The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 254

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/01c4KdiZ0uM This is the topic list with corresponding time-stamps, generously provided by:  Adam Holmes CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction 03:35 Why use a 5 frame nucleus hive instead of a 10 frame brood box a a resource hive? 11:50 Lots of dead bees around my swarm trap, is that normal? 17:18 Tried the Swarm Reacher, the queen did not climb onto the frame. 21:45 What if I direct water from my A/C unit to my birdbath for the bees? 26:50 I've had several large swarms go into a swarm trap and not stay. They just don't fit. 35:28 Any thoughts on washing your bee suit to remove alarm pheromone from your suit? I wonder how long the alarm pheromone remains? 41:04 Plan of the week, fluff segment.

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, April the 19th, and this is back here, Be Keeping Questions and Answers episode number 254. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. We've had quite a week, by the way, weather changes, drama, tornado warnings, watches, stuff blowing through here and it's not changing. We have some stuff going on this weekend that isn't very good. Tomorrow is going to be a super windy day, but you really want to know what's going on outside right now. I know you do, so I want to welcome you here. Thank you for spending your time with me.

Outside right now, it's 52 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 11 degrees Celsius. The wind is gusty, 13 mile per hour, pretty constant, which is 21 kilometers per hour. 94% relative humidity because it's been raining off and on. It's going to rain 20% chance tomorrow, and this is for the people in the northeastern United States. We have several weather systems coming through, and it's going to be gusty and windy, so that's going to ruin your Saturday. If you're thinking about beekeeping out there, not good conditions for beekeeping. So, big surprise there.

So if you want to know, by the way, this is a playlist. The playlist is back here beekeeping questions and answers, and you can find it on my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn. So I want to thank you for being here, too. If you are just listening, it's also on Pod Bean as a podcast. What's the name of the podcast? The Way to Be. The other thing is, if you want to submit a question for consideration or even a topic that you just like to hear more about,

please go to the website, the way to be.org, and there's a page there titled The Way to Be, and you can fill out the form there, and then I'll know what's on your mind, and we'll see if we don't get that covered here on a Friday. The other thing is, some of you may want to talk to somebody right now. Who knows when you're looking at this, day or night, seven days a week, and go to the fellowship. Online, Google it. The Way to Be Fellowship. It's a Facebook group. You can join as long as you're nice.

So, all the topics are from this week and a couple from last week too, because remember last Friday I did something different. I invited a special guest to answer a question, and we ended up taking up most of your time. So I did carry over some of that because I knew I had promised responses to some of you. And we're going to get to what's on the thumbnail for the cover today. that's part of the fluff at the very end. So let's get right into it with question number one,

which comes from Dustin from Bolverdi, Texas. Hello, Fred, my question is related to resource hives. I've heard yourself and others talking about the benefits of five-frame resource hives. All the benefits make sense to me, and the question is, why use a five-frame nuke instead of a 10-frame hive as a resource hive? I think the frames would be easier to manage in terms of swarm control and could yield even more resources to be used. Interested in hearing your perspective on this.

Okay, so anyway, what Dustin is describing is exactly what I used to do. So I've been keeping beat since 2006. And I always collected swarms and put them straight into 10 frame and 8 frame deep Langstroth brood boxes. For those of you don't know what a nuke is, it's short for Nuclis, which just means it's a complete colony of bees in a small container. The thing is, I resisted using nucleicized hives for a really long time, because just like Dustin is saying here, I didn't see the merit in it,

because why do that when they can just expand out? And they did, by the way, they did just fine. So why make the change? I made the change because I wanted to try it out, so I could speak from personal experience, and I put it in a five-frame deep nucleus box. And you'll find out that nucleus hives come in a variety of materials. There are lysin hives.

There are BMAX hives that are nukes. There are seven-frame and six-frame nucleus hives available. So those are insulated hives. Appamay even makes one. But guess what I picked out. I picked an all-woodon hive that came from BetterB, and they don't even make or sell the one that I originally purchased anymore. So it's made out of wood, put the five frames in there.

And the thing of it is, I found out that the bees build up faster in smaller spaces when the colony is small. And that's key. The reason that's key is because coming up in spring, when we get prime swarms, where I reside here in the northwestern part of Pennsylvania, northeastern United States, some of the prime swarms that come out are too big for a nuke. They just, they would overwhelm it. There's too many. do sometimes have to put them in a full-size deep box. A nucleus hive isn't enough.

But if you can get them into a nuke, what's another way of expanding it? You could expand it upwards. So you could do two nucleus hives. That's why I like the wooden ones, they're stackable, just like the rest of your Langstroth hive bodies. And you can do five over five. So now I have a 10-frame hive, but it's vertical. Five over five. And they were outperforming the colonies, the swarms that I was hiving into a 10-frame deep. boxes, right? So then I decided in this term resource hive, what is that? It's not supposed to be a hive that just grows on its own and gets managed separate from other hives. It's supposed to have a limited amount of time that the bees are occupying it. It's supposed to allow you then to make preparations for other, maybe you're doing a long length draft horizontal hive or maybe you're going to transfer into a bigger hive. So then you make the transfer as they fill out the frames that are in there. So the limit was kind of one or two of these new. nucleus hives, right? But then they did so well that I added a third level and that became kind of a new standard. So now I have 15 deep frames in a vertical narrow column. And they turned

out to be comb builders. Like they were really good at it. And they showed that they drew out comb faster and everything else. And here's the thing. I did not feed any of the nucleus hives that I had because they were intended as resources, temporary storage, temporary housing. So I didn't, let's say, build a full kitchen in there. So there was no inner cover at all that I could feed them with. So I changed that over time, added a feeder shem to have a lot of nucleus hives out there now. They're considered resource hives where I can get brood if I need it, a queen if I need it. More bees, nurse bees, things like that if you need them.

