The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 255 Swarms, Absconding, Splits and all that spring management brings.

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/bFlBX_skqtE?feature=share CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction 02:50 Pollen count, where to find that information. 03:57 My bees won't go above the queen excluder. 04:50 High Swarm Risk, what are some weather triggers? 05:39 Mite Treatment, newly installed packages and more. 08:01 How do I deal with deformed wing virus? 09:00 What do I do about chalk brood? 10:59 Packages VS Swarm Captures, Mite Loads. 16:57 Will you be making nucleus hives from swarms this year? 18:43 Using frame feeders as place holders while you wait for new queens to mature. 20:24 How to remove old brood comb without losing the brood that's on it. 22:59 Weird colonies without queens, but pollen is coming in, no eggs or brood. 26:39 Please explain the difference between deformed wing virus and K-Wing. 28:02 How do I stop swarming with the Demaree method? 32:20 Do you use mini mating nucs? 35:26 What's the time-line for verifying a new queen is working out after a split? 38:54 What's your advice, method, for splitting a hive? 42:25 Supercedure, should you allow it? 46:30 High Mites in Swarms, more than 100 counted. 48:34 Where can I get good breeder Queens? 49:30 What percentage of honey should be capped in a flow-frame before harvesting? 51:09 Are you going to try top-bar hives? 51:55 Do you have any tips for those beginning with Flow-Hives? 57:00 Why do Bees Abscond? 58:22 Should we feed a light hive now? 01:01:52 Laying queens are unable to fly, how do they abscond? 01:07:33 Package bees arrive during bad weather, what do I do with them?

So we are live, 4 o'clock. Glad for those of you who made it in time, you won't be sent to the office for a late excuse. So welcome, happy Friday. This is Friday, April the 26th, and this is back here, Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 255. And this session is a live chat because every last Friday of the month

is going to be live. So if you made it, you're great, you're here on time. Keith is here. Joe's here. I saw that Grayson is here. All of the people that are familiar to the way to be. So thanks, guys. I'm going to go ahead and start off with the questions that we received during the week. And then if anybody has a question, they can put it in all caps. So I'll see it because otherwise I just won't notice. I'll assume that people are talking to one another. If people pop in later, please just let them know if they have a question for me. to put it in all caps and I'll try to make sure to see it and there are time stamps with it.

So Mark Bidwell's here. Darren's here from the UK. All the regulars, Maggie's here. Thanks a lot, you guys. I'm going to get right into it. You probably want to know what's going on outside other than the fact that the Amish are running their horse teams through my woods. Not my woods. They're the woods to the east of me.

And they're hauling out all the old growth timber with their horse team. So I was out there staring at them and looking sad because a lot of the old growth trees are going away. That's habitat for owls and squirrels and everything else with the good news. The upside of that will be that, of course, new growth will be on the forest floor where it wasn't before because now the sunlight's going to get down there. So it is 66 degrees Fahrenheit outside right now and sunny. That's 19 Celsius, 6 mile an hour winds, which is super nice. 30% relative humidity.

If they were bringing in a lot of honey, which they aren't, that would be great because they could dry it down quickly. The UV index is six. I learned from our weather people that when you go outside, you run the risk of getting a tan. So the pollen count, this is important because people suffer from pollen allergies and they're not in favor of a lot of flowering plants, right? But the count right now is 10.1, which is really high.

And you know what? I look at the pollen count because what's that mean? The bees will be bringing in pollen. So I did a walk through the bee yard before I came in here. And sure enough, pollen loads are high. The 29th of April in the northeastern United States is going to be the highest day for pollen. Where do I get my information? There's an app for your phone.

Thanks for asking. It's called allergy plus. And you can find that, put it on your phone and find out not just what the allergy sufferers are suffering from. but what your bees will be bringing into the hive. So that's really cool too. There's a website you can check out. It's called pollen.com.

It's that simple. Paulin.com. So this is also going to be available later. If you have to check out, if you're going to miss this, of course, it will be in the feed, just like all of the other Q&As for Friday. But you have to go to Frederick Dunn, YouTube channel, and look at the live section. There's a little tab up there that says live and you'll see it there. So pollen's high, sun is high, what else? Risk of swarming is high. So no great surprise.

A lot of the questions that came in during the past week are related to swarm, swarming, swarm preparations, what should I do after you get the swarm and so on? So we're going to touch on that today. And again, wait, let me see. Is Bruce already have a question? My bees won't go above the queen excluder. Any suggestions? Well, maybe they just haven't filled out everything that's down below the queen excluder. thing is what kind of queen excluter are you using? Is it the metal kind with the wooden frame? That's my favorite. One of the ways you can get them up above the queen excluder, maybe you don't have fresh comb up there. Here's a tray that some of you won't like, some you will. And remember, it's just a recommendation. It's not the end of the world. You want your bees to go above

your queen excluder and they won't do it. Most people have a different size box. So the brood frames are deep and then the supers are mediums. One of the things you can do to get them up there, though, is to entice them with some leftover honey from last year. Or maybe there's some residue and some honeycomb from last year. But if you're a brand-new beekeeper, that's tough. They eventually should go up there after they fill that lower box. That's the best I can do for that one right now.

What else? Sunday and Monday are going to be the hottest days. That's your high risk of swimming. warming here in the northeastern United States. I don't want to focus just on that. But this rule generally applies. Warm weather, pollen available, nectar available, rainstorms come through.

After those rainstorms clear and you've got hot weather, that's when they seem to be waiting at the door to zip out there and swarm. So be ready, pun intended. So Sunday and Monday, 72 degrees, 77 degrees on Monday. That's 25 Celsius for those years. who don't care about Fahrenheit. Let's get right into the very first question of the day. Wait, here comes Maggie. Let me see.

Maggie says, would you might treat a newly installed nuke or wait? So Maggie, I'm going to make you wait because that's in our list of questions for today. So question number one. This comes from Brandon and Anthony, father and son. We received our package of Saskatrasbys on Sunday. and installed them immediately. We were told to pull the wooden plug on the queen cage Tuesday and stuff the marshmallow in there.

We did as well as took the opportunity to mark the queen. If I understand it correctly, are you ready? We should do a treatment within nine days after receiving the package, I believe. Or is it nine days from when the queen gets released from her cage? So we'll address that question number one, right out of the gate. A lot of people don't treat it all, and that's okay. If you trust your seller and you think there's going to be nothing in your packages that's going to bother you, that's fine. The reason I say don't treat right away, because you have an option.

