The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers. Can a laying worker get through a queen excluder? How to keep ants out of your bee hive, and more.

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

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

So hello and welcome happy Friday. Today's Friday the 13th. Ooh, this is back our beekeeping questions and answers episode number 310. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I want to thank you for being here if you want to know what we're going to talk about. Please look down in the video description and all the topics will be listed in order along with some additional links and information that might be helpful to you. So I want to thank you all. So I want to thank you a lot for joining us. It's a great day. Perfect day, in fact. What's going on outside? I know you want to know. 70 degrees. Fahrenheit. That's 21 Celsius. It's beautiful outside. It's overcast. You won't even fry yourself.

No sun tan lotion needed at all. Just go out there. No wind. You won't even mess up your hair. I know that when the wind blows and if I can feel it in my hair, it's time for haircut. and 74% relative humidity, no bearding, even though the bees are actually getting a lot of nectar and pollen in, just look at your landing boards. They are busy. And where would these landing boards be? Northeastern part of the United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. It's going to rain on Saturday. That's what they say. They know stuff. And what's going to happen on Sunday? Sunday is Father's Day. So, fathers, father figures. any person who's been a positive influence in your life that is like a father or actually is your father,

don't forget to honor them. Do great things. So the worst day is going to be Saturday for rain here where we are, where you are. Things might be different. And the fact that it's Friday at 13th, I don't know, just makes it memorable, I guess. If you want to know how to submit a topic for consideration for future, Friday Q&As, please go to the way to be.org. Click on the page mark the way to be.

It also says questions on it. And yes, it's also where you can get an iron-on patch that you can put on the ball cap of your choice. Someone asked if I saw ball caps, I don't, because I think that people might want to pick their own blank ball cap and just get an iron-on stitched patch, the way to be. Put that on your hat. It doesn't have my name on it.

It just says the way to be. No one would know that you even know me or don't. And so if you suffer from pollen allergies, you can actually get outside. It's not too bad. 2.5 parts per million is what they save for smoke, too. So the smoke, where's that coming from Canada, where the wildfires burn continually, apparently during summer. So that's pretty much it. I know you might want to know what's going on outside as far as pollen and nectar sources.

The white clover is finally blooming. So the bees are really getting out there. Buckwheat is also blooming now. I planted that this year. I don't think it's enough to make a difference really. But it makes the difference to the bees that visited. Comfrey is doing really well this year, bigger than we can remember. So Comfrey, great medicinal plant. The chickens eat the leaves of it as part of their pest control through their digestive system. So it's pretty interesting. Bumble bees, chew holes in the side of the confree flowers because the honeybees, their tongues don't reach it if they go through the normal openings of the flower and get what they can use the holes made by the bumblebees to get in there and get those nectar resources so the cosmos have germinated borage is everywhere it's two inches tall so

not terribly exciting yet but i'm glad to see that the woodchucks the rabbits and things like that try to work against me this time of year are not very successful because what i did was i mowed a huge open area around where i planted things planted seeds this year and i think having it all out in the open benefits the hogs if bunny rabbits go after things and at night the owls can get them. So I'm using nature against nature and it's working. Everything's growing. Maximillians are two feet tall already. Milkweed two feet tall. That's going to be great. I don't know if you do anything with the Xerxes Society. It's a fantastic, fantastic group. If you're looking for plants that benefit your honeybees, go to the Xerxes Society and look at their top 100 pollinators.

So it's pretty fantastic. And I think that's pretty much it. So we're just going to jump right in. What else? If you have a question that's on your mind right now and you're watching this at a later date, you might want to go to the Way to Bee Fellowship. If you just Google that, you'll find it on Facebook.

A lot of people don't like Facebook, but if you want to talk about bees with your peers all over the world any time day or night, go to the Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook. As long as you're nice and friendly and get along with everyone, you can visit there and see what's going on. Great for beginners in particular. So I guess that's it. We're going to jump right in.

And so the very first one comes from Shaynestarkie. Shane Starkey. Shane Starkey. That's the YouTube name. So anyway, this is also a podcast. By the way, Podbean, just Google the Way to Be podcast, and you'll find it. All right, now we're going to get into the question. Now, Shane Starkey says, could letting the drones emerging in the isolation cage?

So we're talking about isolation cage over your drone comb as part of your integrated pest management for Varroa destructor mites. And so I suggested that we control the drones and keep them from flying away. So in other words, let them emerge from their cells. That's kind of counterintuitive to allow. lot of people but I'll explain it again just because Shane had a question others may too and so what you want to do is put a drone frame so it's a drone size cells on a foundation that's heavy waxed so that your worker bees could draw out

the comb and then a colony that is really strong really robust will develop roughly up to 20% of its population in drones what time of year right now so if we're trying to limit the varodistrictor mite reproduction and who doesn't want to limit that you can just go ahead and let your queen lay up all the drone cells and then once they get to the pupa state because that's when they cap over those larvae and they become pupy and then when they do that there are varodistructur mice under the cappings and then you can go put them in the freezer if you want to kill them feed them to your chickens someone talked to me about that on Saturday they have a special rack system for feeding their drones to their chickens

