The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 252, ready for spring?

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube video:  https://youtu.be/AiPstUHwzH8  

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, April the 5th, and this is Backyard Be Keeping Questions and answers episode number 252. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. Last Friday was a live stream. Sorry if you missed it, but of course it's still available. You just go to the YouTube channel, Frederick Dunn, and you click on the live stream categories there, and you'll be able to catch off. So a lot's going on today. How about that opening? That was all video this morning. Snowy, cold. Unseasonably cold, considering that this is now April 5th and things should be growing. This should be a happy time. Did you notice the pollen on Salix Discollar, which are the pussy willow trees, and the bees were really going for that pollen.

Now it's covered in ice and snow. Go figure. You probably want to know what the temperature is outside. Of course you do. 35 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 2 degrees Celsius. 81% relative humidity. We've had constant rain. Not a lot of rain, just constant. And it came through lots of wind, and this is not a great time of year. Right now, the winds are at six miles per hour with wind gusts up to 20 miles an hour. So not fun to be out there. That makes it feel all the colder. Guess what's happening in the coming week? I'll bet you already know. Monday, the solar eclipse. And I'm in the path of totality. We're going to talk about that.

the very end and that's the reason for my nifty thumbnail today I was wearing my solar eclipse glasses which are certified you want to wear certified glasses is not the time to break out your brazing goggles your welding helmet and things like that get certified stuff for looking at the eclipse if that's what you're gonna do and this coming week we're gonna get temps in the 50s and 60s so it's gonna warm up but comes with rain and I really hope that people aren't driving all the way out here just to find out that they're going to have hazy days when they're trying to look at the solar eclipse. Kids are off from school. That's great too because grandmokies just show

up unannounced. Like I'm trying to get this out of the way right now because they could show up at any minute and try to get in on the action here. So I hope I get done first. 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 listed in order with some important links to first. information or some resources if you need them. This is also a podcast. So if you just do a Google search, The Way to Be podcast, you'll find it. Then you can listen without wrecking your car. You don't have to use up all your data streaming a video when you could just listen to the podcast. If you want to know how to submit a question of your own, go to the way to be.org and don't be

surprise when it opens up and it says that you're at fredsfinefowl.com because it's the same place. Some people were having problems saying that it was not a secured site. Those people were Google users and supposedly that's fixed today according to network solutions which manages my website. So that should be good to go now. And since we don't actually sell anything on the site, worrying about your credit card information and stuff like that should not be a concern, but still it should be a secured site with an SSL certificate so anyway I don't want to use up all my time on that but it should work now so other services did not have problems with the website so that should be fixed what else is going on I think that's just about it you can go to the way to be.org or fredsfinefell.com fill out the form on the page marked the way to be

and then that will get you in to the running for having your question or subject discussed next Friday. After the eclipse has happened and we can finally get out of all this stress and anxiety, the highway department is giving notices and everything. They are afraid that people are going to just pull their cars over on the interstate highway just to view the eclipse. Are you going to do that? Where are you going to be? Have you traveled? I hope people do not spend huge money just to find out that they found the path of totality, but they also may have found out that there's a lot of cloud cover and you're not going to see it. It's going to be the most expensive nine minutes ever.

So anyway, let's jump right into the very first question for today, which comes from Marie Jacksonville, Florida. I just bought a bee castle wax-dipped nucleus hive. Tows a little swarm and it covers two deep frames that moved into the deep box I prepared for my new bees to come. Just like your perfect swarm video. For those of you don't know what that reference is, last year I had two swarms happening at once

and I went after the one that was in the corner on a tree post, and the other one was up in the tree. By the time I got done with the first one, the second one was taking off on its own, so all I could do was watch them fly. Where did they go? Right into one of my own beehives. So that's why I call it the perfect swarm.

Self-hiving swarm, whatever you want to call it, they're still doing great right now. Fantastic. Good luck. So anyway, the 10-frame deep is too big, and wax moths laid eggs in the corner of the deep that I had to scrape off. Will wax moths be attracted by the wax dipped nuke? Because it smells like wax? I hope not.

Trying to help and give a chance to my perfect swarm. So here's the thing. Let's talk about wax moths. Some of you who are new to beekeeping might be opening up hives later in the spring when you wait until the weather was perfect and all that good stuff and you find out that you've got dead bees in there. And if you wait too long, this is really important. If you wait too long, wax moths can, it's the larvae that we worry about. They're called wax worms.

And guess what? They can chew a lot of stuff, including the woodenware, the foundation. And what's worse than that is they leave behind a mess of cobwebs, right? I'm calling them cobwebs. It's cocoons and stuff because they're reproducing and the larvae come out. People eat and can eat wax worms. Look it up. In fact, just for fun, Google recipes for wax worms.

you'll find out that are actually pretty darn nutritious. So we want to keep them out of our beehives, but here's the thing. When you've got a populated colony of bees, you know, I'm taking a long way around the barn here on this, but if the hive is populated, if you have a healthy colony of bees, and they can get to all areas of the hive,

so the nucleus hive, and the concern is that because it's dipped in beeswags, would it then be attractive to the wax moth larvae? So the wax moths lay their eggs. They fly at night a lot. I've got them on night cameras. They're little, eyes glow and what they do is they lay their eggs in little crevices and cracks so this also comes into play what is the condition of your beehives and the way that the joints are coming together we want to make sure that they're in great shape so we can help limit that

but here's a good news let's say the the wax moth lays her eggs and those eggs hatch and now we have larvae which are creeping around and they're really tiny grubs right and they do eat right into your beeswax now would they eat into the bees wax coating of the hive itself now it's just not thick enough the bees will see them right away and they can get to them now the first time i was able to watch wax moth larvae the wax worms moving through comb was when i had observation hives which i still do but like the very first one it took me a while to figure out that that tiny sawdust looking area inside the cone that was attached to the glass Those were wax worms. So that was really interesting. And then I thought, but, you know, they're eating carefully right through the center of the comb. Why do they do that?

Because they're avoiding detection by the honeybees. Because once the honeybees in a healthy colony discovers the waxworms, they pull them out, they kill them, they get rid of them. So they don't get a foothold. The place that you find waxworm issues is because you have a colony that has no resident bees. So it's abandoned and so all they're doing is what nature has taught them to do which is consume and recycle old comb old beeswax So it's a mess to clean up

You can't render wax once they get in there and The concern here with the brand new nucleus hive will they get a foothold? No, they really won't because as soon as they get big enough to break out of the thickness of the wax the bees take care of it So interesting though you may be encountering that and this is why when you have a dead out once the weather breaks. We don't worry about them when it's cold and snowy as it is here where I live. Because the wax worms don't pupate, they don't move on, they can't expand and start consuming all your stuff. So when it warms up, that's when you need to get hot on your cleanups of your deadouts, right? So make sure that they're good to go and that you don't have resident wax worms in there unless you're trying to grow them and you want a bunch of wax worms for that salad

or something once you look up and find out that there's a whole group of people all over the world that want to eat bugs and larvae and pupa by the way this is kind of an interesting side note the Asian giant hornet which is Vespah mandarinia by the way when they talk about the people that were killed by them in Asia a lot of those people were actually collecting the grubs so they're dismantling the nests and they're collecting their pupa and their larvae so that they can eat them. So, and then they were killed, trying to get at that, so they could collect them, so they could sell them on their market where they live,

which is not caught on here. And by the way, last year, there were no sightings of Vespa mandarinia in Washington State, which is where they've really set up their frontline defenses against having that spread out. So that's a good news, bad news. We have the yellow-legged Hornet, which is entirely different thing, and it is in the south here in the United States. So that's probably going to come out strong this spring. Moving on to question number two, the first name is B, the letter B.

Kernersville, North Carolina, just sharing about the solar eclipse. Okay, so this is cool too, because I did give this some thoughts, so I'm sharing it with you. Some of you might want to do this. Instead of just taking pictures of the actual eclipse, take a photo of the approaching and retreating shadow. I saw the last solar eclipse in 2017, and it's awesome. I had a friend who had a high dollar drone with a good gimbal camera and he took it up to 400 feet. For those of you don't know much about drones, you're limited to 400 feet AGL, which is above ground level.

And then there's ASL above sea level and it sounds like this might have been an inspire because that's the big one that you can put your camera on and you get special lenses and everything else. So anyway, 400 feet, that's your max height. So capturing the approaching shadow over the landscape and then turned it 180 degrees and did the same thing capturing the retreating shadow. I, like everyone else, had tons of pictures of the actual eclipse, but he was the only one I knew of that captures the landscape shadow. Awesome. So here's the thing. I'm a licensed commercial drone pilot and I have commercial drones. Will I be sending up my drones at 400 feet AGL to watch the eclipse?

sounds cool, right? But here's the thing. That would impede what I want to do here. Because a lot of what I want to do here, none of my drones are silent. So even at 400 feet, you can hear it up there. And of course you can set it up there and it parks based on GPS. It operates on satellites. So once you set up the altitude, you can set that thing to record and you can let it go. So you could face it to the east. Southwest is where it's coming from. So you might head it that way and then you get to see the shadows creep across, assuming you don't have a lot of cloud cover, which if you do, kills the contrast, which takes away the drama.

So I'm not adding that layer to what I'm personally doing, but I want to mention it today because there may be a bunch of people that have a bunch of phantom drones or they might have the big bucks spent on the inspired drones, which were the big commercial drones, by the way. And there's a bunch of other smaller drones capable out there, so I'm just putting the word out. maybe you haven't thought of it and where you are, maybe you can send that drone up, but you have to be aware of the rules and regulations regarding where you can fly that thing.

Straight over your own property, no problem. But there's a lot of limitations for drones. Make sure you're insured and don't let that thing come down at a bunch of people. Just letting you know, I had to get a million dollars in aggregate insurance just to fly the drone legally where I fly it. So you don't, you know, chop up people. It chops up bees, by the way. That's why I don't use drone sequences anymore in my backyard apiary and other areas like that. It was coming down and it had red propellers.

So the bees fly to it and they get all chopped up. Some people thought, hey Fred, get that drone out there and chase swarms and see where they go. What happens is the bees fly up into the drone because it's generating energy, right? Physical mechanical energy from the props and then the bees fly to it and they get splattered. So not good. Doesn't work. But I put it out so you guys can do it. try it if you want tell me what you're going to do to document it i have several cameras lined up i have

tripods ready to go i want the quiet uh a lot of people are going to be in the path of totality they're going to be having these parties and they're cautioning people about not being on the great lakes right now because the water temperature's in the 40s so if you're going to be out there even a super swimmer can get hypothermia when you hit that water take it from me a pass rescue swimmer slant rescue diver it is not good for people to be in cold water and alcohol and boats don't mix. Anyway, not judging. I'm just saying there's going to be a lot of people out there, so I'm fortunate that where I am in the path of totality in rural America, I will get the quiet, I hope, unless it's really windy. So I'm going to be putting out

cameras on the bees, on the landing boards, and if I have foraging bees, if we're lucky enough, it is going to be in the 50s, so the bees should be foraging. So I want to see what their behavior is. I think it's pretty predictable. Bees in the dark can't fly, they can't see to navigate, So what do they do? They grip onto the plants. They stop whatever they're doing. There may be an anticipated rush back to the hives, but this totality occurs pretty darn quick.

We know that bees can be foraging several miles away. So there are chances of getting back to the hives when things start to get dark. So there shouldn't be enough time for them to make a rush home the way they often do. When there's rain coming, you can smell those changes in the air. I anticipate they're just going to lock down where they happen to be. I think that landing boards are just going to go still.

There won't be any flying, so they'll secure all flight activities. But we're going to know, we're going to see. So I'll have time lapses and everything else too. I figure do it all at once. Why not we have the stuff? Now here's the other thing. If you're thinking about your cameras, some of the cameras, especially the video gear, have night modes.

So I highly recommend that you have your day mode cameras out, of course, to cover it as it happens. But when it goes dark, if you don't have light, for that you don't have a light mode turned on you're just going to have darkness and you're not going to get a good video so have some of your cameras set for night mode which is infrared sometimes and they've got special lighting so the bees will think they're in the dark so if you're trying to do that just think ahead see what's going on so i want to thank b for that the letter b moving on to question number three this is charlene uh from westfield new york we grow moss on cinder blocks in standing water, we cut them in fours. They are very porous. Take any moss with the dirt that's left

on the bottom moss and make sure the block is wet before you put it on. We keep it in the shade for a few days and then we move it out into full sun and keep it wet. Works great for us. Now the reason that was mentioned, and I'll talk about it to you because this is important in spring. We were talking about water and the bee's propensity to get into moss and somebody said, and we talked about what is that spirulina and somebody said isn't spirulina actually algae yes it is algae and moss they all kind of go together in the water the bees are drawn to both and we notice that when the bees are going alongside by pond that they sit on the moss that algae in the water may be appealing to the bees spirolina has been proven to be healthy for the bees so then i mentioned last week that wouldn't it be cool to

shallow bird feeder style feeders for your bees. So these are waterers for your bees. So a couple of things I want to talk about it because having a water source for your bees is going to be very important. And in the past, of course, I offer them different types of water, fresh water, salt, water, mineral water, water that's got sea salts in it and everything else, which they change their demand for throughout the year. But freshwater constant is something your bees always need. And so I thought, wow, why don't we just put moss? I don't know why I didn't think of that already.

I love moss. I've been planting moss in my woods for years because I wanted mossy paths for people to walk on because I take portraits in the woods and it just looks cool. It has taken me over 20 years to get moss well established in the path through the woods. So what I'm thinking now is let's get the moss out and I have a cinder block wall.

It looks really crappy. intentionally it's supposed to look like it's loosely stacked and I use fog nozzles which are water nozzles that go on the end of your garden hose and it creates an actual fog of water so it's it's micro water so it's like turning on a shower that just has such a tiny opening look up fog nozzles you'll see what I'm talking about I don't need to explain it so I put these fog nozzles out and they create a fog which by the way carries on the wind the slightest breeze

carries it across the apiary it's really interesting stuff but what it does accomplish is it keeps the cinder blocks damp and wherever there are divvets in the center blocks or flat rocks that are put out there water accumulates on it and so then the bees come and they drink there and there's no risk of drowning so if you had like a bird bath which your honeybees naturally go to for water then if we had moss in there your bees wouldn't lose their footing so even the slightest drip because that was the other thing from the fog nozzle I had slow drip hoses right those black hoses that look all sweaty that people use to water their plants from underground I put those up around the blocks I wove them through everything and they create driplets on it because you of course control how much

water it's going into it and then it sweats out and then drips onto the block same thing the bees land on that and they drink that water so I think it's going to be great to cover this thing with moss and I want to thank everyone that sent in all their great information mixing it with buttermilk and all of these other things but I found that you could just take moss put it in a blender smear it on dampen stuff as described here started off in the shade do you have a moss feature that is also a water feature that you're using for your bees I think that's going to be a fun project this year and not just because it looks better than regular cinderblock somebody else sent me a link to a

moss graffiti. So graffiti artists in different parts of the world, instead of using paint on concrete monolithic panels and stuff like that, we're actually shaping their graffiti with moss. How cool would that be if our graffiti taggers, you're not going to see this on freight trains going by. You know, everybody wants to see their work on a freight train go by down to Texas somewhere and get on social I mean, it's say, hey, it's all your tag, man, looks really sweet. That's not what I'm talking about. People that are tagging buildings were tagging buildings with moss. And so they worked it out so that it looked like, look up moss, graffiti.

You'll see what I'm talking about. So something like that, kind of cool. So it's kind of gorilla moss tagging or something. So if you've got lines on really good moss, I don't know the differences between a lot of different moss. I know I like Irish moss for footpaths. That stuff was not easy to get started. I wanted that stuff everywhere. Anyway, enough about moss.

So we'll move on. Question number four. This comes from Beegener, 7681. Longtime viewer, frequent commenter, by the way, so I appreciate that. So this says I have a question about the swarming process with regard to scout bees in particular. How far in advance of a swarm actually departing from a hive to skis? Scout B start searching for and exploring new potential homes. Thank you for considering my question.

You're welcome. Thanks for being a frequent commenter. Anyway, so here's the thing. Your scouts are out now. They're investigating everything right now, and they're finding cavities and places. This is why I said before, get earsharm traps and boxes out early.

And Tom Seeley was just on being interviewed through the bee podcast, a better bee, right? So he's talking about his new book that's coming out, by the way, so if you're like me and you like Tom Sealing, you like his books, listen to that podcast. He talks about it a little bit. But bee behavior is his thing, and this actually came up. So the bees go out weeks in advance, and they're trying to find these places. That's why you need to have, again, your places out there. When you're cleaning up your deadouts and stuff, I found out last year, you know what? You used to clean them up, empty the bench, the support, the stand, whatever it's on, get everything clean, get all of your frames usable, and then, you know,

we used to put them in storage. Last year, I left them out. Maybe because I was lazy. Maybe because I was trying out something new. That's why I got the perfect swarm. They moved right into the boxes. The boxes that were left empty that just had comb in them, so this is boxes that don't have capped honey. I don't recommend leaving that out there. But once you have comb in it and it's a dead out, you've cleaned them out and thrown everything in the trash or compost of them, whatever you do with your dead bees. Leave it there. Nothing smells more habitable than that hive right now. Barring any diseases. So you might be wondering, how do I know if my brood was diseased? Funny you should ask. Honeybees and their maladies. That is from extension.psu.edu.

Penn State Extension sells these. This will show you all the different things could be wrong in your hive, and then you won't have to call your mentor, and you want to have to get somebody out there who's also dealing with things in spring, which is when everything is hopping. And you can instead look through this pocket-sized guide.

Every beekeeper, young, old, new and experienced, should have honeybees and their maladies in your pocket. It gets updated by my friend, Dr. Robin Underwood, I get nothing for mentioning that. So be sure to tell them. I think it's like 12 bucks or something. Don't quote me. Tell them I sent you.

I want to make sure that you spend the same as everyone else. So have your stuff ready. Scouts are out. They're already checking things out. They're finding out what's what. And they're making preparations to move. Dr. Sealy said something interesting that I had not heard before and that I haven't seen before.

And he said most of the time they bit whack. most of the time. And bivouacking is once they leave the hive, they regroup on a branch or something else, and then the scouts continue to lobby for their location. So this is part of the honeybee democracy, which is well-known, well-established, and of course, who wrote it? Dr. Thomas Seeley. So the bees come back and they share their information and you need a consensus. You need a bunch of bees with the same information but it said sometimes they actually go direct to that cavity to me that seems to save a lot of time and energy if they would just do that i've not seen my bees do that but it's really cool that they do so as long as those bees live their memories live and they know those locations and then they

convince other bees to move in so hopefully your old hive boxes will work for that question over five comes from Scott Berlin New Jersey why are there an over abundance of drones entering my strongest hive date observed April 4th 5 p.m. cloudy 49 degrees Fahrenheit that's really good information by the way here's what I think happened because this is what I call a drone rush and once I learned about it I see it on a lot of different hives what do you think's happened I'll give those of you're listening a microsecond to tell me what you you think is happening. When there's a drone rush, and remember here, it's one of the strongest

hives. What do you think happened? I think they re-queened. And I think that one of the new queens finally flew out, did mating flights, came back, and returning from the drone congregation area, picked up a comet of drones that were chasing her all the way back to the hives. They're following her pheromone. And here's why I say it, because I see it over and over again. Let's think about all the reasons that we would expect drones to converge on a hive and why they would be rushing it, why there would be a huge number of drones going in, by a huge number, hundreds, maybe. It is alarming because when you go out in your apiary, you hear all this activity, they're, oh my gosh, you're swarming, I'm going to lose all my bees. But then you notice they're all drones. What's going on there? There's no way they produce as many drones, although a colony could be producing a lot of drones.

They do orientation flights and things like that. But it says here, an abundance of drones entering my strongest hive. I will bet you that this week, this coming week, you will see eggs in that hive. I think that that's a queen that flew out, got made, and returned. Barring the behavior, which would look like orientation flights. What's an orientation flight look like? Well, if these drones are emerging and they're getting their flight strength up to speed, because drones aren't even sexually mature when they emerge from their pupa state. So once they get out and they're well fed, they're still maturing off,

and they're still getting stronger, and they're going to fly, and they do orientation flights. They zig and they zig and they're not looking around in front of the hive, and they're not looking around for anything in particular, and they tend to face the hive, by the way. They're looking at their hive. Do I really live here? Oh, this is what it looks like from the outside, and they zig and zazze.

And so do the worker piece, by the way. So you can see that behavior, and then they land, and then they go in. Because keep in mind, even your drones would be emerging at roughly the same time. So the queen lays the eggs. They go through all their states of growth and development, and then they emerge, and then they get strong and fed, and now they can fly. But entering, coming from somewhere else,

entering, so you see in the sky, there's a whole bunch of when they're coming in, and they just keep joining in because they're following a queen recently mated pharma. And in they go. And then they'll leave later. So this will die out. So barring the orientation flight behavior, that's what I think is going on. I think you have a great colony.

I think Scott has a new queen. The good news is she's mated. And the good news, too, that there's enough drones to be flying around. That means any other bees and colonies that are developed new queens that need to be mated, chances are good that they're going to get mated and come back. Question number six comes from Marie in Jacksonville, Florida.

Hello, small swarm covering two deep frames, moved in my cleaned out dead out three weeks ago. The frames were not pushed together and the bees started to build crazy comb. I added a foundationless frame and kind of pushed the beautiful comb they built on it, but it's not ideal. Any suggestions on how to correct the wild frame? Also, how long do I need to wait until an OA vaporization treatment?

So this is warm. It's been there three, you know, clean. to dead out three weeks ago and let's think about this. One of the reasons I want to talk about this is listen to what happened here. This is the beekeeper's fault. I'm not calling out Marie, but I'm just saying totally under your control. When you do a dead out, you're cleaning everything up, push all your frames together just like it's still a functional hive. Don't leave frames out also. When you pull those frames out, you leave them out. If you need a placeholder, while you do something else, put a frame feeder in there. That for me is what frame feeders are for. They're just

spacers. I never use them as frame feeders. So push them all together because we want to avoid something like this. You never know when you're going to get that surprise occupation of a swarm moving into your hive. And I think it's fantastic and I'm looking forward to that happening this year. I don't have a lot of deadouts though. And I'm not lamenting that. I'm not saying, man, I wish I had more deadouts. I'm just saying that because I only have a couple, the chances of them being occupied pretty darn fast or high. And if they don't get occupied automatically from perfect swarms, I'll be doing splits and putting them in there. But once you do your cleanup, set it up like you're ready to install a package. Don't leave those spaces. But now, you know, that is

water over the dam under the bridge, whatever people say, because Marie has a problem. Self-inflicted. So here's the thing. You cut it just like it cut out. Cut the the wonky comb and then because we have foundationless frames there we can rubber band them in place in the foundationless frame so we want to connect it to the top of the frame as much as possible here's something else i'm thinking about i have a battery powered um what is it a heat gun so it's made by de walt battery powered comes with a whole bunch of little nozzles total control over the temperature so if i can set that thing at 150 degrees Fahrenheit what am i about to use it for I'm going to melt some beeswax.

So I want to take my frame, turn the frame upside down, and we want to put the comb in the way it is now. We don't want to invert it or turn it sideways or something like that because beeswax cells have angles that are very important. And if they're upside down, the bees might not use them at all. So we need to be careful. So keep the beeswax oriented the way it's supposed to be. Oh, look.

just happen to have some here. So here's beeswax and we look, this is of course the way it was attached before. So you can take this wonky comb and you can put it up against the underside of a foundationless frame. Which I don't have handy right here. But put it up against that and then just warm this edge. Just this leading edge until it starts to look clear and starts to soft. Then you can push that right against the center of the frame and let it firm up a little bit And then do the same like if you had a couple small pieces you could put them on the same frame and then glue them up

And then turn it right side up put it right back inside the hive when people are doing cutouts. They use rubber bands and then the rubber band has to get removed later by the bees And I did that years ago in fact aside from just rubber bands what I did is I drilled holes in the frame so that I ran my rubber bands through the frame, not around it. I ran it through the frame, through the holes that I drilled, and then I stuck toothpicks through the rubber band on the outside and on the bottom. So now I had rubber bands going through the middle instead of wrapping around the frame, and then you just spread the rubber bands apart and put these in there. And it still has to be up near the top because we want our bees to finish drawing out come.

It was very disappointed in how long it took the bees to cut away the rubber bands. So I think heating up your bees wax, if you can use one of those battery powered heat guns, instead of at the right temperature, we don't want to melt it into a big blob. But you can even, once you put that on there, continue to apply heat just enough to really bond it. And then the bees will take care of the rest. And you don't want to make it really hot because you can destroy the properties of the wax. By the way, even worse, really, really hot, you can set fire to your bees wax, and we don't want that. You don't want the embarrassment of the volunteer fire department showing us.

up at the end of your street and all the neighbors wondering what you did and now you have to admit not only did you fail to push your frames together but now you set fire to your own beehive so that's for Marie the other part of this was when is it safe to do a vaporization you want to head off their pupa state so if you've hived a swarm and you have a chance you can count your mites if you want to and you find out if they're mite loaded or you can make an assumption that they are mite loaded and now that we have a dispersal phase mite, which means they're not under the caps of pupa. So when would that happen? 8th or 9th day. So assuming they have everything going right away. So if you've installed the swarm,

yep, it's your chance. Knock out the mites. And then you'll have 96% efficacy according to the books and studies and papers and research that's been done. It's something that I personally endorse. So yes, treat them. And so on the seventh day to be safe, let them get set up, let them get squared away, and then let those mites die on the bottom board, sabbat room.

The other thing is you can do massive, you can do passive mite checks on that colony once they're in there. If you've got a removable tray in your bottom board or you've got some kind of removable bottom board, does you with just solid bottom boards so you don't have a means of doing this. but if you've got what I consider my perfect hive design, which all of them are not converted to yet, screen bottom board, solid bottom under that, removable tray or removable insert. Because five days along, six days along,

you would see some dead mites down there. So if we've got some dead mites on there, you know they already have mites. You just don't know how many, but they have mites. Why not kill them? Kill them now while you have the chance while they're exposed and they can't hide. Moving on to question number seven comes from James from Atlantic, Iowa.

When doing an in-yard split, so this is in your apiary yard, right? Should I move the existing queen to the new location and add my B. Weaver queen to the original location? This is a horizontal lands hive. Okay, so you're doing a split. I do walk-away splits. So it's very helpful if you can find the queen by the way If you find the queen, I like to take the queen out and move her to the new location So I don't like to put her in the existing location

And of course that would be a reduced Layans hive so you want to use your follower board and make it so that you only have about three of those layans frames And when you get the queen in there because we've satisfied a couple of things One we did the split and we got the queen out of there. She's an established queen now the the beeweaver queen is coming in, she does not have a package. So we have to do a split to set that up. So the walkaway splits, you don't have to find the queen. So if you do, then I like to move her to the new location. That means the current location is queenless ultimately. And if they are, they're going to start building queens, right? So they're going to go to have a queen cell develop from the eggs that

left behind. They do that right away. So one of the things you're going to have to do in preparation for receiving your queen is that you're going to have to keep a queen pheromone present in the hive. And this is why I recommend temp queen, which is sold from Betterby. It might be sold to other places. It's only five bucks. You can't lose. You put temp queen in the space that you are not keeping the resident queen in. So hopefully you're doing this before they've started to build queen's cells. So there's no swarm cells present. We're talking about a colony that's healthy and functioning and you're just trying to make a split from that. So I recommend pulling the existing queen to your new location, smaller hive, smaller setup, and then using temp queen in the existing

location to make them think they still have a queen so they don't start to develop new queen cells. And then that time, that sweet spot passes to where they could even build one, right? So if you have temp queen in there, the eggs that are present eventually hash third day, and then they become larvae, and then these larvae get so far along that they couldn't even hope to make a new queen. So by then, you could even remove the temp queen in anticipation of the arrival of your replacement queen from B. Weaver. I'd leave the temp queen right there, and then when you get your new queen, you can even remove the temp queen just hours before the install. So verify that she's healthy, She's doing fine, and then you can put her in the existing colony.

So the new colony was made with the queen that you already had. Now if it fails, if they reject that queen for some reason, which I hope they don't. But because it's a lay-ins hive, we don't have the opportunity now to use a protective cage around the queen to keep her from being killed by the other bees. So for those of you who are listening that use Langstroth-style gear, Langstroth-sized frames, there is something called a queen introduction cage. So if you've spent money to bring in a queen like the survivor stock that B. Weaver carries, I don't want to lose her.

So with Langstroth equipment, I would put that in a queen introduction cage until I prove that she's being cared for. And you can do that with a frame of brood. So you can take a frame of capped brood that's in that colony, put the capped brood with no nurse bees, on it we had this discussion with Dr. David Peck, somebody that I really respect his opinion and experience, of course, he's an entomologist, he's a big deal, he knows things. So I thought you could just leave some nurse bees on that, but why not just fail safe? Put a frame of capped brood in the cage,

put the queen in the cage, and of course the emerging brood will attend to your queen, plus she'll be fed through the cage, and they cannot get to her. So that's where an introduction cage is different from the queen isolation cage. A queen isolation cage, nursebees can get in and out, they free flow through there, but they also have the opportunity to reject, attack, and kill the queen that you're introducing. Where if you just have a frame of capped brood, the queen's in there with them, any emerging brood will accept that queen and they'll start taking care of her, and then they all get fed through the cage. And then once everything is set and her pheromone is spreading through the hive, we can then eventually remove that frame where she has been productive

on, by the way. And those nurse bees, because you might think, well, the nurse bees that are emerging on that frame of capped brood, they can't get out. They're stuck with the queen, and they can't leave. So the queen introduction cage prevents workers from passing through. That's perfectly okay, because think of the timeline of the development, the jobs inside the hive. They don't have any outside jobs yet anyway. They don't need to fly out new cleansing flights. They don't need to do anything. So you can keep them there for several days while we establish that the queen is getting her pheromone out, that they're accepting her, and that she's begun to lay eggs. That's the other thing. Now you'll know, not only was she not killed by the other colony mates, right? But we also know

her productivity, and we also know if she's laying a nice pattern and everything as those cells are uncapped and the bees emerged, the new nurse bees. So it's a win, win, win. And then if that all failed and falls apart and something happened to the queen in shipping and she's not laying well and she doesn't seem to be healthy and all these other things you can report back

to bee weaver and let them know, hey, the queen you sent me, I put her in an isolation cage and she hasn't produced any eggs. She's got a very spotty pattern or she's only laying drones or something like that. because queen fertility can be impacted by what she goes through in transit. She can be superheated. A lot of things can happen.

They can rough her up, you know, heaven forbid. There's a UPS driver or FedEx driver or a USPS driver that doesn't care about bees and they just chuck them around everywhere. It happens. So then if that falls apart, what do we have? We've got the queen that originally was there and now we just bring her back and reinstall her. and then recover our colony. But I think everything's going to go perfect,

and I think the queen, so your B-weaver queen, long story short, she goes in where the colony already resides, and you take the existing queen and move her into your insurance policy resource, nucleus, whatever you want to call it, and it's land, so there are lands nucleus hives, and you can hold them in insurance policy status.

Question number eight. comes from Frenchy 9952 that's the YouTube channel name by the way Frenchy I have a dilemma that I hope you can help me with it's been raining since November here I don't like that already raining since November I reduced my lay-ins high for the winter and as yet the temperature has not been above 12 degrees Celsius so those you who don't do Celsius might wonder how warm is that that's 54 degrees Fahrenheit so I haven't opened it up to replace the frames I'm considering taking the hive indoors one evening to do that am I panicking unnecessarily or is that an idea cheers okay so here's the thing this is from the

UK I wouldn't take it indoors now if you have because I like to keep things just where they are and the bees orient better everything is great we have to measure the dilemma is it's raining since November here reduce my land hive for winter and as yet the temperature has not been above haven't opened up to replace the frames so I don't know what frames are needing replacement I don't know what the condition of the hive is so I don't know are the bees flying is do they seem healthy in every other way all I have is it's been raining since November it's a Lance hive and it's 54 degrees Fahrenheit and should I take them inside to open up the hive to deal with the frames so

So me personally know. I don't take it inside. But I'm going to cover both bases. So I'll just give you my opinion on that. There are people around here that are dying to open their hives. I would not do it. I have not opened a single one of my hives other than to look at the resources on top. So because I get all the information I need for the landing board, I don't need to open any hive yet. So right now, you know, pollen just flies in. I have a camera on my ivory beehive because I wanted to see if just a single bee flying out would trigger the camera. And it did. So that's interesting in coming up. So that was fun. But if you wanted to, let's say I'm waiting for good weather.

Then when I hit the 60s and it's sunny and everything else, I'm going to check everything out. Does that mean I will wait to super my hives until I get a nice warm day? Yeah, I will. And there are people that will forward ahead. You know, they're going to go ahead and they're going to super their hives. and pull everything off because there's a lot of beekeepers out there that will say who cares is not even going to hurt them a good colony is going to recover that heat right away just go ahead and throw everything on there peel your stuff off have that at it they're going to recover okay so i'm going to suggest to you if if you want to pull your hives open when it's cold and everything and you think they can take the blast and you're going to pull the inner cover and you're going to put a super on and stuff like that because you just have to because you have ants in your pants i want you to check over the next couple of days before sunrise, go out and look at the landing board. And if you see pupa on your landing board,

then do you know what that represents? Chilled brood? Because you won't immediately notice it, right? So they die from the blast of cold. Which brood is the most susceptible to that blast of cold? Your brood that is actually closest to emerging, which is backwards. You'd think they'd be kind of tough by then.

but they're the most susceptible to these temperature fluctuations so a sudden fluctuation and temperature at the brood area when you didn't need to you didn't need to pull them open I don't know why everybody has ants in their bridges and wants to look at them but if you chill the brood go back out there and check over the next few days and look at the landing boards before sunrise and you may see a bunch of chilled brood casualties out there now does that wipe out your hive because that's the argument my hive will recover my hive is super strong they're going to do great they can handle it. It's no big deal to open and expose them to the cold. Do they still survive? Sure they do. But it wasn't unnecessary incursion. You know, unless you're a commercial beekeeper, you've got a timeline. You have to do things. You're following a schedule and they have to be done. We're back

our beekeepers. We can sit around and start our hives and go, yeah, I'm not open in that yet. They're doing fine. They're great. Look at all the pollen they're bringing in. I'm just going to make sure that they have emergency resources on top if it's a colony that looks like they're weak because those were a lot of the messages I received over this past week. The one colony should be really active. They're just not. Okay. Now here's the other thing. A lot of colonies that have all the resources they need, they go quiet and they can look dead. And then on the next day when it's really nice and warm and sunny and everything else, all of a sudden they're resurrected and they're flying like crazy.

What happened? Well, they had everything they needed and they didn't need to brave the cold because that's inefficient, by the way, for them to fly out on a rainy cold day to get a resource that they're not sure of. So the foraging is limited, and your bees will go out to known resources. So if you're an open feeder, if you've got sugar syrup out somewhere in an open station,

they will fly in 40 degrees and sunny to go to an established known resource because they also come back and report the quantity of the resource to the other bees in the hive and then they fly out too. These are the strongest colonies. Colonies that don't need that stuff, stay quiet, stay inside, I wouldn't open it. Now, but I want to open it. I have to open it. I need to see what's going on. Can I do that inside a building? Sure you can. So here are some things to think about. Now I have sheds that I created blackout windows for. So my lower shed, which used to be,

it's just the space where I had an observation hive in there. You can black out all your windows why would i say do that because your bees are going to fly to a light so if you're going to open up a hive under the protection of a building and this is why long run i like buildings for bees why because it's fun for me it's better for me i have a plan i have a plan but i don't have the money for it so if somebody wants to have a really big investment and all they get is the satisfaction of knowing that i am happier and i have a place to drink coffee you should know economically the The decisions I make with bees are terrible. It doesn't take a genius.

I say this to my grandson all the time. Can you add and subtract? Then why are we doing what you're suggesting? Because here's the thing. I built a building for three observation hides. Do you think they are ever going to give me a return on that investment? Monetarily? No.

Emotionally? Yes. Am I getting great satisfaction out of walking into a building and sitting in a chair and turning on lights, it doesn't have power to the building, so everything's battery powered. Turning on lights and on a warm day, it is 50 degrees outside, but it's sunny.

It is 75 inside that building. That is health and well-being. It feels good to be in a building that's full of bees, and you get to hear those bees, and they're making it, and everything is great. Now, that building is never going to be paid for by those bees being around. but does it feel good to me?

Because you have to understand, I decide how and where to spend my money, and I drive a car that's from 2007. I don't buy new cars. Why? I didn't have a cell phone until just a few years ago, and then I got a cell phone because they had to, because now you can't almost survive without having a cell phone, because I didn't believe in spending my money for something I don't need.

Why do I want people to reach out and call me at a time when I want to be away from people? So here's the thing, you balance out your investment. So putting a hive in a building that only has one window, one source of light, the hopper style window. So if you're not sure what a hopper style window is, they tilt out. So it's a window on a hinge when it's closed, and you can use a rope to close it. It's shut, and you can release it and it pops open.

So if you open this window, the bees that when you open a hive inside the building, like the observation hive, which is why I made that reference in the first place. When you pull the panels off the observation hive, first of all, here's what's really interesting. The bees stay on their frames really well. It's not like because you open the hive the way we do out in a bee yard. A bunch of bees fly out and they're flying everywhere and now you have to puff some smoke or spray some sugar syrup on them or something like that to get them grounded again. You don't have to do that in a building. There's very little annoyance to the bees when you're inside a building and you start to carefully pull things apart and look at frames at your leisure by the way on a nice warm day now the bees that do fly off

that don't know where they belong they fly up to the light and they fly out that window when you're done and then they find their way back to the entrance and if they're a young bee that hasn't been out would be doing an orientation flight or something like that they find their way to that entrance through pheromones eventually so having a single window with a hopper style you know window that you can pop open it doesn't have to be that's my preferred style if you have a double hung window then the top part because bees aren't smart I don't care what people say when it comes to finding their way out of a

window if they're not bright when you slide the double hung window so double hung windows have the top slides down the bottom slides up and now we have airflow in and out that was the whole purpose of the double hung window they're really good at exchanging air in a space passively but if we pull down the top the bees fly to the window, they climb up and they go out. So there you go. Double hung windows work also, but you have to have access to it if it's a tall building. So you could do that inside, but question why you need to open it. But in my future, if I collect all my pennies long enough,

I'm going to have a long single row that's going to house 10 hives. So there we go. How many hives am I putting in it? 10. How long is it? It's 32 feet. What's a purpose of it? it south facing glass working the hives from inside entrances that penetrate a knee wall that go out there i'm going to do all the work myself i'm going to build it myself i'm going to install the windows myself and what kind of windows will i have up high they'll be like velex windows those are you know skylight windows then you you open them up when the bees fly to the ceiling and fly to

those windows and they'll be able to go up and out then i close them when the weather bad and stuff like that and just going to do it piecemeal and so what's the purpose of it a great place to be get it great place to be and then you can be inside this long roe barn style which is up against an existing building that's why the 32 feet the garage is going up against is 24 feet by 32 feet and then we'll have that and it'll be a place where i can sit and where it's going to be warm because i'm thinking about being really old and when i'm really old i'm going to want to be be in warm places that require minimal effort so this is the part that's going to make some of you annoyed what kind of hives are going to be in there well old people can work a couple of

different hives and one would be horizontal hives do you think that's what's going to be there no these will be you know because my wife needs to have her way sometimes these will be flow hives so that'll be the design of flow hives just a langstroth hive but it's a great way to collect honey that's very easy without any extraction equipment and everything else will it require lifting yes it will so we have to balance that out but at least for starters in that building will be flow hives and rain or shine you can sit out there if it's nice and warm and if you need to extract a couple of frames of honey you can do it and a frame of honey from a flow hive is half a gallon and we'll work those from inside horizontal hives work perfect for that too same thing when you lift a horizontal hive to

all the bees come flying out, they really don't, even in the bee yard. So do it in a building, but consider the building and how it's designed and how many windows there are, and they're going to fly to light. So you want to be able to block out all the non-essential windows, turn off the lights when you're done, and then just have a single window. Your bees will all go to that window, and if it's a sash window, whatever, it needs to be open. Otherwise, now your second alternate is if you don't have windows that open, you have to go up and use a bee vacuum and suck up the bees off the window and then go outside and release them near the entrance so there you go question number nine moving on this is op-med bounce 3053 that's a youtube channel name

hi fred i have a problem i don't know how to fix it i introduced three wooden frames with plastic foundation into my colony my bees weren't used to plastic frames before only comb so what's happening now is that the Queen lays worker eggs only in the comb frames and lays only drone eggs in the plastic frames. I'm thinking to throw these plastic frames away. What do you think? Okay, so, well, when a queen is laying drone eggs, that's the first thing jumped out of me. Looking at, so it sounds like they accepted the plastic foundation. It also sounds like we've got comb because she's laying eggs in there. Now, this kind of the queen goes by the size of the cell that she's laying her eggs in. So healthy queen, fertile that can lay workers and drones, right? So the drones are the male bees, for those you don't know. And the queen gets in there and measures. She measures with her limbs and

her antennae. Right. And the way they found that out, by the way, the queen measuring and deciding that way is they actually took a queen and they cut off her front legs. And part of the test was to see how is she measuring and determining where to put workers, where to put drones. So by measuring the size of the cells, she would lay her drone eggs in the larger cells, and then she would lay her worker eggs in worker-sized cells. So she measured that with her body parts. Removing her body parts resulted in a queen that produced her eggs, and randomly then put drones in worker cells and worker cells, worker eggs in drone cells,

worker eggs in drone cells, the queen controls this. So it's a fertilized egg versus that's the worker, the unfertilized egg, which is the drone. Diploid worker, haploid drone. I'm sure you wanted to know that. So this tells me that the cells that are on these plastic frames, the cells might be too big. So that's why she's laying drone only eggs in there. So you need to replace them with worker cells. So I don't know what size the cells are.

You can look it up. it's easy to Google and find out drone cell sizes and worker cell sizes. And my advice for Ahmed here is to measure the cells and see if they're actually drone-sized cells, drone-sized plastic foundation. And if it is, yes, get rid of it if you're trying to get worker cells. Or keep them and move them to the outside positions, the outside frames in your hive because that's where they would produce drones if they need them. And if they don't need drones, they'll use the same.

cells for honey production right so you have lots of options but it sounds like they use the comb well if they're drawing out you know cells then they're good to go so that's kind of all the information I have on that I think you have drone foundation now here in the United States the drone foundation is green so that you don't make that mistake so you know right away the other thing is I just let the bees make their own drone foundation which if there are foundational is frame you'll see drone cells and worker cells on the same frame because they're they're freelancing that you know they're just making the cells any size they want and they tend to push

drone cells out to the edges and to the farthest frames in the brood so there's that interesting stuff question number 10 this comes from jim from ledyard connecticut my question is if one of those Apame hives would unfortunately develop AFB or EFB, which is American foul brood or European foul brood, American foul brood being the worst of it. And it's not because it's only American. It didn't come from here. It was discovered here. And it went like that. So it didn't come from the United States. Anyway, would it have been, you have to burn it. So in other words, when you have a wooden hive and it has American Fowl Brood, depending on your state, Department of Agriculture, your inspectors, they're going to tell you what has to be done to control

that. We don't want that to spread. It's a big deal. Don't play games with it. So anyway, would it have to be burned like a wooden hive or could it be completely sanitized, then put back into operation? Follow up would the state allow this or not? And that is your decision-making entity that is your state inspection service which falls under the department of agriculture and you're going to have to contact them to find out what your state has decided is acceptable in controlling the spread of American foul brood. The good news is that it's been so, the response has been so severe for so long whenever people find AFB. This is why people like Michael Palmer up in Vermont rail against bringing in stock resources and things like that from out of state or worse,

in his opinion, from other countries. Why would you risk? First of all, there's a new might on the horizon. It's not enough that we have the Varroa destructor mite, which is a little jerk that we all want to kill and we want to see them dying on our bottom boards. There's something else called, they referred to as a tropy mite, and that was Dr. Samuel Ramsey that calls it the tropymite because he thinks that people cannot pronounce tropolay lapse. So, and there are a lot of people that try to say tropolapse, but they say a bunch of other things that are weird. So they stick to, hopefully, tropymite. It's faster moving. It has a faster reproduction cycle. We don't want it in this country. It's not here yet. So people like

Dr. Samuel Ramsey want us to fight the mite, study the mite, destroy the mite where it currently exists in other countries. And for those of you think that we'll just leave the mite to do its thing and the bees will build natural resistance and then the bees will be able to handle the mite on their own. Well, it might interest you to know that the tropymite wiped out an entire nation's honeybee population. Let me say it again. It wiped out an entire nation's. Now you might be saying, well, what nation was that, Fred? I don't know. So you're going to have to Google it because it skips my mind, because until just now, I wasn't even going to mention it.

But it's about fighting disease and fighting things that come into your area that don't need to come into your area. You don't need to bring the stuff in. This is why we have the spotted lantern fly, by the way, because somebody had to bring it in here. And this is why we had the Asian giant hornet in the northwestern part of the United States, because somebody brought it in to Canada, right?

So this is why in a perfect world, you know, we would keep the stock that we have, work with the stock that we have, not introduce something new. And that's my feeling about American foul brood and European foul brood, if we're not migrating our bees around, right, which is unavoidable in the United States.

This is why it's such a big deal when we have commercial beekeeping operations. they move around the country with large numbers of bees and colonies, and that is how we get different diseases and problems moved around the country. Now, can we stop doing that? Not really. Not the way the agricultural system is set up right now, because we have a system that cannot sustain itself

unless we have migratory pollination services, and even those aren't fulfilling the demand for pollination. But so American Fowbrood, is there something else, state by state? So I did find it. You know, I looked it up or I wouldn't be talking about it right now. It makes sense to me because here's the thing. If you have woodenware, wood is porous. Pores can house and carry these diseases and keep them for long periods of time.

Decades. Now here's the interesting thing, too, people often say, and it's a good question, how long does American Fowlbrewd persist in beehive equipment? and you hear them say things like 40 years, 50 years. How do they come up with those numbers? Well, look into it, that's when they first discovered American Fowlbrew. So in other words, they don't know how long it can persist because it has persisted in equipment from the time it was discovered

unless you burn it and destroy it. So this is interesting. I don't know how they arrive at the numbers. I don't have the time to dig into that. But when it comes to plastics, So, and by the way, Appame is a plastic hive. There are a lot of, there's lice in hives. There are a bunch of polystyrenees what people in Australia would refer to as polyhives.

So we have a lot of plastic material out there that has been exposed to American foul brood. And New Zealand was the only country that actually published. There may be one here, but if it is, it wasn't searchable. So if you know of a procedure, and I hope that. we develop more because the plastic hives here in the united states are a little bit newer i know that better be carries lice and hives and some plastic equipment so i wonder if they wouldn't be a good source to find out what happens when we get afb so i will give you a little excerpt from what they do about it in new zealand with their plastic hives but and i'll give you a link so you don't have to

i'm not going to get into the whole thing right here right now but if you want to know exactly what the process is, what the chemicals are that are used, and the cautionary tails that go along with using these chemicals because it can be dangerous. I'll leave you the link and then you can go read it for yourself, but they use sodium hypochlorite solution. So they make a 0.5% solution. It makes one part household bleach with five parts water and they clean the hive components, remove wax, probless, submerge of plastic parts in the solution at least 20 minutes and so forth and so on. and they are proving, see that's the other end of it. You have to prove after this, whatever method you're using is,

you have to prove that it killed American Foulbrood to the satisfaction of your department of agriculture, because keep in mind that it can go everywhere. And here's the other thing, American Fowl Brood exists all over the place already. It just doesn't get to the level to where you see it in the brood. So people that can say, I walk into a bee yard and I can smell, if they have American foul brood there. American foul brood doesn't always smell. So following your nose isn't necessarily a good test for it. So the other thing is sublethal, so before we've been showing symptoms,

it can exist at, you know, 50% of its normal strength. You know, so these small levels of American foul brood may already be there. The other thing is people that treat for American foul brood that have suppressed it, it has to remain suppressed. European foul brewed, the same thing. So American foul brood, if you had some peripheral level and your veterinarian decided that that could be treated, that equipment that it's in has to continue to be treated how long, forever.

So you will then be using antibodies on your bee equipment forever. I don't want that. So I would much rather have a treatment regimen If it's woodenware, burn it. If it's not woodenware, I'm not a fan at all of burning plastic because now you're going to put all these toxins into the air when you burn plastic. So I hope we come up with something.

I think there was also something about irradiating it. So radiation exposure. But here's the other thing. That's a commercial operation, like a truckload would go into this big bay and then they would expose some isotope or something and they would gamma radiation hit that thing. So, cobalt 60 or something like that. Who knows what they use?

So radiation, though, wouldn't be accessible to a backyard beekeeper. So APMA hives, I don't want to be burning that stuff for a lot of reasons. One, they're expensive. I like them. And number two, I don't want to put all those toxins into the air. And if you just bury it, it never decomposes because it's plastic. So we need a better method. I like what New Zealand was doing.

At least they published a method that's approved. And our inspectors is something that I think we probably need to catch up on. The state of Pennsylvania couldn't find anything. So maybe it's something that needs to be addressed. So we'll move on from that. The best thing to do, though, is don't bring any equipment that you don't know the history of. Don't bring in stuff that might have already been exposed to American foulbrood. Don't borrow people's frames.

This is also why you don't take honey and just feed it to your bees when it comes from some other place because American fowl brood can be transferred through honey. No big shocker there. So we want to be careful about what you're bringing into your apiary. If you can be self-sustaining, that is a perfect world. We don't want to bring in equipment and stuff from other places. Because what does it impact? It impacts the brood. So moving on. Question number 11 comes from Andrea from Johntown, Pennsylvania. could you go over your thoughts on the long laying and overwintering? We're building our first hive using your plans.

Thank you. And by the way, I just updated that on my website, which is the way to be.org or fredsfinefowl.com. Look at the plans. It says plans and prints. They're free to you. But the cool thing is I just updated it with people that have sent me pictures of the long lang stroth hives that they've built based on those plans.

So anyway, we're building our first time using your plans. I'm struggling to find someone who actually uses them. So all the beekeepers I've talked to locally tell me they will never work and the bees will always die because they only go up, not sideways. Please excuse my punctuation on that because beekeepers, are funny people and their organizations that they pick a hive design and there's clubs they pick a hive design and we are top bar hive beekeepers we are only Langstroth beekeepers we are only lands hive beekeepers and this statement

that bees only go up they die okay well I have an apiary that has at least three hives in it that are all horizontal that proves otherwise and the proof is in of life. The bees are alive. You get through winter grade. They do super. So this argument that they only go up. Now, you could make some discussion around, do they do better going up vertically rather than moving horizontally? And so we're in a cold climate here. Now, I had a friend named Bob years ago who tried over and over to use top bar hives. And I went and looked at his top bar hive, and I saw the way it was set up. It was very,

minimal but where did he get his top bar hive design from and where did you go to the workshops to learn about top bar hive beekeeping this is the most minimal method of horizontal hive keeping it's the cheapest it has the least amount of wood in it it is the lowest investment and he went to vermont to learn about it so they're keeping them in vermont so the argument that a horizontal configuration doesn't work your bees die when somebody talks to you that way and I'm not, you know, calling out individuals, I'm calling out a way of being. And when you lock in and you speak in absolutes, well, they don't go horizontal, they're going to die. So if you do that, your bees are dead.

Well, there's proof of life everywhere. So it really comes down to management practices. How's the hive made? I made dramatic gains in my horizontal hive beekeeping when I did more insulation on the roof of the hive. Just the roof. So I was kind of amazed that when I bought Layans Hives from Dr. Leo Shirashkin from horizontal hive.com, when I bought those, the roofs were not insulated at all and the roofs are vented and everything else. So I made my own modifications due to the climate that I'm in.

I insulated them and I closed up the vents. There's no air venting from inside the hive into the roof anyway, so it was really weird to me because the frames all go together. and the way layens hides work, the top bar of the frames forms the inner cover. So there's no inner cover. It is the frames. So once they probabilize everything up, there's no airflow through there anyway. So why did I need vents through the roof? It was weird.

So I've insulated the roof. I've insulated the roof in my long Langstroth hive. We use double bubble and everything else. So anyway, the other thing was I used double bubble as a gasket. When I close the lid, I have a strip of double bubble. two inches wide that runs the entire mating surfaces when you close the lid, that shuts down any potential for any venting through there. And I have remarkable success.

So I'm going to suggest that I don't know if you can win these people over because it's also been my experience that when somebody speaks in a flat, absolute authoritative way about something that can and cannot happen that does and does not work, they're not easily swayed. So no amount of science or demonstrating that it actually works tends to sway. I don't know why that is. One of the things that you can look into,

if you think it's worth the discussion, if it's an argument, just let them go. Because if it's still an open discussion, let's just consider where that might be proven to work. So when we talk about people that do cutouts and ripouts, these people come to mind all the time. And there are people that do ripouts in the north. Are there examples of unoccupied buildings that bees move into? Yeah. Okay. So once we talk about the buildings that they're moving into that are unoccupied, and some of these structures, we're talking old barns, old farmhouses and things like that,

that have plaster and lathe walls, but they do not have insulation in the walls at all. So then I don't see examples of the bees occupying attics, for example. Well, that makes sense because the space is just too wide open. Yellow jackets and wasps, you know, they would build their nests in places like that because the soffat would be rotting out access in and out. And they don't mind building in an open space that's still sheltered from weather. So that's how it. So they do build into the walls, the vertical structures, right?

And then there's old balloon walls. That's where you have a multi-story building. there's a continuous stud that goes all the way up it's a practice that we don't have anymore because of fire code and then we have floor choice so there's the horizontal opening right the floor choice and then you find honeycomb in there so we have floor choice depending on the size of it it might be two by tens it might be two by twelts real old it would be full dimensional lumber because a two by ten today is not a full two by ten unless you're omish anyway so they do build their home in these structures, feral colonies, build horizontal, and year after year, season after season.

Okay. So I know someone who's home right now has bees in it, and he's fine with that. He says, okay, let him stay. He likes having him there. Where are they? They're in the floorboards of his attic. So the big attic space, he's got, so that is a horizontal hive. And so they build naturally there. They live there year after year. Now, when someone comes, comes and says those bees have been there 40 years and they've never been dead they've never died out i don't know if it's not it's not a 40-year colony they would have to cycle in and out so you would get new queens you would get replacements eventually the comb would get replaced so at some point i suspect that maybe they died out and nobody knew about it because in the spring what's happening right now

by the time they get up and around and start looking at these old buildings again and they get out and they they hike around and they look at stuff, they see that it's still occupied. They could have easily been a spring swarm. I'm not saying with absolution, that's what happened. But bees definitely live in vertical cavities and horizontal cavities in this neck of the woods, and we're in the same state. So it works. And if you go to the south and you look at people doing ripouts, and I'll say it again,

you know, Dirt Rooster, Randy McCaffrey, Mr. Ed, they do these ripouts. They probably encounter more vertical cavities. than horizontal, but they encounter a bunch of horizontal cavities, horizontal bees. So the idea that bees cannot move horizontally just doesn't play out in what we find. And that's bees on their own. So yes, you can do horizontal hives. So insulation will be key and a good construction. But I wanted to take a minute to talk about it because I'm never impressed. I don't like arguing with people. That's what science is for.

Scientific observation is repeatable, observable, and what's my observer? My cameras, my video gear, photography. So if you're showing horizontal configuration, here's the V is right here, and here we are in spring, there they are, would you be able to argue that that isn't true? That's the whole point of science, repeatable.

You know, this is the basis. It's scientific observation. It's not my opinion. I don't have an opinion that they're alive. They are alive. They're right there. Look at them. There they go.

They did make it. So if it were true, there would be no horizontal hives. Now, why do we have horizontal hives? If they work, why isn't everybody using them? Well, because you have to understand that the design of the beehives that most people are using comes from Langstroth, which fantastic. He discovered he had removable frames. It was based on bee space and everything else, which we see.

still use. That's why I like the Langstroth, the long Lang Horizontal Hive. So the thing of it is, that becomes commercially viable. In other words, I mentioned earlier about return on investment. I'm terrible at it. I invest more than I get out of my bees because I like structure. I like to have hives of a lot of different designs and things like that because I like to see how the bees use the spaces that I put them in. And then I like to study the bees. That is what I'm about. I'm trying to earn money. Now, let's say I need to earn money. Let's say I need to follow where the profits are. Well, there are people that make big money, significant money, by moving their hives around and providing pollination services. If you can put over 400 hives on a semi-flat bed, and you can get $230 to $250 per hive for pollination

services that only lasts a couple of weeks at one location, that is a significant return on your investment, particularly if you're keeping, you know, if your hive equipment is built of stock of wood that you happen to have access to your own the milling. So when you do that, you want minimal structure. You want minimal investment in the hive. You're not going to see, you know, a bunch of extra, you're not going to see hive visors. on the front of those hives. You're not going to see screen bottom boards with a double bottom board that's solid because you want to have a tray that pulls out, not if you're commercial, because the investment will not be justified in the return. Your goal becomes very minimal.

I have to get a live colony of bees to that designated area to provide a service, which is pollination. I might get some honey off of it, although the pollen board, not the pollen board, the almond board in California last year reported 30% losses of the colonies that were there that were providing pollination services. So they lost 30% of their bees there, and that's easily searched and you can find out because these are, why would the pollen board say that they had 30% losses if they're trying to make what they're doing popular? It's hard on the bees. So you don't know if it's rained enough. You don't know if they have to feed the bees. You don't know if you're going to get you're probably not going to get a nectar crop off of them so the

income from that is from the pollination service your bees are not benefiting from providing those pollen services right so that's a lot of stress for the bees and now they have to be fed syrup and everything else which is why right after the pollen services after those are satisfied if you're into the money and there's a great documentary called more than honey and i highly recommend that you watch it. Because it kind of shows that a little bit. Now we flip, if I need to make money from that, minimum investment, maximum return,

and this is why you penny pinch everything. Because, by the way, thicker, heavier hives made out of thicker, heavier stock, costs more to transport. It's heavier. More equipment. Why do you have a migratory cover instead of an intercover and a telescoping cover?

Because if I can get by with just a migratory cover, that's what I'm going to use. And that allows me to bundle everything together. So these are the trade-offs. The backyard beekeeper, this is us, right? So we're back-air beekeepers, we do stuff that might cost a little bit more that makes us have to feed our bees a little bit less.

That maybe gets them to sustain themselves eventually because we don't have the demands on them, the commercial operations may put on your bees. So that's also why we don't have 55-gallon drums of sugar syrup out there or a great big vat on the back of a flatbed truck going to hive to hive filling them with sheriff because I don't need to right because I don't need to build up before the environment provides for the bees so there's so many variables here but trying to avoid the lifting but still enjoy having bees if you want to enjoy the lifting or reduce lifting horizontal hives are at the top of the game they really are you are only pulling frame

You're not pulling boxes. Although I see some people try to go vertical with their horizontal hives by adding a super on it. And so now we start to defeat the whole purpose of the horizontal hive. But that's a whole other story. Yes, horizontal hives work. Insulation, single entrance. I mean, you will work your way through it. And no, for someone to flatly say horizontal doesn't work,

bees can't move horizontal. My bees do. I have the thermals, you know, I document it, I don't know what else I can tell people other than what we see. And horizontal bees is another good channel to check out where they make horizontal hives custom configured for whatever your purpose happens to be. So for Andrea, go ahead. Do it. Now we're into the fluff section. That's it for the established questions. I know I'm talking long today. and the first thing I want to talk about, oh, in the cover shot today, I was talking about

nucleus feeders last time, and somebody reminded me right away that cirrusel makes nucleus hive top feeders. That's what this is. It's for a new five-frame nuke. It meets the standard wooden boxes. This is good for syrup. So if you have these inserts in here, you can put your sugar syrup on we can pull these inserts out and you can put solids up here so you can put fondant up there or you can put dry sugar wherever you want so now the bees get in through that corner and of course if your hive is tipped forward you would want it to be these are you can remove them and move these towards the middle if you wanted to so why would you have it in the middle if you've got fondon up here i would have these openings towards the center because that's the warmest area

Your bees will go up through here. By the way, there's no cover on there, and that's because when you put the inner cover on, it seals this up. So these are very easy, and that's right. I did forget them. And you can see this one has not been used yet. I have a bunch of them sitting in my garage right now because I got those for my nuke tops, emergencies at the end of the year.

And you can still use the bee buffet, of course, but I don't want to leave out Cirosil. They work really well, and they're for syrup or dry feeding so and where do you get them uh blythwood bee company blythwood b company sells cirr cell products you can also just google cirracell neuclea feeder and you'll find them so the other thing is coming up monday path of totality people keep asking me hey fred aren't you in the path of totality i am i don't have high hopes now you're going to have a crystal clear day look at the weather right now look at the weather

forecast. We have storms headed this way and it's very unpredictable. I watch the temperatures and what's about to happen with our local weather. And our local weather guy just had Al Roker on. I was very impressed. Al Roker is a big shot. Of course, he's a national figure and our local he's not a meteorologist, he's a climatologist. So he got Al Roker on to talk because we happen to be in the path of totality. But we're going to have Hayes. So Hayes, so Hayes. maybe clouds in fact some people are starting to move their planned location to observe the eclipse based on what the weather patterns are and right now we have a dynamic weather situation I hope people and and people are being robbed right and left and by that I mean there are

motels charging four times what they normally do for a room just because of where they're located I wouldn't pay that there are people planning big outdoor parties for this and I just hope the weather crop rates it's all I'm going to say but yes I'm in the path of totality yes I planned a video stuff no I'm not going anywhere I'm not leaving my yard and I'm going to stay right here and look at the sky and that's why I had my glasses on in the deal use glasses that are approved by the way and I know it's too late to get them anyway so hopefully you got the right classes you didn't get them from some unethical person who's just selling

glasses and saying that they're certified for you to stare at the sun. So lots of safety potential issues there. Anyway, yes I am. I'm going to be here. I'm going to watch it. I'm going to video it. I'm going to share. I'm probably going to be the only person on social media that says anything about the path of totality. And I'm probably going to be the only person out there who's going to show a photo of it.

I just know it. I'm the only one. So you're going to be lost in a mass of people posting everything they saw. there's even drinks and they're celebrating all the songs totally clips of the heart and and all that stuff everything people have gone eclipse crazy anyway so syrup by the way sugar syrup right now if you've got a colony that because look at the rain and situation that we have right now and the pollen has been coming in gangbusters if the nectar doesn't come in that matches the demand because of the pollen and the brooding up that's going on your bees can find themselves without honey and without carbohydrates at a rapid pace.

So in a very narrow amount of time, you can go to a landing board and you can see bees tumbling out and falling on the ground. If you see that, feed that colony now with sugar syrup. If they're flying fine and everything looks healthy, that's great. It's a slow colony and look at their behavior and you look and see a bunch of dead bees in front of your hive and you see that it just don't have energy,

they could be without resources, without carbohydrates. And they will also be dragging out their deeds. and they will also be dragging out their dead bees because they're gonna cut back on what they're feeding. Next, what else? Oh yeah, the Hissop seeds that we've been growing, 100% germination. So that seed company that I recommended,

that sells those seeds, and I can put the link down below too, but I just got them on Amazon Hissop seeds, the most popular one. And 100% germination, so those are all doing great. If you're starting your seeds inside and you haven't started the seeds,

sit, do it now, don't wait. Because you can get blooms out of your hyssop the first year. We're going to do borage, of course, direct-so. Somebody else asked, because I'm starting these things inside, do I do the same thing? For my field plantings, no, I don't, because fields are acres of seeds. And this year, last year, we got in trouble on that

because I followed the calendar instead of the weather. And so we planted our seeds, acres of them, and what happened the birds came and ate the seeds woodchucks ate everything everything got munched because we didn't have rain for almost three weeks so this year I'm gonna wait until the calendar period because we don't want any risk of frost but for and what am I planting cosmos I'm also plant cosmos is the biggest one and then we have thousands of sunflowers that we're going to plant but I'm gonna wait until there's weather in the forecast that

we're gonna have rain that it's going to soak after we plant the seeds I need that so I am gonna plant that but that's different from what I have inside so yes Watch for robbing because right now depending on where you are this is all gonna be all beekeeping is local as people say and that's very true Based on the weather that we have right now I do see a lot of bees trying to ping other hives in other words or checking the sides in the back and they're coming in from underneath when you see a lot of activity like that we have bees that are starving somewhere that need resources and they're willing to rob others to get them so just watch for that you might have to put some robbing screens on i have not had to do that this spring because all the colonies are holding their own it's very important to pay attention to your entrances if you see a bunch of detritus being dragged out on the landing board and things like that it could almost be too late so if you see struggles at the entrance go ahead and put a robbing screen on there one of the most popular robbing screens this is be smart designs that's a really good one we mentioned serose cell earlier this is a

serosel robbing screen also works really well and if nothing else just reduce your entrance if you don't have a robbing screen handy but be aware you definitely don't want to have a colony get overwhelmed just because the nectar hasn't kicked in in the environment yet we have weird weather a level up your drunken hives so because there's frosty even the spring and you may find that hives that were really level going into winter might now be tilted so it's a good time to go ahead and start to square away those things level your hives and make sure if anything if they tilt in any direction it should be towards

the landing board so tilting front and back is not a big deal left and right that can get them generating some wonky comb and things like that when you start to work your hives and it's easy to do it now also i just want to thank people that send in all their moss tips we're definitely going to do it we're going to make that water wall and make sure that your water resources are established for your bees early because they continue to waggle dance for water inside the hive and once they find a good source they pass that information on they continue to use that source so long as it remains available and viable for your bees if they go without it and they find another source hopefully it's not your neighbor's swimming pool and go from there so that's it for today i hope you have a fantastic weekend

ahead I hope that you are able to watch the eclipse if you are great and I hope that you won't have spent a lot of money doing it. Thanks for watching. Have a fantastic beekeeping weekend next week in this part of the woods. We're gonna have lots of warm weather comes with rain but you may have an opportunity to super your hives. Be ready. Thanks again.