If it's like acid, you can do the dribble method. You can actually spritz the package when they come. I like to wait, and that's because sometimes the queen and the package bees are not fully introduced, and they're really not ready to go. I don't want to put additional stress on them yet. So I like to hive the package. I like to wait until the queen starts to lay, and that's where this time frame comes in. So, for example, should we wait nine days after receiving the package or after letting the queen out?

It's after the queen is out, because it's based on when she starts laying eggs, assuming there's drawn comb, there are resources, and all the things necessary to stimulate the reproduction of new bees. So the queen will not lay eggs unless there's plenty of nectar coming in from outside. And of course, pollen has to come in because they're going to feed those bees after the third day. Because what happens after the third day? The egg she lays hatch. After that, this is why I like to rope it down to about eight days. And the reason is we don't want any of the new larvae to be capped.

Once they're capped, they are not going to be effectively treated by the exhalic acid vaporization, which requires your varroa destructor mites to be ferretic, or what we now call the dispersal phase, which means they're not protected. And so that should answer that question, and then you're good. Biatus says how to deal with deformed wings. Would it clean itself? Deformed wings are caused by a virus called deformed wing virus.

One of the top culprits for that, varodist structure mice. It's not that it cleans itself. It's that those deformed wing bees are giving you an indication that you've already got a virus spreading through your colony, but the time you're seeing those deformed wings, it's pretty heavy. I would do a mite count and a potentially mite treatment. So it doesn't clean itself. It's the fact that they are impacted by that. Also, by the way, for those who don't know, that's a virus that your honeybees can be spreading to flowers that are visited by bumblebees that later can also demonstrate deformed wing virus. So it is very important to get your bees

under control. And the number one concern for that is going to be a burrow-destructor mites that are carriers. Michelle Armstrong says, any advice for chalk brewed in three out of five hives, yes, replace the queens. Three out of five hives is a lot, but here's the thing. Chalked in a strong colony can present itself when there's moisture and everything else. Here's the thing. it generally cleans itself up, unless it's extensive. If we're talking full frames of chalk brood, you're in real trouble. If it's a part of the brood frames, it just has some chalk and they're pulling it out, and you see early in the morning you go out and see the dead dragged out onto the landing board,

they are actively cleaning it. So just keep them healthy, and I would recommend letting them take their course. If they don't seem to clean it up good enough, you will probably want to change out your queens. So you can do that by, oh, here's somebody else says. Any advice for chalk brood? We did that. Three out of five is a lot, by the way, but I've never had it stick around and be a major problem, and it should not be a big problem. We caught last week has built out 10 frames of new comb, Southwest PA. Joe Elam also says chalkbrood, what to do. Most people recommend replacing your queen.

But for me, just I let it run its course. If it's not a big deal when you're doing your inspections and there's a small amount of chalk brood, look into honeybees and their maladies. It's not a huge problem. I've never lost a colony to chalkbrew. So I'm going to go on to Brenda for question number two. This is Brenda from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I've been seeing a lot of people talking that catching swarms is the only way to start beekeeping and the swarms are much healthier, being that they survived winter and less diseases. I have bought packages from the southern states and overwintered them in Wisconsin and top our hives. A lot of northern beekeepers refuse to buy package bees from the southern states selling them. But now, if my bees swarmed and someone caught them, wouldn't they still be southern bees? Some are saying if you catch swarms, You don't have to even test or treat for mites. They are hardier, et cetera.

But I test and treat when needed. Also, feed when needed. They are telling new beekeepers this so they get a false sense of security. Plus, the bees they catch can be from an abscond from pests or diseases. Just want to warn new beekeepers that just because it's a swarm doesn't mean that they will automatically survive. Okay, so this comes up a lot this time of year. And here in the northeastern United States, northwestern Pennsylvania, for me, the bees that have come out of winter that collecting swarms, in my opinion, is going to be superior than bringing in bees from outside, particularly from southern states. And that's because often we have a lot of Italian lines, for example, that are not set up to do well in our northern winters.

And you are northern in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So you can, of course, bridge your own bees. So that comes from splitting and doing what's called walkaway splits. And this is the time of year to think about doing that. So collecting swarms this time of year, they've come from bees that have wintered. So even if, as Brenda says, what if it was a package that was installed last fall or last year and they made it through winter? They have demonstrated cold hardiness that they've survived winter. My experience has been that the bees that we get from the south in packages, and I haven't done that for many years, once you install them, if they're of the Italian line, they require a lot of maintenance to get through winter.

Those are the ones that were going through 70 pounds of honey in winter, whereas the locally adapted stock was not consuming so much, was brooding down in concert with what's going on outside in the environment. so they end up being much better. So when people are collecting what we call prime swarms in spring, those are going to be really good bees because they've come out of winter and the colony is big enough and strong enough to swarm. Now there's another reference here that says those might be absconding bees.

So bees that abscond, what does that mean? It means that those colonies have a situation inside the hive that the bees find not survivable. In other words, they're leaving it 100%. So some of you might be opening up your hives this spring and finding out that there's nothing in there, that the bees just left. What's going on when the colony was apparently strong in the fall?

Another thing that can happen is they can lose their queen. The queen can be so low functioning that they abandoned her. Or maybe she died and they cast her out. And when they do that, the abscond is actually not the colony taking off like a swarm they're spreading out and joining up with other colonies. And that's why keeping them healthy and keeping their mites under control, for example, is going to be really important at the other end going into winter because if they survive or just barely make it through to spring

and they have diseases with them, they're affected by mites, they're going to spread that to other colonies in spring. So understanding the health is going to be very important in managing your bees. So telling people, though, that, you know, collecting a swarm, that's a clean catch. I've heard both sides of that. I went to a presentation once where the presenter said that all swarms had foulbrew and that he would never collect a swarm. Now, I think that's extreme.

I collect swarms because when I see them here in adjacent to my vicinity, chances are there are my bees in the first place, so they've come from my colonies. So I already know kind of what's going on. It doesn't mean that you should turn a blind eye to what the swarms might be carrying around with them. There's nothing wrong with doing a broodistrictor might count on a swarm that's been installed. But here's the thing. I'm going to hit this again, just like a package. When you get the package, what do you have?