But the other part of that is that if you let the drones emerge and then also dispersal phase mites will travel over and get themselves onto the bodies of the newly emerged drones. So when that happens, the question here was, what about the queen? Won't the queen be smashed? Won't she be stuck with them and so on? The thing is, your queen doesn't stay in the cage. Your queen is only around until that frame is all laid up. So when you're going to be smashed, so when you're it's full of eggs and all those or when you start to see them getting capped that's a good time that's when you go ahead and you take the drone frame and you put it inside a queen isolation cage so the queen's not on it she's done she did her part and you don't close her up with them and then of course because it's a queen isolation cage the worker bees can get through the bars they attend to the remaining

open brood and then you can set your clock so you can pull it at the right time and the can't get away. It's a perfect system. Well, it's a near perfect system, but you can this time of year, get a lot of road destructor mites out of your hive and ruin their day. And that's our goal. Question number two comes from, I don't even know if I can say this name, Shaney Pub, 7103. That's a YouTube channel name. So anyway, it says new beekeeper here. Giant Red Ants just took out one of my entire colonies. I feel like giving up. Okay, don't give up first.

A lot of people have problems with ants. I think it's interesting. I just did a video of a bunch of ants recently. Following them around. Did you know that your honeybees are related to ants? That's right. They're all hymenoptera. And we're coming up on ant swarm season also,

which is interesting to watch. Because you know that ants that don't normally have wings, get them and off they go, and every queen that flies away becomes another colony. So there are a lot of different varieties of ants. They do go after bees in some cases. I thought I had ants robbing one of my colonies once, and I thought they were actually stealing bee eggs because they each had an egg and they were walking out of the hive and in single file going right down the leg of the hive.

Turned out they were carrying their own eggs because ants can bivouac and move. and they take all their brood with them. It's pretty interesting. So this isn't fun for Shane. So what can you do? Well, hopefully your beehives are not sitting on the ground. I see that quite often. I see that people put their beehives right on contact with the dirt.

Well, first of all, mice, rodents, and other things like that will get underneath your beehive. Ants just naturally take advantage of the shelter and they start building their nests underneath. And then they ultimately go after your hive. your hives for a variety of reasons. Ants can eat everything. So they like the sweetness. They like the sugar. That is a carbohydrate for them just as it is for your bees and they would love to rate it. And they also will haul away dead bees and eat those. So step one is making sure that your hives are

off the ground. Step two, what kind of hive stand will you put your beehive on? I use iron T-posts and then for the run of the hive stand I use metal conduit. It's for electrical work and it's galvanized and it's not very expensive and it comes in 10-foot length so you can cut it and just wire that to T-posts. That's a really good stand. The reason I bring that up is because the metal T-post makes it easy for you to control what's going to climb up that post and get into your beehive. Because ants, and this is why I mentioned that they're hymenoptera, that they are also related to your bees, is that they're pheromone base. Like if you've ever seen an ant scooting across your kitchen floor, and I hope you don't, but if you did, you'll see other ants following that exact path.

They follow that path because they're laying a scent trail down that the rest of the ants are following. If you rub your finger through that with dish soap or something, you'll disrupt that pheromone trail, and the next ant that comes along starts through in big circles. So those circles of the ant running around are much like a honeybee that slots its way that starts to do searches, elliptical searches are flying around until they smell the right thing and then they go or they see the right thing and they go there So we can disrupt their fair amount trail we can do things for the ants that they dislike So let's say you had that there's another really good hive stand that you see almost everywhere Be smart designs plastic hive stands they're black very distinctive at Cornell University, all of their hives were on Beesmart Design stands,

and they hold up to weed whacking and everything else. I've never worn one out. I've had them since they first came out, the first iteration of the Be Smart Design's hive stand. So those hold up, and the reason I bring that up is, because it's a hard surface and they're plastic, you can coat them with things. So for the metal T-post, first thing I would say,

because it's going to prevent rust, too. Why not spray it down with WD40? Ants hate that. The other thing is you want to clear away all brush and growth, no tall grass and stuff like that around your hives. Clean that down. Don't give your ants any means of getting into your beehives. So we're eliminating their pathway to your bees.

People will talk often about moats, adding water, setting your, you know, get a cool whip, plastic tub or something, and put each leg of your stand in that, fill it with water. What eventually happens? We forget that the water's there, dries out, the ants go in. Ants can also walk across the surface tension of the water. So if you're using those modes to keep ants from getting in, what do you have to do to it to break the surface tension

to increase the wetting ability of the water? Add a little dish soap, done, ultra free and clear. A couple of drops is all you need. And the next ant that goes and tries to walk across sinks right in. Not only that, that increased wetting ability, that low surface tension results in the spiracles of the ant, getting suffocated because that's how they respirate. So that's another way. The other thing is if that doesn't work and WD40 doesn't work on the legs and things like that

or you just don't like it, Vaseline is the next step. Smear a little Vaseline on the surface and ants won't cross it. It's fun to watch. See what ants will cross and what they want. Go to an ant hill somewhere, mess it up, get them all mad. This is on you, by the way. and then if you put a wooden stick, a dowel rod or something like that in the middle of it, the ants will all crawl straight up and go after your hands, and I recommend you don't let them get that far. But so what you can do is now we have a test opportunity. We can do different things. So spray the wood a little bit with WD40.

