68.7 degrees Fahrenheit outside. That's 20 degrees Celsius.

9.6 mile per hour winds, but it's gusting really high. So we're going to have high winds increasing right through the weekend, which is 15 kilometers per hour. and we have 45% relative humidity. That's going to change too. We have rainstorms coming tomorrow, which is good news because I'm ahead of it. And by that I mean I frost-seated a bunch of... What did I frost-seed?

Well, I frost-seated some buckwheat, which is really fun. That comes up in like three or four days, I'm told. It's my first year. I've never done that before. And of course, the clover, white Dutch clover, someone asked about that also in today's questions and it came up within just a few days so we'll talk a little bit about that as the time comes also what's going on outside the deer numbers have dwindled so there's one maybe moping around in the wetlands all the skunk cabbage is blooming nice and big guess what

eats at black bears so black bears are out and about one of our members had the apiary attacked by a bear and and ate a bunch of frames and stuff, not fun. So you want to be checking into your bare fencing and stuff like that. But this is more like the fluff section, so we'll wait and do that near the end. And this is your last day for the 300th episode coffee cup that was requested by people just like you. Thank you for that.

And I don't have the results yet. So pins and needles, there are going to be two winners. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm really sorry. You're out of time to enter. We gave you two weeks to submit your 300th episode Q&A. So you had to give me a statement regarding one thing that you've learned from this channel, of course, through the years, through all the time that we've been doing this. And then, of course, there's going to be a winner, but we're going to have two.

And the supervisor's coming. He's nine years old. If you don't know who he is, his name is Quinn. He's not here yet. That's why we don't know the results. We're going to make a video of him picking the winners. And we're going to just use your first name. Don't worry.

And your location. We're not going to divulge your critical information about your address and things like that. But there will be two winners today. And then what happens if you're a winner? You get an email from me saying, hey, you're a winner. Let me know.

Give me your address. Blah, blah, blah. And then we'll ship it out to you. So it was fun to do. And I think that's great. So I think if you want to know how to submit your own question, and I made some changes to the website. What website?

Thewayto-be.org. Now you might be thrown for a loop when you punch in the way to be.org, and it says, fredsfinefowl.com, they are the same channels. Freerangechikins.org, the same channel. So the other thing is, we had a page mark The Way to Be. And that's what you clicked on to submit your question. And then someone else wrote and said, could not find the page with the questions on it. So then I thought, why am I calling it the way to be?

Well, it used to be to distinguish from Fresfine Fowl, from the chicken people. But right now, the honeybee people have taken priority over the chicken people. So I'm starting to slowly modify the website to address more of the beekeepers and less of the chicken people. So now the page says questions also. So that should be easy. to find. I hope it is. And by the way, when you fill that out, you can be anonymous. You don't have to put in your full name. And if you don't want to be mentioned, or if you do want to be mentioned, in fact, you could say, hey, mention my full name so everybody knows. I'm the one that submitted the question. Or you can just say, please don't name me or make a pseudonym, right? Use your pen name. So that's pretty much it. That's on that page. What else do we have? That's pretty much it. Let's jump right in with the very first question. There are 10 today. Very first question comes from Wendy. from Seattle, Washington. I wanted to hear how the Pinky-Winky Hydrange's fared with deer this winter. Planted some for my bees after watching Fred's video of the same.

Have deer where I planted. Okay, so some of you're probably wondering what the heck are we talking about. Pinky Winky. I like to mention that when I'm giving presentations because I like to hear people say Pinky Winky. It's a cultivar, by the way. So it is not a native plant. This is a showstopper for a lot of people that want to plant exclusively native plants where they live.

So it is from a series of plants called Proven Winners. So these cultivars come out as they've been modified. There's a whole bunch of them. And how do you find out which of those plants are going to attract more pollinators and more specifically honeybees? That's how I found it. I went to Stans Garden Center near where we are, but I found out these things are sold everywhere. like big box stores, Home Depot, Lowe's, stuff like that. Anyway, you could hear the bees on it.

So the honeybees were going for Pinky Winky. Now the question is, of course, how are the deer treating them? The deer haven't done dilly with them, but here's the thing. I put the Pinky Winky where we can see it from the house. So in other words, I'm keeping it close because if the deer come around, I'm going to send out my deer chaser, who's nine years old, the supervisor. He really likes to do that. And he will be happy to run them off.

Of course, if they come at night, what are you going to do to stop them? I underestimated my flock of chickens. They went out there, and I don't know if you keep chickens, but if you do, you know that if one of those hens starts to peck at something, they all think they're missing out, so they start pecking on something too. And before you know it, what have they done? They chewed off all the bark from my pinky winky from ground to about four inches. So they basically girdled it.

Now I was told from the experts that it'll come up again from the ground. You may not get blossoms this year though. You'll just see some new growth because the blossoms form on last year's growth. So I think last year's growth is Bologna, that's Bologna, that's Bologna, mispronounced. And I don't think I'm going to get any blossoms. But I also have another patch of Pinky Winky that I planted later and I put cages around it right away. And that might bloom, but they're little.

but they're little. Those are little gallon-sized containers. So anyway, pinky, fun, good stuff. It should be a really good pollinator nectar plant, nectar source. Is it going to make a big difference in my bee yard? This happens a lot. You know, people have backyard gardens and they plant 25 plants and think, I'm going to get so much honey from that. You're not. It's probably not even going to be measurable. What it is is a feel-good thing. If you like having these plants, these cultivars around, and you want to look at them and you want to hear the bees humming around them, want to see bees getting nectar and pollen. By the way, the pollen from pinky-winky, what color do you think it is? It's pink to purple. So that's cool too. Now you add another color

to the buffet that goes into the beehive and becomes bee bread for bee babies. And I like it. I just like having it around. But if you wanted to plant something to really change the amount of honey that you're going to have produced inside your beehives, you're talking acres. Or trees. Trees like the linden tree also known as a bass wood tree. Little leaf linden is what we have here and they are growing bigger and bigger of course because trees are only doing one of two things they're growing or they're dying and mine are growing. So those provide a lot of nectar and those are of course like having a vertical garden so if you live in a

small plot and you want to plant something for your bees that's going to provide a meaningful resource for them in other words abundant resources. Trees think of them as vertical gardens. So A lot of fun. And that's it. All right, so we're jumping right in. That was Wendy's Pinky Winky question. And they're not protected from the deer. And I'm so disappointed. Don't even want to. I will talk about it, but I don't want to because it's super depressing. I planted a bunch of service berry trees last year. A bunch of them. I spent fat stacks on these trees. Of course, I went to the garden center, talk to the guy. He was very quick to respond. How did the deer react?

to these service berry trees. Ah, they won't touch them. Okay, so I planted them. Then of course, within just a few days, the deer came through and munched them right down. And so then other people said, yeah, but you know the deer are checking out new things, it's gonna come back and oh yeah,

well they came through and munched every bud off of every single tree. And we're talking a bunch of trees. I don't wanna say how many. We were out there yesterday, walking around looking at things. See what the damage is. The damage is extensive.