You have a colony of bees that you're going to install into a hive that is presenting themselves with a perfect opportunity for you to give them an exhalic acid vaporization treatment. And there's a lot of discussion about whether exhalic acid vaporization even works. And I'm just going to tell you that I put my reputation on it, that it does. And we verify that. We see the might drop. So when you've installed a swarm, I always say it, you have the opportunity. Now, if you're not, you don't want to be a, you know, a treatment, beatkeeper. That's your choice.

But I'm saying that you have the opportunity now when you have that swarm. and that queen goes to lay that you have up until they cap those pupa to get 96% efficacy with oxalic acid vaporization. So you have an opportunity to take them out. Get the mites. That's what I say. But if you know they're clean and you don't see any dead mites on the bottom boards, if you have bottom boards, it can be checked, the inserts and things like that. A lot of people don't have that opportunity.

but Brenda is right. Do not just assume that because you catch a swarm, that they don't have any hitchhikers along with them. Let me scoot up here. Tommy Chu says, do you plan on getting a few of your swarms this year for nukes and letting the rest go so you don't end up with double hives you actually want? Okay, and that's a very good question.

I do, I'm trying to get ahead of them. Last year, we did a great job of getting ahead of them, but some of them still swarmed. If I am doing an inspection and I find queen cells in production, I'm ahead of the game. If the queen cells are finished and they're capped, I'm too late. The chances are they've already swarmed. Your resident queen is out and about. So I always try to put those swarms or potentially swarming bees into resource, nucleus hives and I have a huge rack of nucleus hives waiting to go out in the

B.R. this year because it's extremely valuable, not just for me, it's an insurance policy because remember when they swarm, you're taking a queen out that's in lay, she's in production. We know her history because we're keeping logs. I know you are. And we put that queen into a nucleus and we've got an insurance policy because if the colony that sent out or cast that swarm, whatever term you want to use, Once they go out, if they don't get that queen mated, one of the queens that are in there, and they don't come back and start laying within a couple of weeks, you will have a queenless colony, and then you risk down the line laying workers.

However, if you find that that did not happen and there's no eggs being produced in there, and you don't think you've got a made a queen, what do we have? The resource hive that came from the colony, which means that they are related, that they're going to accept that queen right back and we can put her in there. But Fred, we put a bunch of frames in there. Now we have no place to put the queen that we took out back in. Good one. That's because I use frame feeders as placeholders.

I don't use frame feeders to feed the vs. I just stick them in there as a placeholder. This is an example of a frame feeder. I talked to these people at the North American Honeybee Expo Motherload products. I'm sure there are other companies that make them. These are placeholders. then once I know things are going and they're laying well and everything else, pop this out, now put a normal frame in there.

If things aren't going well, I go to my nucleus hive, pull the queen out, or if I want to give them another chance, I'll pull a, she's laying while she's in the nucleus hive, I can pull a frame of brood and eggs, put them in, pull this out, let them make another chance at making another queen. But now we're pushing things more than a month down the road before this colony is going to be building again. we can pull the queen with her brood frames right back in take this out put them where we took them out and again she would go in the middle at the brood area and then we're right back in production and we

haven't lost a lot so that's really good let's move on to jane done question number three these are heard on adam holmes by the way when we do these live streams because the questions are all over the place. If you don't know who Adam is, he's the one that puts the timestamps adjacent to the questions in order, and it's a pinned comment underneath all of the question and answer videos. So when you see Adam, do that post, please give him a thumbs up and tell him, we appreciate it. He does that for nothing. He just does it and has done it for many years. So Jane Dunn from Mendovi, Wisconsin. I have several frames in a brood box that need replacing. They have a lot of capped brood and eggs.

do I replace the frames without losing the brood? What do you think I'm going to recommend? I've been on this kick for a couple of years. They're super handy. I am not getting kickbacks. This is a double frame queen isolation cage. Let's say we have an eight frame brood box or a 10 frame. We're going to pull three of those frames out. Now they're the ones that we want to keep. right two of the frames that we want to keep are going to go into this so that's where your queen is queen has to go in this cage with another frame because by the way this provides enough space for her to produce thousands of bees over 3,000 bees per side of each frame and of course it won't be like this it'll have drawn come because you pulled it out there in production now the frames that you're

trying to get cleared out that you want to remove because they're old and maybe they're five years old or more, you want to pull them out because they're concentrating the pesticides from your area in the comb. But they have brood in them. So now the queen's in here, she can't lay eggs in those frames. What happens? Well, they run through their cycle. The brood emerges. So then once they're out and there's nothing, the queen can't get over there to lay new eggs, now we have empty frames. Now you can pull them without sacrificing brood because you put them in a queen isolation cage. They make these for singles or doubles. And that's, That's my very versatile tool.

That's also how you keep your swarms from leaving. Once you find out where your queen is, put her in one of those queen isolation cages. She's still laying eggs. You don't lose any time. And they won't depart and ditch you. So for Jane, that's my answer for that. And if you don't have one, it's one of the few things I will say to buy for sure. It is so handy.

You will not lose your swarms. You can organize. You can keep your queen focused. in one area while you clear out all the other frames and then you decide what you want to do with them without losing any of your workforce. It's perfect. Question number four comes from Deb. Is the ultimate answer to this situation to requeen or combine with a good hive? Are they going to abscond soon?

I've never seen this before. I have five hives. This is complicated. So stick with me. I have five hives. in Venango County, PA. Three of them are being normal. Two are being weird.

The weird colonies are at least two or three years old, and the queens have stopped laying eggs. Last year, they performed beautifully. There are resources in the hive. This is key. Pollin coming in. A reasonable number of bees, though, no drones, and a normal-sized queen who's just wandering around.

I watched one of them for a bit yesterday, her attendants did seem to be chasing her around, and she would stop, and they crowded her, and more attendants crowded in lots of touching. No one seemed angry, but the queen would stick her head in a cell for a while, and when she stopped, she seemed to be looking for something or trying to hide, and the cell was just, they were empty, nothing to eat, ready to lay in, but she never did. The whole colony is plenty calm. There's no brood when I checked last week.