Oil, by the way, is a good wood preservative. But so spritz that with WD40 and see what happens. Will the ants climb up that again? In fact, do it halfway up so the ants can get started and then see them. stop when they immediately encounter WD40. If they cross that, tougher ants. Vaseline is the next step. Vaseline will last a long time through rain and everything else. Now, if you're in a dusty area, it's going to stick to it. So eventually it's going to need some maintenance and some refreshing. Next step. Mint, gel. So there's a thing you smear that on the surface. That smells good to you.

Smells good to everybody. Doesn't mess up. your hands you can go wash your hands later ants hate it they'll stay off of it they don't like it at all if you're looking for a place to dump your coffee grounds some people will say that coffee grounds repel ants maybe well it's fresh but later when it dries out after a little rain or whatever uh the ants are going to cross the coffee grounds so coffee grounds by themselves not so good gel toothpaste specifically peppermint gel toothpaste yes try that all those things so step one of course hives off the ground. They last longer, they do better. You're doing less bending when you're dealing with hives off the ground. My favorite hive stands are we mentioned the B-smart design

stand, we mention the T-posts, you can build your own stands, and then if you're ready to get a stand that's going to last forever that has a 1,200 pound capacity on each end, I'm talking about the Lysen metal stands. Lysen makes those polystyrene hives, which I don't really have, but I like the stance because you run two by fours through them. And some people were questioning when I put two by sixes, for example, in a hive stand that has a two by four receiver at the end. And they said that that was a waste of wood because it's not going to be any stronger throughout the run as it was at the ends.

If you cut it down to two by fours, like cut these angles, taper them, put the two by fours in. What does that do for it? Well, it actually does improve strength. It is, I understand what they're saying. It's still a 2x4 when it goes into the receiver. But if it's 2x6, that means there's less deflection under load through the span, right? So it actually is supported in engineering. Very good principle.

Outstanding stands, they will outlive you. You can put them in your will and hand them down to your supervisor, whatever you have. Whoever's walking around and going, when you die, can I have that? When you die, grandfather, can I have this? Will this be mine? Well, first of all, I'll be pushing your wheelchair. I don't mean that. I mean, you can't have my stuff and stop asking for all my stuff. So anyway, that should take care of it. But these are described as giant red ants. I would accept that challenge. We need to do some monkey around and find out what repels them.

Because the idea of using an insecticide to kill them doesn't hold up very well for me. Insecticide is not good around your honeybees. will be that your honeybees aren't on the ground around your hive but let's not take a chance let's not do that and some people will say diatomaceous earth do that it's called d e you often see that there are freshwater diatoms there is food grade diatomaceous earth i have a big bag of it and uh goes a long way but it isn't very effective as something needed to kill ants the way that it works and the way it needs to dry them out it's pretty well defeated with the rain and you have to constantly refresh it. And so I don't recommend diatomation serves for that.

If you've got chickens and they're in their nest boxes because they're laying eggs all the time every day, then diatomation serves in with the nest box material is fantastic because now your chickens while they're sitting on their eggs or while they're producing their eggs won't be harassed by insect pests because there are mites that all go after your chickens there are feather mites that go after your chickens so by putting diatomation sources in there dusting things up that protects your birds so I hope that helps question number three here is from Vicki from Misbehaving Farm in Duncanon Duncanon PA these places I've never heard of Duncanon PA I heard the

due to the antibacterial properties of honey that you shouldn't have honey, say from washing buckets and extracting equipment, go into your septic system. Is this true? And this is interesting to me because on the face of it, I thought, yeah, yeah, honey, it's not going to do anything to your septic system. By the way, I have a septic system. Here, we are on a well where I live. I designed all of this myself, got it approved by the Department of Health in our county. So I do think about what goes into the septic system. And because we need enzymes and microbes in there that break down waste, we don't have to get into details about what the waste is.

But we need to think about it because we're on a private system. What goes in there and what would be the impact? So I did a little bit of research and guess what I found out? It's true. Do not dump honey into your septic system. There are a lot of things about honey. that will begin to damage those necessary enzymes that are breaking down the waste. And so it wasn't something I'd really thought about because, you know what, I don't dump honey down the drain.

And so when it comes to processing equipment, so if you're extracting or if you're rendering wax and things like that, no byproducts of that should end up in your private septic system. Because if your ability to break down solids in your septic system breaks down, you, you ultimately could have a problem with your leach field. And once you have a problem with your leach field, things aren't leaching. Now you're going to have to get a company out to roto-ruder everything, clean it up, and restart those beneficial bacteria that break down waste in your septic system. So actually, that was a very interesting question.

So, yeah, if you're washing stuff, I would wash it outside. Rinse everything off and let it just go to the grass. dilution and water things down and let the bees come and get the surplus honey there are people that use detergents and things like that to clean their honey processing systems i know someone that uses what is it they use a lot of chemicals to clean their stuff to dissolve everything away and so i also just recommend water hot water power wash things like that i would really try not to use high alkali stuff to take care of that but don't put it in your home, drains, sinks, systems like that.

