The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Q&A Episode #327 with Frederick Dunn of The Way To Bee

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/BDefyv962ec

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, October the 10th of 2025, and this is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and answers episode number 327. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here today. Thanks for joining me. And if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics in order. And there'll also be some links for further study. For those you who like to dive deeper into things, So how about those opening sequences? We'll talk about that in a minute, but for starters, I think we should go outside and see what the weather is doing. And so outside right now, it was really cold this morning, by the way. So before we get to that, we're at the point where we're freezing at night. So that kind of triggers some behavior on the part of the beekeeper. That's right. You have behaviors that are triggered by different seasonal changes as well.

So I hope that you're thinking about stopping liquid feeding at this time, because for you're, freezing at night. And so right now it's 64.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 18 Celsius. And it's windy today. It's annoyingly windy. Averaging about six miles per hour, which is 10 kilometers per hour. So it's no fun to be out there. If you're trying to take macro-micro photos of things, you need them to hold still. We need the air to be still, and it's not. It's not cooperating. But the good news for the bees is it's 47% relative humidity. which means that it's easier for them to dry down the honey that they've stored. So they're doing really well here.

I hope they're doing well where you are. And where am I? The northeastern part of the United States, the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. And the best two days for those of my neck of the woods coming up for beekeepers, Sunday and Monday. It'll be in the 60s. Monday is going to outdo Sunday by one degree.

According to the weather people, they know stuff. Okay, so robbing risk. We need to know about that. It's high. The golden rod, basically done, which means we have a lot of surplus foragers. They're still on the aster's, but the aster's are also fading fast. We did some photography out in our property last night, and everything's turning brown really fast. We have some decent leaf color right now, so that's worth noting. For those of you who like to mark your calendars for leaf peeping, whatever you do. I just go outside in my own yard and stare at things. So anyway, robbing risk is high. Please make sure if you haven't done it already and you're in the part of the country where

things are fading fast, the bees are going to be targeting other bees. We did a really interesting robbing video. I say it's interesting because I made it. But look at the behavior of bees around hives. If you check out a hive while you're walking around your backyard or wherever you your bees and there are bees hovering underneath of it behind it beside it above it anywhere except the actual entrance of the hive you might have troubles so pay attention it doesn't mean that they're being taken over yet the good news is you have time to act how do you act what do you do you reduce the entrance if you haven't already so robbing risk is high air quality is good

finally thank goodness pollen is low pollen counts there's still pollen going in even hive number 44, that tiny double nuke is bringing in a decent amount of pollen. So that's impressive. So that means they're keeping their brood up, but it also means they have a demand for nectar. I can't tell if I have any bees that are the culprits. And by that I mean, is my colony, you know, are they robbing other colonies? Are they robbing my neighbors? I would hate to think that my bees are robbing the neighbors. Since they don't talk to me, we can't talk about entrance reduction and things like that. But overall, things are good.

Hives are heavy. I don't have any real lightweight hives right now, I'm happy to say. And in the opening sequences, you saw a large hornet. In fact, the only actual hornet resident to the United States now, the European hornet, which is Vespa Krabro. Often people confuse Vespa Kro with Vespa Mandarinia. What's that? Well, that's the Asian giant hornet.

but they were calling the murder hornet. And it was only found in the northwestern part of the United States, the state of Washington. And it's gone. They got rid of it. Thanks to community activists, entomologists, professional and amateur, all went after it and got it. And one of the things they did,

now the guy that was in charge of that, this is really interesting. His name is Sven Schediger. That sounds like a foreign name, doesn't it? You know that guy graduated from the same high school that my children did? A high school with a graduating class of less than 75 people? That's really interesting. But you know what we learned from Sven Svinds Fiedger?

How to track Hornets. See, they were tracking the murder hornet, of course, which they're large. And they were finding their nests, and they were tying string onto the hornets and tracking them, making it easier for them to see and also attaching little transponders to them. We don't have the money for that, but we can certainly afford floss, dental floss, that your dentist just gives away for free. So the supervisor was here. And we collected some bald face hornets,

and we experimented how much dental floss could a bald face hornet carry to its nest? Six inches long, we were tying those on. So one of the way the good news is, it was a good experiment because they all flew to the west. No, they flew to the east. So where the sun rises. Takes me a minute.

Anyway, they did that and we found the nest. It's the largest bald-faced hornet nest. It's easily this big. So bigger than a basketball and collected them. And so the reason I'm telling you that is so that I can give you something to look forward to the video that's going to come out. Because there was a lot to mesh together because it happened over a period of several days. First, we demonstrate the process of putting dental floss on a bald-faced hornet, which, by the way, isn't even a true hornet.

They're just called that. They're also called bull hornets and bullet hornets. They're bad news. They're kind of jerks. So anyway, we tied the floss. Six inches of floss. They flew away with them. One went one way, one went another way,

but they kind of generally went in the same direction, and they ended up in a nest, 11 feet off the ground in a maple tree. I collected them from the maple tree, and then what did I do? Relocated them like a good steward of the environment. I relocated the bald-faced hornet nest into the woods where they would be out of the way,

where they could annoy the deer, and they did. I have sweet video sequences of deer discovering that they're there and running away really fast, which brings me a lot of pleasure. Because they're eating all my stuff still. The deer are eating my morning glories, so this is making use of unpleasant wasps. And then you know what happened?

They didn't last the night, of course. Even that large colony. Guess what? Raccoons showed up, wash bears in Germany. and they went right up the tree and tore them down. And then other opportunistic feeders like the possum, O possums, went by, they took some. Lots of larvae in there.

Boy, did we take out a big nest. Anyway, the video is coming up. So I hope you'll tune in for that. And if you're not a subscriber already, I recommend that if you don't want to miss that, you do subscribe. And you can go to my website, which is the wayto-be.org, and submit your own topic or question for future consideration. and the way to be.org, the page is marked, contact.

Fill out the form. That's the same form for everything. And then, of course, your email's part of that if you want it to be. You can also be anonymous. And then I might contact you back or talk about what you've suggested. And I have great suggestions today. I'm very happy to report. So I think that's pretty much it.