We have too many deer, too little resource in the environment. So the deer have munched things that maybe on a great year, they wouldn't have touched it. But, and I will reiterate, the only thing that deters deer around here is liquid fence. The super stinky, concentrated, smelly stuff that you spray onto your plants. I still have it, I still use it, it works.

If I had known about it, it. See, that's the thing. I would have used it. If the guy at the store had told me, you might want to do something while they're new out there and protect them a little bit, I would have done my research and put out the liquid fence and deterred them before they could do all that damage because I sprayed it later and it deterred the deer. Moving on, Christina sent a question in from Bloomfield, Indiana. I was inspecting my overwintered highs on March of 28th, and I heard one of my queens piping. Before I spotted her and she did not appear to be a virgin queen,

I don't know how B appears or does not appear to be a virgin queen, but anyway, only a small amount of drones in the hive and a healthy amount of worker brewed, no sign of queen cells. My question is do maided queens pipe and if so, why? So I'm going to give you a homework assignment, everyone who's listening and watching right now. because that response could be an entire Q&A response. It could take up the whole time. Why?

Because people have done studies on sounds bees make. And they've made it their area of expertise in the queen. We say the queen pipes. And she does. She doesn't have pipes. There's no air moving through, like pipes of an organ, for example. They don't just pipe. They quack also.

They toot. Bees pipe, bees quack. bees toot. Not tooting after eating a bunch of beans. I mean like they toot and make tooting sounds. So what I want you to do is do a Google search and look into sounds queens make and what they mean because it's a rabbit hole that you will go down and you will learn so much about it. So the thing of it is it does not have to be a soon-to-emerge queen from a cell who they pipe and you can hear them and it goes e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e and you hear another one in the hive and then they use this vibration because remember

they don't hear the airborne sounds and they follow that and they find one another so who's mobile who can find the others the first to emerge and the worker bees inside the nurse bees they're playing favorites how do they do that They can even keep a queen inside her cell against her well. They can prevent her from getting out. They hold on to the top. They reseal it while she's trying to cut out. If you look at the mandibles of a queen, they have a jagged edge on them.

They're a little different from the mandibles of a worker honeybee. And if you find a hole chewed into the side of a cell, then a queen bee, usually one of the new ones, has chewed a hole through the side of the queen's cell, inserted her stinger right into the thorax. usually just next to the wings. There's a big spherical there and injected and killed her. There's a lot going on, but yes, they can, aside from being a pre-emergent, they also, when they come out and they're scooting around on the surface, so newly emerged, unmated queen, makes a lot of noise.

And why the others respond to her knowing that it means certain death, I don't understand. But I'm just going to let you get down that rabbit. If you find a link to a good study that's published and there have been some, go ahead and post that down in the comment section so that others can benefit from your research. So it's going to be fantastic. Question number three comes from Jose. Hampstead, Maryland, when doing a split, how many days do I need to separate the new brood

and nurse bees before introducing the new queen? I'm getting the new queen on Wednesday. So the thing of it is when you make a split and you separate brood from a queen they know that that queen is gone in minutes so an hour even this is an area where beekeepers this is frustrating for new beekeepers because you ask several beekeepers how long you should do that before you introduce queen to increase her acceptance we want them to want the queen so in the absence of the queen they become a little bit desperate and they need one so

So I do evaluations. In fact, I made a video that shows you how to read the colony and decide whether you could take the chance and leave your queen in her cage and introduce it that way because you need more time. Or when the bees are demonstrating that they're ready for the queen. They want her. They're feeding her. They're providing resources through the screen. They need her now. They want her laying eggs. And then some people will make recommendations like close that queen up for a week before you turn her loose. I want you to think of something when you're introducing a new queen to a hive, a mated queen. Every day that passes, when she's out and in production, if you bought a queen through the mail, she's a laying queen. She is ready to go. Her pheromone attracts nurse bees. Her pheromone settles the colony, calms them down, and assuming that, see, here's why we need to feel them out to make sure that there's no opposing queen. That's when they'll attack the queen or when they're

genetics are so far away that they reject the queen that's coming in as two different from themselves, right? So it can be a little complicated, but it's easy to look and see what their reaction is. If they grab onto that screen that's on your queen cage and they're biting it with their mandibles and their abdomens are turned in and they're clearly trying to insert their stingers through the screen, another reason they could be doing that is because they don't like, they might like the queen, but what else is in the cage with her? Workers. They came with her that they don't know. So they may be actually attacking the workers and actually wanting to care for the queen that's in the cage. How do we know the difference? Well you have to get the

workers out of the cage. How do you do that? Well you put your queen cage inside a queen muff. What's a queen muff? Let me show it to you. I've shown it to you before. I think you know mine sits around. I've been keeping beads since, well, 2006 and I think I've used this five times but here's an example of where you would use it. Queen cage comes in the mail. Workers with her. Inside the muff they go. So your hands are in here. You can of course put your tools in here ahead of time. What kind of tools would you need? Usually a pair of tweezers so that you can get the cork out or a little pointed penknife or something like that. So then you pull the cork out of the end and you turn it with the open end up and you let the workers go out.

And if the queen happens to come out, this is why we're in the muff. You can find the queen, you can catch her, put her back inside the cage, seal it up with a marshmallow or something like that. Take it out, let the workers go. By the way, this also feels apart. You could be working with a full frame, by the way. If you have the queen on a frame, you're trying to catch her and you don't have confidence and your ability to catch her without her flying away.

Put the frame with all the beads in the queen muff. Anyway, now she's in her by herself. and reintroduce this cage on the top of the bars near the brood. See what their behavior is then. And if it's all positive, all they're trying to do is feed and they're not getting frenzied and grabbing it and biting it and trying to sting.

Now you can probably direct release her. Remember that a queen can lay, the numbers are huge. 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day. Her body weight every 24 hours in eggs. So if you follow the instructions, of keep in that cage for five days, keep in the cage for a week, let them get acquainted over an extended period of time. How many worker brood have you lost? In other words, 21 days out, you would have new brood emerging at that same rate, 1,500 to 2,000 new brood per day.