Okay, for Deborah and people that find this. I was just out looking at observation hives before I came in to do today's Q&A. So here's the thing. This is a key moment. The queens are in there. Here's the thing. Unless there are resources coming through the front door of your hive, coming through the entrance, they will back off on production. The queen is not in charge of being able to produce the brood in the hive.

but they are sending the signal. These are the storykeeper bees inside the hive. They're letting those foragers know that they want pollen in there. So what's that mean? It means that somewhere in there, this is often hard to spot. There will be eggs present and you may not even see them. So it can look like nothing's going on. We have this queen roaming around.

What my bees did, they really let me down. But it's reasonable because of the weather conditions that we've had recently here in the Northeastern U.S. What happened? Things warmed up. Brood was building. I wrote it on my status board that I identified the queens where the brune patterns were, where they were laying eggs. And it was a full frame of eggs in this instance, right? I go out there today to check the progress because they should have capped those brood. Not only did they not cap the brood, there isn't any.

So I have pollen in cells and the brood is gone. So what happened was cold weather hit us, rain, hit is preventing foraging or greatly reducing foraging. The colony has to sustain the nurse bees, the queen, and probably a core area of some brood. But what they will do is so cannibalize your developing larvae to save the hive because they just can't feed them. Otherwise, they just dry out and die in the colony and they don't allow that either. So they actually do eat eggs and young larvae, or they remove them if they're developing, but they can't feed them. And they just drag them and discard them from the hive. I highly suspect based on this description,

queens are present, they're calm, no laying workers, no brood right now, watch what you do in the coming weeks. I think that that colony is probably going to recover and I hope that Deb lets us know what happens. My bees did the same thing. They were building up and then that's it. Next question. Let me first see if there's any. Okay, so Lindsay from Homestead Farms, Fred, can you explain the difference between deformed wing virus and K-wing virus? Okay, K-wing is usually, when you see the bees and their wings are spread out, there's also spread wing, K-wing. When it's K-wing, it's like their wings are locked open and they can't fold them back no matter what's going on. So the bees are walking around with their wings stuck out.

That's often caused by tracheomites, believe it or not. So it is very different from deformed wing virus. Often deformed wing virus, for those who have the colonies that demonstrated deformed wing virus on some of the bees, get out there at sunrise, look at the landing boards, and you may also see developing pupa that are dragged out and left on the landing board, and you just see shriveled up little strings where normal wings should be. And they often pull them out before they've even emerged. So when you see one out walking around, they have little, just little strings.

It's usually the leading, rigid portion of the wing that's intact, but it also corkscrews a little bit. And the rest of the wing, it looks like it just didn't develop. So the wings are deformed. That's why they call it that. Very different from K wing, which is indicative that B is under stress, probably tracheal mites. So, do, do, do. do. So Lydia says, how would you go about stopping your hive from swarming? Demeray split? Okay, the Demeray method, I don't practice it just because too much lifting, too much movement,

too much going on. If you want to stop your bees from swarming, because the demuree is about pulling the frames up, having to queen excluder, and they're up above, and there's lots of hive equipment manipulation. I'm not shutting it down or poo-pooing that. I'm just saying, I don't personally do it because I don't like to mess with things that much. However, what I would do, if, as I described before, you've got queen cells in production, the whole point is to stop the swarm, and it's up to the beekeeper to stop it. How do you stop it? We have to control and prevent queen movement, if that's what you're going to do.

So find the queen that you have when you're doing your inspection, and the reason we control them is because they're making preparations to swarm. How do we know they're doing that? if they're building queen cells. You have to look at every brood frame to make sure you don't miss queen cells if you're doing this method. Pull the queen on her frame into a nuke.

And you can, that's your insurance policy. Now that's much better than having that queen fly out with a swarm and losing up to 70% of the population of your colony. So now what we do, we've pulled the queen out, we've put her in a nucleus hive, and she's in that cage, right? Now we go through and we cut away every single queen cell that's in production. Once you do that, we have to verify that the rest of the brood go past the point when they can develop another queen.

So to do that, we have to convince them that there's a queen present so they don't start making new ones because we just pull their queen out and there's likely eggs still in there that they could use to build new queen cells because now they're in an emergency situation. you pulled the queen because you didn't want her to go. What am I going to tell you to use now? Queen mandibular pheromone, also known as temp queen. Those are noodles, $5. They're cheap. You put that in there. You zip tie it to one of the brood frames,

and it puts a pheromone in there that convinces them that they still have a queen. She's just not lame because it's just a synthetic noodle that makes them think, pheromone-wise, that a queen is present. so that suppresses two things. One, you won't have worker nurse bees that decide to activate their ovaries and become laying workers 21 days down the road. Number two, they won't start to make new queen cells from the existing eggs because they think a queen is present.

So we're messing with them. Now, you could goof this up. You could miss a queen cell. You could end up with another queen. So we want to take the time to make sure, remember, we're not losing time because the queen is in another nuke. She's in a frame. She's laying and probably a five-frame nuke is what I like to use.

What do we also need to do, preserve space to bring her back if we need to. So follower boards, if you want to use those, most people don't have them. The frame feeders serve as placeholders. So now once we get past that swarm stimulus period, now we can bring her back. And you haven't lost all of your workforce. Everything is a gamble. It requires careful manipulation. You're going to have to be on top of it. There is a new method that is easier than the Demeray method. In fact, they use the Demerie method, but there's no heavy box lifting. What do you think it's called? It's called the Keepers Hive.

So take a moment, write that down, or Google it, and find out what the Keepers Hive is. And it is a method of preventing swarms during the swarm season. Here in northeastern United States, state of Pennsylvania, we have two big swarm seasons. And so that's right now coming up and it's going to extend right into June. And then we have another one in August and September where we end up losing really good colonies of bees if we're not on them all the time. So that's the answer to Lydia. And PMG James 3K high is a mini mating nuke, a good way. of raising queens have you tried this okay mini mating nukes i'm not a queen producer okay i don't like

many many mating nukes if you've never seen them you can go and look at them at better be they're small i have them here's why i don't like them uh i'm not using them to finish queens and what it's for is if you're in queen production you produce a queen she's a virgin you put a bunch of nurse bees in there with her you put her in the mating nuke you take her out to a mating yard you wait for her to fly out come back and get mated and start to produce. Once she's made, you bring her back. Now you're going to install her in a package if you're selling queens

or you're going to put her in another nuke and let her grow out. I don't use the mating nukes. You just get out of hand on me and because I'm not that vigilant. And I would much rather just go ahead and put them in a nucleus hive and put that out, let them mate, let her come back, let her be in production. That becomes a resource hive where I can take her if she looks really good. and the production is great and the pattern is good and they're healthy and if they're chewing up drones which is my favorite thing to find they become ultimately another colony of bees all in their own

but the mating nukes that's queen breeding i'm not a queen breeder i just allow my colonies to make new queens uh when i need them and stuff like that so let's see what else are we doing here today everybody's talking about swarms had a swarm go back to the high guess it was just a fire drill. By the way, you know what fire drills are? That's from Nancy Taskar. Fire drills, we used to think, yeah, the queen's flying out with the whole group. They changed your mind and they come back.