If you have a question on the top of your mind right now, and you just have to show somebody a picture or a video or some other multimedia and get the opinion of your peers. Go to the way to be fellowship on Facebook. And you can interact with each other day and night all over the world. We have moderators on almost every continent. It's a lot of fun. You'll have great time there. Okay, so the very first question for today comes from Larry Master, XR8WZ.

That's the YouTube channel name. how do you keep wax moths off the frames at the robbing station okay now this is controversial for some people and that's because depending on where you live you may not even be allowed to have open feeding or a robbing station where you live it's true but i live in the keystone state the state of pennsylvania and we allow robbing stations and feeding stations and stuff so what i did was I used to, in the past, just put frames of uncapped and spun out, you know, comb from the hives. Because cleaning up, by the way, if you harvest honey, everything is sticky, everything is a mess. Why not let the bees and some local vespite clean them up?

So I put them out. Now, historically what I've done is I put those on a bench out at the edge of the woods, well away from your other beehives, well away from your apiary. So as far as you can get them from your apiary, good idea. The reason is we know to kick off robbing where your bees live. We want them to fly to the site and have an established cleanup spot. So whatever you need to have cleaned up, like you've just finished extracting honey, and you want your filters and stuff to get cleaned up just as a precursor for the final cleansing that you're going to give them,

robbing station. So often I forgot that it was sitting out there and then I'd go back out the next day and there would be, you know, frames all over in the woods and stuff because raccoons would come and take them down so instead i have it mounted to the side of a building and that's where i took the sequences that were in the opening today of uh vespa crebrose and the honeybee side by side so you could see the difference in size between these two things that's at my robbing station which by the way is a little over four feet off the ground mounted to the western wall of a stand-alone building and the building itself is up on stilts that's so rodents and pests don't move in under it and I can observe I have five

right now five cameras on that just so we can see what comes and goes day and night and then we can see exactly how effective that is and it's a fantastic thing so wax moths are not an issue and here's why it's in the open air there's lots of air movement there's daylight all the things that a wax moth does not like wax moths like to lay their eggs at night usually in openings in your beehive in areas that your bees are not defending very well and then when those eggs hatch the little larvae go out and what are those things called wax worms and then those go in and they start getting into the wax and here's what a very tiny waxworm can do it gets right into the honeycomb inaccessible to the bees now the bees eventually when it's in an

occupied hive they will get the wax worms as they get too big to hide into the comb anymore so they become thicker than the comb. And then the bees get them and haul them out. They don't eat them because bees are vegetarians unless it's their own eggs, but that's a different story. So we can keep wax worms out of our hive equipment just by providing air ventilation, air flow, light. And so I even have racks inside a building that are open air.

If you're going to close your stuff up, you need to count on things dropping below freezing and freezing those frames. Well, I'm lucky enough that where I live, it gets that cold at night anyway. So if we can put them in storage, it's like putting them in the freezer eventually, because it will kill the waxworms.

Now, you can also put, there are shipping screens, there are shipping bags, that are mesh bags that go over the top of all your hives once your equipment's stacked. The most popular way to stack these, you know, the frames and the boxes from your beehive, that are going into winter storage 90 degrees out from one another so they're overhangs so they're not all closed up and air moves freely through them because that's again something that the wax moth does not choose to lay eggs in now if you did want to close them up and line them all up historically i've also put industrial-sized trash bags so i set that on the concrete floor first first box goes on it flip the trash bag over set a next box on flip the trash bag over and then i'll

I put another box on. And if I'm going higher than that, I start with another trash bag. So then the trash bags seal off between each one. Now that does a lot of things. If some kind of varmint gets into one of those boxes, it doesn't just get a free pass to go through all of your hive boxes. The other thing is if honey drips inside, and sometimes it does, you miss stuff. Maybe you didn't have a rubbing station. Maybe you didn't clean things up very well.

then the trash bags are rested at each level. And you can go check it out. So then the other option is to put unindustrial. I use clear trash bags now, which I get from Home Depot, Lowe's. You probably have Menards or wherever your building centers are. Get the largest. These are like the 55-gallon drum plastic trash bags that are clear. And the reason I like the clear ones is because if there's any condensation or anything going on in there,

you're going to see it right away. So we see right through the bag. Also, remember that when you put a clear bag over it, there's still light in there where these industrial trash bags that have used in the past, everything was totally dark inside. So what we're doing is we're making it again unappealing to the wax moths. So now let's say we have the clear bags. We've stacked them all together. Now we want to keep it really dry because we can also desiccate them. We can dry out any little wax worms that might be in there by putting desiccant packs.

inside the reusable ones. I like the ones from wise dry by the way. So those are just some options but that's why the robbing station itself, wax moss, no chance. I did get some sweet video of wax worms this year. I wanted to show what they would eat and because they have to give a presentation. I'm giving a presentation at the North American Honeybee Expo in January. It's going to be a lot of fun and my crowd will not be disruptive the way they were the last time and distract Bob Benny, who was right next store trying to give his well-ordered presentation. But I have stuff I'm going to show you that waxworms do that are kind of phenomenal. So if you haven't already got your tickets,

you might want to do it just for just for that alone. They eat plastic, by the way. They eat it. So that was question number one. Let's move on to question number two from Jerry. Jerry says, my daughter and I are, by the way, thank you to Jerry. I'm going to use the last name, Tucker. Because I got this. Set it on the 8th, and I read it today. So anyway, the thing was, this led me to a solution. So I'm really grateful for the audience that I have

and the people that speak up and say things and share their ideas because you never know. We're helping each other out. No one is smarter than everyone. So I appreciate that Jerry did this. It says, my daughter and I are wrapping up third bee season or having a blast raising bees and selling the honey to family and friends. Yes, charge your family members money for that honey. No free pass. You and Mr. Ed have kept us

inspired since day one. So if you guys don't know who Mr. Ed is, Jeff Orchhoff, Mr. Ed, YouTube channel, check it out. Good stuff. This year we expanded from four backyard hives to 15 on two other properties by means of splits and two swarms with the exception of a flow hive and the mean might be mindful top bar hive that's done fantastic it says all our hives are 10 frame langstroth wood boxes with appamate bottoms tops and feeders so appamate bottoms tops and feeders which means they can use woodenware and then have these apomay feeders in the Appamate bottomboard, and I want to send you to a family-owned company if you want to check those out, Nature's Image Farm. And that is Greg Burns,

and they have the Endora Hives, which bring together a lot of cool stuff. This is not sponsored or endorsed. I'm just sending you to a great place for a very good product. Because they also have the Propola Hives. What is a propola hive? Well, it's a hive that has the surface of the interior distressed in such a way that it optimizes your bee's desire to propolize it and create a healthier hive.