So that was interesting. It actually could, it turns out, interrupt and damage your private septic system's ability to process waste. So who knew? Question number four comes from Alec. From Francis, it says. So hello, Fred. What is the size of a laying worker? Do they get through the queen excluder?

I was thanking of introducing a frame with a queen cell inside a frame cage to see if the queen pheromone will have the bees turn against the laying workers. This would then be a very easy way to get a queen-right colony without the hassle of dumping all the bees in the garden somewhere. Okay, so I agree, by the way. I don't dump out bees to get rid of laying workers. So this may be interesting to a lot of people, at least two people that are listening right now. If you have a laying worker, what is that in the first place? So we have three casts in the hive. We have workers, which are all female.

We have the queen, which should be the source of all reproduction. Sometimes there is more than one queen even. And then we have drones, which are the males. They're the largest. They're the fat as they have the thickest thorax. and so thorax they have a head thorax abdomen that's the basic components of an insect's body head thorax abdomen so when we have a worker they have the ability in the absence of a queen and they could do it even with the queen around but it most often happens when your colony is queenless when your colony is queenless they have ovaries remember that there was no difference between your queen and one of the other workers

as an egg. What was different was how that egg was treated when it hatched on its third day and became a larva. Then the workers decided the nursebees specifically had to feed it, had to nourish it. The frequency of the feeding and the composition of the feed is very complicated and they feed it in rapid succession. So in other words, if it's a queen that they're developing and it's a queen cell, one nursebee backs out after feeding and another, another one basically goes right back in and they're feeding it so they're keeping it fed and can change a worker into a queen through diet alone not only does she become a queen her development is faster than a worker bee so from the egg being laid to the emergence of the adult queen is only around 15 days

so from the laying of the egg to the emergence of a worker bee which is much smaller and in theory less valuable to the colony individually, 21 days. So this is all through nutrition. This is why they can replace themselves quickly when they need a queen and their colony is in duress and they're struggling and they need those numbers to be kept up. This ability to produce the queen in short order from any worker egg is very important. Now that we know that, when the worker starts to lay eggs, or she's not bigger. So in other words, she doesn't become in some way unable to pass through a queen excluder.

So that won't work. So you may be wondering, and keep in mind, there are a lot of different genetic strains of honeybees. Some are bigger, some are smaller. And so I thought I would talk, first of all, the queen excluder. What are the bar spacing dimensions in a queen excluder?

And by the way, my favorite queen excluders are metal. Because they let workers through. I've had queen excluders that are plastic that workers struggle to get through. So first of all, the gaps you're going to find are pretty darn tight. 4.1 to 4.2 millimeters. That's the spacing of your queen excluder bars. So now we have to talk about the thorax. That is the only part that does not change.

So the head doesn't change, but the head isn't what we're gauging this on. The thorax is the center portion, is where all the muscles are. where the wings are attached all the legs are attached there and that is the main machine for the b so this is an exoskeleton it doesn't expand and contract the only thing that expands and contracts or changes with diet and things like that once they're emerged and established is the abdomen so abdomen on a queen for example can get very small it gets contracted like when they're shipped when they're banked when they're not in full production and then that same queen can look like a whole new queen with a much larger abdomen when she's in full production because she's full of eggs now.

So that does not change. The thorax. So what is the size of a queen's thorax? Remember, the restricting bar is 4.1 to 4.2 millimeters. The queen's thorax is 4.5 to 4.7 millimeters. There are cases where there are runty little queens that don't get enough nutrition or maybe It's an emergency queen that they produce with two few days to get it full-sized. And they do, in some cases, squeeze through.

But their dimensions, their physical dimensions, don't change during their adult life, right? The drones are the biggest, 5.5 to 5.8 millimeters. And the worker, tiny thorax, no matter what, laying worker or not, 2.5 to 3 millimeters. That's the outside dimensions of the thorax. This is a great exercise. If you've got kids that are learning science and they want to understand anatomy and how to get physical dimensions from things.

And the idea that there's soft tissue, that they are expanding and contracting portions of insects, and those that are static like the skeleton, like your bones, we can't make our hands shorter. You know, our arms don't get shorter, but we gain weight and lose weight. So our stomachs can get bigger and shrink. Hopefully they're shrinking if we're working out a lot.

then the workers are the same. So it doesn't work. Now, what you can do, though, to impose this pheromone force on your colony that has laying workers is you can take a queen introduction cage. The queen introduction cage is different from the queen isolation cage. The queen isolation cage has gaps in it that are just like the queen excluder that you use. to divide your boxes honey supers and then of course brood area but when you put these queen introduction bars on the queen is on a frame hopefully of brood and the best way to establish that is to get a frame of deep langstroth frame one or two depending on the size of your cage

and you can have all capped brood in there the reason that's important is because we want them to be emerging soon so they can attend to the queen that you're putting in there queen introduction so you put the queen on that frame of capped brood with no workers put it inside the queen introduction cage which you can get from better be there may be other places better be is the one i know of and then once you put them in there and the queen is safe in the field and you put the lid on you put that inside then now what we've done is we've established that there's a queen there and her pheromone begins to spread the workers that reject that queen, try to sting her, try to bite her, and kill her. That's the potential. And then

