The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode 311 are you prepared for a dangerous colony of bees in your care?

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

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

Hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, June the 20th, and this is back here at Bkeeping Questions and answers episode number 311. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here to join me in celebrating what? The very first day of summer, the longest day of the year, also known as summer solstice. So they say that there are more bonfires tonight than any. other time in the year isn't that interesting okay so if you want to know we're going to talk about today please look down in the video description below and

you'll see all the items listed in order the topics were submitted during the past week from people just like you so I hope you enjoy it if you have a question right now that you just have to get an answer to and you need someone's opinion you want to be able to share a picture please go to the way to be fellowship just Google the way to be fellowship you'll find it it's on Facebook so I know you want to want to know what's going on outside right now it's hot getting hotter gonna have a really hot weekend ahead in fact tomorrow i'm going to a picnic and it's going to be one of the hottest days of

the year so far and uh 75 degrees Fahrenheit right this minute i know it's not as hot as where some of you are but that's 24 Celsius 2.7 mile per hour winds which is 4 kilometers per hour 70 percent relative humidity some of the bees are bearding they're gathering on the front of their hives because there's a nectar flow on. It's doing really well. The UV index is six, which means you can get a sunburn today. So stay covered, stay in the shade, put on the sunscreen, whatever. The other thing is pollen is medium. So if you look at your landing boards today, there should be a good amount of pollen coming in. Now, where is that happening? The northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania,

because that's where I'm located. Things for you may be different. The other thing is air quality is good now. So the Canadian wildfire. might still be going on but we're not getting those particulates right now. I'll take it. So also wandered around a little bit this morning and look to see what's growing and what's in bloom and to see what our bees are on. So Sticky Willie, I don't know if you've heard of that. It's called gallium aporine. Maybe I mispronounce that. But it is a long-stemmed, thin plant that seems to be growing everywhere this year. Tiny white flowers. Honeybees are not on it, but other parts.

pollinators are so that it's a benefit. It was interesting to learn that a lot of people eat it that has a lot of medicinal properties. So if you want to look into a plant that's everywhere that you can actually chew on while it's young and green and new, look up sticky willy. It's pretty interesting. Clover is in bloom. The white clover is everywhere. And I don't know what the bees are doing, but they're not on the clover for the nectar right now. So they can get nectar and pollen from clover. And even though you look at the clover and see that its flowers are white, the pollen that they get from it is generally tan or light brown. So if you're seeing that on your landing boards, it's likely that's what's coming in.

For my bees, the pollen coming in on landing boards is a lot of different colors right now, which is good. Forage diversity, really good for the bees. And I just don't know what they're getting it from. They're going everywhere. So they're flying off, coming back, they're doing all the good stuff. The other thing is that we have just come out of a series of heavy rains, which is not unusual in this neck of the woods this year, because rain just seems to be coming and just were saturated.

It's like walking on sponges out there. So of course what happens? As soon as the weather breaks, it warms up, and there's no rain, you're going to get swarms. So we're still in swarm season here in the northeastern part of the United States. So be aware, check them out. If you're sitting there and you're in an area where you've just had storms and it's warm and it's the middle of the day there, go check. You might be losing bees.

So wild roses are in bloom. Comfrey, still blooming. That's a long blooming plant, by the way, goes all summer along. Linden trees are going to blossom soon because I was checking those out this morning. Buckwheat is blooming, but my honeybees aren't touching it. There's another plant. Here's the good news. When there are known nectar and pollen sources out in the,

environment and your bees are not on them and you check the landing boards there's lots of activity and they're bringing in pollen and resources and they're just zinging in and out just as fast as they can go they're getting resources somewhere so they're not starving that's the good news they have choices and they're ignoring some of the stuff that you think they should have so the buckwheat's just out there milkweed is growing well and uh it's going to blossom soon it has all the buds on it so hopefully within the next two or three weeks we'll see monarch butterflies here and we should should see some of the caterpillars. Of course, the milkweed goes into bloom and your honeybees get a big nectar flow from that. Borage is still a little two inches tall right now. Sunflowers are four inches

inches and these are the ones they've planted and Cosmos, four to six inches in height so we're well away from those things blossoming. So that's what's going on out there. What else? How could you submit your own question? I'll bet you're wondering that. Go to the way to be.org. It's a website and there's a page mark the way to be says questions and you just fill out the form you can be anonymous maybe just have an idea something you want me to look into and you think it would be interesting i'm happy to get information for my viewers like you so thanks a lot for that uh and i guess we're going to jump right into it with question number one which comes from calide who is in um greater boston area in massachusetts as a little kid

I lived in Swampskit, Massachusetts. So, a little side note. Anyway, it says I have a new nucleus hive as a result of a split. I would like to use it as a resource hive, and I understand some of its uses, although, how can I keep this nuke small, i.e., not having to add more boxes to it. In other words, what are some good management practices for such a nuke-based resource hive? Okay, so first of all, when I started keeping nucleus hives, I'd been told about those for years. I just never did it, whatever I caught a swarm or something like that.

I put them in a standard full-size, 8-frame or 10-frame deep brood box, Langstroth standards. Years ago, I decided I would try out 5-frame nucleus hive boxes, and I used the wooden ones. I got them from BetterB, the individual that used to make them for Better Bee, passed away and they did not have someone to replace that so they still sell them but not in the design that i use and so i thought yeah well just you know you get the small swarm they do better in a small space and you put them in a five frame nucleus hive uh they fill it out quick and then you've got a box it's too small for them so the idea of managing them and keeping it small is tricky what i ended up doing is expanding it. So if you're thinking about a nucleus hive as a way to establish a resource for

your other full-size hives, nucleus hives inevitably become one of two things. They either become a bigger hive, which is standard full-size hive because as you start stacking them up, that's 10 deep frames and you had a third box, 15 deep frames. So now we're at full-size hive population, right? And the other thing that you can do is, of course, rob them out constantly. So take away the resources. And if you're in them too often, you can cause them to abscond. You can lose those bees. So the purpose of the resource hive for me.