So multiply that by a week and see how many workers you are behind. That's why I take the risk and I've not had it fail. I will link the video. and you can watch it and see how the bees behave. And then when you turn her loose, she's on her way. So they know that their queen is gone right away. It's up to you to evaluate their behavior. This is part of learning beekeeping and it's a lot of fun, by the way. You get to be what restores that colony that's in a state of disarray

because they have no queen, even if that's because you're removed a queen. Because some people are going to be removing queens because their colonies are too hot, things like that. Question number four, Christopher, Pasadena, Maryland. I inspect my hive and couldn't find the queen. Not sure if I just missed her or if she isn't in there. Let's see, one of the queen cells was, I found three or four capped queen cells. Okay, so here's the thing. This is coming up, because this is timely this time of year,

Northeastern United States. I'm in the state of Pennsylvania. What part of the state, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania? So my climate is different than yours. But let me tell you this. If you find a bunch of queen cells along the fringe of your brood frame or anywhere in your hive, for that matter, and they're already capped, 99.9% chance your queen is already gone. She flew the coop.

She's out of the hive. She left the apiary. And she took a bunch of bees with her that you probably didn't even notice because you were inside staying warm having coffee. If it's warm after a storm, expect a swarm. That's going to happen. get ready in the coming weeks a lot of beekeepers up here are going to be caught off guard so you find that situation she's out okay I'm 99% sure

so I was wondering if I could make a split by moving a few frames one with the queen's cell leaving queen cells in both new colonies would each colony raise new queens just from the queen cells I also did not see any eggs but did see very small larvae So you don't see eggs, that means there hasn't been a lane queen in there for three days or more. So, of course, everything in here that's subscribed, yes, you can do it. And this is why this is timely. You look at your brood areas, you find these great queen cells. Now, we had a bee breakfast at IHop, one of my favorite places to go to talk about bees.

And I brought with me the hive butler tote, which a lot of people don't like. They're expensive, they say. I say this is one of the most valuable tools working bees in your apiary. that I have ever had. Because you can carry around a deep brood box and use it like a hive butler tote and put a bunch of frames in it and tote those around. You can tip it one way or the other and the frames all slide one way or the other with the hive butler tote. They don't slide at all because it's set up to keep them in line in order. There's grooves to keep them spaced. And listen to this. Spaced. They're not bunched right up against one another. They have space between the frames. Where else do they have space with the hive butler? These people should do. pay me. The deep frames, there's space underneath. What's that space for? Well, what if you had

queen cells hanging down from one of your brute frames that you found inside your hive, then you would need space so that when you put it in, if you were just putting that in a deep box, you can smash a queen cell. But because the high butler tote, those people design those things to accommodate the queen cell. So there you go. Now we have something to sort and put our queen cells in and our frames with brood and nurse bees in there so that we can move them over and start. another colony somewhere else without exposing them to weather, without having this wind that's coming up because managing hives on a windy day can annoy your bees. You don't have to risk the queen or some other valuable bee falling off of a frame onto the ground somewhere without you seeing it because

you're going to be looking at other frames moving them around. What a great way to move your frames around. And if you go there and if you buy one from hivebutler.com, tell them I sent you. Use a discount code. Fred five. What do I get for that? Nothing. I get nothing. You get $5 off 100, whatever. Highly recommended. So anyway, yes, take the frame that has queen cells on it. Because often there'll be two or three queen cells on the same frame. So make sure that we look at ones that have queen cells on the other frames. The other question that comes up, should I smash a bunch of the queen cells? You don't have to because what are we just talking about earlier? The first queen to emerge is going to go and chew open the sides of the others. How do we know if the bees, the nurse bees are favoring one queen's cell over the others?

Nine times out of ten, they build more beeswax around it. They model it. It looks like the exterior of a planter's peanut shell. All dimpled and modeled and worked up like a piece of sculpture because they're spending time on it. You can also look at the queen cells and see how many nurse bees are collected around it, on it, guarding it. And as it gets near the time for that queen to emerge, they'll grab it and find it. vibrated a little bit. They want to check to see if she's okay in there. Is she alive? And then she vibrates back. And so then they know. Now you got a queen cell off by itself that doesn't get

any of that action that doesn't have all that attention and all the nurse bees around it waiting for it to emerge. Then probably not as popular. So that's one that's a candidate for smushing. The other thing, credit to Randy McCaffrey, dirt rooster. Get a penlight and try to shine it through the backside. You know what? Candling chicken eggs is. when you candle a chicken egg, you put a lamp through it, darkened room lamp through it, and then you can see the developmental stage and the air cell size of an incubating egg for chickens. You can also see, according to Randy, the Queen's development stage and how much space she's occupying, even if there's one in there, and even if she's alive or not.

So if you're going to be selecting, by the way, that's another thing that should mention. Be very careful in how you manage these queen cells. Don't bump and dry them around. Don't tip them. When you have a frame and you're looking at it, you see a bunch of queen cells on it, don't be flipping it up all different directions and everything else. They could be extremely sensitive. I want you because you're listening to me to fail safe. Treat it like something very delicate.

Keep it vertical. Don't shift it. Migrate it over. Put it in your hive butler tote. Oh, I don't have a hive butler tote. Well, then go to hive butler and get one. What are you waiting for? or find someone else who doesn't like it and buy it from them for half off.

All right. Yes, collect them. Make splits. It's going to happen. They were on their way anyway. The queen's gone. Also, by the way, what's the amount of delay? So this is very different than picking a frame that's got eggs on it and everything and saying,

I want them to make a new queen and start from scratch. Well, the queen is the fastest, you know, cast in the hive to be produced from egg to adult, right? 14 to 15 days. That's if you had no queen, no queen cell, and which it is, you just provided them with a friend that's got eggs on it. And now we count on the nurse bees to freak out and zip into gear and start overfeeding one of those eggs. The that they choose, don't be the one that picks the egg that you've decided is going to be the queen. I am not a fan at all of the on the spot queen rearing method, which means the beekeeper it goes, pooh-squashes the adjacent area around the cell that we want them to pull out the queen's cell on

and feed that one because just as much as not, your bees, you'll do that to the frame, which means just mush all the eggs around it, and then they'll build another queen cell off somewhere that you did not indicate with your OTS method. So I want the bees to pick it because they're much more sensitive than we are. They have great sense of pheromone, genetics, and everything else. let them, just my opinion, let them choose the egg they want to be their replacement queen. But the delay there is a lot where if it's already in the cell, the cell is capped. It's in the pupa state.

So you're within a week of that queen emerging. And then she has to, of course, scoot around. She has to toughen up. She has to practice flying and eventually zip out there and mate and come back. but you're way ahead when you have that. So the whole time you still got brood going. In this description, there was some open brood too. So, yes, do it.