those workers that are laying workers, they don't want her there either. You would think they would want her to be there because all the laying workers are doing is producing drones, male. So the colony is going to dwindle until it just dies out completely. So the workers may, because remember they're all older now, they don't have replacements. There aren't young nurse bees in there. So we're counting on them reactivating their ability to feed brood they are feeding some drone brood because you've got laying workers but it's not in the quantity that you would have when we have a fully healthy hive that's queen right with everything going right so what they'll do is I'll feed the queen through that bar system and then so through direct contact those that feed

her will be getting her pheromone and spreading that through physical contact through the rest of the hive. Also, as those bees start to emerge from those capped pupa cells, those workers come out, their nurse bees, they also get fed and nourished through the cage from other bees that are resident to the colony. Now, how will you know when you can let them out and it's safe? Well, the feeding is going to continue, but what you're going to be looking for in about four or five days after putting them in is you're going to look for eggs. I'm outside of the cage. So if there are no more eggs, no more laying workers are in production. It means they've stopped. They've arrested their production of eggs. And now we can open the top,

pull the frame out with the brood and that new queen, and she can just go her happy way and start laying eggs all over the colony. So if you're three or four days inside, because what she will start to do, it's not lost because the bees that emerge from those cells, those nurse bees, the queen can turn around and lay eggs in there. So she can be in production in that queen introduction cage. If you just spend a lot of money on a queen of a very specific genetic line, you don't want them, you don't even want to take a chance that they're going to eat them. I recommend anyone who's handling their bees in that way use that queen introduction cage from better bee.com. Tell them I sent you, pay the same as everyone else.

So it helps that helps with that. Now, there's another way. Let's say you don't want to buy a cage. You don't want more stuff. You just want to push these bees around and get those laying workers to stop laying. You can also combine colonies. So we have a laying worker colony. By the time you discover that, we know you haven't been in there for 21 days,

because that's how long it takes for that to happen. So they've been queenless, 21 days. On average, by the time the laying workers starts laying. And so when they're doing that, you've got an unsettled colony of bees. You open it up and they are not happy. They're spread out everywhere. They make a noise. There's a little whir or a roar that happens when you open the colony. It's time to investigate. So anyway, you can combine the weaker colony right on top of a stronger established colony. They could just use a boost. Now there are a lot of ways to do this. You can use

the queen excluder, put that on the existing colony, put your, the reason you're, the reason you're putting the queen excluder in is we know we've just got laying workers we don't have a queen up there we want to clean all the bees out of that box because you're not going to want to leave that box on your hide that you're combining them to so queen excluder put the box with the laying workers on it on top of the existing colony that's strong and you can have honey if you've got a honey super already on it would go above that so the ones that we're blending honey super on top of that and then what happens is they finish emerging up there The bees that are on the bottom of that, that are in brood production, that's where your queen is, by the way, of the existing strong colony that's Queen Wright. The workers can pass through that queen excluder, and they can attend a business up there. When all the broods emerged and they're gone and they start laying things up, you can just go ahead and pull that box out completely, and then just put them back to normal.

Save the frames that you want. So if there's a bunch of drone comb and stuff, it's a chance for you to eviction. those pull that out and just go ahead and restore order to that colony but it works pheromone storm an overwhelming pheromone that helps get them established question number five comes from Aaron Lincoln Nebraska what do you thoughts on filling the top vents of the Apamahe Hives with silicone and using either reflectex or closed cell spray insulation to insulate the lid better are pretty handy and can make some sort of mold.

Then there is no venting and the top lid is insulated better, which I think is the only downside to APMA hives. Okay, if you've got reflectex, if you've got double bubble or single bubble, it really doesn't matter. We're talking about APMA hives, if you've never heard of it, they are a plastic insulated hive that has a lot of really handy features. It also has insulated sidewalls, insulated cover, and a very well-designed feeder system that allows you to feed solid or liquid. And with a new combo that comes for the wooden hives, that means the APMA plastic feeder system goes on top of an established wooden hive.

Then you have the ability to feed solid and liquid at the same time. They're the only ones that have a feeder I know of that does that. So you could have a pollen paddy in the center while you're kicking on. a colony that's new or small and you can have syrup on the sides and feed those at the exact same time. The drawback that we're talking about don't have one here because of course I'm using them right now. But the drawback is that around the perimeter of the feeders there are little holes, vent holes, because as a manufacturer, they are trying to make what every beekeeper wants. So there are beekeepers that regardless of science and best practices, wherever they are,

still want venting and they want to take that control away from the bees. To the point where once the bees are sealing up holes and propolizing screen and everything else, they take heat and they clean it up again to make sure they have the venting that the bees are struggling so hard to close up. So I agree. I would like it if they had no vent. holes around them or through the candy section but this is what we have so one of the ways that we can just fix that is by putting a single layer reflect tax which is an insulation that comes in rolls

home depot lows menards wherever you go shopping and it's very easy to cut and you can put that over the top of that feeder and then it blocks all airflow which is what i want to do it's what the bees want to do so now if you live somewhere and your bees are not sealing things up and they want the airflow and they're demonstrating that consistently then now you have the option you can leave it you don't have to close it up so the outer cover which is insulated except for the front and the back exactly where these little louvers are where the vented air comes out you don't have the option to close them up so if they came solid i would take the solid ones but by just putting them for like reflect text in there we've taken care of it and it's really pennies so you That works well and I've put that on every app of may hive now that I have. And as far as expansion foam or using silicone, I don't see the need to use silicone sealant to close those louvers up.