The second thing that can happen, of course, is that you leave it small and they just become a swarm generator. So they fill up their population, they swarm out. Fill up a population swarm out. Maybe if you're looking for queen cells and stuff like that is a very easy setup to force. a swarm. And so when you don't expand the space and you leave it, let's say you just added a second nucleus box. So it's five over five. And you leave it right there. So you don't feed them, don't simulate them, let them just get whatever they want from the environment. That's what I do. Some of them have no ability to be fed because there's no feeder shim on top of them. So I did some

with feeder shims, some without, and guess what? There wasn't a big difference in production between those that I fed and those that I didn't. Now, if you put a similar size swarm into a standard eight frame or ten frame deep box instead of the nucleus hive size box, do they develop at the same rate? They don't, and I don't know why. I cannot explain it. It's summertime, it's springtime, it's warm, the resources are out there. They should build at exactly the same rate, but for some reason, bees in a space that's much larger than the population of bees that you put in there are stifled. They just don't build infrastructure. They don't continue to build comb at the same rate that they would if they were in a narrow five-frame box. And I've seen this over and over and over again.

And of course, this is where I live. There may be environmental factors. I don't know what's going on. But they get out of hand. So the idea of keeping them is just too much work. if you want to keep them down. So instead I expand them. I stop at the third box. I find that that's kind of the sweet spot. And then what we can do is you can go to that top box and when they've drawn out all the comb, you can start to use them as a resource for comb. If you're inspecting your apiary and you find that you're queenless and you've been neglectful and haven't looked at your bees for over three weeks and you find you've got laying workers. Now we've got problems. You can go to one of your resource hides and you can divide it right in half.

and put those resources and of course your queen right into the laying hive and take it back. Then what you've done is you've left a smaller hive, your resource hive, and you've left them with eggs and all the brood that they need to replace their lost queen. So that's what they do and they do it pretty darn quick. Because they're going to start making queen cells right away, they're going to choose eggs that are already there. And as soon as those hatch, those become fed like future queens should be fed. They get multiple feedings.

They get a super rich formula from the nurse bees. A lot of people want to know what exactly are they feeding them. I don't know because the details are so extravagant. Just understand as a backyard beekeeper that what your nurse bees are feeding to a developing larva that's going to be a queen is richer, is more plentiful. They feed in cycles that are continuous. So in other words, when you see a queen cell that has been built and it's still an open cell and you've got a pupa in there that's going to be a queen, it's almost like they're high-fiving each other on their way in and out of that cell. They're constantly feeding because it's going to be capped up and it's going to be the fastest produced cast inside your hive.

15 eggs, egg to an adult queen. So they do feed them and they recover fast. So that's kind of what you're doing with your resource hive. And then if they don't make another queen, maybe you've got another resource hive and you can pull another frame of eggs. And that slows them down because now they have to again make another queen. So you keep pushing them back. Their numbers get smaller.

I've also noticed that they don't dwindle down to nothing very often. And the reason is drift. we have a series. I had a friend over and I was showing him all the beehives in a row. If you have four hives in a row that are identical like the nucleus hives, I was doing different color control wheels on the entrance, so I thought that might help them orient. If you do four in a row, the bees know they zing straight to the hive, even though they look very similar.

And so then you don't see a lot of oops at this entrance, and they hover a little bit and go over to the next entrance, which is what they intended to do in the first place. If you do four in a row, they beeline it right to each individual hive. Then when you expand your rack, and I've seen this before with people that have multiple, especially if they're selling nucleus hives, they're building them up for sale, 10 hives in a row, same row, same height, same entrance, same box, same configuration, same color.

The bees now load up individual boxes more than others, depending on where they are in the row and this is because of drift and I read a study that I can't find right now that was regarding bees ability to count so in other words if you add up to four including four hives they could look at that and go straight to the second one from the left if that's their hive and they would find it quickly when you start to add more hives identical then they had more misfires and what happens is is a foraging bee comes back with all its resources and goes to the wrong entrance and decides it's just too tired to look for its primary residence and it just gets welcomed in.

And then we have drift. And this is where we end up with large numbers of bees. Those studies are done over and over again. So it's really interesting. The reason I bring it up is if someone's thinking about setting up nucleus hives and having them as a resource, first of all, they're a huge benefit. sometimes colonies of bees do things weird. One colony may build up a whole bunch of pollen, a whole frame of pollen, multiple frames of pollen.

And then not have a bunch of brood that justifies that demand for the protein, which is the pollen. So now you can go and find one that's low on pollen that needs help and pull a frame of pollen and take it over and put that in that hive and pull the frame that's not fully developed from that hive and go and put it into your nucleus. hive and so it's a bunch it's a swamp meat that's what it ends up being but as far as keeping it down you just can't sorry they grow so fast there's no keeping a good colony down it just doesn't happen so swarm generators it's like the observation hives they're not expandable so i was just outside 15 minutes ago watching one of my observation hives swarm again and this thing um So it's almost like a resource hive as far as the size of it goes. And that swarmed before, but they changed their mind and went back.

Now it swarmed again. You can hear queens piping in there. So those are the pre-emergent queens that are in their cells. And the others are leaving. While I'm sitting here, they are leaving. So I care about you more than collecting a swarm that's coming out of one of my observation hives. So small spaces that are not expanded end up swarming. Question number two.

from Carol Ann. It says have an aggressive hive. This is important. It's important for backyard beekeepers to know. If I were teaching a class in backyard beekeeping, this would be one of the first ones that we go over. Do you know why? It's because if you're not prepared to deal with an aggressive, defensive, or potentially dangerous colony of bees, you probably should reconsider whether you should be a beekeeper. So let's find out here. Try to find the queen and fails. This an aggressive hives that's attacking people. I only pissed them off more and five neighbors got stung. How can I mitigate this situation? I don't think split and move hives is the answer because people have been stung. So if you want to get already sketchy neighbors that are upset and that you're

setting up beehives and you're in your rights, you know, you checked out all the regulations and ordinances and you found out that I can keep bees and I can keep them this close to the property line and things like that. B law in my state is being rewritten right now. So the thing of it is you've got neighbors being stung. What's the first order of business? What should you be doing? You need to lock them down, for starters. If they're attacking people, we need to prevent them from being able to attack in big numbers.