Okay. Next one comes from S. Last name, bees. Mishawaka, Indiana. Okay, so I had some frames from a hive that died out this winter. Some of the frames still had a lot of nectar. And it was beginning to ferment. So I wanted to clean.

it all out possibly give it back to the bees these are foundationless frames so if you don't know what that is and you're a new beekeeper that means you have a wooden frame there was no foundation on it and so there's no plastic insert no starter strips stuff like that it's foundational so bees drew out the comb all on their own so it this is an underachievers foundationless thing by the way which if you're doing top bar hives side side bar here you're doing top bar hives, top bars, they have nothing on them. Get this hot with a hair dryer, stick it right on the underside of the top bar, save, comb like this to start your top bars. Okay, back to the question. So let's see. Had some friends that died out this winter. Some of the frames still

had a lot of nectar and it was bending a front. Okay, so that fermentation, this is something I want you to be sniffing for when you're open your hives this year. So the first time you're getting in there, you'll smell it. It smells sour. And also sometimes you look in the cells and they'll be bubbly. Yeah, they have like little air bubbles caught in the honey. Not good. Sometimes you'll see a white, very fine foam on the surface of the honey. What is that?

That's hydrogen peroxide, my friends. Honey will produce its own defense in hydrogen peroxide at the interface where water or condensation happens to come in contact with the honey that they're trying to preserve. But if it already smells off and it's already started to ferment, guess what? Your beast is not use it anymore. So cleaning it out is what we have to do. So I tried blowing it with a handheld blower, but still left too much too wet with nectar. I decided to try to rinse them out with a spray attachment on my sink.

I now have them in front of a fan in an attempt to dry them out, upside down. So hopefully everything can drain out. So I don't know if you have ever washed out, and I have, sell. because you rinse out old bee bread and stuff like that too. And you use really warm water. How warm should the water be? Well, I'll tell you what, not up near wax melting temperature. So if you want to run your water at 85 degrees or something like that,

you're pretty good to go. And it's going to soak things. We want to dilute away and rinse away. You can rinse out honey with cold water. It just doesn't happen as fast, but it does go into liquid and it does wash out. so when you want to clear that out if you leave it by itself once it's full even of water those selge you tip it every which way and sometimes it doesn't even drain out and you start

shaking it out but this is foundationless we don't want it to bow or flex or flip out of there so the cover shot for today it's my new favorite tool i just got these this winter by the way i have used these air blasters before these are called wolf box and i like them i've talked about them before that's why i'm talking about them again because we have two of them one's on the charger one's ready to go one of the questions i got about it because when you turn these on it has these little blue indicator lights and that's at the third that's the strongest if you operate it on the strongest setting you will not get an hour out of this okay in fact you'll see by the way this is how much battery you have left at the bottom there if you put

on number two more than enough so then what i would personally do is once i rinse it out and i by the way since it's fermented and everything rinse it really good and it doesn't hurt to prevent mold because wherever there is random sugar around and there aren't bees to clean it up then uh you want to make sure that there isn't going to be any mold how do we do that we did that with a teaspoon of bleach and a gallon of sugar syrup and you can sprit salt and a gallon of sugar syrup If you're going to leave that in to start the next colony to get them to clean it out, teaspoon of bleach, gallon of sugar syrup. Now if we're going to clean these frames off and then dry them off and then put them in dry and ready for the bees to use,

it's a 10% bleach solution that make sure that any surface bacteria and everything else is completely dead and clear. Now we want that out of the cells, but we don't have a lot of time. We don't have patience. Turning it upside down, it won't even drain out. It'll still be in there. You have to use forced air. These things I learned through direct experience will actually blow chicken eggs out of the egg carton. So I was drying off chicken eggs and I sent it down and it lifted each egg right out of the carton.

So I want you to understand how strong these are. These will easily, probably even blow your foundationless comb apart if you're too close. So that's your advantage. you know get close enough to blow the moisture out of the cells get it dry enough but if it's got bleach water as a residual you will not have the problem with mold forming on your frames and yes the bees will use it just fine it's got a lot going on this year with bleach and sugar water bleach and drinking water and seeing what the bees are choosing this is why they route themselves to swimming pools chlorinated swimming pools, and they do not mind it at all, and it does handle that.

So, rinse them out, spray attention to think, now have in front of a fan to dry them out. It absolutely works. And was it okay to wash them out with water? Yes, absolutely. Once they dry, could I still use them in the hive? Absolutely. And the bees will clean them up, polish the cells, go right to work. Is there a possibility of mold now that I got them wet?

only if the water is associated also with sugar or proteins that come mixed with sugar like bee bread. So you want to rinse out all your bee bread too. And of course as I just mentioned, the bleach will help take care of that. One teaspoon of bleach in a gallon of water or a gallon of sugar syrup. Bees will drink sugar syrup that has been treated with one teaspoon of bleach. Bleach that is nothing but bleach, nothing that's for your laundry. Not the no splash bleach, the stuff that is designed just to make sure that you're sanitizing surfaces. Nothing added.

Okay. Question number six comes from Francis Moore. That's a YouTube channel name. I bought packages to build back up, and I got 30 queens last week. So people are really buying packages, and there have been a lot of losses, so people are trying to get back in the business as quick as they can. Now I have 60. I have 20 production and have done the Demoree on all of them trying to get Max on honey. So if you don't know what the Demiree method is, that has to do with frame manipulation with brood on it

so that your bees feel like there's been a swarm and there's decongestion, and then the queen has more spaces to lay, and then they won't be building up queen cells to get rid of their current queen and replace her. Look up Demery. you can also go to the Keepers Hive YouTube channel and they have Demery demonstrations. So I'm sure there's other places too. Anyway, so for Max Honey, it is so much work but doing good. I hope the weather changes for you soon.

Me too because we had frost and snow yesterday. Look at this weather dynamic. And so it is. We're on the upswing here. Can you tell me again where to get Clover's from and what kind I did it last year but not much came up enjoyed your video okay so here's the thing in this time of year so plant your clover seed clover seed is super tiny by the way and the question is what kind white dutch clover seed is what

you're looking for I got mine from Ernst seed so here's the website er n s t s e e e.m and they sell it in as big a quantity as you care to get it. They kind of have flat rate shipping, so if you're just buying a small amount, you might want to just go to Amazon or something and read reviews and stuff like that, because earned seeds will ship you several pounds. My FedEx delivery guy was here yesterday and said, I must have bought a bag of dirt because that's what it felt like to them, but it was actually my more white Dutch clover. And I am a lazy gardener. So by that I mean we have rain ahead. So what do I do? We had, you know, so this is the good and the bad of having a frost

this time of year. It's terrible. Look at the ground. Look at the patches of dirt when it's frosty. It's all cracked and open. It's got these little caps and openings in it. That's when you spread this time of year. That's when you spread your seed like your clover. And then what happens, the sun comes up, the snow melts, the seed now gets moist, the soil expands, and closes up on the clover seed and now it's going to germinate. And this is why I did a second round of it. Because I also frost seeded way before I should have because we had a warmup coming.