I would just still leave them open and just provide that barrier, which is a ventilation barrier and the reflect text reflects the heat back down. And of course in the summertime, reflects the heat out and away from your bees. So I think that would work really well. expansion foam. The ability to mold expansion foam could be fun. You could make some unique configurations there, but there is room the way it clamps down to have a single layer reflect X up there. And that works. And I talked to the guy that's from the company, and he thought

that was a good solution too, so we can have the best of both worlds. I wish they would make one for nucleus hives. In other words, Aupame makes a six or seven frame. nuke configuration nucleus hive. But we have these five-frame wooden deep nukes. And I would like to have the appamate. They make the feeders for a single nucleus hive that are compatible with the five-frame wooden box. The thing is, the feeder's compatible, but it has a little eighth-inch edge around it, and there's no roof for that. So I have to custom build a roof for that. But if they made one, I'd have one. and then i could just put that on the wooden wear so if anybody's listening and i want a dream sheet accomplished for father's day even though nobody owes me anything that would be cool but the modifications

are simple to do easy to do and it's a good system a system by the way full disclosure i did not like appamate hives when they first came out every time i saw one i saw video about it and like the look of it it looks like a play school play set in somebody's yard it doesn't look right as a beehive it it came in reynolds was putting one together everyone was putting them together and i just thought oh my gosh just use wood why are you doing that until i saw the way the feeder systems work in general and this is let me explain how they won me over this is not an ad for them I get nothing. I have no affiliation. I get no kickbacks or anything for mentioning Apamee.

But the way their hive bodies go together, they're only compatible with other Apamee equipment. So the hive body is because they overlay the lower box and they clamp together. There are some knockoffs out there that are conspicuous when you see them. The knockoffs of the Apamee are not as heavy built. They don't have the metal plates on the inside where you've got the handles and the locking class. There are stainless steel bolts that go through and there's a plate that receives that on the inside.

So when you're lifting a heavy high full of honey, it is pulling against a plate on the inside where some of the knockoffs that are seen at different expos and different conferences, there's no interior metal plate to receive it and so it is much weaker. Now, I don't know if any of you own those because I didn't buy one. clearly but they didn't look like they would hold up as much the other thing was I naturally kind of rejected it because it was literally a knock-off of the Apamay design so I really like that they all go together where I live I have heavy weather we have storms that come through here that are 60 plus miles per hour with 20 degree

weather in Fahrenheit and it can be even colder than that we had a actual blizzard last year. Now the highs I don't worry about coming apart are the Apamai highs because once they're clamped down and clamped together, if that whole thing managed to blow right off a stand which none of them ever have, once it did, it would still be together. It would not come apart. If you've got rascally raccoons trying to pull things apart and fiddle with their little fiddly fingers, they can't get them open. They can't get into them. Bears, I suppose, if they really worked it for a long time, could get one open. But it is even what I would call bear resistant,

and I'm in the middle of black bear country. So there are a lot of advantages to it. It's tough stuff. So they won me over through the years. Now it was slow to the game, so I don't want to say it was one of the early people that looked at it and said, wow, that's viable. That's great. That's fantastic.

It is plastic. So I get pushed back from viewers. that don't like the idea that I would promote anything plastic. But there's part of that too. Let's do the logic of that. By the way, if you don't know, we're in the fluff section now. We had a short Q&A today. So when it comes to plastics, I need to talk about that.

Because the justification for using plastic, this is some people just won't even listen to it. Won't hear it. It's kind of like shouting at somebody about plastic is a bad, and slamming the door so they can't be in a discussion about it so the option is wood have you seen the prices of wood lately by the way way up bees would naturally occupy wood we could say that so it's a natural material it is a renewable material to some degree but i notice that there's a bunch of supply shifts when it comes to lumber and the other thing is lumber has a usable life expectancy right

So eventually, who doesn't have, if they're a beekeeper, a bunch of old woodenware sitting around that is no longer suited for the bees. And we can take our deep, prude boxes that are made out of wood, and we can cut the top and the bottom off of them, reestablish a rabbit joint with a router, and we can put them back in service. So we can get some extra years out of them, but they require preservative.

They definitely require maintenance and care. Now, with the APMA boxes, or if you've got another, you know, plastic, that's durable, we don't know the extent yet of how long they're going to last. Now, there will be ultimately a time when it can't be used. So we have to think about it's going to go to landfill or something. It's definitely, I don't care what emblems are on it. It's not going to be recycled. The recycleries are so specific and so picky that even stuff that's labeled for recycling

often never makes it. If it's got anything left in it, any part of a label on it, They just discard the whole load, by the way, the whole bag. So recycling is touch and go-to. But I think we're going to get a lot more longevity out of a hive like an apame than we do the woodenware. And it does start to look a little oxidized. So the colors fade a little bit. And so again, I'm talking to the owner about it.