And the key was through management, we would keep those colonies small, which ironically, those are actually closer to the same size that a feral colony would find in a selected bee tree. Then are those that are in deep hive 10 frame and eight frame boxes that now we stack up. So I started keeping them as standard hive configurations. I found out that they replace our resources fast. That small space, there's no venting through the top. So we have some colonies that are vented through the top, some that are not. And we have different entrance configurations,

entrance sizes and things like that here but the the long answer of course here is that you can put them in your standard eight frame deep brood box you can also put them in your standard 10 frame deep brood box and to give them some sense of more manageable space because here's the thing these are smaller swarms that don't fill those boxes i've had swarms that fill them right off the bat bonus all the way around don't even play with a nuke go straight to the 8 or 10 frame deep root box. I'm thinking more and more about filler frames. In other words, frames that aren't drawn out because it's a new colony.

Bees that swarm are more than ready to draw out new bees wax, so they're good to go. Unless you've got some terrible weather condition ahead, some terrible situation where they're not going to have access to nectar from the environment and things like that, you might consider putting sugar syrup on that. I don't do it with my nucleus-sized hives historically. And then you can just watch them build out and then expand the hive in, you know,

in concert with how your bees are building out their frames. So sometimes your storms are just too big to go in. But the thing is, they do build faster in smaller spaces, which means they require more keen or just in time style management. And that's so it's not a hive you can just set up. leave alone for weeks at a time you'll have to add boxes to accommodate that expansion and to keep them from going taller than three and then we're talking about the nucleus hives now when that top box that third box is full wall-to-wall capped honey I pull it

so you don't have to pull all of it out in fact I highly recommend you don't pull it all out so we leave three out of five capped honey frames up there and then we checkerboard in new foundation and that's so that the bees can draw that out Some people like to do cut comb or Ross rounds. Now Ross rounds historically, it's comb honey, by the way, and you have to have a specialized Ross Round shallow super that's built just for that. However, the company called Ciracel came up with brackets

that fit the Ross rounds in the frames because it's a frame that you purchase and there's foundation that you put in it. That's thinner than normal wax foundation. and it's rated for human consumption because that's comb honey and that's what you're going to be eating. With those, you can put Ross Round Deep Frames with the brackets from Cirocell into Nucleous Hives. That's your third box and they will build out comb honey faster than some of my larger colonies have. There are a lot of things to play with and experiment with and where you live.

Things can perform a little differently. even different bee colonies perform and behave different from one another. So it's trial and error and see what's going on, but you can put them in your standard 8 or 10 frame deep box because I always saw it in the past that I would have to move them again, which means I have to take the nuke apart, put them in a bigger hive and everything else. So I want to just install them straight up right there

and keep them in the same location, by the way, if you're swapping boxes later. So question number two comes from Amy Woodbridge, Virginia. Just caught my first swarm and was fortunate because the swarm trap was in my mom's backyard and very visible. Saw hundreds of scouts Monday, so many I thought it was a small swarm. Tuesday I saw what I now know to be scouts fighting and it resulted in many dead bees around the swarm trap. Is that normal? I've not heard about this happen. and the end result was that a swarm moved into the box today Wednesday a large body of bees completely covered the swarm trap and ran inside today they were about two inches thick and covered the entire front of a 10 frame deep box

still there plan to collect them Friday because it's supposed to rain here tomorrow okay so there's several things going on here one I would like to know from Amy if there was any honey in there so weren't any of the frames that were left inside the box, capped honey. Was there any syrup or food in there? Because those things can cause a combination of robbing and another group trying to occupy it, which could end up with some conflict there. The other thing is, with a lot of bees coming and going,

I kind of worry that there must be resources that they're after, so I don't have an answer to that question, but it's suspicious to me that so many bees would go and that there would be conflict there like that. Now, a second thought. Sometimes scouts do go, even before the swarm has departed from its parent colony. So for those of you don't know, the swarm is the old queen, departing with up to 70% of the population of the hive that they currently reside in.

So when they move out, go to a bivouac spot, then they move into this final destination, which the swarm trap is intended to be. The scouts will stake a claim, kind of, and you'll see them acting as guard bees at the entrance. and they'll even fan their pheromones there. And it'll look like something's moved in, but they're just preparing that, and they're also identifying one another through the queen men of veal pheromone

that comes from the queen that is present in the colony that they're about to depart from. But a bigger conflict, dead bees, that implies that there was some food or some resource in there, and I don't know this to be a fact, but I'm just guessing. And so the bees that were coming to rob that were different from the bees that were coming to occupy, those that wanted to occupy, defended it, and had a fight, and killed some bees at the entrance.

That's my suspicion. The other thing I want to mention here, because I know that a lot of people are probably putting swarm traps out this time of year. You should. If you're going to trap bees that are leaving from somebody else's apiary, or maybe you're hoping to get one from a local bee tree somewhere that you think the genetics might be really good there, when they occupy the swarm trap, the hive that you put up there. I highly recommend you collect those and relocate them as soon as possible. The thing is, the mindset of the beads when they're moving into a new cavity like that, they're orienting themselves to that space.

They're sending out their foragers right away, like the following day. They're already scouting and foraging and starting to bring resources in, so they're setting up house there. So two things I like to advise people to do, and one is have another swarm trap ready to go. So when you go and collect the one that's already present and you're going to move them to the final destination, I recommend you do that just as soon as you can. And then you put another swarm trap in the exact same spot, hopefully configure the same way,

and with plenty of frames in it so that they can get in there and occupy that too. So then they'll be orienting to your new location and this transition will be much easier and you won't lose a bunch of them. If they're there for several days and then you move it and you put it in a new location, There are a lot of scouts are already out about and they spend the night out in the environment often. And so then those will be coming back to where the site was, and then they'll be established there. And so they'll just move in and occupy it with the absence of a queen. Now you can take several trips and shuttle them back and forth, but you're much better off if you make that move quicker. Then any scouts were out about the return and find that the colony is no longer there will ultimately return to the parent colony that they swore.

out of in the first place. The other thing is, often scouts from several colonies are checking the same spot, trying to lay claim to the same spot, and this is some of the conflict that also might be there. And then once you hive another swarm right away, get them out of there and have another swarm trap in place, you might pick up a secondary swarm right away, those that were trying to get that position that couldn't do it. So there are some people that get two or three swarms in the exact same spot in the space of 72 hours. because when swarming happens in an area, there seem to be multiple swarms within three days of one another,

particularly after we've got a rainy, cold weekend coming up right here. So Saturday's going to be cold and windy, Sunday's going to be iffy. And then when we get to the next week and the weather clears, guess what's going to happen right after storms? Prime swarm time. So I think we're in it right here. It's going to happen.

So I think I covered that. Question number three comes from Henry from Nyota Tennessee. I hope I said that right. I think it's not Neo-it. It must be Nyota. I don't know. I wanted to let you know that I tried the swarm catcher adapter on a swarm last week and I fastened it to a 24-foot extension paint roller pole and held it up next to the swarm and some of the bees went onto the frame. I lowered it and put the frame in a deep hive body, I did that four times with four frames. And each time I had fewer bees on the frames. I did get the queen. I didn't get the queen, however. But the next day, the balance of the bees and the queen came down out of the tree and went into the hive box.

I had put there with the other frames. So what we're talking about there, it's not the swarm catcher. it's the swarm reacher and i highly recommend that people look into that and i still consider that a win so the swarm reacher is a matter of it's a clamp that goes on the end of a pole which is a painter's pole light bulb changer pole whatever you have handy it does work on all of my washer pulls so this is a windshield not a windshield but a window washer pole and then look at the end of it here that's the swarm reacher it's just a simple piece of plastic that clamps onto your frame Now, what do you put on there? I get nothing for talking about this, by the way.

But I do want you to know what it is. I'm going to be playing with it. I haven't had new swarms to play with it yet. But what Henry did is collected some influencers. So put up what I hope was brood comb, because you want comb that's had brood in it in the past. And this is why when you're cleaning out your dead outs and stuff like that, we'll talk about this later.

I want you to save this old smelly comb because it is a magnet for swarms. So we put it up there, it's out of reach. Look how high this was. 24 feet. Nobody's going to, well, I hope nobody, is going to put up a 24-foot high ladder. Normally you'd see a swarm that high. You get a call or whatever.

And you pull up and the people told you over the phone. It's like 10 feet up and then you get there and it's in the top of a skinny tree that you can't climb. And shouldn't, by the way. And then your ladder can't reach it. And there it is. Even 16 feet up would be out of reach. So you just kind of write it off.

talk to the people about the bees, say, yeah, they're going to move on, everything's okay. And, you know, you explain because that's what you're there for. You're not just there to collect a swarm. You're there as an ambassador for beekeepers everywhere. And it's important to talk to the public and calm them down. And we don't want them spraying it with garden hoses and stuff like that, and the things that teenagers and some grown-ups like to do and they think they're being brave. But here's the thing.

That pole will get that scented frame up there. and this is why I suggest saving a bunch of them, just as Henry described here. He sent that up and collected bees onto it four times. So there's four frames with bees on them in a hive, so they are making that hive smell right. Now, what's going on is the influencers that are in there are going to make their way back to where the queen still is

if they didn't get around the frame, and then they're going to communicate where this new space is that they're occupying. And if they approve of it, and obviously they did, they all move in. and you can sit down and bring your folding chair if you've got time and watch them do this back and forth and pretty soon you see bees going back and forth and it looks like they're leaving the box you put them in and they are but they're going back to the tree branch that's good news because then when you see them coming back the other way and going back to the box on their own you're winning them over because now they'll be waggle dancing and they won't even do a waggle dance it'll be what's called a round dance there's no waggling involved Why not? Because it's so close. All they're doing is turning and going down. Turning and going down or opposite the sun or wherever this location is where you put your box. And then all the rest of them will just go there. So that to me was a very good collection. I would love it to see the queen go onto this box and get the queen. And then of course, well, we'll talk about the rest later. But that's the way that worked. Henry got a swarm. He used the swarm reacher, it's called.

So if you want to look that up, tell my sentious you can pay the same as everybody else. And then we'll get on to question number four here, which is from Marie in Jacksonville, Florida. I'd like to have a B water source in my backyard since it's hot in North East Florida. My current bird bath dries out fast. I was thinking of your water wall, but I don't have a well. I do have a big AC unit that drains lots of water every day in the sun. summer though. So can I use the AC condensation water to feed a bird bath so my beads have water, my beads have water all the time this summer. So that's an interesting thing because if you're running your

AC all the time, air conditioning, think of that as distilled water. But depending on your AC and what kind of, there are swamp coolers, there are all kinds of things going on when it comes to air conditioning. So I don't know what kind of air conditioner we're talking about. But I know that it reminds. It reminded me that in Arizona during a period of profound earth, the bees were collecting underneath air conditioning units where they had these drip pans and they had tubes that would drip the condensate out onto the ground next to. These are window units.

And so those things should be kept clean. So I would say what you clean your drip pans with and stuff like that, since this is under your control. And if the water is not, you know, if there's an air conditioner out there somewhere, you know within a mile of your house and it is producing condensate like that and it could be dirty it could have bacteria in it you're not going to stop your bees from getting to it they're going to go there anyway so let's pretend so we have control over this one it is you know water that doesn't have a

lot of minerals in it because it's it's condensed right it's water out of the air so then uh it wouldn't be great for a lot of things to drink however i was thinking about this and i thought If Marie ran some kind of tube, some kind of collection, and, you know, just had a trough that went right down and fed that onto the bird bath. And then, of course, the bird bath overflows when it's too full. It's not wasted water. It's condensation. The water's going to be there anyway. And I think that would actually be an interesting solution to keep some water available for the bees.

And, of course, when it rains or whatever, then you get another wash out of that. But I would, since the air conditioner is under your control, do my best to clean. it out and whatever you clean it with make sure that you understand this is going to be exposed to your bees so I would not use harsh detergents and things like that but I would make sure that there isn't a lot of mold and stuff in the water but I think actually that's a pretty good thing because there are bees that go to condensate bottles underneath cars while they're idling and parked you know you drive your car and then you get home in the driveway and it's summertime you turn off your

car and somebody goes hey your car is leaking and it's really just condensation from your air conditioning unit. So water's water as far as survival, because it's the difference of water and no water because here's what your bees are going to do. They're going to go to the water source that is preferable for them, but availability is going to trump preferable. So in other words, some water is better than nothing, right? So they're always going to go to their preferred water if it's abundant. And I think rerouting condensate from your air conditioner sounds like a cool idea and I hope you'll share what the results were so I hope we hear good things and if you've done that some kind of modification why not the water's just dripping

anyway I think that sounds very interesting and for those you are wondering my water wall is just a bunch of concrete blocks and it's shaped in an arc and it does not look pretty and then I have a bunch of pavers there and then I run a garden hose through it and I have what's called a fog nozzle so if you want to look that up there are even micro fog nozzles to the point where it looks like puffs of smoke in the air so they have a very low flow rate and it keeps moisture in the air and it drifts easily with the wind and stuff and it keeps the surfaces damp and then the horizontal surfaces that little have little divots in them and stuff like that actually pull tiny bits of water and the bees land right in there and drink the water so i'm also thinking about making my own

bird bath out of concrete. So I want to with weep holes so that as it fills up, the water flows out. And that helps your bees, by the way. If you've got some minor movement of the water, number one, any water movement makes those pools not stagnant, which means things like mosquitoes won't be breeding in them. Mosquitoes want standing water. So if you can keep the slightest movement over the surface,

keeps that clear and there's a little runoff going on the side a little cascade down the concrete the rocks whatever you have bees like to use that so it'd be great so moving on to question number five this comes from this is the youtube channel name backyard beekeeping adventure 335 when swarms are looking for a new home don't they go inside and measure everything to make sure they're going to be happy with the size yes they do those studies were done by dr Thomas Seeley, and I'm sure others have done that too. He actually watched how long, how many, how much time they spent counting off the space and what the preferred spaces were. And by the way, Tom Seeley has a new book out on and it shows how he conducted his experiments,

which I personally find very interesting. I'll put a link to his book down below. It's available on Amazon. So anyway, I just asked because I've had several very large swarms attempt to move into my swarm traps only to not be able to fit in and then within a couple of hours they leave they'll fly out and gather on a tree limb as though they had just swarmed i have been lucky though to witness several of the bees and have been able to get them into full-size deeps and mediums so they can all fit but i worry about the ones that i may not be around or be able to collect so this ties in with the

earlier question too we're going to get a lot of swarm discussion it just goes with the territory this time of year here in the United States. It is swarm season. Be ready. So, and here's the judgment call there, because if I'm putting up a swarm trap, would I put up just a single deep five-frame nuke as a swarm trap? No, not big enough. So I strap two of them together. So whether you're using a 10-frame Langstroth deep brood box as your swarm trap or 10 frames in two nucleus boxes, it's 5 over 5. It's the same volume. Now, do the B is demonstrate a preference for a vertical, narrow volume or the big rectangle that you've got there with your 10-frame box? Well, if they have nothing else to move into, they'll move into that 10-frame box. If you have a vertical channel,

they'll show a preference for that. Who else did those studies? Dr. Thomas Ealing, a bunch of others. So there's statistics, but statistics don't always win, so. We're going to talk about that a little bit later too. The other thing is you get a swarm in your hive. I don't have it with me right now, but there are entry guards. In other words, if you're using a Langstroth 8 frame or 10 frame, and the swarm moved in there, you know, we've all been through it. You see a swarm that moved into your box.

You're excited. They're yours. You see that there are some scouts going. Be aware that that first 72 hours are critical because they're still making up. their mind they can still leave you can keep them from leaving by putting a queen excluder entrance on you can probably make one yourself if you've got a metal queen excluder those are my favorites you could cut one of those down put a wooden frame around it and use it just to block the entrance now the workers can come and go if the queen decides to

leave and she's the final decision maker if the queen can get out of that hive and leave again you're going to lose them because they won't stay in a box that the queen doesn't stay in so if she changes her mind we can make her stay there long enough for you to expand the hive and accommodate the larger group so if you're filling a 10-frame deep box and that's too many bees I would go ahead and put a medium on that and keep them there until the queen starts to lay make sure everything is good to go there are massive swarms sometimes these large swarms have multiple queens in them so you also have to be aware of that and watch for that you'll sometimes see them divide themselves

In other words, you think you've collected a large swarm and you did and you put them in the box and they split. Or, as I often use these big butterfly nets, which are nothing but oversized pillowcases made on muslin cloth and they're on a bass net, right? So I shake a huge swarm in there. We're talking five, six pounds of bees. Half of them move right into the hive and they start fanning, nests and off glands and everything else. But then the others not only stay in the net, but they form a new clobes. cluster in there. So you know what happens nine times out of ten?

There's another queen in that smaller cluster. And I've been unsuccessful in encouraging them because this is why... So, yeah, I'm going to back up a minute. This is why I don't... People that are in a rush and you've probably been taught this. You want to put your sworn that you've collected in a high that you've selected. You take the cover off, you pull a couple frames out to make room for them, and you dump them and you shake them all in there.

Okay. I don't do that. First of all, I have more time. So not in that big a rush. I like to rest the butterfly net full of bees right on the entrance of the hive. Now I could take a handful of bees and dump those in, but also now I don't have to pull any frames. I leave the hive completely intact, and I close it up,

and I watch the bees going in. Now, one of the things that it gets to do when I'm watching because it's a big white muslin cloth, and I think it's a 16-inch diameter butterfly net, and they're on Amazon. You can look for them. They're big aluminum telescoping handles, but I rarely telescope the handle.

But while they're on the landing board, I can see them going up and going in and exploring and coming out, and then if they start fanning their nymph glands, the rest of them pick up and they all start going in. When the queen goes up and goes in, I have an option there. I see her.

I can collect her if I wanted to. I can put her on a frame inside a queen isolation cage if I wanted to, or once I see her go in, to do her inspection, this is a frustrating part. Queens often will go in and then come right back out. So once it's here, go in, boom, put that entrance guard right on there

so now the queen can't come back out. Now I know I have a queen in there because I watched her go in. I see Nazanov glands on the bees that are at the entrance fanning. You can get one of those entry queen excluders from Datant, D-A-D-A-N-T. Just go look for them.

They're the only ones I know of that sell They're already made. It's metal queen exclitter with a wooden frame around it and its physical weight is enough just to sit right on the entrance and if you want to you can put a bar clamp on just to hold it in place. I don't recommend putting screws on and holding it in place and stuff like that. But now this gives us a chance to watch them more. The rest of the bees go in. The queen can't leave, but that's we end up with another queen. And so then when they wouldn't go in, I take them over to another hive. Now this is why it's very important to have plenty of extra. hives and places for you to transfer bees. Now this one's a smaller collection so I can put them in one of my five-frame deep nucleus hives. So it's the five-frame deep. It's on a stand. It has an insulated cover. It has a migratory cover. And on the migratory cover, I put double bubble underneath that wooden migratory cover, which acts as a gasket up there. And I move, and sure enough, there'll be a queen. it's a smaller cluster of bees there's a queen with them do i want to put a queen excluder on the entrance of that nucleus hive that i just loaded them into yes or no no because if she's

a virgin queen and it's likely that she is and sometimes you'll find even more than one once they move in and she's in there with them she has to get back out to me so you can't leave a queen excludeer on the front of that for more than a couple of days if you use one at all for this case. So I've been very successful in getting multiple colonies out of large swarms. Sometimes these big swarms have multiple queens in them and some of the largest group will go to the queen that's mated and then the smaller little cluster. Sometimes swarms will leave a tree branch or they'll split up and you'll see a little cluster on the branch over here and then the big cluster over here. Go through this little cluster over here and nine times out of ten you'll find a little

queen in there that is just not made it. She's younger. So she left with a big swarm. Lots of learning to do there and don't don't bum out if they get away from you, but it is frustrating to watch a queen get all stuck up about the beautiful hive that you've offered them. And then she doesn't move in and then before you know it, they bib-wack on the side of the hive and then they fly away the next day. So it's bad news. This is how you can manipulate them. Let's move on to question number six, which comes from Kelly. So some weeks ago, recently you mentioned that Guardian recommended Tide Free and Clear to launder the bee jacket.

I imagine that's only a few times the season, though, and I've heard of beekeepers spraying their suits with diluted vinegar between use or rinsing them. Any thoughts? Given how long a queen's fairer, can stay on a queen clip, for example. I wonder how long the alarm pheromone can stay on a hive tool or a bee glove.

Now this is interesting too, and I'm glad Kelly asked the question. I already answered, but we will talk about this looks like an advertisement. That's the tide. Why do I have it? Tide free and gentle, dermatologist tested, and free of dyes, perfumes,

and so on, which is what you want. Who did I learn about this from? Because I go to experts. I don't consider myself an expert on all things beekeeping. No one is smarter than everyone, so I reached out to Terry at Guardian Bee Apparel, and he's the one that told me that that's what they would use and what they recommend.

So, and you get those big Tupperware toots, keep them outside, soak them because Terry sells, of course, Guardian Bee Apparel vented suits. And just hand-wash everything. Why not? Go ahead, do that. But I want to address the other part here, and this is very interesting, I'm going to do more research about it, but I'll give you my thoughts now.

Bees that sting you when they're being defensive. This isn't a bee that you've just put your hand on like I did two days ago because I was sitting in my umbrella chair and just put my hand there so I could sit and trapped a bee under my finger and got stung right there. Talking about the guard bees that are ramped up, they're ready to go, they're ready to defend, and they start stinging everything. Let's talk about when they put venom into the air and when they even coat the stinger on its way out and so what they're doing is they're marking you this is why

often a bee will sting and then you know you've been fine up until this point one bee stings you and three or four or even more I've had seven or eight bee sting right at the edge of my cuff because my glove was here and the cuff was there and one stung me and a whole bunch stung me right afterwards think about an alarm pheromone right it has to get out fast. The other bees in the vicinity need to pick up on the fact that an alarm pheromone has been distributed into the air. And they need to act on it right away, so it's highly volatile.

And by that, I mean, when they emit an alarm pheromone, it goes into the air and it gets spread around fast, so it's a strong. Think of a fire alarm. It's a sudden, loud noise. And then the fire alarm just goes off when the fire's out, or once everybody's, safe or whatever. So the same thing. These are volatiles, which means the alarm pherom goes out quickly, but what also happens is it dissipates quickly. In other words, so long as other bees are still stinging, they're re-ringing the alarm. Every subsequent bee that stings your glove,

that stings your suit, that stings your socks, Randy Oliver calls that getting your socks stable to your ankles. Every time another one stings you, a refreshed alarm pheromone. A refreshed alarm pheromone so the guard bees that are in the air on the wing flying around that's why they also you notice their movements pick up they move very fast and they're following the trail the scent of the alarm pheromone and they're starting to sting wherever something else has stung so here's the thing the other part of that is it also dissipates quickly so in other words just because you're out somewhere in the bee yard today and uh you your bee suit got stung by a bunch of bees you had one hot hive or something like that tomorrow would that same bee suit now still have enough alarm pheromone present so that the bees react to you right then?

I don't think they do. I think that the alarm pheromone, I think it's probably a good idea to have a backup bee suit. Or as Kelly mentioned here, somebody people spritz it with, you know, the vinegar, something like that. That probably wouldn't hurt to reduce that. Fresh water would mitigate it. I don't think it has to be any other harsher chemical to mitigate alarm pheromone so i think the next day you go out there and uh you'll find out that they're not they might remember you so if you've got distinctive markings on your suit you might get some guard beads but remember the ones that hated you the most are now dead so that's interesting and so uh the pheromones of course from queens is very different it's a high residue pheromone it's a slow release pheromone it's a direct contact pheromone therefore it's not as a

volatile. So the queen's mandibular pheromone that binds them all as, you know, related to one another and following this queen or collected around this queen and taking care of the colony that she's occupying. When she's on a tree branch or something like that, this is all through direct contact and then they just passes on and throughout the hive, B to B to B. And then of course they leave that on tree branches and that is long lasting. So it is very different. So alarm pheromone, queen mandibular pheromone is very different ones extremely volatile to get them all excited and defensive to protect the colony and then the other one of course is to attract everyone and let them know that hey there's a queen here everything's good so now that was question number six we are on to the fluff section so i have stuff i actually

have to do today because temperatures are dropping it's not a not a great day at all and we're not going to have a saturday to work or stuff anyway the fluff monday for me starting this monday where i am West Pennsylvania, stop all feeding. So if you've still got fondant on the hive, so I'm talking to my network of people around here. If you've got fondant on your hives, it's time to remove it, close up your hives. If you've got dry sugar, time to get rid of it. And so syrup feeding and things like that, pull it all because it's super time. And the reason I say that is because we had a bee breakfast at IHOP, which is one of my favorite places to give a bee presentation, by the way, the end. International House of pancakes.

They give us a room in the back, and we hold a bee eating back there and eat pancakes and everything else, and it's just fantastic. So, kudos to them. Anyway, people are spotting developing queen cells in their hives. So when you've got a hive, and this is why I'm going to encourage all of you to do inspections this coming week. And do landing board observations, make your notes, use your voice recorder in your pocket, however you do it.

make sure that each one of your hives has an individual identifier. So it's a number, it's alphabetic, whatever it is. If you're naming things and you can keep all that in order, good for you. I use valve tags, which are brass, and they go all the way up to like 500 or something. And you can make yourself sound like a bigger operation, because you might just get tags at start at number 60 and go up. And then you can say, yeah, it was in hive, 67, yesterday, and they're looking good. And somebody comes over to look at your apiary. and you have three beehives back there. So identify them uniquely so that you can make your notes.

And so you can keep track of them. And this is the week that I highly suggest that on a clear weather afternoon, so perfect timing is anywhere from noon till two, somewhere around there where maximum foraging is going on. You get in there and you do maintenance. So you look to see if there's been any damage. You pull frames that are no longer of any use

that don't have brood on them. So you push everything together. You keep everything under control. If you haven't cleaned out your dead outs yet, this is a great time to do it. Get those out of there. And the other thing is, remember to put your dead outs back together

as if they were occupied by bees because the story comes again and again. I had stored equipment on a rack somewhere. It got occupied by bees. There were a bunch of frames missing. So they built feral comb in between those frames. And now I wish I had had all the frames in there. So treat your unoccupied.

occupied hives, unless you're going to close them up completely and put them in storage, if they're out about where bees can access them, keep frames in them, push them together, just as if they were occupied by a hive, and you might be surprised how many swarms you pick up just out of pure happenstance. So keep those things in order, stop all feeding, get that stuff out of there, close up your inner covers and things like that. Now, organized deadouts for occupation, already said that. By the way, if you're breaking down a hive that you had a deadout, and it's seen its time anyway and you're going to take the hive apart. Save those frames of brood comb in particular.

Clean them up if they've got anything in them. Make sure there's no disease. How do you know if there's disease in it? Get this book if you don't have a mentor that can tell you things. This is called honeybees and their maladies and it's a field guide, right? So it's got pictures that will show you. If you are suspicious about something you see in the brood frames of your hive, that's a dead out in particular,

these are important go to extension. psu.edu these are sold by Penn State University this is the updated version so look at it one of them's got a golden colored cover this green cover is the latest edition so go there get a field guide to honeybees and their maladies if you're looking for something to give your favorite beekeeper get them that pocket-sized guide that's going to help you identify it so may make sure that they're clear and if they're just empty cells and you know that it was an abscond then you've got those frames save them and you can use those in your swarm reacher or in your swarm lures

your trap boxes your you know your swarm traps and things like that i'm not a fan of hive traps that don't look like beehives because you're going to have to transfer the bees into an actual beehive later why not use your older beehive equipment your swarm trap it smells right it the bees have been there before if you want to use swarm commander that's a good idea but if it's already got brood frames in there and they're empty that smell alone is going to attract scouts to check it out the other thing is um oh yeah the cover shot today you might have angry neighbors so i am giving you the beekeeper information that you can pass on to the bird lovers in your

neighborhood this is a hummingbird feeder there are a lot of different hummingbird feeders out there people love hummingbirds they are only found in the Americas by the way which I found very interesting here's the top of the feeder this is a nice big one you can Google it it's the hum zinger excel by aspects anyway it's patented and everything else and right under the lid it even tells you the correct nectar mixture For hummingbirds, one part white sugar, four parts water, do not use any dire coloring, 16 in ounce capacity, do not overfill. And it's the overfill part I want to talk to you about.

This is a reservoir-style hummingbird feeder. There are people, this will shock you. There are people that love birds and don't like bees. Sometimes bees are so desperate for syrup that they'll occupy hummingbird feeders and your birds won't be able to come to the feeder. So what we want to do as beekeepers is help educate the bird enthusiasts in your neighbor and maybe you keep and feed don't keep them but you feed hummingbirds my wife feeds hummingbirds that's why I get these feeders. Now all we have to do is fill this trough and keep up below this little edge right here. Keep it down at least a quarter inch from the clear edge there

and then the added height of this. See the difference? So now you're already at 3 eighths, half inch. I don't know of a honeybee that's got a half inch tongue. So you can fill this up like that. Put your lid on it and now the hummingbirds can get in and feed. There are tongues you'll see through the clear thing. You'll see the little tongues going down there.

The honeybees cannot reach it. Therefore the honeybees will not stake this out and won't chase off your hummingbirds. So you can get on your social media. It doesn't have to be this particular one. but any reservoir style where it's down here where you can create that critical distance or if they've got one that's got a central riser and it was a hammy down or it was a present and they just can't let it go and it's the best ever you can get them to take aquarium air tubing because it fits in these little holes and you stick little pieces of that

and now you create that distance that now the hummingbird can get its beacon there and then its tongue will still reach the nectar, but all you're doing is creating the minimum amount of space that your bees cannot get their proboscis in there and get their little tongues in there and get at that sugar water. Because once they find it and discover that it's good, they might mob it and displace the birds.

So that's my tip for that. Just create space between the bees and the nectar. So also we're planting stuff. So service berries plant to the water. wheat for me. So service berries are really good trees. They come in bushes, shrubs, and tree size. These will grow to be 30 feet high. They grow a foot a year. They're very diverse and fantastic for wildlife as well. So the berries are edible to people and your bees will get an early spring nectar flow and pollen from those. So the other thing is critters are out now.

Skunks, raccoons, possums, we have not seen bears yet, but please do not, if you're new to bekeeping, by the way. I know those of you have been doing it for a while have made up your minds. So I recommend and all my hives are well off the ground. How high are they 18 inches to the landing board? Because that's the most agile skunk that I've ever come across in all my time of keeping bees here has been able to reach 16 and a half inches. So by going to 18 inches, all these entrances are out of skunk range. The reason this is important, skunks are all over the place, by the way.

They move around at night. They don't seem to care about a lot of things. They're tough like little badgers. I like to keep them around because they dig out other things. They'll eat moles and voles. They will dig out yellow jacket in ground nest, which is perfectly fine for me. I approve of all those activities.

But if you're walking through your bee yard and you see a bunch of pushed down grass, you see some muddy spots there right in front of the landing board of a beehive, and then you look at the landing board of the beehive, and there are muddy little scratchy prints on there. You probably are being. visited by a skunk. So all you have to do is elevate the hive so that the entrance is at 18 inches. That's all. By the way, that's a comfortable height to be working your bees anyway. You don't want to

bend down and have your stuff sitting on the ground. And you also don't want your woodenware, your bottom boards and stuff like that, in direct contact with the soil or the ground because it's damp and that accelerates the deterioration of the wood. So it's just a win-win all the way around the block there. So for those you have bears in your area, as we do, make sure you've got some kind of bear protection up and running. So that could be something as simple as a electric fence, and they make solar-powered ones if it's a remote operation. And you can get some very good information about the bears what's going on in your area from the game commission. So make friends with those people. They know what's up.

There are troubled bears that actually have been fed by people. And then they come right up to houses, and they go right through, bird feeders and things like that they're totally comfortable this is exactly what you want is a great big bear three or four hundred pounds eating bird seed out of your bird seed feeder two feet from your kitchen window because somebody has taught them that food is available at people's houses we're going to talk about queen cells being cited so we want to get ready for that oh when you're doing your inspections for those of you who count mites and i hope you do count your mites bring your mite counting gear. This year I'm going to be demonstrating the CO2 counting method, which is a lot of fun.

I can't wait to do it because it doesn't kill your bees. It's a lot of fun. We get to look at the mites and we collect mites that are undamaged and then we can see them. See how they get around. CO2. So but while you're in there already doing something else is I'm a big fan of, you know, piggybacking all your activities together so that you're not into your hives all the time. Those who are new are often excited about your bees and you want to get in there every week or every five days. I went to look at someone's hive that was asking for help and everything came off so easy. In other words, the inner cover wasn't glued down with propolis at all. None of the frames were glued with propolis.

There were a lot of bees in there. And one of the problems was the fact that the bees seemed defensive. So I asked, how often are you getting into the hive? well they had been in them like two hours before I got there they were inspecting their bees on a daily basis that is too much inspection keeping your head please that I don't care how much you think your bees like you every inspection into the hive is destroying infrastructure so the the burr comb and the little channels that they've made in there you are not welcome inside the hive I don't care who you are So keep your visits brief, keep the impact on the hive as low as possible. If you're using a smoker, just enough smoke to keep the guards from staring at you.

You see a bunch of guards up there looking, watching every movie make a little light puff. They turn around, they go down and just stop puffing right then. That's it. You got control of it. You can use sugar syrup. So really hot, really dry days. places where smokers are a high risk. There are places, by the way, that are so hot and dry, and you're going to see more of that. They're so hot and dry that you cannot use a lit

smoker in your beehive. So now we have to look at alternate methods. Here is where an example of sugar syrup comes into play. And you mix that particular, I do this every spring. I mix up several one pint bottles of sugar syrup with honeybee healthy in a it. If you don't know what that is, look up honey be healthy. It's an additive that you put into your sugar syrup. And the reason I added is twofold. One, it's going to extend the sugar syrup all summer long. So there won't be any black mold. There won't be any bacteria growing in it. The other thing is that it adds a scent that your bees recognize as a resource. So I've been doing this for years this way. So on very hot, very dry days, hitting him with smoke just doesn't seem

very productive to me. It doesn't feel good, right? So then when you see the bees, when you open it up, now it's not the same. You don't want to spritz a bunch of that on your landing board because you can draw bees from other hives to come and check that out. And now you've got a feeding frenzy on the landing board. So when you're opening the hive, spritz towards the center of your frames. You don't want to spritz around the perimeter, the outside edges, because the bees will come up and and go to that and their proboscis is out right away and they're feeding right away. And I have a very good friend named Frank Mortimer who wrote a really good book about beekeepers and the bugs they keep.

And one of the things Frank wrote in there is do not spray with sugar syrup. So I wanted to talk to him about it. And his argument was in the book that bees can't clean the sugar syrup off on their own. And to me, that's okay. We just occupied a bunch of bees cleaning each other up and we're spruising that. lightly with the sugar syrup they're not going to store this it is not going to impact the actual honey that's going on in the supers and things like that so the argument is that well he's they've been doing you know look at cave paintings and

things like that they've been collecting bees with smoke for all these years and so I thought oh I'm just trying to explain the thought process here that I have because let me just tell you the people that climb those those ropes that climb those trees that burn fires to get honey and things like that they didn't have access to a plastic sugar squirder there wasn't any honey be healthy and if they had sugar syrup handy they wouldn't be risking their life to go up and get honey because it was just a sweetener for them so we have the advantage of sugar sprayers and you can use sugar syrup with honeybee healthy in place of smoke now if you've got a hostile hive

that's ready to eat you alive and stings everything on site if ever there was a time to you smoke, that's it. However, you've got a moderate hive that's semi-calm and you're just going to do an inspection to see how well they're loaded and things like that on a really hot dry day, sugar syrup works for me. Make your own choice, but I'm giving you the argument that maybe the reason they didn't use sugar syrup a thousand years ago is because they didn't have a spray bottle full of sugar syrup hanging in their garage. So you try it and you see how the bees react. And people that are clumsy with hives are going to get their bees mad no matter what's going on. So count your mites, clean out removable trays for those you have the inserts and stuff at the bottom. Often they get

forgotten. So if you've got flow hives, they've got trays under them. Bring out a clean tray, pull the dirty one, put the clean one in. I always recommend having multiple trays. If you've got core flute, those plastic inserts, pull those out and replace them with clean ones. Those are okay because the water just drips out of them anyway. But if you've got removable trays that will hold water, time to pull them and clean them and get the new clean trays in there. And the last part is I'm going to say,

have your swarm kits ready to go. People, it's going to catch you off guard. Somebody's going to say, hey, I know a beekeeper. And somebody's going to say, we have bees in our yard or they're in the school yard or something like that. Custodians are out there. They're going to hit them with the fire hose, whatever they're going to do. and you get to go and be a hero, but you want to be Johnny on the spot. You want to move fast.

So having your swarm collection gear in a tub, in some kind of Tupperware, something like that, ready to go at all times, will mean you get to be the first one to respond and collect that swarm. There is a new network of swarm collection registration. I want to say they started in Texas somewhere, and I don't know the name of it right offline. if I find it I'll put the link down below but it is for beekeepers everywhere to register as swarm collectors now their goal is to have a central place that anybody that sees a swarm can call

and it will have be swarm response people in your geolocation and then they register with this website and then they send you a text you say yeah I'm there it can go I'll be there so then when you do that they send you a response back and the person that reported the swarm that somebody's claiming it they're on their way and this prevents multiple beekeepers from showing up and responding to the same swarm now you got people saying around criticizing each other about you know since somebody else showed up ahead of time now the ones that show up later have to criticize the way they're doing what they're doing so don't do that be good get on social media let people know that you will collect swarms what happens is you end up with too many bees and before you know it you will not want those phone calls depending on where you're located so that is it for today if you have any questions at all please write them down in the comment section of this video you can also go remember to submit your own topic at the way to be.org and click on the page also marked the way to be here's the other thing we're talking about smokers i'm going to mention it again the smoker fuel the smoker pellets that link is also going to be down in the video description switch grass smoke

pellets. The feedback has been really, really good and it's for a good cause. So that's it for today. I hope you have a great weekend ahead and that you have time to get in there and get everything organized for your bees. Be ready for swarms and get your hives expanded just in time, pull the feed, let the bees get what they need. Thanks for watching.