And it's the last thing you want to hear from a neighbor is your bees are in our. yard stinging our dog our kids first thing you're going to have to do is get out there fully suited up smoke your hives and you're going to want to put a robbing screen on the front if you do not have robbing screens as a backyard beekeeper or any scale beekeeper robbing screens are multi-purpose tools when you've got a colony that's out of control that's going after everyone including you because I've seen beekeepers back away from their own bees and not have the ability to go right into their own apiary. This is a scenario that you need a plan for and you need to practice it. And I know that people say, I'm just going to show you what I do and I'm not going to tell you what to do.

I'm going to tell you in this case what to do. I need you to take a frontline position with your own bees. So I'm just going to use this as an example. This is the B smart. This is probably one of the most frequently encountered robbing screens. This is also a multi-purpose tool. This is undergoing renovation right now. So if you don't have one, don't buy one.

Don't buy one right now. New one's coming out. So anyway, the B-smart robbing screen has pushpins already on the top of it. So I don't, if you've got a potentially dangerous colony of bees, I don't know if the pushpins would be enough, but they would be placeholders. So you'll put this over your entrance, you'll take your pushpins out,

and you'll put them in the pre-established holes. This is made for an eight or ten frame, and then you just close them up. Now, sure, you'll have angry bees that are already out, right? We just want to prevent them from more of them getting out. The thing is, the ones that are on the outside, if they don't back down, if they're still hostile, and if they're dangerous to pets and animals and people

and dangerous, right? The ones that are on the outside, you're going to have to spray them down with Don dish soap, Don Ultra Free and Clear, and water, tablespoon per gallon. And what that's going to do

is it's going to drown those bees right away. So it's basically chemical free. If you're doing Don, ultra free and clear, it doesn't harm the environment. It's not an insecticide. It has a high wetting agent, which means that the water now, instead of sitting on the surface of your bees,

soaks into them and goes right into the spiracles and suffocates them. The bees that are on the outside are the guards and the foragers anyway, and they're the ones that are causing the trouble right now. We want to prevent others from coming out, so you may have to kill those. Now, you've got this on the front, and hopefully you don't have multiple entrances. If you've been following my lead, you have a single entrance. You don't have upper entrances, but if you do, you have to close that upper entrance. We have to lock them down.

So my suggestion was, and of course I already have. answered Carol Ann because this is an emergency situation, so I responded directly. Close it up. The other thing is, call a friend. So if you've got a beekeeper in your club or a friend that is more capable of dealing with a really defensive colony of bees, call them up, get some help. The other thing is, some people can help you evaluate your hive. So once it's buttoned up, they're also shipping bags, which are screen bags that you can put around the whole hive, so it doesn't kill them, it just confines them. In a perfect world, we'd be doing this at nighttime, but that's not when they attack. You can't wait for nighttime when your bees go on the rampage.

You have to go and get them right away. You're going to have to heal relationships with your neighbors. If they're getting stung, man, you can't unring that bell. It's kind of bad, because especially if you've got the people that are borderline anyway and you've already bought them off with honey and stuff like that and you've played all your cards, you can end up getting a complaint. And then we have problems. So one of the options you have is, of course, closing it up and having a friend come and get it, making sure it's really secure, who lives in the rural part of your neck of the woods, and they can take it out in their car and haul it out away from the population. Then we can do a really good evaluation. It just depends how much work you want to do, what the resources are like in the hive.

you might be talking about a hive that's full of honey and everything else so it's not an easy thing to move all these things have to be considered but securing them locking down on the hive is number one so then the next thing is if you can't move them if you can't take them anywhere else and this is a building problem you might have to euthanize the colony because when people are in jeopardy the bees come second so And the euthanization process would be a garden sprayer with the dish soap that I just described and start spraying the whole hive down. And this is one of the reasons why these shipping bags, they're like a mesh, like a laundry bag or whatever. You put that over your whole hive and you can spray right through it.

You don't have to pull it off and put people at risk again. So we've got bees flying in and out, close that up, start to spray them down, saturate the entrance and start at the top box right through the screen spray them under the inner cover and just keep working your way down you'll eventually have bees washing out so and euthanizing bees is not something some people seem prepared to do at all ever and i'm just wanting to make sure that we understand that if you kill someone that will be with you forever and you may think well the bees did it but they were under your control. There is precedent. You can be sued. You can be in trouble. Please have a contingency plan for hostile bees. So I hope to hear back from Carol Ann. I want to know what she ended up doing,

how it went and went through and tried to find the queen and things like that. It just made matters worse. The bees just got more hostile. Of course, you smoke. Of course, do all the precautions. there shouldn't be a lot of fast motion, bumming and slamming things around, but if neighbors are being stung, see, it's already beyond your perimeter. So it's out of your control. You need to do something because they'll be calling 911 or something. Don't want to be in the news for having dangerous bees. Question number three comes from Wendy.

This is in Seattle, Washington. I know you mentioned a podcast, the video cameras that you like for monitoring your apiary, but I can't find that info now. Can you let me know what you use, especially if it can be remotely accessed on a cell phone with an app? Thanks. And Wendy says, driving with the family cross-country tomorrow, and they are going to be listening to you for hours. I apologize to Wendy's family for these hours. Okay, so I've done a lot of videos on my channel, not just bees.

I do equipment reviews and stuff too. And of course, I have cameras everywhere so I can see what's going on. And there is, look what's going on. Wendy is traveling with her family cross-country. Wouldn't you like to check in on your beehives and see what they're doing? So I've tested a lot of different camera companies and everything else. So Arlo is not a perfect system. But the Arlo system is something that's worked for me for a long time.

I have Blinks. I have Hiberti. I have a lot of different camera equipment out for different reasons. I also have trail and game cameras. and just I've tested a lot of different things. The reason I'm telling you that is when you get, for example, a trail camera, if you want to use that, they have a card in it that it'll call your cell phone for you and let you know when things are going on.

You can check it if you want to download the file, things like that. I'm not a huge fan because if you get a bunch of those, it runs into a lot of money in a short amount of time. So if you're going to put out lots of cameras, I do this. that. So the Arlo, let's talk about those. If you just go to my YouTube channel, Frederick Dunn, and type in the right-hand corner, the little search thing, type in Arlo cameras, right? I have all the reviews posted. I do their focal tests, things like that. So I had the Arlo Pro series, Arlo Pro 2, there's Arlo Pro 4, there's a bunch of different versions out. So I find out that if you get the older

are low cameras like the pro two's those are okay if you get the pro four they have spotlights built into them which you can turn on so if you're trying to scare a cat or something while you're looking at it you can flip on the spotlight you even control how bright it is they have limited range so these cameras have to be within about 300 feet unobstructed of your station so in other words you get a Wi-Fi hub in your house there are cameras that will connect directly to the Wi-Fi hub. I went the other route where I actually use the Arlo Home Base Station because they get an extended range out of that. They have 5 gig and 2.4, whatever the gigahertz is,

so the 2.4 goes farther and can reach cameras farther away. So when you have those, you have options. So you can use the base station. You can put a big USB drive on it. And then they can report directly to the same. station and they load their videos there locally, right? That will not get it to your phone and it doesn't get hosted by the website. It doesn't get stored in the cloud. That becomes a prescription-based program, which I pay for. So I do the prescription and that way I have unlimited cameras. And when I have

unlimited cameras, I can check it with my phone. I can see the battery status. I can see when there's motion. If I suspect there's motion and it's just not sensitive enough to pick it up right now, I can turn it on manually with my phone and see what's going on. I can also take a still photo if I want to. I can turn on the video aspect if I want to. So you also control, you can have dust till dawn coverage. All the cameras can come on. You can have away from home settings and things like that. So they're called the Arlo camera system. That's the good news. Let me tell you about the bad news on those. Some of them just disconnect from the network for no reason. Camera disconnected, camera offline.

You have to go and get them and charge the batteries yourself. So if you want to put one way up in a tree that has a good view of your driveway or something like that, that can seem like a good idea until you have to get out there and get it. So then what do you do? You put a solar panel on it because they sell solar panels for them too. I am not affiliated with them. I don't get an affiliate payment or anything like that for talking about them. I pay for those cameras.

So here's the thing. When you get the ones that are like a lot of things, last year's model, a model from two years ago, you can get whole sets of them, groups of three and six for a fraction of what they originally sold for. And they will record in 4K, 2.4K, 1080p, whatever you decide you want it to do, so you also control video quality. and how long do you want it to record 10 seconds every time it comes on you want it to record until all activity stops that's what i do so they're the arlo system and uh the blinks is them i don't like those

because i have to go and get the batteries they don't have built-in batteries that i can charge up and things like that so but they were smaller little pancake thing um the arlos are a little bit bigger so mounting hardware things like that arlo sells floodlights so the big LED floods and stuff like that solar power anyway that answers that question we use the r low they're good except when they go offline or when it disconnects from the internet or when you really need it to record something and the particular one that you need to have recorded it has driplets all over it or a spider parks itself over the lens or it builds a spider web over the front of the lens and makes 100 recordings of itself

doing selfies in your camera at night while it makes spider webs that's happened before it's a lot of fun at Halloween to play those videos on Facebook and see people unsubscribe to you and unfriend you moving on number four from mark from arlington texas i removed check mic plus and placed veroxan the following day i found lots of bees dead

i wish there is a link to show you so I think I should have moved check mite plus and waited a few days then place the rock sand just want beekeepers to know so you should consider this anecdotal but if there is a correlation one of the reasons I want to share this from Mark is if we're mixing up treatments or miticides because we're trying to kill varo destructor mites when you shift from one to another make sure there is definitely withdrawal period We don't know sometimes if there's going to be a synergistic effect. In other words, when these things work in concert with one another,

and there's an overlap of these things, which might be just fine on their own. When you start to layer them together, they may not be just fine. So Mark had a die-off on this and thinks it was attributed to not waiting between cycles or treatments when you're shifting from one to another. So checkmite, and then Varoxan. A lot of people are using Verac. this year I think it's the first year for a lot of them I have it haven't used it yet sitting here I also have Formic Pro the new formula sitting here haven't used it

yet if you're using varoxan this year please put down in the comment section how well it's working for you I know some people have had it and it's done a really good job for them it's an extended release exhalic acid delivery system so we just put a little cardboard pieces in your hives and you leave it there for a long period of time. Question number five comes from Sean Kellogg, Oregon. I've been using hexa-cell comb for many years and have been checkerboarding them

and going to HexSEL's product info. They don't recommend that, but say to use all frames for the max result. But when going to their site, they have a new Hexas-Sel comb of varomite control, and it looks like it has a blue tinge, and it works by making it unpleasant for the mite, but the bees aren't bothered by it.

Just something to check out, Sean. Okay, so I've known about this for a while, actually because I have the test group. I have the test material. And hexa-cell is really also, you may know it as Bettercombe. So Better Bee has it. The original, the parent company,

sells it as Hexac-Sel in other countries, and it is something that they're doing research an innovation on is having impregnated comb. I'm not going to tell you anything about it because I don't I don't want to violate any agreements that I have non-disclosure. So if you can search it out and if it's in public domain you can find out more about it. That is a direction that they're headed in to have comb as described here that bees work just fine but mites don't like it. They don't get in there for reproduction at all, which shuts down the reproduction, which means that the mites would have to live in their ferretic or dispersal phase exclusively and can't reproduce, and they just live their lives

and die. Sad story for the mites. But Hexasel is parent company, so if you want to look that up and see how that's going. But that is where they were headed. So just let you know. Question number six comes from David from Leola, PA. I have a question about whether worker bees move eggs into swarm cells. I think I heard this discussed on your podcast in the past. Today I was checking supers to see if I needed to add more. And in one hive, I found a queen cell in the super with royal jelly and a developing larva. This comes up a lot.

I also ask entomologists, research people, deep thinkers, people with lots of experience in the lab that understand this reproduction. understand the parameters of what bees can and can't do can a honey bee a nurse bee pick up an egg from a cell if she wanted to sure they can because they do it they remove them they're very careful about it too because for example if a queen lays multiple eggs in a cell which they often do particularly when they're a new queen recently mated nurse bees get right in there and police them up so they eat and remove or remove and eat i don't know which goes first if they're eating it right there or if they're moving it, eating it somewhere else? I don't know. But they have the ability to pick it up with their mandibles and remove the eggs. They can do that and leave an egg that they prefer. So do they have the physical ability to pick up an egg, move it somewhere, and reinstall it? They clearly do. Now the question is do they? So here's the thing. One of the frequent knee-jerk answers you get from some of the top entomologists from some of the top research universities, right away they just say

those are probably laying workers. So in other words, we don't have eyes on a worker collecting an egg that's laid by a queen, carrying that through a queen excluder, parking that egg inside another cell, letting that hatch, and developing that into a queen, which would mean it's a female worker cell,

or egg that was produced by the queen. The easy way to prove it is the fact that, because here's what often happens to, and I'm not saying that that's the case for David. But often people will say there's an egg above the queen excluder, they built a queen cell. Sometimes, on rare occasions, the queen cell is really a drone cell, a really fat one. So the way to prove it and seeing is believing video can't. be argued with so if you know for a fact and you think for a fact that you've got a worker that has moved an egg because no one's produced a video yet this is why this is youtube gold if you're trying to launch a channel you need to see that that develops into something other than a drone because

this part of the story gets told often queen cells built eggs above the queen excluder they're feeding it the larva is developing blah blah blah and I've never heard a story yet where someone said, and a queen emerged. That's the part we need. So we need to see the egg being carried by a worker. We need that. And you can even mock this up and make it to see if they can do it.

Force it. I don't know. It's something that bees generally would not do. But if you've got it, it's going to be a famous video. So you need to document that. and let us know if it is in fact a queen and not just a drone. So we need to see it emerge because these stories, these observations, when we get to the other end of it, tend to fall apart,

and then we don't get any more follow-up information. So physically could they? Yes. Do we have evidence of it? No. Other than, hey, there's a queen's cell where it shouldn't be. So check it out and let us know. Keep us post if we want to know stuff.

Question number seven comes from Jason Kilgore. That's the YouTube channel name. I must say I have never caught or even seen a swarm as large as the second one. Wow. I'm concerned that they will build comb all over the place, but I do like your method of adding comb to the bars. I believe that will definitely help, however, I'm still worried about it. So what we're talking about here is the top bar hive that I've added to my apiary. recently on the very day that I put it together and put it outside, I did collect swarms.

Two swarms. One tiny one that I kind of manufactured out of thin air because I used queen mandibular pheromone on a stick to do it. They are still there. They're still going and they're still building infrastructure at one end of the hive. Also, I got a large swarm that was nearby, collected them, got them through some pheromone teasing, to go into the other end of the hive. So I had two follower boards, colony at each end,

the big, robust colony that's in there, the concern that's being voiced here or written about here by Jason is. Some of the top bars, of course, I dripped honey down the center, and I also, honey, I dripped wax, and I took paddles of comb

that came off of other foundationless frames, and I heated those and melted the wax onto the underside of the top bar so they would have guides to follow. Now the thing of it is, when I saw how big the swarm was, I needed a bigger space because they only had six top bars to accommodate them. So because it's a horizontal hive, expanding the hive is easy. You add more bars. So to do that, I just added more top bars without guides, without starter strips and things like that.

And then I put this big colony in there, and it looks super great until it was. was empty and there were like three bees left so they abscond it they're gone that's the bad news here's the good news good news is and this will calm jason down too about it because i took the covers the top bars and i first so i did this in two stages i glued starter strips on there so they're like popsicle sticks that come with other foundationalist frames they come with starter strips that you put in or you don't put in i just surface glued them on there with gorilla glue, the latest gorilla wood glue, which is waterproof, by the way, and approved for indirect food contact.

So it's okay stuff. I glued that on there. All I did was glue the stick and set it on there and left it. And the following day, you could grab it with pliers and you would break the wood strips before it would break the bond. So I had a good bond. So that's firm. The next thing is to make it appeal.

to the bees. So I've got guides now. So then I rendered a bunch of beeswax from all my scrapings and all the work I've done in the beehives. I collect every scraping in a bucket so I can later render the wax. So I rendered that wax at a very low temperature. In other words, I don't want it to be brittle. I want it to smell good. I want it to be bright orange. And so I rendered it at 155 degrees Fahrenheit. And then I ran that through a cotton cloth and then I had wax. bars then that I rubbed on all the starter strips and then I went back and I even melted bits of it onto the starter strips. So now the good news is that end of the hive is still empty, but I have 11 top bars all with starter strips and they're primed with real beeswax. So we'll see how it goes, but yeah, they absconded. So the sworn that's happening right now, the one that's leaving the observation hive. If they're hanging on a tree, when I get done talking to you today, I'm going to go outside, I'm going to get them, and I'm going to encourage them strongly to go into the other end of that top bar hive so that things are cool. Question number eight comes from George Garcia.

This is the YouTube name. Regarding the Apamehive, I have a seven-frame nucleus hive. I notice that when the bottom pull-out tray, the bees are attracted to the underside. which makes me wonder if there is an air leaking in and out we will soon enter the dearth in the greater Los Angeles area so it will be interesting to see how this all plays out probably a phenomenon that all hives with pull-out systems deal with anyway so here's the thing if you look at the bottom board of an Appamehive so if you haven't seen it I've done a full review on the Appamee the big hives and of course the nucleus hive and all of its traits characteristics, features, and so on. They all have removable bottom board trays. Here's the other thing. They are pre-vented. So the perimeter of your bottom board on any Apahe hive also has vent slats in it

that are not under the control of your bees. The bees can't get to it. So this means that it's an area that if you had a lot of condensation building up in there, you had a heavy rainstorm, whatever might happen, water can train out of the bottom, which also means air can travel through it. So just as described here, bees that are cruising around looking for easy access to a colony. When robbing season comes, you can expect to see them zipping up underneath the bottom of those. Just wherever air passes through. Because this is the same thing that you'll see in your beehives during a dearth period, beehives that don't come together well that have little gaps and breaks in the seams where the marrying surfaces are,

you'll see bees coming into the side and from the back and going wherever they can smell that honey and resources that are in your hive, they'll be checking out the back door. So they're just like little criminal bees. They're looking to rob, and they do that by going through side windows and little crevices and openings. They don't go through the front door. So the bottom tray is like that, which I see as a plus because in the wintertime, for example, if you are practicing the condensing hive, which is what I do, and it wasn't called that when we were doing that in the beginning, but if condensation on a really warm day forms on the bottom of your hive, which if you had a solid bottom board, this is why we tip our hives slightly forward. But the people at APA may have thought

about all of this stuff. The other thing is they're very good at responding to beekeeper feedback. So if you've seen something about their hive that presents a problem and you have a solution, a suggestion for improving it, they are all ears. They will listen to what you've got to say. they might ignore it if it's not a strong enough position in other words what are the risks if it's left as is so if it's just able to drip away excess moisture down there that's a bonus to me personally so because remember that we're not as it's not as detrimental to a hive is venting through the top in the dead of winter having a vent in the bottom that stays vented that stays open i think is a good thing in this instance in other words it's not going to pool up people that have

pools of even when they're pulling apart your beehives let's take this a step further when you're pulling apart your beehive let's say you're totally against tilting towards the landing board you think that's a complete waste of time when you are pulling apart your beehive and you're doing inspections and things like that sometimes you disrupt honeycomb that's capped and you got honey dripping down there. Or you slipped with your hive tool and you stuck it right into the capped honey and it's all dripping down. Or something happened and you've got cross combing, you pull these cums apart when you're

looking at the honey super and now you've got a bunch of honey running down into your hive. The solid bottom board will hold it there for them to clean it up. So that's a plus. But if it's tilted to the back, your bees can get stuck in it. They can start dying there too. So we want it actually to run out the front. and your bees are going to catch up on that. If it's mixed with water and other things,

your bees don't even eat it. Pooling water, trapped moisture inside the hive at the bottom is not good. So we need to think about the advantages against disadvantages. Did I just talk myself out of a vented bottom board? I like enclosed bottom boards. I like removable trays. I like a way to remove moisture. We do that with enclosed,

solid bottom boards that have removable trays you have to pull the tray out and dump that moisture otherwise is trapped in there but it's away from your bees hope that works all right moving on to question number nine francis moore long-time viewer commenter big-time beekeeper says hey fred always enjoy your videos what do you add to your sugar syrup for protein we're in a pollen dearth here and the flow is over hive beetles are a big problem I make syrup in 55 gallon barrels. That is a lot of syrup. Okay, so when it comes to the dearth period, and we're trying to keep our bees alive, and some people, if you're a commercial level sideliner and you need to keep your numbers up,

this becomes critical because you don't want to wait until they're on their last leg, so to speak, before you provide them resources that keep them going. I have to say that even when I've looked at the numbers of some of the field studies that are done on 3,000, beehives and different apiaries and research that's being done and I see how they, because they document everything they do. They have to put down what they fed them, how they fed it, what the consumption rate was. When I see things like six and gallons of sugar syrup per hive,

that is a, I have never fed any hive ever that much sugar syrup. But I understand that some people do open feeding on in huge huge quantities and um landy simone also did a video uh she's a big beekeeper multiple 50 gallon drums of open feed sugar syrup it's just something i've never done but here's the thing so that's a carbohydrate adding protein to that uh if we were just sitting down talking about that and thinking about how we can best feed our bees and give them what they need um i personally would not mix in the protein with the sugar syrup. And so for those of you who are trying to wonder, what are we give, what's the protein for? What are we doing? What is this protein? Well, the protein that the bees will normally be getting is, of course, the pollen from the flowers. So we can provide real

pollen. This is what pollen patties are about. You're also going to find out pollen patties are big time expensive. So there are alternatives that are less expensive. And I also like to feed free choice. This is kind of, it comes from the poultry world too. You want your chickens, for example, and your dogs and your guineas, and if you've got emus and ostrich and ratites that need to be fed, you break it down and put it out in different feeders. So now it's free choice. If we put just a calcium load of a bunch of crushed oyster shell in the chicken feed and made it part of the chicken feed that we don't know what they really need and what they wanted we combined it and therefore they were forced to consume it together so I personally don't like that for poultry or honey bees

so when we have the honey bees and you need you think they need protein because there are no pollen sources out there and you want them to continue to sustain their brood I would put out a pollen substitute the pollen substitutes have been studied the results are really well well established and there are three top pollen substitute brands and formulas that are out there and available. So I would not mix it in with the sugar syrup because that's a form of force feeding. You would be giving them something that maybe they don't want, maybe they don't need, and they don't have the ability to separate that out themselves. So when you put a sugar syrup out, it would be like you want, you know, someone to take medicine so you jam something. So you

jam something in it that they would eat normally and then they'll take the medicine that they don't want so the bees free choice is the way to go pollen substitute separate and i also put it out of course this is a small scale francis is probably going to have to put it out there one of those big i have one of the big blue 50 pound or 25 pound pollen sub feeders way overkill So I put it out in egg cartons. And we put the pollen sub out at a time of day when the bees are going to use it. So a consistent feeding station, this is not the same as putting out sugar syrup. And I wouldn't put them in the exact same location either.

There's no reason that they need to be in close proximity to one another. So you can have your 55-gallon drums or barrels of sugar syrup out. And then, you know, 20 yards away, you can have a dry pollen sub feeding station also. What is kind of important is that they're in the same location all the time so that your foragers and scouts can find them. So those that need the pollen would go to the pollen, they'll start loading it up on their corbicular. They will fly that back to the hive,

and if the hive likes it, needs it, and the other bees in that colony approve, then you'll have more bees there. The other thing is the reason I put it out in egg cartons, and I'm talking about the paper egg cartons, they get their footing, and I've never found a dead, be in that. Sometimes people put dry pollen sub inside containers, old hives, things like that.

Sometimes they'll put it in PVC pipe. There are feeders that are being sold that are just repurposed PVC pipe. I don't do that. And they also leave it out day and night. I don't do that. So I put it out when it's in demand for the bees and when the day comes to an end or if we've got a rainy day coming or something like that, I take it in and I store it and I put it back out when they need it again. So dry pollen subs separate. You may be wondering what are the top formulas. Okay. Any of these will work. AP23 is sold by D-A-D-D-A-N-T dot com. Mega-B is sold by BetterB

and UltraB is sold by Man Lake. So if we put them all out at the exact same time together because I've done it, put mega B ultra B 23 all out same table same time and see which one they go for guess what draws them the fastest ultra B draws them so the man leg dry pollen substitute sold this ultra B gets B's attention first you can smell it I've walked out across a B yard when I was using the big feeder and they were after the bag the empty bag. Bs just came across open spaces and were after the bag that I was carrying. So something in the formula smells good to bees, they come to check it out. AB23 almost has no scent. So it's almost like I wanted them to use AB23 because it outperformed

mega B by a little. It outperformed ultra B by a lot. So when we say outperformed, meaning that if that's what they were fed in lieu of, remember it's a pollen substance, It's a placeholder. It's something you only feed them when real pollen is not available. AP 23 performed fantastic and could almost replace pollen according to the laboratory studies. So you need to question everything, challenge everything. It is not a replacement for real pollen, but it is a substitute and it's going to keep your bees in brood production because this needs to come in through the entrance. some people want to push it and they want to put dry pollen substitute inside the hive i highly recommend you don't some people want to dust the bees with it open the lid dust them with dry pollen sub that's a form of force feeding they're just going to groom it off and get rid of it if they can

if they don't want it so what you're doing when you do that is uh or even when you mix it up with your sugar syrup and you put sugar syrup on a hive you're dictating to them that they need the protein, they don't get to make the choice because they do need the carbohydrate. And when they take the carbohydrate, they don't get a choice whether or not to take the protein. So you don't know what they needed, you just forced it on them. By building up solids in your bees, particularly in wintertime, if you put pollen substitute into your winter feed, then you've also added solids to their digestive system that if they cannot fly out into a cleansing flight

will cause problems for your beats. so we want to reduce that we want them only to consume what they want to consume so feeding it outside you can do it in the wintertime of these warm days and stuff same thing dry pollen sub out at a predictable location and be consistent about it and see what they want so that's what I recommend to you and to Francis is that keep those things separate I never mix pollen proteins into sugar syrup at all okay so Oh, this is the last question of the day. Question number 10. This comes from Skipper Ben. It says the bees are very chill. Of course, this is in a video where I explained bee swarms, what they're doing and why the swarm is moving and so on. It says, I think I'll make a bee hotel. So, bee hotels are different from beehives, of course. We have bee hotels. I have them on the side of buildings here. And it's for the solitary bees. and even wasps move into those so anyway it says are was evil i sometimes get an explorer inside my house and then i let it out but they don't bother me as much but are they evil so was first of all

evil and not evil these are just animals so they're not good they're not bad they're equipped different ways they have different needs to get through their life cycle so wass do things a lot of people don't like including the ability to sting you a lot sting you over and over and not die from A honeybee at least gives you the compliment of dying after they leave their stinger in you. And people think that it's not as advanced as a wasp. Although if you kill the wasp, it can't sting you anymore, you kill a bee, the stinger keeps going. So there are advantages. But when it comes to wasps, the different subspecies of wasps and the different behaviors that they demonstrate are pretty interesting to me.

Over the years, I have shifted a little bit. Am I thinking about wasps? I have a wasp nest right now that's right over my garage door. So like arms reach right there, it's this big. And I always forget about it until the next day when I see them flying around. So anyway, here's a thing. No, they're not evil. We just need to understand how they function.

So understanding how they function, there are some that have a terrible reputation that's very well earned. One of those would be bald-faced hornets. They're called bald-faced hornets, but they're just wasps. They're actually in the Yellow Jacket family. There's only one true hornet here in the United States right now, and that is the European Hornet, the Asian giant hornet, Mandarinia is gone.

Thank goodness. And this is Crabro, C-R-A-B-R-O, is what the European Hornet is. So they're not even terrible because I have studied them and been as close as I am to your screen right now. for day after day, hour after hour. Here's the thing I learned. Last year, for example, a storm brought down a yellow jacket nest. Now, we don't like yellow jackets.

There's a tendency. You just want to hit them with a bat or something. Drown them with dish soap or whatever it takes, hit them with raid, whatever people want to do. But if you slow down, take your time, think about where they're located, what they're doing. You'll see the things they're bringing in are not your honeybees, which is interesting, because that's what I wanted to get.

wanted to get evidence of what they feed their young because they're meat eaters and by that I mean they're developing larvae are meat eaters and the adult wasp is no longer eating meat it's killing things collecting meat even from dead animals on the road and as some people say put a pin in that for a second because we're going to come back to it why being stung by a wasp is much worse than being stung by the honey bee but anyway I got to know a colony of wasps through the year. And I was videoing them day after day to show their progress because I wanted to see how much reconstruction they would do. I stuck them inside a suet cage. They built there. And the first, when I first started out with that, they full on attacked. They totally were defensive. They came after me. I just

happened to be a beekeeper. So I had a B suit. So I didn't care. So I set up my gear. Full cinematic rig. And I videoed every aspect of it so I could get this entire year on video. video. And within days, they didn't even care that I was there anymore. So what's interesting about that is, the wasp, the yellow jackets, recognized me. So they pretty soon started to realize that you're just part of the environment. You come and go, you don't hurt them, and they ignore you. So now you can get even closer. Now you can fill a screen with just two wasps, which is a lot of fun. But so I learned a lot about it. And of course, they did more research. about Vespidae and I realized that they even recognize one another they even

recognize their own faces they all look the same to us but if you modified one of their faces with the tiniest little dot or the tiniest little color of paint they reject that wasp all of a sudden because it doesn't look right anymore so it's very interesting stuff now let's go back to is it better to be stung by a honeybee or is it better to be stung by the wasp the wasp remember what I said they eat animals sometimes dead animals animals, which means they've been climbing all over that, which means those germs, those pathogens are on the wasp. And if they sting you, they could be transferring that along with the venom that they're giving you.

They're more infectious. They're dirty. So they spend a lot of time. Look what they do. They chew it up and they make a meat pellet and they use their mandibles and they use their forelimbs and they scoot around and they get into the carcass and everything else. I don't want to be too gross. But anyway, they're not evil. They're just what they are. Bald-faced hornets are the closest things I've ever encountered that could be called that because they're also called bullet hornets. They have other names. And they don't seem to have a lot of rationale.

They seem to just come after you. I've had a hard time with them in the past. Yellow jackets I can kindly win over. European hornets, super easy to approach every single day. And I just played freeze tag. Whenever she was flying, I watched a queen build out her name.

nest in spring and lay the eggs and feed the larvae and everything else and each time she moved I froze and once she was gone that's when I'd run up and take videos of the progress of her nest just a few inches from the nest and it was really interesting so once you know about them and kind of decode their behavior they're not evil so except ball face horns all right we're in the fluff section that's the end of it for today so I just want to remind people that are using drones comb if you're using drone comb for varroa mite control just mark it on your calendar on your refrigerator don't forget that they're out there otherwise you have provided an area for them to reproduce more than others have so if

you're using the green drone comb just monitor that put your dates on join a B club and be sociable there are a lot of people that won't join a club I get people that reach out to me frequently there are even near me that live in my area they don't want to join a bee club they don't want to join any fellowship there are benefits to that please consider joining a group for me it's a northwest pennsylvania beekeepers association and having an association of people you might be able to help other people they can help you there's power and numbers and i highly recommend to do that this is a time of year when there are beekeeper picnics beekeeper workshops and beekeeper field days and things like that tomorrow

for us it's a field day and it's just a great time to catch up with people consider joining a group uh queen status checks so you may not know this comes out a lot people think that their colony is fine it's been smooth sailing uh you may not know when a swarm has happened so i highly recommend that you get into your hive at least every third week two and a half weeks is key would be better because we want to know if we're queenless and have time to do something about it before you get laying workers. Once you have laying workers, it's an uphill climb. You have a bigger challenge on your hands, plus you've lost more bees over an extended period of time. So just do status checks, learn to identify a colony that might be queenless.

So one of the easiest ways to do it is to do what were we talking about earlier, pollen counts. So if you do pollen counts on landing boards and they're bringing it in, you know, Now it's mid-afternoon. They should be bringing in 10 or more bundles of pollen. So pollen-bearing bees should be coming in a 10 or more per minute on your landing boards during a nice, dry, sunny day when resources are available. The other thing is comparisons between other colonies. If they're all bringing in pollen and then you come across one that's not doing any of that,

it's time to check it out. Or if they're bringing in pollen bit by bit, that does not mean you have a queen because keep in mind even when you have laying workers, they have to feed that brood and they will be bringing in pollen. They just won't do it in the quantities that they do when they have regular brood. So as I mentioned earlier, my top bar hive, the bees absconded. I'm still going to work with this top bar hive and see how things go. I have added all the guides and strips, starter strips on it.

I've used real beeswax on it. I'm trying to keep things going there. colony at the end is still going they're still plugging away i have not opened it i have not inspected it yet so that's upcoming a lot of you are facing summer dearths as described here please make sure that if there is no natural water source that your bees can count on please provide one provide a consistent water source water is the number one thing that the bees need in the hive summer and winter all year long they need water they can't metabolize honey with it. They cannot do their bodily functions without having water. So it's up to you. If you want to keep them out of your neighbor's pools, of course, I might be saying this a little bit too late right now, but a consistent, dependable source of water that your bees will go to should be established early in the spring and sustained throughout the year. It was interesting to me. I was out in the rain because I'm also taking photos and videos of water snakes. I know that's exciting to you, the northern water snake in case you're wondering.

I was out in the rain, washing the snakes move around. And the thing was, I could hear honeybees coming to the water's edge. So it was interesting to me that even during active rainfall, the honeybees are flying out to the edge of the water and getting on the moss and drinking water from that. So the mineral content, something about the water that they're getting there is better than even rainwater. In the rain, they're getting that. So maybe you're not as impressed by that as I am, but I think it's interesting both that we're in a downpour. And, you know, there's rushes of rain and it kind of lightens up and it's just sprinkling for a while and the heavy rain comes again. During that sprinkling period is when the bees would fly out, come to the edge of the pond and get water.

And I think that's really weird. But they're doing it. So, of course, I took pictures of video of bees in rain getting water because it's fun. The other thing is, people have asked about the switchgrass smoker pellets, just because they don't mention it every week. They are available. You can get them. If you just want to Google it, you can go to the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association

smoker pellets. If you just Google that, you'll go right to their page. This is a nonprofit organization. 100% of the profits from your smoker pellet purchase goes to furthering education about bees and community outreach and things like that. So I get absolutely nothing. I have no part in the income that comes from that. They are, in my opinion, the best smoker fuel

that you can get that I've ever used. Once it's lit, you're lit all afternoon. No problem. It's switched grass smoker pellets. It comes from Ernst Seeds. So it's a partnership between the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association and Ernst Seeds. And Ernst Seeds, of course.

It just happens to be where we're having the field day tomorrow. So it's going to be great. But for those that are asking about that, those are available right now. That's it for today. So once again, if you have a question for me, please go to the way to be.org. Click on the page, mark the way to be, and submit your topic. I've learned a lot of things from people that are watching and listening and who send me little tidbits of information. Did you know about this?

Look into that. What do you think of it? I think it's really fantastic and I've benefited personally in my search for new information about bees and beekeeping from people just like you. So thanks a lot and I hope you have a fantastic weekend.