And then the bottom of the hive will never rot. The hive itself is an endora hive, so it has a treatment that also will not rot. And then we have the convenience of a hive top feeder and an insulated cover from Apame. So it's a combination package. If you want to support a small business, I highly recommend Nature's Image Farm. Okay, so moving on. So we now have another person who wishes us to set up our third apiary in the spring. You know, we are considering building half a dozen or so.

This is a lot. Long, Langstroth highs from your plans. Now, I know some of you might be sitting there going, wait, Fred has plans for a long Langstroth High. Where do I see them? Well, you go to the way to be.org, and you click on the page marked plans and prints. How much will those cost me? Nothing. It's free. Thanks to Ross Millard. I sketched them up. Ross formalized them and now you could have them as a starting point or it could be the finish point. You could build your hives. Totally free. Anyway, so in the spring, they're building those. We've had no issues keeping the Apamay feeders on our hives year round simply an inner cover when not in use. That's true. They're super practical. I was wondering if you had tried the

Appamee feeders on your long laying and whether they will fit in place with a few top boards under the lid. Here's where this was such a super help because I just happened to have these in the garage. Now that is the kind of feeder that we're looking at. This is the Appamee hive top feeder. Now this one, by the way, you know what I did? I went to Amazon and I ordered these because I just wanted the feeder and the top and And the new feeder is a big one that covers the full 10 frame hive. And then the fondant pack feeder is in the middle. And then we have two sides with liquid.

But this one came with the two separate feeders that goes side by side. So this is kind of their outdated version. I'm not upset about it. Especially now that I got this message from Jerry because you know what I did? I took this outside right before I did this today. I went out and checked the coverboard. let me explain how it's set up my long langstroth hive has the standard deep frames that are langstroth frames they sit in a rabbit joint three-eighths of an inch above that it the rabbit

joint kicks out just a little more and that's where the cover boards go and then the cover boards on top of those i might as well talk about the winter configuration on top of those cover boards we put double bubble or reflect text or whatever you want to call it i made a quilt out of that. I also made a gasket out of double bubble. So when you close the top, there's no air leaks anywhere. And in the cavity, it's a gabled roof after all. We have double bubble too. Do you know what? This fits. So instead of the cover boards, which are minor four inches long, I can remove a coverboard or two, put this in, but the other cover board's up against it, have the follower board, and then we put insulation over the top of it. Now I have a feeder ready to go for solids or liquids

because the way these are set up, might as well explain it. I get nothing for this, by the way, and I wouldn't be against getting something if Appamese paying attention. This is set up for liquid see this little block right here swap that around now it's open so now the bees can get up into this reservoir and of course they're underneath this cover so they don't go everywhere and we can put our fondant pack so the fondant pack gets cut in half and then I just put it in here then I leave both of these open so candy position open for the bees now they can go up and they can get to this and they go right back down and do their business. Now I have an option. I used to put rapid rounds up there and that's still good.

That still works because the four inch cover boards that we put up there have the hole in the middle for the rapid round to sit on top of. Same thing. We insulate that and we have the opportunity to feed. And because cover boards can be moved all along the full length of it, where would you put it? Entrances over here. Frame of brood, frame of brood, frame of brood, brew transitions into stored honey. that transitional area that I keep an eye on and then when I do a thermal scan which you may not be able to do we know when they hit the honey and they're migrating in mass in a cluster through wintertime horizontally through the hive then I'll know when they get to that last so let's say you know the brood is over here they move through at that last third is where I would put this over the top

so then like the follower board is back here and then this is where emergency winter feed goes and in my case that's going to be fondant I did not feed that hive at all last year and somebody may be sitting there going well if they're saving enough resources to take care of themselves through winter why would you put that on there why would you bother well let me tell you why because it's an insurance policy if something happens you know what this is counterintuitive because oftentimes we think, oh, it's really cold, it's really bad, it's staying cold, it's not warming up, this is so bad for the bees, it's actually not. The roughest winters for me are those that get these big breaks in the middle of winter

where we get these unusually warm days. And what happens is the bees break cluster. They get active. They start going all over inside the hive, which is good news if they have resources to access. But this activity also results in the consumption. of carbohydrates. So then what they're doing is they're actually using up more resources on a warmer day in the middle of winter than if it just got cold and stayed cold. So the winters that I thought, oh man, everything's going to be lost because here in Pennsylvania, we can get some pretty severe

winters. And I thought, oh, it's just they're all going to be dead come spring. It's been cold, it stayed cold, no cleansing flight days and all that stuff. And those days, those winters like that actually the bees came out better than otherwise they would have. I was worded weird than they otherwise would have. So anyway, by having a feeder on there, let's say they do use up their resources. You have got a resource now that you can check without getting down into the hive. That's the key point. By having a hive top feeder or a long Langstroth hive in this case with a feeder like that on it,

we have options now which will not cause a panic. If we're still in the end of January, the first couple of weeks of February, and I find out that my bees in a horizontal configuration are already up against their follower board or in a vertical situation, if they're already up in the top box, we have a problem.

Because unless we have the ability to put on some kind of emergency resource for them, we're just counting on things to get better really fast. and it's not like you can just put out a bunch of open feet up here. Now, I realize if you're a southern beekeeper, I know Jeff Orchoff was mentioned previously, down there, beekeeping's easy. I mean, if you're a southern beekeeper, it's just so easy to do.