How long will these things last? So they don't know. if we were consumer reports, we would take these things out and we would artificially accelerate their degradation in sunlight, ultraviolet light. And then we would forecast how long this would last before it becomes unusable. So we don't know how long they're going to last. But I know that I don't have to buy wood and make new ones. And I know that I have a lot less concerns about them shifting, falling apart in storms, conditions, pest, predators, things like that. So I'm not trying to convince you that plastic is the

thing that you should have, but I am suggesting that may be constantly buying new wood and restoring and replenishing everything and or having to do a significant wood finish. If they came up with a wood finish, right now my eye is on Indura Heights, which are in Nature's Image Farm right now and they're tied in with Premiere, which makes the probe live. I like the idea of that. I want that to last forever. I don't know if they know how long that's going to last in the weather. And of course, when I say in the weather, what's your local weather?

I don't even know. So different extremes, different environments. One of the reasons that my test yard, my apiary, is a good yard for finding out how durable things are is because we get summer heat. We get very distinctive storm systems that come through here, and we get challenges through winter, very extended winters. So can it shelter the bees? Would the bees move in on their own? That's another good vote.

Would the bees move into an apame hive on their own, or would they choose a wooden hive instead? Mine will occupy. I've had swarms self-occupy apame hives, but that's because it smells like bees have been there before. If it were brand new and never previously occupied by bees, then I think that they would likely go towards the wood naturally. But I don't have to get new lumber, worry about things falling apart,

worrying about little gaps forming in midwinter, and then I got bees poking out because the wood warped or came away. You know, the weakest part on these wooden joints, on the wooden hive boxes is where that rabbit joint is, and they come together at the corner and it always kind of just opens up a little bit there which lets air water in it accelerates the degradation of the wood so when you're putting together wooden hives i highly recommend a very good wood glue tight bond three and the new gorilla waterproof glue is fantastic so once you get those boxes all together and and then put a tiny self-tapping screw right through where that rabbit joint is to make sure that that holds together. We do a lot of damage shore hives when we're prying them apart. So we've got to get the boxes, the upper box off.

They're propylizing it, which is exactly what they need to do. So the bees have glued that up. And then again, go back to B-smart designs. I haven't seen a lot of people use them, but they have pry points that go on the side of the hive. And so the bottom has a piece of. goes on it the top has a piece that goes on it so when you put your hive tool in there your prior boxes apart and you're not damaging your wooden wear so that is sold at a lot of different suppliers so those are the B-smart design's pry points I don't get anything for saying that it's the only

thing I know of that preserves you wouldn't wear so it doesn't have to be damaged every time your supervisor is in there missing the joint and jamming his hive tool as hard as you can into those corners. So there are a lot of things to consider to balance that out. The longevity of a plastic hive. I'm not a fan of polystyrene hives. Chickens eat them. They have some drawbacks.

So I consider the Apamehive a middle ground for that. So getting my bees through winter is kind of the test also. The wooden hives, they go through winter just fine. the plastic ice that goes for winter just fine but i've never had to run out in a snowstorm and use a bar clamp to re-align joints on a hive where one box is slightly off center from the box below it and then use those twist grips to pull them back into alignment under load and by that i mean the bees are in it it's full of honey 70 to 100 pounds of honey maybe and so being able to realign them appamay Trouble-free, no problems, no shifting, no issues.

Do I sound like I'm promoting them? I think I am, the more I talk about it. But I wish I would add more stuff. So I think that's it on that. So the fluff, by the way, when we're collecting swarms this year, and just like everybody else, somebody was happy to point out that I'm failing as a beekeeper, and that's true, I am failing to keep my numbers down. I did not want to, I'm trying to condense my apiary, fewer hives, more bees per hive, more production

per colony, right? Not doing very well, because I'm dealing with swarms. So, since they're going to swarm, you can still do your best to outsmart your bees. They can have extra space, they can have ventilation, they can have checkerboarded frames, they can do, you can do all the things you're supposed to do, and then watcher bees swarm out when they shouldn't. So when they shouldn't buy the book. So the other thing is I want to talk about Swarm Commander. I have nothing to do again with this company.

Swarmcom is actually, it's the owner of the B-L-Y-T-H-E-W-O-O-D-B company. Came up with this. These little capsules, I don't know how old they are, but these are they have a glass vial in them and then the cotton tip you snap these and the swarm commander comes out then you can just touch things let me explain how i use them i want my bees to go on to we all know if you've been listening to me before that i use the qmp the queen mandibular pheromone temp queen noodles they're very inexpensive too uh i did some stuff some manipulating of the bees with those

recently and I used a nitrile glove to hold the noodle and I was trying to get bees to go into a hive the top bar hives that I just did a video about and did they all go after my hand and go after me because that smell was there so what I want to encourage you to do is pick the tree the branch the location something porous wood is porous so you can put little dabs a swarm commander on a tree branch you will will get volunteer honey bees onto that branch fairly quickly. So what we want the bees to do is go to the branch that we want them to go on. One that we can observe easy.