They promised to warm up. These weather people, they know what's going to happen. They must have a crystal ball. They absolutely are spot on every time. I hope you can feel the cynical tone in my voice there. So you spread the seed around and I even did it around my flagpole. And then during the warm up within a week, little half inch to one inch tall patches of clover we're coming up and clover's perennial once it's in it's in

it's good it's taken off it's good for the bees blooms all summer long you can let it grow up and then as it starts to look like it's going to seed that's when you can mow it down and you mow it at a time of day when your bees are not on it hopefully so anyway dutch clover aren't seeds that's where it comes from and uh so that's it it also improves the soil I don't think it's particularly drought tolerant, but it handles a lot of different agricultural hardiness zones. So just look at that too. Another place I like to get them because they had them on sale, 20% off was Eden Brothers. They're another good place where people can write reviews.

In fact, I was looking at some plants there and somebody had written a comment that they liked it. It was a four-star review and they'd heard about it from me. So there you go. always when you're buying something and if you heard it heard about it here then make sure to tell them i sent you so you can pay the exact same price as everyone else question number seven francis again so i let francis get away with two long-time viewer frequent commenter you just talked about leaving a box ready in your yard for swarms yep it's right what is in the hive what kind of frames or no frames. That is a good idea, but here we have moths. Bad. Okay, so I am on the learn

when it comes to what kind of moths are we talking about? Your brandy beekeeper, you're listening to this. What kind of moths? What do moths care about what's in our beehives? It's the unoccupied hives or colonies that are dwindling down that are really small and they have a bunch of brute frames and honeycomb that's drawn out that's up in upper reaches of a hive that the beekeeper is not yet packed down and taken apart since they dwindled. And there is a wax moth that will fly around at night. And when you use night cameras, which I do, you can see their little eyes glowing. And so this lets me know. See, I'm on a path now because I have no plan to pack away a bunch of hive equipment into my garage just to have to drag it out again later when the swarms show up. So I'm leaving

them out on their stands as they are except they need to be cleaned out if they're a dead out. So what's in it? What should be in it? This is another discussion where you'll find that beekeepers have differing opinions. Some people want a furnished apartment. Others want to move into an apartment where they bring in their own furnishings and they don't want to deal with some furnishings that other people have had. So the furnished apartment is what I'm providing with my bees for my bees. No dead bees in there. No resources in there. No store. No store. pollen left over in there. No capped honey, no uncapped honey, no nectar, no sugar syrup, no feed. It has to be appealing to them to move in bringing their own groceries. Because we don't want

to encourage robbing. If we leave resources, potential robbing. If we leave bee bread, and so that's pollen that's been taken care of and prepared so that the nurse bees can consume it and then feed developing larvae. If that's in there, then you run the risk, of course, of having small high beetles. I don't have small high beetles, but here's the thing, talking about the wax moth specifically. I think the wax moth scoots in the entrance at night, finds a suitable frame of drawn comb, which should be in there, in my opinion, if you're trying to attract a swarm to move in. And then she's going to lay her eggs on the beeswax. and then her eggs are going to hatch and those are wax worms and the waxworms set to work

spinning their little cocoons spreading their cottony cocoon fabric all over everything making a huge mess and then they chew up consume and of course defecate they cycle out what they're eating and so here's my thought correct me if i'm wrong and i'm perfectly happy by the way some people have said stuff from you oh well i don't want to get into an argument so i don't want to say what i think yes i want to here what you think these aren't arguments these are discussions tell me what you think i'm perfectly fine if you tell me that i'm off track on something so now this is going to take extra management because when it comes nightfall i want you to close the entrances to your unoccupied hives so that could be screens that could be a robbing screen on the front look how easy this is robbing

screen this one happens to be by B smart designs if you put this on front of your unoccupied hive during the day leave the entrances open you know through the top so that your scalp bees can still look at it and think about it as a place move into night time comes you go out there you close it and then that means the wax moth can't get in there to lay her eggs that's what I want to see on my night cameras, frustrated wax moths looking for a place to lay their eggs. I kind of wonder what they do when they don't have beehives to ruin. So anyway, that answers that question. Keep your hives out there, pack them down to a single deep. So 10 frame deep or an 8 frame deep,

they both are interchangeable. Close it up completely, only have the entrance. Keep the entrance small. Don't make it wide open. We've found that bees prefer occupying spaces that have small, restricted entrances that are easy to defend. If the space feels like they can't do enough repair work, so that's too many gaps and crevices and openings. If they can't do repair work, they won't occupy it. If the entrance is too large and they can't defend it and they have a sense about that, they won't occupy it. So the scout bees will come during the day. So there are things I want you to think about when this is going on. You're sitting out there drinking your tea, coffee, whatever you do. Doing the important stuff staring at hives, watching scouts come.

You can get pretty excited because, wow, they're checking that out. See how much time they spend in there because they spend 10 or 15 minutes pacing it off. If they like something, they're actually pacing off the interior to evaluate the space. Dr. Tom Seeley and the studies there from Cornell identify that as about a 10-gallon fish tank size space, right? Optimum, these are statistically the most chosen. okay but we've got previously occupied spaces that are very appealing so one of the reasons i bring this up is because you will want to stop doing your screened at night and open during the day if scouts move in and hang out on the entrance and start to guard it because this is another thing that they do

before the swarm has even departed from its parent colony the scouts have come and gone and identified a space that they like and then they will start to occupy at 10, 15, 20 guard bees that are scouts at a time as placeholders. This is like those people that jump out of the car at Walmart and run over and stand in a parking spot while Gladys makes her trip around and gets the parking spot so nobody else can pull into it, that kind of thing. Those names are fictitious. They don't have any bearing on actual people, of course. But often so, the reason I bring that up is if you see guards, it and they're not going home at night and they're staying in the hive, don't close it up, because they're also going to keep the wax moths from getting in there.

I want to know more about wax moths. All right, moving on, question number eight. And by the way, some people this year have already had swarms move into their boxes, just as I described, left in the apiary, just cleaned it up, made sure everything was out of it. And they've already got self-hiving swarms. It's a win, win, win, and you don't have to store the gear. Do it.

Question number eight comes from Teddy C. 32963. Hi Fred, I never knew about the vegetable patty for helping with tracheomites. Would you suggest putting a little in every hive now and then, or just if it's a problem? Yes, just if it's a problem. I don't want to mix up a vegetable patty and put that in a hive just to thwart some tracheomites when they're not demonstrating that they're an issue because I don't know, there's so many other things that we can be doing in our bee yard. And our goal, of course, is to not be in our beehives any more than necessary.

The colonies that are doing well and don't need our help, don't need our help. So please stay out of it. Look at landing boards, evaluate activity on landing boards, see if the bees are vibrant, healthy, bustling, flying when they should. They're not piling up on the ground ahead. of it. They're not overly stressed. They're not making a bunch of noise. They're not attacking you just for being 10 feet away from it, which may be genetics, but it also might be a problem with the hive. So one of the things we're looking for this time of year, problems with hives, predators.

Skunks are everywhere. And that's okay for me because through the years, we've established, the established height that a landing board needs to be to be out of reach of a skunk is between 16 and 18 inches from the ground. we had one skunk that went all the way up to 18 and 3 quarter inches, but that's because the skunk had already been feeding at one hive, harassing it, scratching its landing board at night, bees come out, they eat the bees, scratch a little bit, eat the bees. A skunk will stay and feed it a bee hive for hours at a time at night. This can change the disposition of your hive.

It stresses the bees, and like people, you won't hear me say this often, but like people, if the bees don't get a good night's sleep without being agitated, assaulted, bothered, vexed, harried. If they can get through the night without being assaulted by another animal, they're much better when their next day shows up and they need to forage and do the tasks of cleaning up, monitoring the landing board, guarding the hive. They're on edge if something has been bothering them all night. So it impacts their health, much like our health is impacted if we don't get a complete night's sleep without being harassed. So, say how do you beehive unless there's something going on that actually requires it

and don't put a treatment in it that doesn't work because there's no real nutritional value to putting in grease patties. They don't do dittly niddley for your bees. So let's just go ahead and take care of the bees. Again, you can do anything you want. I'm just, don't want you to waste resources, time, and on top of that, harass your bees. But keep an eye out for predators, things that might be bothering your bees, causing a disposition change. I like to I want to keep skunks around. Skunks dig things out of the ground like yellow jackets. Skunks eat all dead bees on the ground too.

They're a great cleanup animal. So I recommend keeping them handy. You know a skunk can chase off a bear? Sometimes they do. Google that sometimes. It's pretty funny. I've had skunks chase a fox off of dead animals in the woods. It's pretty funny too. But it shows you skunks are tough little squirters, you know.

Anything within 10 free, 10 feet can get sprayed. And baby skunks, don't get me started. They squirt you for no reason, just for walking by. I don't know what's up with baby skunks. They're super cute, but give them a wide, you know, birth because daggone adult skunks, you can talk your way up to them and away from them, and they don't get alarmed.

They kind of, you get that little foot stamp thing going, you better get out of there. Like right now. Cover yourself in a trash bag. Save yourself. Push your friend in front. between you and the scone. Question number nine comes from Betsy. I counted a small sample of capped drone pupae from Green Foundation. 12 mites on 60 drones counted. Are there studies that correlate green comb counts to alcohol washes of 20, 200 to 200 nurse bees? Okay, there aren't, but if you had

12 mites on 60 drones, you have a high mite load in your colony. Mites get discussed constantly by every bee club, all the beekeepers that are worried about treating mites, caring for mites, counting mites. There are a lot of people that prefer not to know. Knowing full well, they're not going to do anything about it, so why count them? I am of the line of thought that I want you to know your mite loads because it correlates to healthy colonies and it helps with your records. Did this colony have a high mite load but at the same time continue to be fantastically prolific, had full brute frames kicking butt in every other possible way and if you hadn't done a mite wash you never would have known that they were being

attacked by mites. These are mite tolerant bees. So this is, there are going to be some judgments in here. 12 mites on 60 drones. That's a treatment level. That's a big. treatment level because remember you would be doing a half cup which is 300 bees and this is you're looking at what are the 36 mites in that and we know in spring this is where thank you to Dr. Zachary Lamas and his work he's the one that suggested that we're looking at the wrong bees in spring we're testing nurse bees we're counting varomites on nurse bees but what he discovered is and proved is that the mites are actually on the drones in spring and most colonies that are brooding up right now are brooding up drone cells drone frames and

we need to be counting drones mites on drones and if you might wash drones you're going to know but you can also just pull these green frames which I'm highly recommending because I'm going to use those this year more than I have in the past makes sense to me to give them a frame that's already got brood all over it or drone-sized comb on it so they can have their drone brood and then that gives us a focused area to evaluate mite counts because later on in the year the mites when we have fewer drones the mites then pile up on and migrate towards your nurse bees and then of course your worker brood that's why often we're caught off guard and we think whoa where did all these mites come from

well we don't have any drones anymore so we have more mites on the workers again so it may not be that those came from other colonies which they can but it may also be that we just have fewer drones fewer hosts for the mites which is their preferred food both adult and as pupa then the nurse bees are secondary to that as far as the mites go the road instructor mites so there's not a correlation in other words this means so many that means so many but if you had that might count you are in treatment zone me personally I would be treating that colony. I'd get them because those drones will fly out of your

hives and carry the mites with them and deliver them to other hives. So get them right now. One of the things you could do while I'm thinking about this, you could put this green drone frame, right? So when the comb is all drawn out, which it clearly is not, but once it is and once it's occupied and once the drones are capped, then we know that we've got pheromites under those cappings. Now that's phase one. We could throw the whole thing in the freezer, feed it to your chickens, whatever you want to do,

and that takes care of the foundress mite and any reproduction that she's done inside those cells. However, what if I told you could get more bang for your buck? I know what I'm going to say, if you've watched this before, because it's like a broken record. I want to pull these frames out. These are pre-drawn better comb.

So we've got this queen isolation cage. Well, if it's a queen isolation cage, it's also a drone isolation cage. Capped drones. What do we want to prevent? Let's say you're one of those beekeepers that always manages to fall behind and these emerge anyway,

and you didn't mark your calendar. You didn't get out there, or it's raining you didn't feel like it whatever the excuse caps drone brood in this frame now this frame is designed for two this cage is you can have the twos or the ones right put the lid on it what do we just do we locked the drones in here they can still be attended to by workers remember your drones don't feed themselves and so you might think well friend is there going to be a tended to by the workers that go through here. Any varroa mites that are on the drones when they come out of their cells are going to jump on those workers?

No, they have a preference for the bodies of the drones. So I'm going to make a recommendation. You decide if you want to do something about it. We have a method that's 96% or better effective against the varroa destructor mite when it's exposed. What is it? It's exhalic acid vaporization. It's an organic treatment. It is not, you can do it with honey soupers on and everything else, but we can pull this out.

The drones are emerged, they're all inside this cage, are being fed through the bars. We put this in a nucleus hive. Boop. We treat it with exhalic acid vaporization, a single shot. One gram, it's only a nuke. Let them have it. Watch the little drones die on the bottom. In fact, put a little core flute sheet in the bottom, anything white so that you can see

the drop off, the might drop from that treatment. Because you know what that just satisfied? One of the problems we have from a lot of people that want their genetics to go out is if you're going to freeze the drone frame and you're going to kill the drones or you're going to feed them to your chickens or whatever you do, you lost those drones, you lost those genetics. The other thing is we don't know how loaded they were. When we take a drone frame and it's capped and we stick it in the freezer,

unless we start, you know, using a fork and picking them out of there and looking at them as described here, we don't know how many varro destructor mites were in there. But if we wait for them to emerge and we keep them in this cage and then we treat them with exhalic acid and we watch them drop, we'll know. If there's a hundred mites on the bottom of that cage, wow, it was loaded. It needed it. On the flip side of that, ooh, even better. Let's just thought of this.

This is a good control thing because if there's a mite drop that's very low, five or six mites hit the bottom when you hit it with exhalic acid vaporization. It's contained right here in this cage. Those are good genetics. Keep them. Let them fly. You didn't kill them. You didn't wash them.

You treated them. Let them go. Then you get another one and you might wash it or you exhalic acid vaporize it and you find that you've got 100, 200 dead mites on the bottom, those are not good genetics. Don't let them go. Feed them to your chickens, freeze them, whatever you need to do. You get lots of choices.

That is a great genetic control that I just thought about. All of these things take time. All of these things take paying attention to your bees, knowing what they're doing, and then making sure you're committed to getting out there. That is a great job. Trying to find jobs, you know, for the grandson, the supervisor that won't result in the ruination of my apiary.

And I think he can't do acylic acid. I would never allow a child to use exhalic acid vaporization. Only grown-ups, high-risk venture. You must have good respiratory protection to do that eye protection also. But isolating cages, keeping track of the calendar, understanding what's going on, we're teaching tomorrow's beekeepers, and I think that would be really fantastic. So I hope if you take that on board, that's a great thing to do. Find out.

Help with your own genetics that way. Let's see. Question number 10. This is from Diane, from Warren, New Jersey. Got my first two hives through winter. Now entering my first swarm prep season. I'm in central New Jersey, so the weather hasn't been quite as terrible as yours. Right, this is the worst year.

I'm going to skip on down to this because this is a very lengthy question. So the other thing is I spot a few developing larvae, not tiny ones though, saw no eggs. So there are some concerns about whether or not there's a queen present. And this is something I want to talk about because, a lot of new beekeepers are anxious. And if they don't find eggs, they're a little upset thinking maybe the queen's gone.

So we want to look at how we can look at a colony, look at a hive. Wouldn't it be better if I were outside showing you this on the frames? Well, you know what, now that the weather's breaking. That's finally going to happen. Just not today with the gusty winds and Friday be in a Q&A.

But it is coming up. Finally, we can get into the hives. So understanding when you see no eggs, what does that tell us, stage one, that there's been no laying queen there for at least three days. But I want you to think about other things. There are no other indications that this colony is making preparations for swarms, that there is just one small queen cup here. So for those of you who don't know what that is, it looks like the top of an acorn, the cap of an acorn. Your cells in your hive are all pretty much on the horizontal plane. They angle up about 12 to 13 degrees. But if you see a queen

cup or a cup of any kind facing down. It's the only vertical cell in your hive. A queen cup just means there's no egg in it. There's nothing developing. Okay. So at the bottom edge of one frame, and again, I could easily have missed some, but it didn't seem to have started working up a swarm. So I think they're queenless. I don't think, but I'm not positive, that there are laying workers yet. Now here's the thing. Part of this description included that there is some small larvae left, right? So these are older larvae. So what's that mean? There's been a queen in roughly, so if it's a worker larvae that we're talking about, they get capped on the eighth day or ninth day. So if they're uncapped, there's still larvae there. That means that we've had a queen

producing there for less than two weeks. So if she's gone, she hasn't been gone for more than two weeks max. So here's the thing. Sometimes, depending on what's going on outside, they stop brooding up. The queen can stop laying. Or the queen can be laying and the workers are policing up the eggs and preventing it because the resources are not coming in the hive that would allow them to take care of open brood. So with all these signs together, I'm speculating that there still is a queen in this hive. And this is why sometimes people jump the gun and buy a new queen, and the queen comes in and it gets rejected. And they get rejected, and they find out, whoa, there is a queen in there.

Where does she come from? Well, they may have actually produced a queen without your knowledge. That's called supersedure. Unlikely, unless you have a bunch of drones flying around, because that queen needs to mate. And the drones tend to be produced at the same time. And drones, remember, have a much longer period to develop, and they have to, of course, become fully viable and sexually mature so they can fly out

and mate with Virgin Queen. So they take longer than a worker. So if you don't see drones flying unlikely that they, again, have a mated queen in there, and we know a queen has been in there for two weeks. Now, the other question is, what if they have a laying worker? Well, you know what, there's some evidence that there's always some peas in there that are workers that are laying eggs, and the eggs just get chewed up and consumed by the other nurse bees. But what happens is in the absence of a queen complete, there's no queen mandibular pheromone present. So your bees are going to respond to the lack of pheromone.

This takes a worker bee, even though she starts to activate her ovaries, and worker bees have those. They can start to activate their ovaries, and it takes about 21 days before they start producing eggs. So it's too soon for that to be happening, right? So for laying workers. And then of course when a laying worker, when one does happen, that's when you start seeing nothing but if you're looking at the developing

and emerging from the pupa state, you will see only drones coming out eventually because they're all the product of laying workers which can't produce other female bees. So that's it. My advice is to wait that out and see what's going on. Now part of it is, so finally my question, I'd like to give them a frame of brood from another hive. But given that it's my only other hive, I don't want to risk them. Today's temps are just going to break 50.

So when it's 50 and windy, I don't recommend opening hives and working them anyway. So the winds are going to be substantial with gusts and the weather for the next few days. Not much better. I have some QMP noodles, all right? In the freezer, can I use them to buy me a week or two to find better conditions for getting them and getting into the brood chamber? So here's the thing. A queen mandibular pheromones. This gets complicated for new beekeepers. If we knew for sure, like you were doing an inspection and you smashed your queen, or you realize your queen flew away and they're absolutely going to be queenless. And rather than have them produce,

their own replacement queen, you want to bring one in. And so if you want to bring one in, we have to have a placeholder to prevent laying workers from occurring, right? So the queen medibular pheromone also sold as temp queen. You can get it from betterb.com. It costs like five bucks to a cheap great insurance policy. What it does is provides a pheromone in the hive that makes your workers think there's a queen present, even when there isn't. This suppresses that activation of the ovaries on your worker nursebees that otherwise could, you know, become laying workers eventually. So, but if the queen is present, we don't want to put that in there.

So I want to give it more time. So in other words, when should you put in? If you're into the third week and you still don't see evidence, so don't let it go a full three weeks, but near the end of the third week, I would go ahead and put the QMP in there. use it as a placeholder, a pheromone placeholder to fake them out until you can get another win in. Now if you're going to put another frame of brood in there, you can do that at any time. Even if queen's present, they're not going to attack because this is a whole frame of nurse bees, capped broods, stuff like that. And if you've got some eggs in there, they're going to tell you

right away that they're missing a queen. What will they do? They will start to produce a queen cell, multiple queen cells likely. So if when you do that, they don't produce queen cells or start to build that out, then that's reinforcement again. You've got a queen present. So don't do the QMP noodle yet. Do these other things first. You've got 21 days to work with total. Okay. So I hope that works. Last question. Question number 11 comes from Roger. Oh, so this is an easy one. Roger was asking about different kinds of cameras that I use. We talked about the Arlo cameras. I use the Arlo Pros, ProFor's, Pro 2s, I have some old ones. We monitor our property with them.

So there are problems with those cameras that a lot of people have. Roger was pointing out that I make it all look too easy, and it's not. Well, it's not for Roger, and here's why. A lot of people do not pay for the subscription for Arlo, which means you're limited in the amount of control you have. The cameras also do not load the video sequences to the click. cloud, you also therefore cannot just go, be on vacation somewhere and say, yeah, I wonder I'm going to see how my V-yard is doing, you know, log in on your phone and look camera by camera

and even make recordings manually if you want to. You see something interesting going on, just hit record, and it goes into the cloud, right? If you're not doing that, if you're storing locally, then that means that you're storing right onto a USB that you've put on your base station or something like that. So I should clarify that the way I manage mine is I use the Arlo subscription. And that allows me to have as many cameras out there as I want to have. Another common problem that Roger cited here is that sometimes the cameras disconnect from the base station. You have to go find the camera, you have to bring it in, you have to charge the battery up,

and then you have to re-sync it with your base station. Now for a lot of people that aren't tech savvy, this is a huge pain in the rear end to do. I don't like it because it seems to happen to the very camera that's got the most action going on and something that I need right at that moment and it shows up with a little exclamation point there that there's a problem with the camera and that it cannot be accessed. So there are a lot of things that get fixed when you have the subscription. So I use a subscription. I think it's super worth it. Peace of mind, if nothing else. You have colonies that you're concerned about and you want to watch them remotely, then you have to be in range of that base station. So what does that mean? Anything here within 300 feet comes in really, really good. So I recommend the prescription base is what I'm talking about here. And I also like the pro four.

The Pro 2 still work really good and those become my disposable ones. You can put those in bird houses, you can stick them in hollow logs, you can do anything you want. Whatever you want to see. You want to know something's going on. They turn on when there's movement. You can have it set so it only comes on from dust till dawn. You can pick the zone and time and everything else. If there's a lot of activity over here and your targets over here you can pick the active zone that you want it to record. So they are fantastic and when I talk about the profile, fours, that's the outdated model. So you can actually get those pretty cheap. Pax of three and four.

And when it comes to, I don't use them so much as actual security for my home. I use them as security cameras to let me know what critters are running around. This is how I know what skunks are coming and, you know, the possum, the weird possum that's tooling through here. Stuff like that. So connecting, disconnecting, those are common problems. The other thing is sometimes they run their batteries out too quick. So there are a lot of inconsistencies. But overall, I didn't like the blink cameras. They got a bunch of those for bird houses.

And they wouldn't take, you know, they're not rechargeable. The Arlo's recharge and they last a long time. The blink cameras were using double A batteries. Now you can use rechargeable AA batteries, but you have to go out and get them all the time. So you don't know what's up. I did not like those and I have a bunch of them. So I hope that works.

So that's the end of it for today. Stay tuned after the credits. And you'll find out who the winners are for the 300th episode coffee cup mugs. So that we're going to have two of them. And the supervisor is going to do that. So watch that after the credits. The fluff section here for today is first week of May in my neck of the woods, Northeastern United States, swarm season, starting right off May 1st.

Even if with all this garbagey weather that we've had and all the setbacks that we've had for the hives and all the colonies that we've lost, those that are still building and going are on schedule, and so expect swarms. Number two, next week, if you're going to practice the Demery method, so Demerie or what I'm going to do is just put the queen below a queen excluder into the bottom box and get them to move themselves down as the brood in the second box up starts to emerge, they will just migrate down through the screen, through the queen excluder, and join the queen down below. That's my goal. And the other thing that I'm doing is super splits this year, which means not just taking a colony, it's doing really well,

splitting it in half or in thirds, and then making two other colonies, keeping the base colony there. I'm taking a single frame of brood from three or more colonies and making it. a super split. The reason I call it a super split is with those numbers of capped brood, I've relieved the congestion inside the hive that I take them from and making sure I'm not pulling the queen with them. If I come across a colony that is producing queen cells, in other words, they're not capped, but they're halfway underway, so we know that they're going to get rid of the queen and there is a queen there. I'll take her into my super split and fortify that with three or four full frames from three or four separate colonies and they all get along what am i going to carry those around in the

hive butler tote and then i'm going to put them in one hive by themselves and if i have the queen with them that i pulled from one that was going to replace her anyway i just stopped a swarm from happening i took a bunch of capped brood and i fortified and provided a queen with my new super split which is going to be a top performing colony. I can call it ahead of time. I know it's going to work. Trust me. So also feed inside. So as next week gets here and swarms are happening and everything else, if you have colonies that are limping along or you have a swarm that you're trying to keep going, try to put your feed inside on top of your insulated inner cover. I see no reason to remove insulation. Keep insulation on summer, winter, all the same. No reason to, again, have a bunch of stuff that you have to put into storage.

when your bees can benefit in summertime as well. The winners today are going to receive cups and booklets. And this is also the last day if you wanted to buy one of these. So you can't wait until you find, well, you actually could. You can wait and find out if you won one or not. And if you didn't win one, they will be available. There will be a link down below to the T-spring for that. they will be available until midnight tonight and then they go away that's it they disappear so either

you got one or you didn't and if you get one for free you're also getting this booklet so coffee cup and booklet and as i mentioned we're doing two winners stick around we'll find out who they are i want to thank you for watching today so glad the weather is improving for all of us here in the northeastern united states and i hope that you're prepared for all the volatility that's going on in your apiaries thanks a lot for watching Welcome back, this is the way to be. Hello, I'm Gwen. And we are going to be drawing and see who can win.

Let's get started. Okay, our first winner is, my hand is Marien, City Woodstock, and State is MD. I'm not, okay. I've learned how to handle frames from watching you. Okay. Congratulations, Marnian. You are our first winner.

And then... They won't go with my hand. Second winner is Megan. City, Prova, State, Utah. Comment, Thrainters, episode, bug. One thing I've learned from you, oh gosh, I've learned so stinking much from you, Fred. It's hard to name just one thing,

but I would say to... I would say an overall better understanding and appreciation for bees and beekeepers. You have shared with so many the importance of bees in our life and how they can bring joy along with the many various ways of taking good care of them. Thank you so much for your insight and willingness to share that you know so, that you know and our learning. I'm grateful for you every time I watch and listen because I learn so much. Congratulations, Megan, you are our second winner.

Good luck. See ya.