If you're a northern beekeeper, that's where the challenges exist. That's where the real proving grounds are, places like Pennsylvania. So that's why we have tougher bees. Bees that can handle stuff. So anyway, I want to thank James. because that was a great suggestion if he hadn't made that it's so obvious now that we know

so I appreciate you that was great that's going on like this week we're gonna do that question number three comes up here this is widow's wash basin that's the YouTube channel name what should have thought about insulating the flow hive setup with a quilt or other so this is interesting by the way here in my beekeeping club, which is the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association, which I highly recommend you join, even if you can't come, just send them money. Just join. It's $15 a year or whatever. So Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association, we have a bunch of people that don't agree

on how to keep their bees, how to configure their hives, how to set up for wintertime. They don't agree. Can you believe that? and it's the fact that people don't agree which makes it very interesting and someone is going to give a presentation about some elaborate quilt box and when did they put it on probably this week so they're changing their hive configurations for winter now this is something that i really want my viewers and new beekeepers in particular to understand there are a lot of ways to keep ease and they're not all you know exclusive of one another some make it they do okay this way some make it this way and do okay that way. So this is why it's confusing to new beekeepers. So I'm just going to tell you what I do.

And I want to give you a brief history about the quilt box. The quilt box, which is a box that goes on top of your hive, usually on top of the intercover, or it replaces the intercover, and it might be a complete unit. And people put like a quilt. They put fluff in it. So they might put a bunch of pine straw in there. They might put a bunch of pine shavings in there. They might put cedar shavings, thinking that those are even better. So what they're doing is their following suit was something that was established a long time ago. And do you know at the time the quilt boxes were set up? They didn't have modern insulation. So the choices were different.

In fact, I used to be a home inspector. I moonlighted as a home inspector in North Chicago and the state of Wisconsin, by the way. And the reason I did that, I wanted to see what things were failing, so I would know not to make those mistakes when I built my own house right here in Pennsylvania. But I inspected really old houses. I was amazed by some of these old homes and how they had no insulation in them. And that's because the fiberglass bats, the pink panther insulation, all this stuff didn't exist. Sometimes you find people had mulched up newspaper in their walls. Or they had just stuff they threw in there.

It's interesting because you find things in these walls. Let me move on. We won't talk about things we find in walls of old houses. So we have modern insulation. And so now, you know, when I was making feeder shims, I wanted the opportunity to do exactly what I described earlier. I wanted to be able to feed my bees at any time of the year without opening the whole hive. So I made a video and you can find it on my channel.

The YouTube channel is called Frederick Dunn. And you can in the top right type in feeder shims. And I show you how to build your own because I built mine. and it had an integrated bottom board in it and we could insulate it and you could put a rapid round in there and then someone pointed out almost immediately when I made that video you need to put vents in there you need to put a screen in there or you're going to have a big condensation problem in your hive but see just to satisfy that because I figured it doesn't hurt me to test it to create a demonstration so I put number eight screen in there and I filled it with stuff that would let some air pass

through and it put a tiny little opening in the top and the bees went to propolizing the screen. Now there's something key here. And that is that these feeder shims stay on all year round. And that's why during the warmer times of the year, they had the time to seal things up with propolis. And we can really see what they're going to do. Now if we just put it on at a time like this, when we get a cold weather night when it starts to drop below freezing, now we put on the quilt box. Now we put on some kind of insulated feeder shim that's vented that has a screen in it. And then the bees don't plug up the screen. They don't propolis everything. Well, you know why, because it's too cold, because they're not bringing propolis into the hive. This is also why we kind of

draw the line here at changing configurations on your hives and packing down. We want the bees to have a few days left to seal joints and crevices. So every time you pull apart a hive, have a reason to do it, because now the bees have to repair it when the weather can turn bad and stay bad. So I'm explaining my logic and how I arrived at what I do today. They sealed it up with propolis 100%, so then I was able to say to the viewer who was concerned about that, that look, the bees don't want that. So I'm abandoning, having holes and venting through my feeder shims. And so instead we could insulate and put the rabbit around in there,

and that allowed me to feed dry or liquid, not both at the same time. And so that's how I arrived at what I do today. And then after that, a company called B-smart Designs came out with their insulated inner cover. And it had venting and non-venting options, so I got it. Put it on my hive. And it was better than my feeder shim. So I now no longer build the feeder shims because it doesn't make sense to do that. And if I can just put something that's never.

going to wear out on my hive and then just put a medium or shallow super bots on top of it. So that's what I'm doing now. And then I have no venting and insulation and the option to feed right there. So right now I'm split. So for those of you who are trying to figure out how to configure your hives, I'm split between the B-smart Designs insulated inner covers, which are still on my Langstroth hives. and I've gone 50-50 last winter

with the APMA feeder inner covers and then insulated covers over the top of that. I find that to be pretty darn versatile. And now with a new feeder that they came out with, which allows us to feed liquid and or solids at the same time or separately without changing the configuration, now we have a pretty sweet setup. So at any rate, the insulated hives,

which now, after that an article came out in the American Bee Journal. So after I was building my feeder shims and stuff like that, a new term got coined, and they started calling it the condensing hive. So the condensing hive just means what we were doing, stopping ventilation through the top of the hive, letting the bees seal things up, having an insulated inner cover, which prevented condensation from forming on the underside of that inner cover, and then the condensation formed on the side walls instead of above your bees. If you had no insulation,

or if you had a quilt box or something like that, we frequently get feedback from members of our beekeepers association that say that the pine shamings they had eventually got damp because the dew point was achieved inside their box, their quilt box on top as air was passing through, and then it would freeze,

and then we would get these warm days. We have these really cold nights down into the teens, and then it would go up into the mid-30s during the wintertime, and that meant that top box warmed up, and now what was frozen, thawed, and started dripping down or defeating the insulation because it became soggy. So wet insulation no longer insulates. We need the air, not moisture. So that just for me reinforced it. So these things are very different, and I just wanted you to understand, you can do whatever you decide. to do. And I recommend if you're being pushed or pulled around by people that say absolutely do it

this way or absolutely do it another way. If you've got several hives, as I've always said, please do one one way and one the other. Follow both guidelines, follow everyone's instructions that are practicing both the condensing or the ventilated quilt box style hive. See which ones do better. See how they work. So when I gradually made this transition, into no venting in the top because they used to. More honey in spring, stronger colony, and no, there's no condensation on the cluster of the bees. That would happen if I had a hive that was too big for the bees.

It did cool down. So again, that other key means that you have to condense your hive to where they just have enough honey to get them through winter. So for me, with an insulated inner cover, here in my part of Pennsylvania, I only need about 47 pounds of honey to get a full-size colony through winter. So enough about that. With the flow hive, the insulation practice is the same, and I'm really glad that they kind of set it up because the flow hives are not set up for top venting. Now, they're also built in New South Wales in an area that doesn't see a lot of snow,

if any. So I had to modify mine, which means they had to create a feeder shim up above because there's no room in that gabled roof for even a rapid round. So I got an extra flow hive deep, which is all they sell, although I think they're toying with something else, medium-sized box. I don't know too much about that yet, but I took an extra deep and I cut it to make it a medium, and then I took that little piece that I cut off and I put that on top of the medium as my feeder shim on top, which now meant the gabled roof was bumped up, that little two-inch trim piece up there that sits on top of the inner cover is a place that I can insulate with double bubble. That's key. Set a rapid round in there because now it accommodates it. And then I also insulated the inside of

that gabled cover and the perimeter with double bubble. So I airlocked it, which means this trapped air becomes a warming surface that now down below. I won't have condensation. So I also made a video about it. So you can also go to insulating the flow hive. You can go to my channel, my YouTube channel, or you can also go to my website, The Wayto-B.org.

Click on the page mark the flow hive experience. I have all those videos are there, showing how I modified my flow hives for a colder climate and how it gets the bees through. So I used this question as a, I want to keep the discussion going. I don't, I'm not a huge fan of one person announcing how things should be done and the discussion's over. I like open debate, open discussion, and people's egos should be abandoned so that we can get to just the facts about what works.

Because everything doesn't work the same in every environment with every configuration. So having an open discussion and having open debate, is very important for a healthy arrival at a good way for someone, particularly new people, to keep their bees. And you shouldn't be hostile to somebody that says, well, I'm not going to go that way because I've heard something else from somebody else. I'm going to try that. Yes, please try that. And if you have more hives, try this while you're trying that. And see how that goes. Do you find out the best management practice for yourself? Question number four comes from Ross Wagner. Do you feed the bees, your fondant in this?

system did the bees continue to stay in the feeding so we're talking about in the system in the past i talked about this feeder so it says did they go back down to the cluster so i switched three quarters of my hives to the new app i made top feeders uh which are much better design that's true the new ones they're twice this size they cover a full 10 frame and they have a center feeder very good unit um so anyway i'm worried that the bees will just move up to the feeding tray where the fondant sits and stay there. What is your experience in winter with this feeder and fondant? I'm in Wisconsin Zone 5B.

Okay, so here's the thing. This is critical, and I'm very glad this question got asked by Ross Wagner. When you put fondant in this, wait until you have nights that are freezing. Your bees are not in jeopardy. Okay. Because right now, they should have the resources that they need. are ready stored away to hopefully get them through winter now what is important is that the configuration exists and is set up and ready to go don't wait until you think they're up near the top

and they need that to pull your inner cover out put this on instead of your inner cover and then try to emergency feed them have your feeder units in place insulated because you know what these have these little holes in the bottom and with the two of them come together it's like i mentioned before if you had changed your configuration earlier on these are vent holes and i talk to the inventors about this I don't like these vent holes and neither do the bees they plug them up with propolis and so the only ones are still open and vented look at this there's vending up here in the top that your bees can't get to there's venting in the top of these little capsules that your bees can get to and they seal them up

so they propolize everything the bees are letting you know so then you take your faunette pack and as I said you cut it in half and you put it up here, when do you put it up? This is the key point. If we put it up here too soon, the bees, and this comes from a lot of different beekeepers, this isn't just a one-off, that the bees will migrate up here early

because they show a preference for the hive alive fondant specifically over their own honey, and then they move up there, which means that if they're not anchored yet with their brood, and if it hasn't got cold enough for the bees to start clustering regularly in the, hive there is the risk that you end up having a pile of bees up here with the fondant and then if you get extended really warm days they'll actually start to build comb and everything up in here that's why I want you to wait until the cold comes for good so that's probably days in the 40s and nights below freezing that's when you put

your fondant packs up there and because it's already in place you just open it up put the fondet pack in you cut it in half when they first came out with the there is a shelf life on these so do not over buy don't like try to stockpile a bunch of them although somebody wrote me and said they're out of stock again so i don't know if that's true however these are good for two years so this one i purchased in august of 2004 it's good until august of 2006 these are the five pound packets the two pound packets the thin ones they would go through them and it would be emptier there just be little bits of fondant in the corners and I needed to catch that because once they're at the fondant stage they are being resuscitated they're on life

support and that's what that is doing for them now if you can make your own fondet and you've got some other formula it's important to have some kind of emergency resource up there. Now in the past, I always recommended dry sugar that later became a sugar block, a candy block, as winter progressed. And then in the springtime, whatever was left over, you could liquefy and feed it back to your bees. So nothing was wasted. So with the fond impacts, now we know that they have a impact on nozema. So nozima is something, an organism that lives, little tiny organisms, that live in the digestive system of your bees. And they can rob them. of vital nutrients going through winter. So the studies that were performed on hive alive, the liquid

in particular, and that's also in their fondent packs, was knocking down nozemus wars. And because of that, you had more vibrant, healthy bees coming out in spring. And now this is why, and some people, because I see the comments sometimes, they're, they hate hive alive, they're against it, they're tired of hearing about it. I can tell you why you're hearing about it from Kamen Reynolds and everybody else that I know is because it's working so well. So just as with other things in the past, I've done. I did it on a third of my hives, then half of the hives. Now all of my hives that can accommodate that. And now this year will be the long Langstroth hive will have it too. As an insurance policy, they will have hive alive fund in in case they get to that point where they are just on life support and they need something to consume.

But put it on later rather than sooner and here's why, since you don't end up with all your bees moving up into that because that is reported pretty frequently for people that, for example, have it on their hives right now. So that's the risk. Your bees are going to be anchored with brood. And so the cluster gets settled over the honey and brood. So honey around the brood,

fruits in the center and of course you have fat-bodied winter bees coming up and everything else and we want them to stay down below as long as possible we don't want them to be on emergency feed by the end of January ideally we want them to only consume honey so let's see what happens question number five comes from isancho forty six says hi Frederick how do we know how many pounds of see this is a hive live phonic question again by the way use if you go to their website use fred 10 you get 10% off fred 10 okay how do we know how many pounds of high life fondant to buy are you saying reflect tech for the insulation and you recommend a feeding

shim yes i recommend a feeding shim and yes on top of whatever you're feeding your bees dry sugar sugar brick candy board fondant whatever you're putting up there insulation over the top of that So the passive warmth coming off your winter cluster will do some warming and also you'll get your bees will have access to it directly over the cluster and then the insulation is on top of that First your beekeeper my hive was doing great about 80 pounds of honey and then my bees were robbed Robbing is no joke you guys so about 85% wiped out and I'm trying to save them. I have two to one sugar syrup with honey be healthy now So Honeybee Healthy, by the way, is a sugar syrup extender, keeps it from being spoiled. And so if I were giving advice to a new beekeeper that was one of my mentees, right now I have 10 men teas. If I'm giving them sugar syrup 2 to 1, 1 to 1, whatever it is, it gets those two teaspoons per gallon of hive alive syrup for the same reason that I described before.

it not only extends the syrup, but is an actual treatment for nozema. And so if you're just putting essential oils in there like Honeybee Healthy, it will extend the sugar syrup. So there's nothing wrong with that, but you will not get that medicinal benefit of knocking down nozema. If you want to know how to count nozema sports, if you've got a microscope around, you've got a hemo cytometer, which is the little blood cell count. slides for your microscope and there if you go to scientific beekeeping which is randy oliver's website he has the best demonstration on there showing you how to count nozima spores and once you've done it it's very easy to spot them and then you'll know that you could actually be knocking them

down so anyway it's um so queen is there and larvae but not much food any tips i'm in indiana so here's this is a cautionary tale for the rest of you they're listening. Once robbing starts in a meaningful way, that means like no more guards holding their own at the entrance, things are falling apart. It shouldn't mean you don't try. But while the robbing is ongoing, until you get that under control,

there is no point in putting in sugar syrup for some kind of supplemental feed. Because now what will happen is the robberts are already accessing and bypassing your guards accessing the resources in the hive now have a renewed resource they can continue to go after so i recommend putting a robbing screen on the front whatever your preferred robbing screen is or if you don't have one a reduction in your entrance really small if they're being robbed three-eighths of an inch by two inches something that they can defend hopefully, but you're on life support. Don't feed sugar syrup at that time. For the reason I just

mentioned, it reinvigorates because the robbers are going back to the hives they're coming from and they're indicating to the other bees in that hive how many resources are there and what the resources are. How do they tell other bees what the resources are? They regurgitate it into the tongues of the bees that are on the dance floor that are watching this waggle dance and they're assessing quality of the resource that's coming back and whether or not how many of the bees should be sent out to also exploit the resource. So the amount of this stuff that's being given to your bees is indicated by the vigor with which the waggle dancer waggles.

And the number of cycles of waggle dancing that that robber is doing. So if that robber is very excited about the resource that they're bringing back and they want other bees to really get going, the waggle dance is exaggerated and the amount of time the circuits in the waggle dance are extended. And then they go and pass that on to another bee inside the hive that will store it in cells. So if you've got a colony that's being robbed, don't add resources yet. I know that seems bad. Seems like a mistake. But until you see that they've got guards on the landing board,

that the robbing has dwindled and subsided even, that's when you can start to put resources on the hive and resuscitate those bees. We need to stop the robbing first. Question number six is from Diane, from Warren, New Jersey. Glad you've been featuring your Apisalus Vapor. I got one a while back, and I love it for the reasons you mentioned. Question. The instructions say, so if you don't know what we're talking about, it's the Aposolus

vape system, it's not a smoker, it vaporizes their proprietary blend, which gets your bees under control. There is a new blend that has the same lasting reaction for the bees that smoke does. The only difference is you don't have to light it. It's not burning. You turn it on. You use it. You do your inspection. You turn it off.

You put it in storage. So the question is, the instruction. say to clean any traces of liquid from the tank and container connectors after each use. It's not clear to me what exactly they mean. So this is a French item. So sometimes there are some differences in the words that they use. Have you been doing this? So I have to confess, no, I haven't. I haven't cleaned it. I haven't cleaned it once. And also I had a flashing red light and warning beeps this afternoon when I operated the bellows. Documentation. just refers to the flashing red light and to check the resistance.

So what they're calling the resistance is actually the resistor, and it's a little ceramic piece that has a connector in it, because this is battery powered, and it heats that up so that you get atomization or a vape system. So when you puff the bellows, I bought a whole bunch of those because I thought you had to replace them for every bottle or something, but I haven't even been through one of their bottles yet. Because once again, it lasts a really long time, and now I have two of them.

So I bought another one because I have the light original formula in one, so it's loaded, and I want to have to dump it out. And then I have the new formula in the other one, and I just marked strong and normal on the back of the bellows of each. They're expensive. I get it. Super convenient, though. Because if I have to go to somebody's house and look at their bees, I just walk up with my vape system, turn it on do the inspection turn it off put it in my car go home it is super convenient i know that other people are working on other things that blow that you know there's fire starters and smokers for cooking and there's all kinds of stuff it's a great area for innovation but i've not followed any of this

cleaning and so i haven't done it uh castle hives brian that's all he uses his is all grubby looking so I guess he uses it all the time. I wonder if he's cleaning it. So if any of you are watching his channel, you might ask him if he's had to clean it. So I have not popped it out after use. I have not cleaned it. I have not wiped it down.

So anyway, I found it challenging and I wonder if you've come up with a Fred easy way. Yeah, it's not doing it at all. In the end, I just added some liquid. It was pretty low. I wiped things down and it worked. So now it's back to functioning. So in my video that I,

did of that. When I initially even put it together, it didn't function right. I had to take it apart. I had to pull a wire to make the spring. There's a magnet that activates it instead of just a regular on-off switch that's on it. You have to hit it three times and turn it on. And so then it started working. But even initially, the interesting thing about this is it's 100% user serviceable. All the parts. All the parts can be replaced, including the battery. So it has a lot of advantage And I like it. And the new formula is stronger. It does work.

I thought for a minute I can almost use it to clear bees out of a super for honey harvesting. So I haven't tried that yet, but I wonder they do move away really well. I just wonder if that's going to work. That's yet to come. I haven't tested it that way. Question number seven comes from Grandpa Bees. Okay, here's another one. This is why I like, see, people like you writing and telling us.

me things. Fred, I have the pygmy shrew here in northwestern Minnesota. The 3-8s entrance, which is what I tell everyone to use, is large enough for this shrew to gain access. I think one-sixteenth of an inch is what is needed to keep the pygmy shrew out. Like you said, they aren't going to take over a hive like my stew, however, all winter long, they will come and go, eating constantly to maintain their high metabolism. So what do I do? I have to reach out to small mammal biologists because I need to confer with experts. I can't just have you sitting there listening to whatever Fred thinks because what I thought and what I initially said to Grandpa Bees here was you know what? How much can a shrew eat? You know, a tiny, I don't know if you've ever seen, excuse me, a pygmy shrew, but we have them here.

They're tiny. And I feel bad when one of them gets. gets killed in one of my mouse traps. It's probably trying to find mice or trying to feed on a dead mouse. And that's coming up too. We have to think about trapping mice in our storage areas. Because even though you seal everything up, stuff gets in. And a shrew like this can get through tiny holes. Trues are cool.

I'm not going to lie. Short-tailed shrew, those things are awesome. Had videos of them tracking mice. They're just, and that's what I said to Grandpa B is. Well, you know what? I would do the trade-off. This is my knee-jerk reaction. I would do the trade-off. And if I had a pygmy shrew in one of my hides, I'd be proud to have it there. They're not rodents after all. I mean, what can they do? How much can a shrew that tiny? Because their measure, their weight is in

grams. I think, oh, what if I could show you one? Look, I just haven't had Peterson's field guides to mammals of North America. Oh, look, one of the pages is marked. I wonder what's on that page. Look, pygmy shrews. What do they look like? They're on that page. They're tiny little venomous mammals. So I looked up the pygmy shrew. Super cute. I highly recommend field guides because they're a lot of fun.

In fact, when the holiday seasons come, why don't you give a field guide to every one of your grandchildren? You find out kids today love reading books. They just love it. Give them a book of facts and it'll sit on the shelf unopened for months on end. it doesn't change the thing but the pygmy shrew which is found here in pennsylvania by the way across the northern uh border here um but uh one to three grams that is teeny tiny but i did my research and of course reached out and i found how devastating can it be this thing eats multiple

times its weight in a 24 hour period in fact it could eat 35 this makes a jumping spider nothing a shrew inside your hive a pygmy shrew will eat upwards of 35 bees every single day 350 bees every 10 days think about it if it's in there all winter long it really can devastate your winter cluster of bees because that little rascal can do a lot of damage so i changed my mind don't let them in now the good news is i have cameras on my landing boards i like to see what's moving around out there my most frequent culprits in the wintertime is the deer mouse. So the next thing that I wanted to know

from the small mammal biologist who doesn't want to be named, I get that. What can they climb? What kind of surfaces can they climb? So they actually have a hard time going up the metal legs of the lice and hide stands. That was my other question.

And if your hives are painted, semi-gloss paint, vertical surfaces, they have a hard time getting over that. So the good news is the pygmy shrews prefer to be close to the ground. They like to be around wood. They like where wood and ground come into contact with one another.

So the people that still have their hives that sit right on the ground, and even though they've got that little ramped entrance, but the whole box sits on the ground, a shrew would love to move in right under that. Because they winter over under pieces of wood and stuff. And they come right to the surface, and they have this meteoric metabolism, so they have to eat, eat. Now, if you're already in the ground,

they just scoot right in go through the entrance because it sounds like given those mesh screens that people put up to keep mice out so my hives are elevated to keep them out of skunk range and that 3.7 inch isn't good enough but I'm going to leave mine at that setting until I see a pigmy shrew trying to get in. So straight off. What do you think in favor of the pygmy shrew? Maybe see if they can actually make it. I spent lots of time looking into that. And so I changed my answer from, hey, I think it'd be great to, wow, thanks for sharing that information. We do need to stop pygmy shoes from decimating our tag on winter bee hive clusters. Question number eight comes from Glenn in Loganville, Georgia. Having recently scrounged a bunch of scrap plywood from a local townhouse construction site, it has a red tent, which I believe designates it as a eight.

fire retardant. A quick search tells me it's likely iron oxide, so I'm trying to decide if it's safe to build new hives out of and appreciate your insights. Okay, I'm a huge fan of scrounging through those building site trash piles. Usually I've got a great big old dumpster there and they just throw all their stuff in it. You can get a lot of wood out of that. Two by fours, two by sixes, a lot of walls are built out of two by sixes. You'd be amazed, which you can get for free. Talk to the forum and say, hey can I pick through your trash sometimes they say no because there's liability or something but what they're throwing away is amazing however if it's got that red tent the iron oxide stuff the iron oxide is what the red tint is the

composition of the board is very different and I'm going to I'm really glad that Glenn asked this because do not use it try to use wood that is the most chemical free that you possibly can but I looked into that because I looked into the red tent and iron side. The red tint is a fire retardant treated wood, F-R-T-W. It's often an added dye to make it easily identifiable. So that's just so at the construction site, they know which ones are fire-retardant, but it's called, it goes under names like flame freeze and the red-tint treatment process for easy identification. That's just the dye itself to indicate that. However, the fire-retardant

treatment of that wood is what we don't like. Ammonium phosphate, modobacic, and dibasic, ammonium sulfate. So boron compounds like sodium, borate, and boric acid. The risk to honeybees is considered high. Don't use it. So when you're scrounging,

do not use wood that's been treated for fire retardants to make your beehives out of it. It's not good for your bees. in fact it's the other way around it's bad for your bees okay so question number nine last question of the day comes from wendy in seattle washington good morning at liberty today checking on new queen install attempts in the high thirties and nights in the 60s during the day all hives are very insulated tops more so than sides per your recommendation while i'm inspecting is now a good time to put out or put on fondant okay so i already covered

that we talked about when to put your fondant on all hives are new colonies this year some have tons of honey others less want to provide fondant for emergency feed all in appamate feeders except by two lands which will be put in dr leo's frame feeder so at horizontal hive.com that's dr leo he discourages feeding and says it should be all natural but still will sell you a frame feeder if you're insistent if you want one i have one just to see what they're like and And so that's what it's going to be in. And we've already covered the territory, when to feed, what to feed. And so I think Wendy has already got her answers.

So we're in the fluff section. And get 10% off Fred 10. People don't like it when I say that. That's why I said it twice today. Question number one. Oh, not question. This is plan of the week. Continue to pack down your hives in the northeast.

It's time. You're running out of time. The weather's going to go bad. I'm telling you it's going to go bad, it's going to stay bad, and don't be caught without preparing your hives and inspecting those edges. And remember this year we're using, I'm using the extreme weather, extreme temperature. Oh, look, this is not the one, but this is that aluminum tape that I wish I had used in the past to seal holes and crevices and cracks and places where robbers are getting into your hives. That stuff is holding its ground. We had a heavy rainstorm come through, two inches of rain, and it looks just like I just put it on, so it's not peeling or anything.

That stuff is good. So complete your packdowns, get your honey harvested, whatever you're going to take, whatever the surplus is, and try to get your winter configuration just as quick as possible, assuming you're not already done. Find and close up all your leaks with something. Do not let them have openings as the win. winter comes and hits them because those openings and gaps and crevices are due to bad wood swarping cupping rotting whatever's going on it's also a great time to put out pollen sub for those of you have it so what we're trying to do is provide your foragers with something to do other than rob other colonies of bees so this is where the feeding station once again

if you're allowed to have a feeding station where you live and why do I support that. Somebody might be sitting there going, well, then why do you support it if it's bad? Because there's so much drift going on in a backyard apiary. My target audience are backyard beekeepers. And there's so much drift, so much interaction, colony to colony to colony within my own apiary, that having an open feeding situation is almost no different. So if I know all my colonies are doing well and they're healthy, other than rubbing the hairs off their hind ends when they're robbers, they all look pretty darn good. So I do.

You can put out dry pollen substitute if you have it. The most appealing to the bees is not the one that performed the best under laboratory conditions. So Man Lake UltraB, dry pollen substitute was the one that the bees go after the first and the quickest. It was the lowest performer out of the top three. The second one is MegaB, which you can get from Better Bee. MegaB from BetterB outperformed UltraB. Then we have AP23. AB-23 from Dayton outperformed Mega-B, which outperformed Ultra-B,

which comes from BetterB. AB-23 comes from Dayton. So, that's it. If you have it, price shop, because if you're going to use it, because it's just, you know, it's satisfying to set out pollen sub on a sunny, warm day, because that's it. I don't recommend leaving it out all the time ever in any container. I don't even care if the container,

like the big giant blue one that I have for many years ago, is designed for pollen sub in all weather. Keep it inside, keep it dry, and then only put it out between 10 o'clock and later when the bees are out actively foraging, looking for resources. And then I recommend putting it in those paper, pulp, egg cartons.

And when you put it on those, the bees get their footing and they can fly away. If you've got these enclosures, you're going to find dead bees in it. They get so covered in pollen, that they just can't find their way. So I have no dead bees when I use egg cartons that are paper pulp. So AB 23, data, and then we have mega B from BetterB, and then we have Ultra B from Manlight. Okay, let's see, process all your leftover honey. Get it out of those five-gallon containers.

if your honey sets in a five-gallon container, now you have to warm that thing up. If you can get your honey into the jars right away, it makes it easy because now if it sets or crystallizes, you can do that jar by jar. And there's no reason to make it liquid until you're a couple days out from selling it to someone or giving it away to family if that's what you do.

But get it into the small jars as soon as possible. These bigger jar situations, these containers, five gallons and seven-gallon pails, get them in the small jar. It's my personal recommendation for that. Document your moisture content regardless of what you think you're looking at. If you don't own a refractometer, get an inexpensive yet dependable refractometer. For those of you who are looking for the expensive, the most accurate ones, you're looking for a MISCO, M-I-S-C-O-Honey refractometer.

You don't need all the other bricks ratings and stuff like that. They're the same ones the inspectors use and they're calibrated. Because we want to know if it's over 19% water, you run the risk of getting one of those jars to get super foamy at the top and actually can explode or the lid can pop off in storage. So you have the possibility to ferment. Anything over 20% is going to ferment. Anything between 19 and 20% water could ferment and anything below 19%, 18%, 185 and so on, you're probably good to go. But you need to know. So we write it right on the lid of the jar when we're bottling it.

Join a bee club. Things are about to get quiet. They're about to slow down here in the northern part of the United States. You can't get out there all the time. Why not fellowship with other beekeepers? Join a bee club. Maybe you're in northeastern Ohio. Maybe you're in southwestern New York.

Maybe you want to join the Northwestern Beekeepers Association. They have a website. They sell smoker pellets. $15 for the year. here I've done my part clean and scrape probolos off your stored frames so here's the other thing

often when spring comes you know what happens when spring comes swarms and swarms find beekeepers unprepared so I highly recommend that we start pre-staging for spring so you're getting your wooden frames and stuff like that and you're scraping all the extra

propolis off you're making sure that that frame could fit in and be placed easily into any high that you decide to put it in so once they're empty and extracted I either put them on an open rack or I'm storing them in hive butler toads. Hive Butler Toots, you can get a discount for, Fred, 5. What do I get for that? Nothing, zero zip. But you get 5% off.

So any place that you go shopping, always ask for the Fred discount. Tell them Frederick Dunn sent you. And if you happen to pay the same as everybody else, even when you mention my name, so what? You have nothing to lose. Ask them. They're not going to pay me. It just helps you. Insulate.

all of your inner covers and secure for heavy weather. By securing for heavy weather, I highly recommend shipping straps. Shipping straps have actually kept hives together, even once they blew over, and they've also prevented bears from getting into your hive all the way. Bears like the easy path.

They just like to, if they can flip off a lid, if they can get a couple frames out, it's pretty classic for a black bear to get frames out of your hive and haul them 50 yards away. and eat them. Once they get access to your stuff, they keep coming back. So you don't want to be sitting inside with your hot chocolate,

watching something that you're streaming on TV, and you see the weather report say it's going to be 27 degrees Fahrenheit and 60 mile an hour winds, and all you're going to do is sit there and worry about your bees. So shipping straps, stable stands, get them ready, do it all while the weather's great. And that's it for today. I want to thank you for joining me.

I hope that if you enjoy anything, or this format, please subscribe to my channel. I'm Frederick Dunn. This has been The Way to Be, and I wish you all the best, you and your V's. Have a great weekend.