Let me tell you what I think really happens. And the reason you see it is because, you know who doesn't leave? The fire drill is your colony is trying to swarm. Who do you think in the hive is still doing her makeup, putting on heels, refusing to go, the queen. She doesn't leave the hive. So the swarm goes out. They bivouac on a branch. The queen doesn't show up. Now they have to come back, go inside, and find out why she's not ready to leave. Sometimes she's too heavy. She doesn't feel like flying yet. They have to exercise for a little more. So what will ultimately happen, though, after a few of these, what we're calling fire drills,

it's just a swarm without a queen, they eventually will have a queen that will leave. So that's your warning sign. That, if you want to stop them from taking that queen and taking off, this is your chance to get in that hive, find a queen, put it in an isolation cage. If you want to keep them, and all those workers will come back to the colony they departed from,

and now you've got your queen in a nuke because she was about to leave anyway. She just wasn't ready right then. so okay so ross millard can you give us a timeline of verifying a new queen after a hive swarms or you split can you give a timeline okay so you're going to hear a lot of things about that because a queen once she emerges from her cell she has to mature sexually and physically before she can fly before she can mate then she has to come back now the word on the street is eight or nine days for that to happen after she emerges from her queen cell. She's being fed. She's exercising. Sometimes I've been told that queens, I haven't seen it, but I've been told that queens even do some

orientation flights sometimes. They test their wings a little bit. So now let's say at that ninth or 10th day, she's capable of flight. So you mark your calendar. She's capable of flight. Do we have drones in the area? Do we have suitable conditions? Do we have a bunch of rainstorms right now? kind of not good for the queen to fly out. So let's say within 14 days, this is what I like to do, 14 days I go in and see if there are eggs. And they're nine times out of 10 are eggs. If they aren't, it's time for us to do what?

Go to a resource hive because we lost the queen for one reason or another. The other thing is, why two weeks? Why not three weeks? because remember at 21 days, that's when you could potentially have a laying worker in the absence of a queen. It takes them three weeks to finish maturing. In other words, activating their ovaries.

They don't have as many ovaries as the queen does, but they become drone layers. And that's what we're trying to stop. So that's why we want to verify that second to third week. By the second week, you'll know what's going on, and that's where your resource size comes in. If she's not laying about the second week, you're going to have to restore your queen.

So that's kind of the thinking behind it. But here's what happens. You know, some people look and there's eggs in 12 days, which is pretty darn good. Some people get eggs in 10. So the question about the maturing process and her being viable for mating and making that flight to the drone congregation area and everything else, we won't even talk about how many people are going to, or how many drones. she's going to mate with the drone congregation here.

I see in the comment section, hi, it's Quinn. So for those of you who don't know, if the supervisor is in the house, he might actually come over here and talk to people if you really want to hear from an eight-year-old. All right, so, Mark Bidwell says there's a new study out, Better be blue-green algae may benefit deforming virus

via modified genes. I don't know anything about that. what I'm always going to say is whenever there's a study, you want to check it out yourself. Read it. See what it says. See what's going on. Let's move on again. Hi from England and in England.

Nancy Taskar did not find a queen. Okay. If there's no queen, we need to get one in there. Sorry to say. I thought there was a queen. I know you guys are going to try to talk to Quinn in the comment section. Good luck. Okay, so here's from Madeline Bowden.

Do you have any advice on splitting a hive? I want to add a hive to another property of ours. Yes, I do walk away splits because they're a lot of fun. And you can't fail. I don't even have to find the queen. If it's a colony that's really strong, and there's at least, let's say it's a 10-frame brood box. This is, we're coming up on the next couple of weeks,

it's a perfect time to do it. So you get a chance to, first of all, get your nucleus hive all set up. That's my favorite thing to split into. If you have the big box, my favorite nucleus hives come from Apame. They are the six frame, seven-frame nukes. I'm getting, yeah, six-frame nukes.

And those are the top-performing ones. they're expensive. You can get the five-frame standard deep Langstroth nukes. Those work really well. What I do is find a colony that's doing well. They're well populated. If it's a 10-frame colony, I expect to see six or seven of those 10 frames actively engaged in brood production. Now do I have to find the queen? If I can find the queen, I go ahead and pull the queen out, because now I get a new queen for the old existing colony. I take the new queen out with two frames of brood. and I put her into the nucleus hive and I move her to the new location. Now, you want lots of capped brood.

The reason is bees that are in the hive that are capable of flight that you pull with you will often fly back to the original site because they have the home team advantage, which is why I like to take the existing queen and leave eggs, larvae, larvied, lots of capped brood. Now here's the thing. You can take a tub with you. It could be a hive butler tote if you want to do that. that or any kind of smooth plastic tub take a few frames and shake them into the tub some the foraging bees bees that have been outside that fly around will zip right out of there and they'll

zoom around over your head and they'll be unhappy because of the way you're treating them and then they will eventually go back in the eye you'll find a big cluster of bees in there that seem a little confused in fact they're in no rush to get out of the tub you just dumped them into dump those into your nucleus hive because those are young nurse bees that are going to care for the new colony that you're establishing with your queen or if you're just pulling eggs because you couldn't find the queen eggs and larvae in both hives that guarantees that one of them has the queen but they also have the potential to make a new queen from the eggs that are there and so the new hive that we're making always gets an extra shake of nurse bees set them off wherever you want i actually put

them right in the same apiary. I know that you will hear frequently that you have to take them really far away, that you're going to lose all the bees. I push a little bit against that because what is emerging from the frames that I just took over and established my new hive with? I have nurse bees coming out that have never been outside that hive. They don't know where they belong. And if they seem to struggle a little bit, you can feed them if you want to. But they tend to do very well. So that's what it's called a walkaway split. That's what I do. That's what I do. So what else are we looking at? Do to do to do to do to do we have PMJ James 3K hi another question

Thank you for the last answer you're welcome should I allow a supersedger to take place or should I replace the queen myself Due to age now this is going to be interesting for people that are looking at your brood frames Supercedure how do you even know that that's happening because where they're making the queen's sell is usually right in the middle somewhere of your brood frame. Swarm cells are usually on the fringe, on the outside. You'll see them on the ends along the bottom. If they're building a queen cell right on the middle, it's either an emergency replacement or a supersedeer because something is wrong with the existing queen. So should I allow that to take place or should I replace the queen myself? Now, that is really interesting.

If you've got a queen that's currently laying, depending on her performance through the years, if she is a top performer and you've got eggs produced by that queen, I would allow them to make another one. I also don't like the OTS method, which is on the spot queen rearing, which means you look, you see an egg and you take your hive tool and you damage the cells around it, encouraging the bees to turn that egg into the queen's cell. I prefer to let the bees find out because there are people that have done that, by the way, and then had them produce a queen cell from another egg that they didn't even pick out. So I like to let them choose the egg that they're going to produce their queens from. And eggs are best. Brand new hatched larvae are also okay, but the eggs are best.

And the nurse bees will know and select the ones that are best for them. Because even when it's just an egg, they smell and they understand kind of the progeny of that egg. They also know if they want it, what its genetics are, how close or related it is. Sometimes if you get a queen, for example, that made it with some drones that were too closely genetically related, the nurse bees police those. They eat those eggs. So allowing the bees to pick whatever they think is best, if you've got the eggs, that's the good way to go. Again, I can't stress it enough.

Nucleus resource hives are fantastic because you can then know their performance, know how well they're doing in those nukes. nukes, and you can go over there, you can collect the queen, you can bring her, and you can introduce her into the colony that you're going to pull a poor performing queen out of, or, for example, they're starting to supersede her. If you have those resource hives, I would not allow the supersedes cell to progress. I would cut it out. I would put a queen that I know her kind of performance and behavior, and then I would put her in and let my nucleus hive produce a replacement queen from the eggs that I'm leaving

behind there. I know this is a lot. That stuff works. Here's the low stress for me is that it doesn't, I don't depend on them making it. And that's probably exactly why they do make it. I do that and I walk away. And then I come back in 14 days to see of pollen's going into the colony that we were hoping produced a new queen.

And if it is, voila, we're good to go. How much pollen should be going in? If it's like 11 o'clock in the morning, 1 o'clock in the afternoon, 10 loads of pollen per minute. That means you have good stuff. going on in there, you don't even have to check on them after that. So that's it. Allowing the supers seizure to take place entirely depends upon resources you have available and what other options you have.

You can, of course. This is the day of getting on the internet and buying in a queen. I did that last year. I bought in, because I wanted to play around with them, Carniolan queens. And they did okay. So there's that. Let's get to question number five,

which is from Chris. in Roseburg, Oregon, like many of your followers, it is swarm season. Big surprise. Quinn, you can come right in. And last week, I caught two large swarms, and yesterday I hit them with exhalic acid vapor. Both swarms had a very large drop of 100 plus in the pan. I will be treating all swarms in the future, and I would recommend a mite treatment for all swarms for art of cap.

So there you go. Chris collected a swarm. Swarms that we think, you know, are free and clear of mites. A hundred plus mites dropped from that treatment. So for those of you don't know, this is my grandson, Quinn. He is in his second year of being a real beekeeper. So you have your own bees now, right? And so we're planning on transferring my. We're planning on transferring my, um, come closer so I can hear you. this current colony to my flow hive colony when we build that we'll keep you updated. We might make a video and show you guys the transferring bees and building the flow hive. So if you didn't hear that, Gwen collected a swarm last year, so we got his swarm ahead of time.

We put him in old hive equipment, so we're going to be replacing his current beehive, which is coming out of winter it's nice and strong how do we know your hive is nice and strong like the first time we checked we it was water wall honey so wild the wall honey said a lot of resources going into winter what do we see now when we go out there pollen coming in like every single honey be lots of pollen so they're building fast we're going to swap that out uh Quinn had the option to pick any kind of beehive that he wanted he did a lot of chores for that he had to clean he had to organize he has to mow the yard and do all these things. And he chose a flow hive.

Do you want to explain why you made that choice? It's my favorite brand. I mean, they have like everything. I mean hives, hive tools, B-suits, we have like everything that you need. Okay. So you got your stuff from Flow Hive.

And he is selling his honey too. I think you have 100% selling success rate if you can get people to come to the door. Yeah, people come. 100%. This is the honey boy in his neighborhood. He sells stuff. Now, we do have a question here from Brenda.

Where do people buy breeder queens? Bob Benny gets breeder queens. I can't seem to find a source for them. The reason is breeder queens are generally very expensive. And what you want to do is contact different commercial beekeepers that buy them in. And find out you can spend $600 bucks on a breeder queen. If you're not producing hundreds of new queens, for example, that may not pay off if you're going to really get into it.

I've never purchased a breeder queen. I can tell you one thing. If I did, I would introduce her into my hives. Most people do a lot of queen production from those. If I was going to put in an expensive queen, I would put it in a queen introduction cage. So I would not let my bees kill that queen. So what do we have here? Hey, Queen.

Sorry. This is from Darren in the UK, which is Great Britain, by the way. Do you have a fabulous job, beekeeping? Well done. Okay. So I'm saying, well done. Don't you dare try to do an English accent. Okay.

This is what percentage of capped honey in a flow frame do you wait for before harvesting that frame? I like to see the whole frame covered. but if they get because when you open the back of a flow hive uh you can see the frames on the ends of them so as we know they start capping through the center and then they work their way out to the edges so when you see the caps on the very end uh that's when you're 99% sure you can also open it and look down between them if you want to but uh that's pretty much it they're capped sometimes they get up in there and consume some of the honey right through the middle frames and you may not see that i don't like to pull flow frames out to do the inspection because they've done a lot of work to seal up the joints between the frames and everything. And so that's the whole point. But once you see them on the outside, they have that outside window. So you can look at that.

Mine build from the eastern side first, which is warmest in the morning. And then they finish out with the western end last. So it's pretty interesting. Brenda says, excited to see Honey come out. He wants to turn the crank. Turning that crank is not as easy as you might think. It was a nice hot day. Here we go.

So we're in the fluff section, by the way, I think. Make sure, again, if you're collecting a swarm, you do have an opportunity to 100% knock down those for omites. Here comes Brenda. It says, are you still going to try top bar hives? It's in my plan. I just have a lot of things going on, but a top bar hive is easy to build.

I think we will try to try that out this year, particularly since the apiary is full of bees, we have a lot of surplus. The thing is you can't just transfer frames from one colony into another hive. We have to actually install a swarm. So I think to populate a top bar hive, this is a time of year to do it. They're very easy to build. So I think we're going to get, do you know what a top bar hive is? Yeah, I didn't think so.

It is a beehive. Okay. So this is from Crullfath. what tips you have for someone about to start beekeeping who owns a flow hive too already. I'm going to say what you'll probably hear from everybody. Get a mentor, join a bee club, get some in-person training and get somebody to walk you through. It would be very helpful if you could connect with somebody who also has a flow hive. But here's the thing.

Your flow hive is no different from any other beehive when you're starting out. because you're just going to have a brood box. It's going to be used the same as any other brood box. The only thing that changes is later when you're trying to get your honey from it. So for me, I change the configuration where I am. I use the deep brood box and I have a medium honey super first. Then when those are full, the flow super goes on.

I haven't had to use a queen excluder that way. And without the queen excluder, I find the flow super fills much faster. I've even had them successfully do that. in the first year with a swarm install. The difference is the size of the swarm that we're putting in there. You can fill a deep brood box with a prime swarm in spring. So we're looking for that. So let's see what else do we have?

Thank you for that. Answer a second question. What breed of queens do you use and why? Okay, so my queens are mutts. They are breeding right here. So when I make splits, when I allow them do walkaway splits and things like that, I have locally adapted stock, and every time a bee flies out, the queen flies out, she mates, I like that to happen in spring because I want that party winter stock.

If I'm buying Queens in, I buy them from the Bee Weaver family and their Bee Weaver Queens. Those are Survivor Line stock, and they have done really well for me in the past. I had a state bee inspector come out and go through all my hives at the time that I was running nothing but the weaver stock and I had zero mites. That's pretty big considering I was treatment free then. I had to change later because I have more local beekeepers around me and my zero mite status didn't hold very well. Thanks to Ross Wagner for that. Yeah, $3.00 that buys this cup of coffee. So, if you belong one, Colin Sophily. Yeah, there are lots of guidance. I have a whole,

If you want to understand, if you've never heard of a flow hive and you want to understand how they work and things to consider, if you go to the way to be.org and look at the page mark the flow hive experience, all the videos are there from assembly, putting them together and how they work. And of course, how much honey you get out of them? That's the most common question to get. How much honey can you get from a flow hive every year? Well, that's widely variable. But each full frame, if it's capped, is half a gallon of honey. And it is a great way to collect honey from your hive. Do do. Maggie wants to know, have I tried the modified Ukrainian hive setup? I have not. There are so many configurations. Ukrainian hives? Ukrainian hive setup. I have not tried that.

Would you recommend a flow hive for Colorado? The flow hive works. You have to configure it for winter. So I've also done that. On that page, there are modifications for your flow hive. for your flow hive for winter. Keep in mind it comes from New South Wales. They only have a deep. They go straight to the honey super and they have no dearth year round. So they don't have a heavy winter like we have here. So it all depends on how you configure it so that your bees come into

spring this time of year, heavily populated with a great workforce. And again, it's no different than other supers. But remember, it's a deep. So a flow super takes a long time to fill because it's just like having another deep on top of your hive, even though it's a seven frame, which are flow frames, or a six frame, which matches the Langstroth 8 frame. So strong colonies, highly productive colonies, this is why I recommend for people that want to save a little money on it, just go ahead and have a standard Langstroth hive, 10 frame or 8, whatever your preference is. And then just buy the flow super six or seven frame. And then when you find a colony in your apiary, that is really a top performer that is bringing in a lot of nectar that is building honey fast,

that would be the one that I would put the flow super on. And that's what I used to do in the beginning. I didn't buy a full flow hive. I just bought the flow super. And then I found whatever colony was strong, and I put it on that one. And it was very good. It performed really well. I also don't do anything to prep the frames for the bees.

I don't roll wax on them. I just put them on a strong colony, and the bees go up in there and use it. To do to do to do. Shane Ziggies bees says, Fred, how do bees abscond? What mechanism do they use? Bees can abscond for any reason when they find that that hive is too stressful for them. A beekeeper can cause bees to abscond. You can annoy your bees so much by invading their space so frequently that eventually they just depart.

absconding is all the bees leaving. That is the ultimate insult to the beekeeper. The other thing is disease. Sometimes there could be disease in that colony, and the bees are dwindling, and they just depart. Sometimes it can look like an abscond when really what's happened is you've lost your queen. If you don't have a queen in a colony, you have nothing but workers. You end up, of course, with laying workers.

You'll notice the numbers dwindle fast. We've demonstrated that these bees will drift to queen-right colonies in large numbers. So your workforce will depart the colony that's dwindling, and it can start to look like an abscond. And then you end up which has a little pocket of tiny drone. And those are laying workers that just didn't leave and they're getting older and they just dwindle. So absconding can happen for a lot of different reasons. And it's rare. You know, I've not had many colonies abscond ever.

So the Morris Homestead says, should I feed a light hive? right now, Western New York area. Okay, so Western New York, you're in a similar climate to what I am. All of your hives. Now, a light hive, let's talk about that. This is a philosophical difference in how you're going to manage your bees. When you look at the landing board, are they capable of flying out and coming back? Is there lots of foraging going on?

And are they bringing in pollen and things like that? This is your judgment call. If they're capable of flight and have enough population in the hive, to go out. They are just now at the point where dandelions are blooming across the fields. They're getting resources in. Trees are blooming and they're bringing those in. Apple trees are about to blossom. Cherry trees are about to blossom. So what can happen is they'll build on their own. They just won't build as fast. So it depends on what you need to do. Now on the flip side of that, if you're looking at the landing board and they're lack energy and they're coming to the edge and they're toppling out or

they're not flying strong, a little sugar syrup can turn that entire colony around. So it's a judgment call. I would not right now open feed because some people have super their hives are ready. And we don't want sugar syrup going in and becoming part of what should be honey from flowers only. So if you're going to feed, feed inside the hive. Look into bee butlers. If you're going to put syrup on there on top of your inner cover, with a quart jar and feed sugar syrup that way because your bees come up into this area to feed from the bottom. When you close this off, the bees do not have access to this area so you can swap out the jar of sugar syrup at the same time. You can give them a light syrup one to one or a little lighter and that will give them the energy to keep going and they shouldn't be storing it because they're starving. So if you have a really light hive and they're starving out, that's it.

So feed a light hive. All my colonies are light right now except for the ivory beehive is a top performer, 15 frames full. They're nuts. The layens hives are full. The long laying stroth hive is full. Quinn's hive is full. They're overproducing.

But I do have some light hives. And I think that they're just going to catch up on their own. We have had wonky weather this spring. and they're just catching up on it. So, my bees class, not to get one for Colorado, but I really want,

oh, so this is Madalena again. Thank you, Flower Street Farms Bees. I was told by the business, oh, so you're talking amongst another. Okay. Yeah, flow hides work, different places. It's just, it's bees.

It's not, the flow hive is not different. If you can get a high honey yield, the type of hive that you, use is going to be secondary. If you've got the colony strength and they're going to produce a lot of resources for you, you will get a couple of gallons of honey off of a flow super. So what else we have? This might be it. We're in the fluff section here. I just want to run down this really quick. I highly recommend if you're trying to control what your bees are doing, if you've lost a queen and you want a placeholder while you order one in, always have the temp queen,

which is queen mandibular pheromone in your freezer, ready to go. You can use it to direct swarms. We're going to play a lot with swarms this year. I'm really looking forward to that. We want to try out the swarm reacher. The results on the swarm reacher have been mixed from viewers. Predominantly, people say it's successful. Others have not liked it because it didn't clamp and hold it well enough. So the swarm reacher is something we're going to play with this year. We're going to be getting swarms with that. And we're going to see how that goes. And we're going to try to control them. So here's the thing with rainy weather coming up ahead and warm weather following it. This has been my experience through the years that right after a storm or a series of stormy days,

as soon as the weather clears, as soon as the temperature gets up there, that's when you end up with swarms. And my number one swarm spotter is standing right here. I can't believe he's not on the bee yard right now looking for swarms instead of standing here looking at. Well, there is no storms because they're not swarming this time of year. Not this time at this time right now. Oh, so Shane Ziggies bees says Fred, sorry, but I understand many ways that bees can abscond. My question is, how can they do it with the queen laying? The queen that's in lay just can't. If she left that hive, she would end up on the ground.

She's easily destroyed by predators. They generally don't do that when the queen is in lay. She just can't fly. So sometimes you'll find the queen dead or dead in front of the hive, something like that. But it would be extremely rare. They can't make any ground. So they would ultimately have to leave their queen behind, or you'd find a clump of bees in the grass.

even when a whole colony leaves and if the queen ends up 10 feet in front of a hive in the grass that's where you find a softball size clump of bees around her and the rest of the swarm is just gone because they make several attempts to get her to go with them

and when they don't they just abandon the queen and they join other hives, other colonies. Thanks for the donation. And from, thank you, Quinn, from Maggie and gave us $19. We do appreciate that. And yeah, he does know a lot, not a lot of knowledge for this master bee keep. Please, don't do that.

Okay. So, Shane Zicki says, so they have to trim down before swarming. Yes, this is the practice. When the bees decide, and the bees are the deciding factor for everything, other than, as I mentioned before, the queen can refuse to go somewhere. She can also refuse to enter a hive that you've tried to put them in. But when they've decided they're going to replace the queen, that's when at the same time that they are producing queen cells. So when they do that, they change the nurse bees, changed the diet that the queen is being fed. So they're leaning her out.

And when the queen is not being fed the full complement of proteins and amino acids and everything that she needs to produce eggs, she starts to cease egg production. So then she starts to lose weight. and as she starts to lose weight, they also don't let her take a break. They harass her, and they move her around the hive. So she's exercising all the time. They're making preparations for that queen to leave. And so, yes, she has to lose weight or she can't fly.

And we've demonstrated that when we've taken queens out to be marked, for example. If you took a queen out of a hive and you were going to mark her, she's in lay. You can put her in a jar like this. And you'll see the queen trying to fly up and walk up the side of the jar. can't. She's so heavy because her eggs are in full production. And so that's what happens. And so the bees alter her diet. They exercise her and they make her prepare to depart. And then the moment that they get into a new colony, they give her an enriched diet again and she goes back into production once the resources support eggs and new larvae. Do to do to do. So I think we might be

wrapping this up. So just know that, well, first of all, thank you all for for being here today. Thanks to Quinn for popping in. Spending a touch with us. Before he goes out and has to do all the chores around here. And we need to look at things. What did you think about? Did you see the horses or were they gone?

I only heard chainsaws and the guy living logs in the field. Okay. So thanks a lot, guys, for being here and attending the live. Everything will, of course, repost later on because it goes for a processing and everything else, and then it will be out there. And of course, next week we'll be back to the regular. And let me just tell you, coming up on Tuesday,

there's going to be an interview that you're going to want to see. And I want to talk to you about a book that just came out, if you don't know about it already, Dr. Tom Seeley. Dr. Tom Seeley put out boisterous piping hot bees and boisterous buzz runners. So 20 mysteries of honeybee behavior solved. If you don't know who Tom Seeley is, he's the author. of the lives of bees, the honeybee democracy, and a lot of other foundational research publications

that people like me really count on and have read. So that's out there too. If there's a last minute question for me, I will stick around for that. Something that says, I am getting packages. It is going to rain. How long can you hold and at what time? Oh, that's a good question.

If you receive your package of bees and the weather turns terrible, keep your bees cool and just give them spritzes of water to make sure they have something to drink and keep them in the dark we want to reduce that activity and stress and as soon as you have the opportunity to hive that package go ahead and do it but with bad weather coming and if it's not good basement's a good place and in the dark it makes a big difference and just make sure that they've got water if they need it so that's it sugar syrup would help well the package we generally don't. They should come with sugar syrup already in there. Okay.

Hopefully they're fed. All right. And hopefully they're fed. Yeah, hopefully they're coming healthy through the mail and they're right side up and everything else. So thanks a lot, everybody. I hope you have a fantastic weekend. Thanks for joining us today.