You can see it at a glance. Do we have a swarm? And then also that you can access it so that it's time to collect the bees off of that. So you can shake the bees that collect on the branch. And they're constantly reinforcing the pheromone. And in some cases, they're even adding beeswax. They're starting to build honeycomb on the branches. So the swarm commander works really well in getting them to do that.

There's another way to use it. Because they also recently had a swarm of bees that I was trying to get them to move into the opposite end of my top archive that I just set up. Everything's brand new. It smells like it's just been milled. You know, the woodwork is, it smells like sawdust. So it's not necessarily appealing to the bees yet. So I had a swarm in a net and I put it against the entrance because it's, It's a two-colony top bar hive.

And so they wouldn't go in. In fact, the bees plugged the entrance and wouldn't even let other bees go and check it out. So I took a QMP noodle and I just took one of the top bars, the farthest one in, number 10, and I lightly rubbed the QMP noodle on the underside, put it back in there, and now the bees that are outside refusing to go in could smell that, and didn't they all then go in? So we can get them to go in and you can get the same results with Swarm Commander. It does the same thing.

Once you break this vial and of course that scent is out, this is a synthetic Nazanoff lure. And so it works really well. This is not just lemongrass. So anyway, I wanted to tell you that. That is a great way to get like a scion. Somebody else was mentioning that. You're just picking a post or a wooden area. that's sheltered a little bit that you want your bees to congregate on and once they start doing that you'll find swarm after swarm on that same branch and it helps you out a lot so can get bees into a hive that they don't want to get into a branch and then they reinforce that pheromone on their own

so the other thing is we're about to have to super our colonies here really soon so I want to encourage you if you're a beginning beekeeper then please no more feeding if you're currently giving sugar syrup to colonies to help them draw a comb and build up and everything else if you're going to super for honey collection as the clover's coming in and everything else time to stop with the sugar syrup feeding what else inspect your queens make sure that your queen right one of the ways you can do that is looking at the landing board and at what time of day you look at the landing board also plays a part so right around noon would be a good time noon to two p.m. to see the maximum number of peas coming in with pollen on their legs. And if you can count more than 10 per minute,

I'm going to say 99.99% of the time, that means you have a laying queen in that colony. If you see pollen coming in, but it's about three or four per minute, you may have laying workers. And if you've got laying workers, that means they're just feeding drones, which is why they are backed way off in production,

because these aren't full frames of brood. that we have when you have a queen in production. So do the pollen counts on the landing boards, look at their behavior there. Pay attention when things aren't going well. If you want to look at the top bar hive that we just started, I posted the video yesterday, and so you'll be able to see how we put it together.

It comes mostly assembled from a company called Be Mindful. And so we're testing that out. We don't know, I've never had a top bar hive, go through winter. I have friends that try top bar hive. here where I live and I have friends that have kept bees for a very long time went to workshops in Vermont came back never got their bees to survive a winter so we're gonna see we're just gonna see how that happens if you want to follow

along on that I started a playlist called top bar hives or horizontal hives so that one include the horizontals long langstroth and layens hives are included in that ivory bee is also another horizontal hive that's in that collection. So anyway, oh yes, and last Saturday I want to give a shout out to the Lorraine County Beekeepers Association. They invited me there for their 31st annual field day. That was a lot of fun. It was in Ohio and the town is Spencer, Ohio, and it was at a place called queen right colonies.com. If you go to that website and look at it, it's in the middle of Amish country, and I went there give a presentation but it was fantastic and really unexpected so you show up in amish country we got

held up behind an amish buggy going down the road and that was pretty funny to me because that was the amish buggy version of a tesla and by that i mean when we got past the guy he was just relaxed and sitting back he wasn't even holding the reins the horse was going where it knew it was supposed to go it's like these tesla drivers that are they fell asleep and the car is just taking it them home this buggy was just taking the sky home so anyway the queenwright colonies dot com those by the way were the people that said the way to be in the opening of today's video so in closing after we do the credits here I want you to watch the little feature I just had to walk around with my phone and made some videos of

they have a fantastic store there they had and it was surprising to me when you walked into this farm, the way it's laid out a lot of small buildings and things, but there are beehives everywhere. I thought they were, because the public is walking right down like a boardwalk, I thought they were display hives. They have tall Victorian roofs, slate roofs,

all these different designs, very unique. But they were occupied. So in other words, bees are coming and going while the public is just walking through these little areas. So it was really interesting, a lot of fun, fantastic, organic feel to that place. And the store was great. Everything's great. So if you live anywhere near Spencer, Ohio, check out Queen Wright Colonies.

Dot com is the website. Lots of information. Because it was so retro-looking, I was also surprised when I went inside their store, which looks like an old-time country store on the outside. But they had everything. It had all the modern stuff mixed in with the slate roofs and the offerings and things like that. Copper clad roofs and stuff. All the high-end super artsy stuff was there.

So I was really happy to be there. It was fantastic. And I hope that's what's going to play at the end of today's video. And you can see what things look like. Check them out. They have a catalog. They're online. I'm in the catalog because I was their guest speaker.

So I was really surprised by that. So once again, I want to thank you for watching and wish you a happy Father's Day this Sunday. Thanks for being here. Hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead.