The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 256 strong nectar flow and swarms.

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/zyAgdC5eHSs

So hello and welcome happy Friday. Today is Friday May the 3rd and this is back here to be keeping questions and answers episode number 256. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. Welcome. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please look down in the video description below and you'll see all the topics listed in order. Let me give you a fair warning. It's all going to be about swarms predominantly. There are some other things tossed in there and I have a shout-out. today to another YouTube channel but you're gonna have to wait till the end for the fluff for that I know you want to know what's going on outside 66 degrees Fahrenheit and that dropped 10 degrees in the last hour because apparently we have a weather shift four mile power winds 64% relative humidity it's important to track the relative humidity because that kind of keys us in on how much bearding there might be and there's a lot going on yesterday. Today, not so much.

Nectar is coming in. The pollen counts are high. If you want to know what the pollen counts are in your area, look at the allergy alerts. And you'll find out because they go hand in hand. So if you want to know how you can submit a question of your own, please visit the website, the way to be.org, and click on the page The Way to Be.

You can also Google the Way to Be podcast, and you can listen to this rather than watch. you doing chores mowing driving your car something like that we don't want you to wreck so the entire series is a podcast the topics that we're talking about today we're submitted over the past week i think that pretty well covers it so we can jump right in uh if you do have a question and you're looking for online fellowship or it's midnight you have nothing to do and you just want to know what's going on please google the way to be fellowship and you'll find it on facebook group of happy people talking about bees at all levels no question too basic no topic too sophisticated so

24-7 all over the world you'll find someone there who can answer your questions or you can share some information if you have some so question number one comes from gregg from monita virginia i hope i said that right i've heard in the past that you should not put newly extracted frames back into a hive seeing there is uncapped honey and in the hives does it really make a difference? I transferred a large colony out of a standard 10-frame hive that already had two medium superseded to the new long-lang hive that I just got built.

I noticed 10 frames of full-drawn honey. I went around to other hives and found the same thing. I'll be extracting this coming week and do not have extra frames and really could use the extracted ones right away. Can I? So anyway, here's the thing. We're in a nectar flow right now. I'm in the northeastern United States, state of Pennsylvania.

And there's lots of birding going on. And what do I always look at to see what's going on out there? I look at my observation hives and the cells are wet, which means they're bringing in nectar in abundance. Now this kind of for a brand new beekeeper gets exciting because it looks like they're filling everything in. So what should you be doing? If they're running out of room, you should be supering, especially, before they're starting to cap this honey. But here's the thing, they take up twice the real estate with nectar that they will have when it's finished honey. Sometimes people get excited and they look

and they see that the whole frame, if they're doing an inspection, full of honey, really it's nectar. It's what's referred to as unripe honey because it happens so fast. And then later they'll check it and it looks like it only has about a half or a third of what they thought they had before.

And what's really happening is they're drawing it down and they're moving it around. Those storekeeper bees are busy. So the question here is about, and I like the idea, by the way, you have choices when you are managing your bee hives. If it's a Langstroth hive, we're stacking boxes, right? If it's a horizontal hive, this is very easy to do. So we'll start with the vertical hives. So you've got a deep and a medium. That's my configuration going through winter. And we have another question later on today asking if the medium is enough to sustain your bees

here in the northeastern United States, it is for me. But one of the things we can do, commercial beekeepers are the ones that tend to stack box on top of box, on top of box, and so on. And the reason they do that is because they're doing everything in a much larger scale than we are. Backyard beekeepers, we can pull the super that's full of honey, provided they still have resources, never, even though there's the promise of a great nectar provision coming towards your bees, never leave them without honey, no matter what time of year it is. So when you're supering, rather than continuing to stack boxes higher, which is very hard for people

to lift, by the way, you can take them off and harvest it and leave a super of honey on to get them through in case we have, which is what we have going on right now, the threat of rain coming up over the weekend. So because they're brood building, they're nectar harvesting, they're bringing in pollen, and what can happen is you get rain and all these wet cells, these open uncapped cells of nectar, unripe honey, gets consumed rapidly. So you could also, those you have scales, brood minder scales, things like that, you'll see a rapid increase in weight, several pounds a day. And depending on the colony, the size of it, you could be 10 pounds a day, for example. So quite a bit comes in at a high rate. But so what happens is then you all of a sudden it gets consumed,

metabolized, and the weight goes away. So you harvest honey and you want to put the frames right back. I've never heard of do not put your frames of extracted honey back on the hive. What I always tell people is put it back on the same hive that it came off of. And the reason that you do that is we don't want to take the risk. If there happens to be some disease, heaven forbid, inside one hive, it can be transmitted through honey. Even American fowl brood can be transmitted through honey. So putting it back on the same hive that it came off of, I think is a really good practice.

Plus, it gives them new space to put new nectar, which since we're in the middle of a nectar flow, harvesting capped honey and cycling frames right in and out really quick actually works for me personally. So here's the thing, here's what I like to do. I put them in hive butler toots. I know people are tired of hearing about hive butler toads, but I'll mention it. And there's a discount, Fred, 5.

And I get nothing for saying that. So here's what I do. An extracted frame goes into the hive butler toad. Then when you go out, the reason I'm mentioning this is I don't want you getting into your hive frequently, right? So I want you to go out there with all the resources that you think you're going to need, which includes drawn comb. Maybe you've got foundation because you've got a particularly strong hive and it looks like they could actually draw new foundation for you. There are differences in how you use it, but drawn comb that has just been extracted is going to be fine for your bees.

But what I want you to do is show up at the hive that you know is full that has capped honey on the frame. When you pull that frame out, put another frame that has drawn comb right back in. If you're trying to head off a swarm, this will not head off the swarm, and they won't look at it as added space unless the comb is drawn. So popping in foundation right now is not a good idea if you've got a congested colony that looks like they might be making preparations for starting with queen cells. If they have that, the decision's been made. But if we're trying to relieve congestion and give more spaces to our nectar so they don't become what we call honeybound. Honeybound, nectar bound, whatever the term that you hear is, it means that your bees are looking for space to store this nectar because they are hoarders. They're bringing it in as much as they can while they can.

And that means they'll backfill at the very last even the brood area of the hive on those frames. And that's a problem because then what happens, you're starting to lose reproduction within the hive. So the queen has no place to lay eggs. We are honeybound now. there's congestion and that's when your bees could be stimulated to look to swarm. So swapping out and putting in drawn comb is going to be a very good move. And I see personally nothing wrong with restoring the frames that you pulled from that hive back inside.

Now let's see you're a brand new beekeeper. You don't have any drawn comb. So I'm going to talk about something else. This, by the way, it's a polarizing topic among beekeepers. and the reason is it's called better comb this looks like regular drawn beeswax comb and biochemically it is but it's not made by the bees however notice that this is a medium deep and they're wired so they're they're supported well some people say these go through extractors just fine here's the thing if you've got a brand new colony or if you've got a colony that you've been too late for it looks like they're actually

two congested, the honey's capped, and you don't have anything but foundation to throw on. If you have better comb, and I use this sparingly, so I would only put two or three of these, the rest would be foundation on a super where I don't have drawn comb to replace it with. This stuff is golden, but the thing is now you have drawn comb, and they instantly have a place to store additional nectar. So the trees are flowering right now. pair trees, the apple trees, the crab apple trees, everything is flowering where I live, and that has resulted in a rush for nectar and a rapid increase in liquid resources inside your hive.

So yeah, you can draw them out, and I just hope that you'll bring swapouts as you go. And if you're ahead of the game and you have a really strong colony, here's what I use swarms for. We're in swarm season. There's so many questions about swarms today. It's going to bore you probably. But when bees swarm, what they're prepared to do is build beeswags. In fact, they're among the best to build beeswax. And I'm going to say something now that's a little, it's polarizing again among beekeepers.

And the thing of it is, you can leave them to nature because we're in a nectar flow. That's why they swarmed anyway. Production is high. Reproduction is high. So there's reproduction on different levels. Inside the hive, they're creating worker bees, right? The queen's laying, they're developing, and they're emerging, and then we have a new workforce.

They're also reproducing as a colony, superorganism reproduction, and that's what the swarms are. Some of the larger hives are casting several swarms. We're going to talk about that a little bit too. So you can use a newly collected swarm to draw comb. And this is also what I use my resource hives for. And resource hives are nucleus hives, small hives. They take the overflow from the other colonies.

So let's say you don't have the equipment. You don't want another 10 or 8 frame Langstroth full-sized hive, but you want to relieve some of the congestion. And you want to pull some frames of brood even, for example, and push the remaining brood frames together and put additional undrawn frames or empty drawn comb to the outboard position. So keep your braid together.

They're much more efficient that way. And then when you put them in the nucleus hive, you can put frames up above, and once you install your swarm, they build out those frames really fast. And if you wanted to keep them building, here's the controversial part, you can feed them light sugar syrup.

Light sugar syrup one to one, even a little less than that, has demonstrated that while it's consistently available, the bees continue to draw the comb, if at any point nectar dries up outside or light sugar syrup in the hive dries up, they can stop comb production. And once they stop, it's difficult to get them started again. If they're building comb actively and we can keep a light flow going,

either in through the entrance from the environment or because it's a new colony and you're never going to harvest honey off of this colony, you can have in-hive syrup for those bees. judgment call on your own. If you want to draw a comb and get new comb, that is one way to do it. We're going to move along, so yes, you can uncap,

cycle it out, and replace the frames. Question number two comes from Captain Brian's Bees. That's the YouTube channel. Says, I'll be making a split today. Two deeps, two mediums, completely full of bees. I've heard of bees for the last six days. I'm sorry, I had a beer.

of bees for the last six days on the outside of the hive. My estimate three deep frames worth of bees. So we had that here too so it's not that rare and that's what let me know that all that nectar was coming in. So it's not the end of the world to have a beard on the outside. And so what do I do with those bees? I plan my plan is to end up with one deep and one medium on each post split hive. If there are no queen cells, it will be a walkaway split. I just don't know what to do with the bearded bees. So the bearded bees, why are they bearding anyways? When you're looking at them, these are foragers, workers inside the hive that are in the way. They're in the way of the nurse bees.

They're in the way of the storykeeper bees. All the bees that have inside hive jobs are trying to do efficient work. Foragers and workers that have been outside the hive when they come back to the hive and they don't need any more of their resources or their surfaces they get parked and they're stuffy they're up inside above the frames they're on the edges if you have slatted rags it's a two-inch shim that sits on the bottom board of your hive and that provides some space for these surplus workers and the rest of it is they collect and sit idle on the outside of your hive that's so that they can facilitate airflow for the bees that are venting through there and they're drying things out good news is today with the lower humidity they should actually be back inside that's what happened i did a walk around before i came in here to do this and uh all of the colonies that had beards on the

outside of them yesterday because it was much warmer uh do not have beers today so they moved back in that's the good news so as far as the splits go um that's the same thing just divide their resources It's a walkaway split. For those of you who are wondering what that is, you're not necessarily having to find the queen. You're making sure because there are no queen cells, that's key. We're doing a split because there's an abundance of bees. Somebody wants more than one hive.

And then we're going to pull resources. So it might be time to pull a couple of frames of honey to put that in the new hive and a couple of frames of brood that includes eggs and larvae, open larvae. and put those in the new hive also. You're also making sure, if you're not finding the queen, that you have eggs and open larvae also in the original hive that you're drawing from. So you can split the resources equally if you want to. And then what you'll notice is,

I also recommend it because I did respond to Captain Brian, that I would put these hives right next to one another. And why would I do that? Because they're familiar with one another. They smell the same. So we're splitting brood. So what will happen is that workforce, aka the bearded bees on the outside,

doing absolutely nothing, will find familiar pheromones in both boxes, and they will divide themselves. They will merge and drift into both of the colonies. Now, let's say your original colony is the abundantly populated colony, and you want to relieve some of that. If you pull the queen out of there,

when you do this split, and again, you're going to leave eggs, in brood frames when you put the old queen in the new hive right next door she smells sooner to them and you'll get a bunch of your workforce drifting in there so it's just a great way to divide them i see no downside to it for the backyard beekeeper so and i've done this many times i put my splits right next door or maybe they'll be the original hive another colony and a split 15 feet away so it isn't necessary to to move them really far away.

Sure, some of the foragers go back to the original box once they head out because their memories are locked in for where they live. But you're going to have an abundance of new bees. Hopefully you transferred a bunch of nurse bees too. When you do that split, you can take frames of brood and gently shake them, keep them perfectly upright, shake them off and take some nurse bees with you.

They won't come back because they've never been outside. They don't know where they live. And then they'll be the ones that rapidly, progress into becoming foragers for the newly established colony. So easy to do. You know, having bearded bees on the outside of the hive is not the end of the world. And if you want to get them inside just so you can manage the split, that might be what the real question is.

What do we do with them on the outside of the hive? Wait for them to go back in before you do your split. They don't know. Question number three comes from Billy Mac from Newburgh, Oregon. Hi Fred, I have a horizontal hive that swarmed twice. Doesn't say what kind of horizontal hive. I capture the first swarm without issue, but the second swarm formed a couple of clusters of bees on the tree. So when they divide and you see multiple clusters, give them a little time to make sure they're all settled

because sometimes, as happened here, during the past week, they merge into one. Okay. So anyway, a couple of clusters on a tree. thousands in the air and after a couple of hours all the bees returned to the hive except one queen two drones and just a small handful of workers the question is do you think that was a new queen skinny queen and was about to do her mating flight or could she just be another queen that was kicked out of the hive swarms for about a week and a half apart whether has been too cold to open the hive to verify if there's another queen present So this happens a lot.

And I sort through those little collections. Clusters smaller than my fists, right, on a tree branch. Sometimes you'll see swarm over here, two feet away, another little cluster. I have always found a queen in those tiny clusters. Sometimes you find them on the ground too. So why didn't they win over all the bees that are in the big cluster over there? What you frequently find in that large cluster of bees is a laying queen. Her queen mandibular pheromone is very strong. So queen substance, right? She creates a scent that binds them all together. Who doesn't have as strong a scent and has less appeal? The other queen that has not been mated yet. And sometimes because look, when we're inspecting hives and you might freak out because it's your first year of beekeeping, you pull a frame of brood and you see five, six, seven cells that are queen cells in person.

What on earth are they going to do with all of those? Now what frequently happens is the bees destroy most of those themselves. In fact, the bees can change your minds completely and you can end up with no new queen. And that's because for one reason or another, there wasn't enough of the resources coming into the hive, there wasn't enough pollen to sustain them, there was a big weather event, and they decided to keep their original queen and they go ahead and chew away and destroy and completely move as if nothing was ever there all of the queen cells that you were looking at. So I'm a big fan of splitting them up. In other words, if you're trying to create more beehives

and you pull a frame that has queen cells on it, generally there are adjacent frames that also have at least a couple of queen cells on them. And when you take them apart and you put one in each deal, you're creating insurance policies. So if they did change their mind or if the weather did change or they didn't make a new queen and the old queen who was laying flew out and away with the working population you have got insurance policies that now you can restore now here's what happens they do what's known as after swarms so what we're in right now is prime swarm and season and what we're getting is a lot of prime swarms that is the queen that made it through winter she's strong, she's still healthy, and they're kicking her out because their job is to reproduce.

This is why bees survive. They reproduce and generate and create new colonies of bees out and about in a bunch of cavities in the area where you live. So, and their chances of finding a new cavity to live in might be pretty low depending on where you are. Much reduced now in my neck of the woods, literally now that my neighboring farmer has sold off all of the large hardwoods from our woodland area to the east of my property. Huge piles of giant lumber. Anyway, habitat is gone for these big bee trees. So they might have a tough time finding a place to reinhabit a hive. So you need to have an insurance policy to make sure that you're not completely out of bees. So saving those queen cells on the frames, treat them carefully. Don't tip them upside down to look inside.

If you need to look up to see if there are eggs and development going on, if that queen cell is half the way developed or two-thirds of the way down, you can bet something's in there. Don't flip them upside down and look down inside to see that. You can have an impact on the development of that pupa, or the larvae in the case of it being open, it's a pupa when it finally gets capped. So having insurance policies for that, but here's what happens is when the queens emerge in multiples, right? Sometimes the bees kill them themselves. Sometimes the first queen out, which is what should happen, goes around and kills the other queens that are about to emerge, right? And sometimes that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, you have multiple virgin

queen scooting around inside your hive. This is also why sometimes when you're doing a hive inspection, look at the behavior of your bees and look where they're clustered and look what they're doing. Sometimes you think you've got the queen and you put her in a queen clip or something like that or you put her in a tiny queen cage just so you can have control of her and stuff that's opening with grass or something while you're doing your inspection. Then you'll notice another queen sometimes. One of the reasons that we think there's only one queen, in a colony because there can also sometimes be multiple laying queens. The optimum order is that there's one mature, well-mated laying queen per hive, but sometimes it happens that you get these

sister queens that are in lay. Other times one is mated and others are not, but after swarms can go with these unmated queens. Now what also happens is sometimes a queen that is mated leaves with the swarm and other queens just get caught up in the flow and off they go and you see this and I'll give you an example of what I was doing before I came in right now I collected a swarm off of a tree in a canvas net which is one of my favorite methods to do it now when I'm installing bees I collect the swarm and I just go and I put it on the landing board of a hive I want them to go in I didn't even shake any of them in, I just lean the edge of that net on the landing board. And then the first

bees near the edge, they explore that hive. And guess what they did? They moved in. So I didn't do anything to entice them into that hive other than to make sure that it has what? Drawn comb. All the frames are present. In this case, it's a double-decker nucleus hive. So it's 10 frames, five over five. And so I watched them going in, and then of course what happened is there's a big cluster inside the net. They seem stubborn. They did not move at all. So they divided themselves. Half went in, Nazanoff glands and everything else, fanning at the entrance. One queen went in there, and there they sat. They're satisfied. They're already foraging yesterday afternoon. This morning, the other group is still in the net. So even overnight, with the cold weather that we had

during the night, they didn't go into that hive. So what's going on? There's another queen in that part of the swarm too. So it was a swarm that clustered together for what looked like one large swarm, but it's really multiples together. So then I took them over to do to do, put them next to another nucleus hive.

In this case, it's a licensed nuke double-decker. Did the same thing, set them up there. There is nothing in it. Drawn comb is present. and what do they do as soon as the few on the edge of that net started going in they did a little walk around they came back out others went in they do a little walk around they come back out you're witnessing kind of a honeybee democracy the dr seeley would describe and they get a consensus that they like the space they come out they lined up on the edge they started fanning their nes and off and the whole cluster of bees became animated and up and in they went and a third of the way through the cluster going going in went that little queen. So now I have two colonies. But otherwise, I would not have understood,

I went out there again after lunch and I looked and that it's completely empty, now the hive is occupied. So there were two queens in those clusters and that's why some went in on the first one and then the rest stayed out two separate hives of bees from one cluster, one swarm. So that's what often happens. And the size of that cluster, though, led me to believe,

I think both of them are actually mated queen. So what could have also happened is they could have emitted or being cast from other colonies and just joined together on the same tree branch, which, by the way, who do you think discovered that those were out there? The supervisor showed up, Quinn, he wasn't here five minutes. He said, grandfather, there's a swarm on the tree. It says, I know it's a fake swarm. I'm playing around a pheromouse.

He says, no, it's a real swarm. And we argued back and forth. And then I went outside. And sure enough, there's my study swarm. But there is also another swarm on the tree. So we got them. Easy access. I forgot to use my swarm reacher.

I missed a chance to play with that. But that's okay. There will be other swarm opportunities coming along. Let's move on to question number four, which comes from Jill in Chicago suburbs, Illinois. So April 29th and my first swarm appeared. Swarms everywhere. Are you tired of hearing about swarms yet?

They're exciting every minute. Swarms are just fun. It's a great opportunity to play around them. And April 29th, my first swarm appeared early this year, as I do not usually see swarms until mid to late May. Now this is really interesting. I'm going to take a sidebar here because I have flowering trees on my property. I have trees right now that are flowering that don't normally flower until June historically.

They're flowering now. So we're talking about hawthorn trees and the crab trees and things like that. The prairie fire crabs are not blossoming yet. Apple trees are blossoming now. So we have a lot going on. It seems a little out of sync. But anyway, it says, easy to catch from a low-hanging bush. But whew!

were they hot, started stinging me within a few feet, and they ate through the cuffs of my bee suit, and followed me relentlessly back to the house. Weather was fair, cloudy, but no rain, and it was evening. But none of my existing hides are that aggressive, and this was a swarm. I have mutt bees, but the attackers were mostly dark to black. Carniolan's question mark.

Could have been carniolans or Russians, for example. I hate to say it, but I wish I just let them go to the wild. I have been giving away bees but won't give out these. Do you think that will calm down? I have been through eight of 12 hives and no swarm cells found. The last for today. I wonder if you care to comment regarding an aggressive swarms. These bees give swarms a bad rap. Yes, I care to comment on Jill's question. So here's the thing. Swarms can change your disposition. Now somebody said, she said, it's not raining that it's overcast. Well, overcast conditions can make bees a little angsty. They don't know if a storm's coming or not. And the last thing they want is to be exposed during a storm. So they can be defensive, but that doesn't apply to swarms generally. And here's why I like to, I like to mess with swarms. They're just fun. So there are a lot of things that we can look at when we're looking at a swarm. So let's say you go out, you've got a swarm, you don't know how long

it's been on a branch, right? So we need to assess their disposition. And the longer a bee cluster in a bivouac is on a branch or a fence post or wherever they happen to be, the longer they're there, it means it couldn't find a place to live. You'll also see them bring in resources to one another. This was interesting too because we spent a lot of times turning at swarms over the past few days. And some go out, get nectar, and bring it back to the cluster and start feeding one another through trophylaxis. So you see the bees that are on the cluster, another bee flies up next to them. The bee that's on the cluster extends its proboscis and starts feeding from that bee that's been out and about. So they're actually provisioning the cluster in place.

The longer they're in place, the more critical their situation is. Because you'll also find that They start to build little bits and pieces of beeswags on the branch that they're on. And that's because, remember what I said earlier, a swarm is ready to build new comb. By design, they're ready to survive and establish a new colony, right? So they need the infrastructure. They have to build comb right away because the queen will have to produce new eggs and new larvae for the new colony. So they do all that. They're ready to multitask.

Okay. The longer they're there, the more defensive they get. And this is my cautionary statement to beekeepers that show up to collect swarms. I know the season beekeepers probably aren't even listening to this right now. But when you're new to beekeeping, sometimes you think, because you see it all the time, somebody runs up to a swarm, and they stick their finger in it, and they take their temperature, and they're wearing a t-shirt and shorts and flip-flops

and a bunch of neighborhood people come out. I can't believe you're looking at the bees like that, blah, blah, blah. And so some people think that going out with very sparse clothing on is a good way to go when you're introducing yourself to a swarm. I personally don't. So I will relax my protective gear after I've established that the colony is safe to approach. If you're being met with defensive bees before you've even gotten close to the swarm, it's time to wear your B suit. So please bring full protective gear with you because the last you want to have to do if you're responding to a swarm call is to have to leave you you show up and they

come after you and you got to run away and you don't have anything to wear so it's interesting you should have protection it's much safer to backtrack later and you know relax your protective stance right so the longer they're there the more defensive they can become so the other thing is we're near night time so when it comes to a swarm i realize that we have to get them they might get away. There are indicators that let us know, is that swarm settled or are they about to leave? What would you think would be those indicators? So what we want to know is how long they've been there. If this isn't on your own property, you probably know, and you probably think that you know them. So approach with caution. Now, they're tightly clustered first thing in the morning because what

have they done? Overnight, they got cold. The cluster gets tighter and tighter and tighter. and there's no activity. That's what we want to look for. Now if you also just happen to have a FLIR system, F-L-I-R, they make them for your phone, there is the FLIR C2, which is an old camera system that I still have, the temperature of the cluster can let you know if they're making preparations to leave, because every one of the thoraxes in that cluster of Bs

will warm up to the high 80s and low 90s. So every single one of them. They cannot fly unless their engines are warmed up. That's their thorax. So if you can do a quick scan, now here's the risk of that. They can warm up fast. So within a couple of minutes. But this is letting you know, do you have to rush or do you have time? So the other thing is one is their thoraxes have to warm up. That's why I like to go out there early in the morning and shake them into a bag before they they even know it's going on and they can't fly, and that saves me a lot of hassle. Second thing is, if they're established and you want to get out there and somebody called about it and you're not sure what their disposition is, are they making preparations to leave?

So again, how active are they? Do you see waggle dances on the surface of the cluster of that swarm, right? So they're in their bivouac spot. Are there any waggle dances going on? Let's say there are a few. Okay. That's not the end of the world either. Do the waggle dances that they're doing look the same?

You see one of them waggles straight up, turns to the left, waggles off to the right, turns to the right, repeats it again, turns to the left, wiggles to the right, turns to the right. So they turn left, then they turn right, and they waggle in different directions. Now, if you see several bees waggling the same way, across the face of it, on other sides of it, they seem to be communicating, the same location relevant to the sun and it starts to look like a flash mob and they're all doing the

same moves then they're about to leave so they've developed a consensus what we see is conflicting you know dances so these are scouts that have been out and about they've found a place that they'd like to live they're coming back they're trying to convince the rest of them that it's a good place to live and until they get a consensus and they all do the same waggle dances they're not leaving yet either so the temperature, the activity on the surface, the swarm dance looking the same. So these all let you know that you've got time or you don't. The other thing is when the queen is present, they are very calm. So if you've been playing with the swarm and you're wondering, did I get the queen yet? So maybe you're using a beevac. So there are multiple bevaks out there. The Colorado

BVAC is a favorite. The everything BVAC which straps in your back has its own battery pack and everything else and you can go and suck the bees into that. The way you know when the queen goes into your vac is the exhaust air coming off of that vacuum cleaner has bees flying around in it. So you'll find out that members of the swarm that you're collecting will be flying around in that air that's exhausting from your BVAC because the queen is in there. So when you see more and more of that and when you've got the everything be vac, it has a backpack with it, the bees are all swirling around your head back here because the exhaust from that is straight up behind you. So those are indicators that you have the queen.

And when you look at bees that have been left on the tree or the branch or wherever they happen to be when she started collecting the swarm, if they seem to be actively searching every inch and creeping out on the branch, coming back and searching one another, the queen is gone. So you've either already got the queen or she's been knocked on the ground or something else and it's time to find her and usually find her with a cluster of bees around her. So they get agitated and they start searching everywhere once she's gone. So again, if you've swept her into your butterfly net or you've collected them into a be vac or something like that, if they're not going to recollect on the branch, if they're actively searching around, you got the queen. So now the other part of this is what would I do with those bees?

If they seemed hostile, I definitely, I live in rural America. I live on a dirt road. I'm in farm country. I don't have immediate neighbors, right? So I could wait and see how they're doing. Because once you hive them up, and once you reunite them with their queen or whatever, and you get them into a hive, you should see a calm colony. I don't know if you've ever installed queens in a queenless colony of bees.

When you open up that hive that's queenless, there's a rush, there's a word, there's a sound that comes with it. That's very different from hives that are well set that are queen right. When you open it up and it goes voo like that. I've noticed that they've been also they display something that this is not all the time, but some of the time I see that they have spread wings. This is different from K-wing. I used to say K-wing. I was incorrect because K-wing is,

they're locked open, they couldn't close them if they wanted to. That's a sign of health. The other thing is of unhealth, by the way. So the spread wing, though, it's almost like when somebody's about to fight and they arms akimbo or whatever they call it where somebody's, their arms are out and they're ready to grapple. The bees that don't have a queen often will have a bunch of workers

and they're flying around and their wings are spread, like they're ready to go. And then when you install or introduce a laying queen into that colony, they calm rapidly, and you'll see their wings close in and align over the thorax and down, of course, over their abdomen, and they'll start to interact with the new queen. And so they need physical contact with the queen to spread her pheromone through that colony. So there are reactions to their queens and the absence of a queen. Of course, if there's no queen, they wouldn't be out on a branch anyway, right?

But this is also why sometimes a colony, and the reason I'm explaining this, a colony that should be passive can seem somewhat defensive, and that's often the case when they're not queen right. So I would keep them and see what's going on. You had an overcast day. It was late in the day. They may have been there a while. Let's hive them up.

Let's see how they're going. And hopefully, Jill, will give us some feedback. what happened and I agree if you've got a really riled up bunch of bees in a swarm situation and we don't know their disposition ultimately I would definitely not be passing them on to someone else worst-case scenario you remove the queen and you let all those workers go back to wherever it is that they came from so because that's what happens to if you sometimes people show up you know to collect a swarm somewhere and they only get part

of it and then people are really upset, well, what about these orphan bees that you're leaving behind? Well, they go back to wherever they originally came from. They're not lost. You don't, you don't ever come back and find a big pile of dead bees where there once was a swarm on a branch because a beekeeper came and collected 80% of them. Keep in mind, hundreds of them are out scouting for a new location to live and when you're collecting them off the branch, they haven't come back yet. In fact, sometimes they bivouac individually overnight on flowers things and come back the following morning. So there are always going to be some of the foragers and scouts that do not make it when you collect the swarm and hype them up or take them away.

Question number five comes from Brad Oliphant. That's the YouTube name. Thinking ahead to our dearth in July or September. If I still have my supers on, is it safe to still feed a weaker ratio of sugar syrup like two parts water to one part sugar i think this would be safe to do being that this low ratio would only be consumed for energy what's your take on this okay so here's the thing anytime we're introducing sugar syrup at any level any thickness you know uh two parts water one part sugar that's a very lean by the way um if they're your bees your supers and your the consumer of the honey and you do not sell the honey this is an ethical thing and i've heard it myself you know for as long as i've been a beekeeper and been to meetings i've heard people say

you can put sugar syrup on because they're only going to consume it they're not going to store it and if they don't need it because there's lots of resources coming in they won't be consuming it so there's some people that see no problem whatsoever with putting sugar syrup on their hives even with superz on in periods where they might lean out because it prevents them then from of course consuming the resources that they hope to harvest later. If you're harvesting this honey for your own use and you don't mind that there's a risk because let's face it, we don't have a hundred percent control over what your bees do with sucrose that they collect, whether it's inside the hive or outside. That's why I stop all open feeding, if any, whenever supers go on. If

supers go on a single hive, zero open feeding. Okay. And that's for me personally because I don't want any sugar syrup coming into a honey super or comb honey or anything else that I might sell to someone or pass on. Now that my eight-year-old supervisor is around and he's the honey boy and he sells honey, it's going to be from this apiary 100% honey from flowers. And this is, you know, it's the toss-up thing because you will go into bee yards that have bee feeders on every single hive and they're selling honey and the claim will be that the thinner syrup does not make it into stored honey. Well, I don't want to personally run that gray area at all in my area. So July and September, here where I live, I don't have a dearth, so I have a different, you know,

consideration. If your bees are not going to starve, see, they're going to consume their resources, and this is the risk for people that are in this for the money value of the product that you're producing is the last thing you want them to do is be consuming the honey that you hope to sell in August or September. So I wait until after, if you're going to feed a colony, it should be a colony that is not going to be harvested from at all. But even my nucleus resource hives, I don't feed them. I will consider putting syrup, on the license hives and stuff like that if I'm trying to build a colony and use them for comb builders and things like that. But most of my nucleus hives don't even get fed. And they do well. So wherever you're living, if you happen to be in the United States, look up B-Scape.org,

B-E-S-C-A-P-E-E-D-Rg and see historically where the dearth happens in your area. and there is some, I mean, let's take the discussion to both sides. There's lots of evidence that the bees then would use a light syrup just for consumption, just as a carbohydrate source, just so that they can function inside the hive. Because once bees cap their honey, the last thing they want to be doing is uncapping it during the warm season, right? So if you're in a profound dearth, then they're going to consume. And it's reverse of how they build.

so they build the honey from the center frames outward and in my case they're a little lopsided because they build from the center but they also build towards the east first and then the western frames if i have a south-facing hive the western frames are the last ones that get filled and capped so they fill from the middle though and then out they go now it's in reverse when they're consuming honey this is why sometimes people get upset because they think they've got a full thing of honey but then they get to those center frames the fourth and fifth and six frames sometimes you see a little arch up into it because below that is brood and what's happened is they've hit lean times possibly and they go up in there and they consume some of those cells of those honey frames that you were hoping to harvest so it's interesting that way but this is going to be a personal judgment call it's what you want and you're going to have to assess the overall strength size and how provisioned your beehive is and this is why the way I set things up for myself it's the deep brood box and a medium super 100% of both of those boxes are just for my bees so if we get into a dearth period or a difficult

period or we get a really dry summer or something like that they will go up and consume what's in that medium super right there and then they don't even get supered until those boxes are 80% full and then they'll get honey super on top of that so whether that's comb honey, a flow super, whatever it happens to be, if the colony is not strong enough to provision those bottom two boxes, they never make it to the next level. They don't get that honey super. Judgment call completely. So question number six comes from Marie Louise. Hello from Southern Ontario. I really like your idea of removing the empty flow high framed honey super and storing it empty for winter. A lot of reasons, by the way, why I do that.

With any honey super that you're going to extract, keep in mind, I don't use queen excluders, but here's the thing. Most people do. If you have a queen excluder and you have a honey super on top, you have to remove everything before winter comes above your queen excluder because you run the risk that your worker bees will migrate up through the queen excluder to get those resources and leave the queen and any small breed that she has below with just a skeleton crew of bees that are main. So I always remove honey supers and I don't have queen excluders on any of my hives So I remove the flow supers and all supers when it comes wintertime and That gives us a chance to clean them up harvest whatever remnants there still are in that at the end of the year and for me That is the second week of September historically and then everything after September

They provision themselves for winter again, but they start off the year like right now with the deep and a medium that they're filling before I super it. That way they have an insurance policy already in place. Let's say we get the worst year ever and they barely bring in what they consume. So it'd be like getting in your car and finding out you have a 200 mile range in your gas tank and you drive 200 miles to fill your gas tank and then you come back and it's empty again by the time you get back. So what happens is you're at the same position as a beehive that you were at the beginning and end of every day. They consume what they gain through the day over night the following day they replenish exactly which was consumed and that loop continues so what they are

is just sustaining themselves they're not building a surplus so i need to leave that for them and i don't want to harvest anything that when they can't provision a surplus rain thank goodness bees or hoarders it says have you found one medium honey super filled by fall is enough to feed one brood box for winter yes and this past year actually they consume less last one is a colder winter. This year we had a mild winter. Bees were activated several times through the winter and they still had honey on. In fact, let me tell you what my most provisioned hive is, is that ivory bee horizontal barrel shaped hive. It's a swarm generator now. It has 15 frames of honey and resources. It is chocka block full and I've been lazy and I've not pulled it

open. I hope to make a video about it. I just seem to run out of time every single day and I have other priorities. But there are hives right now out there. The Long Langstroth hive has winter capped frames of honey in abundance. They did not finish consuming the resources that they have. They are rapidly building and they're going to be a split resource for me. So we're going to make nucleus hives of course to the people that are mentoring and then off they will go. The land hives, again, the ones that I purchased from Dr. Leo that are insulated with lambs wool. Those are all full. I have problems with them. There's worm generators now. They did not consume all of their honey. So they kept in more honey than they needed.

Insulated colonies are outperforming uninsulated colonies. So now does that mean that the uninsulated colonies, and by that I mean colonies that just have three quarter inch pine, three quarter, inch seed or whatever they happen to be made of, does that mean that they did not survive winter? They did. Even the nucleus hives, which are only wooden hives, which just have an insulated cap on them, three quarters of an inch sidewall, they are gangbusters right now. But what they don't have is a big surplus of honey left over. In other words, they were timed just right to come into spring when new resources were available for them to start to backfill from the top down and they're migrating down closer to the entrance now there are three boxes high so it's five over five over five

15 deep frames and unfed and so they did consume their resources at just the right time had we an extended bad weather period they would have been done so but when it comes to the flow hives for example i have one flow hive out there that has double deeps that's too much it's it's too big for the bees. It's a giant colony but I would if I were doing that again it would be a deep and a medium never double deep. So in fact my double deep hives right now and I've got a couple of them I would like to shift those to a deep and a medium and then super those after that. So we're fine-tuning how we're handling those. The horizontal hives, the long Langstroth hive has 12 full frames. So 12 full deep frames and then they

got some open area and some open area near the entrance now because what they were doing is the brood was near the entrance going into winter and then the brood migrated through all these frames and now they're about midway in the box and they're coming back towards that entrance again so but they have way more resources than they needed and it was the side walls are two by four so that's not a full dimensional two by four but it's two by stock and the roofs on those are insulated with double bulwold So made all the difference ever since they shifted to high insulation values on the covers of these hives

It really boosted their winter survival and resource management So the second part of this question is have you found inserting two keys when empty Empting a flow frame works better than one it does for me and we're talking about the keys that open the flow hives if you're wondering about the flow hive and you've never seen one before I do demonstrate this when I go to, if you go to the website, the wayto-be.org, there is a page there that's called the flow hive experience and it covers from beginning to the most recent different hive assembly procedures and stuff like that. But it comes with one key when you get all the frames and for your super. And when you turn that, the top of a flow frame bows up a lot, right? And it's plastic, but it's a very good quality plastic that Cedar says it can take it,

that there's no problems with that. I don't see Cedar using two keys, and he's the inventor, the Flohive Cedar and his father, Stuart. But what I do is I take two keys together and I insert them a third of the way, whatever it is, and I turn them both outward. And when I do that, they catch in the shoulders and then they push up like this. Instead of bowing it in the middle, they're in that bend on the sides of it, and it also pushes them into place and the keys are straight up instead of straight down. And then I leave them in that position and so that lets the different leaves that shift inside those flow frames.

They get their position better and it just since I have two of them, why not do two hands together? I don't know. So the other thing I do need to mention because I was at a friend's house and he had left his flow frames out after cleaning them up and everything in full sunlight. When it comes to those frames, do not put those out and expose them to ultraviolet light like sunlight. It degraded the plastic and they cracked apart. It is amazing how fast that material will degrade if exposed to sunlight. So if you've cleaned up your flow frames and you're putting them out to dry them out and stuff like

at always have a hive cover over them and don't let them be in direct sunlight if you want these things to last a long time so and those frames are the most expensive part of that hive system so keep them covered keep them out of the sun and it says how do you get the bees to clean up an emptied flow frame so I put it right back on the hive for 24 hours and this is at the of the year and then take it away now if the weather's turning and it's going to get really cold really fast i pull them off and then i'll just hose them down myself so once we've extracted all the frames whatever's left in them sometimes there's unright punny still in there at the end of the year when you pull those off and i put them in a dehumidification room which is really i call it a room

it's a vivo sun which is a growing tent it's all closed up there's a household portable dehumidifier in there and fans that blow and we just put those frames on a rack in there for the open cells and let them dehydrate them down and we lose about a percentage point of moisture every 24 hours so if they came in at 21 you got to get them i like to get them around 18 right so and then we can just empty them rinse them out dry them out and then put them in storage for the next year so that's it and then uh just leave it outside the box near the hive for a few days question mark thank you for your advice okay so here's a thing when you're taking frames out or you're extracting them or they have honey on them please never put them on top of your hive don't lean them against the hive and don't have them anywhere near your hives once they're exposed and that's because you bring in robbers and foragers from other colonies and maybe you only have one or two colonies of your own but if other bees from other colonies nearby you discover that they can mob that area and

and they have long memories. In fact, their memories, as long as that bee lives. So once they discover it that there's a resource there like that, then you take it away, because now you don't like what's going on, or they finish what you needed them to do, now they'll put pressure on that hive, and you'll see fights on the landing board

because they'll attempt to rob it. So be very careful about honey being exposed outside your hive, get it away from your hive. And that's also when you're harvesting your friend, If you're a little sloppy with your hive tool and you cut into capped honey and it's dripping down and things like that You need to get that undercover fast because once the bees get a taste of it No great surprise Bees like honey and they're gonna go nuts about it

So the good news is right now heavy nectar flow. This is the most passive time to be walking around your bee yard When they're fat and happy and they've got all these resources coming in I don't even see guard bees on the long landing board. That's how happy they are right now. They're in reproduction mode. You're walking through a maternity ward for Pete's sakes now. It's totally safe. And that's all the questions for today. So that leads us to the fluff section. Okay. Enough talk about swarming. Anyway, I did an interesting interview yesterday about a swarm registry. So is a California-based beekeeper. You created a website. If you're like us, right, you're on social media and somebody sees a swarm of bees. They post that, can anybody come and get these bees?

They're on the mailbox or on our porch overhang, you know, wherever they are. And what happens? Social media goes, contact Bob, contact Cindy, Susan's the best bee grabber, blah, blah, blah. And then what do they do? They all rush over to this address and they want to get the bees. And somebody goes to get one. They leave work early. They've got their go kit in their car because they're a serious bee wrangler.

and off they go only to find out that Cindy Lou has taken those bees ahead of time. And here's the thing. Website. It's called B-Swarmed.org. B-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D.org. Now that's for two people. Who are they? One, the citizen that's out and about that finds that they have a swarm of bees on a tree in their yard

next to their barbecue by the swim pool, wherever it happens to be, they can go to that website. So here's where the beekeepers come in. We want these people to be informed regarding how to report a swarm of honeybees. And I've told people in the past, contact your local fire department. In my neck of the woods, there are volunteer fire departments all over the place. Sometimes people find bees. They call 911.

So fire departments, police departments, whoever will take your information. So if there's a community bulletin board or something like that, out. I've always said, make sure to get your name out, get your name and your B association and stuff like that. But here's what happens. When you have a B association, for example, like the one I belong to, I used to send people to the page. I used to say, somebody will be out to get your swarm, I'm sure. And they would go to the Facebook page. They would write on there, I have a swarm, and on it goes. And then now somebody has to collect that information and then forward it to. We have an email group of people that are willing to collect swarms in different areas. And then they shop.

shotgun the email out so now you have to be checking your email or checking your messages on your phone after somebody from the club decides to disseminate that information this website and there's also bees 911 or something like that i like this one be swarmed.org and i'll tell you how it works someone sees a cluster of bees they go to be swarm.org and there's a button right there report a swarm here's the advantage to it. They click that and they file the information about where the swarm is located. It can be town, street, your house number. Here's the beauty of it. You don't post that information on social media so 100 people don't see it and know where you live or call you up. That information is controlled through this website and then based on the region that the swarm

is located. Beekeepers, free honeybees for the beekeepers, you register on the site. as a beekeeper. You identify where you live and you don't have to even give your your absolute address. You can give your zip code and you can say, I only want to receive alerts for swarms that are within five miles of where I live, 10 miles of where I live and you provide your cell phone number. And then what happens is the person reporting the swarm, if they live in the zone where you live, their information gets sent to you that a swarm has been reported and where it's located. and then that goes out to any beekeeper that's registered through that site for that area.

And then what happens is you sit on your phone and go, huh, I'm not doing anything right now. This is only three miles away. Take it. So once you say you're going to respond to that and that you're going to come and collect those bees, guess what? It's not on the alert network anymore, which means no conflict. No one else is going after those bees but you because you said you're going to take it. Now if something happens, you change your mind.

you get a flat tire, you decide that you don't like bees anymore, you just take your name off of that and make that swarm available again. But there's a really good information for that. So I love a central network like this that's automated. In other words, it's not dependent on the website manager. This is free. They don't get a finder's fee for linking you up with these forms. There's nothing other than it provides a service where you can log in and check it.

And I asked, where is it for? It's for anywhere you have access to the internet, because it will, of course, peg your location, and then people that report swarm. So the more people that know about it, the more effective it's going to be. And that's where the beekeeper comes in because people that are not beekeepers,

they like to post pictures on social media and everything, say they have a swarm. That's where we make them aware. If you see a swarm, go to this website, and click on that, report the swarm. Because it also has a series of questions anyway. the interview was done yesterday maybe you'll watch it it's beswarmed.org and you can see screenshots and see how it works and everything else it's a brand new website the other thing is which i haven't done for a while

there's a shout out today the shout out it's going to be related to this gizmo right here which is the swarm reacher I was watching TV today and I shifted out of the regular TV and looked at YouTube on TV and what I put in my recommended views somebody was using the swarm reacher so I thought that was really cool watch the whole thing and here is the YouTube channel for the shout-out for today there will be a link to it down in the video description but is the South Florida beekeeping with Rich that's the channel name South Florida, Bekeeping with Rich. The title of the video is, how well does the swarm reacher work? And then so I'll put a link to that, but if you just want to search it and find it

on your own, please tell Richard that I sent you, say hello, wish him well. And, uh, because here's the thing, with a new piece of equipment like this, we need, um, well, first of all, I like to get feedback on it, good, bad, or otherwise. How does it work? How doesn't it work? What would you do better? You know, is there a method that you're coming up with? So I don't think, Rich, overall, I don't want it to be a spoiler, but I don't think you had an overall great experience, but I enjoyed watching the video, and I saw it had some ideas just looking at the way he does it. And that's why I'm giving it a shout-out. I would like for you, those who are interested in collecting swarms with minimal gear, which involves this clip and holding a frame, an old brood frame up there.

I've done some things to that myself, which backfired. I'll tell you about it in a minute. But I like Rich's video. I like his method that he did. I also had a lot of fun listening to his wife telling him what to do as he went through the whole process. She had great ideas. She was really keyed in to everything.

Plus, she was videoing it all. and he goes later to look at a, you know, a bucket trap, and he says, oh, it's empty, there's no swarms in there, and she thinks that there might be a swarm in there. And he lifts it up, sure enough, there's swarms in there. And she did not say, I told you so one time, but she very easily could be doing, I told you so to him, I think, throughout his day. So anyway, go to the South Florida, be keeping with Rich, check out the channel, give him a thumbs up, say hello from me, and watch how he uses the swarm reacher,

and see if you don't get some ideas from that. So here's the thing, because I'm thinking about the swarm feature all the time because people are asking me what I think and I haven't used it. The thing is, when you take a frame, I did something wrong. Okay, these are Swarm Commander vials. I like them because I carry them in my pocket. If you have empty beehives, so they're the deadouts that you cleaned out, you take one swarm vial and I went around and I just tagged every entrance on several hives that I want scout bees to check out.

I didn't put it inside. I just marked the landing board and around the entrance. And scouts are checking them out. It was very effective. So I, you know, like a kid with a new toy, I went out there and I had my telescoping pole and my swarm reacher. And if you have a frame on it, I thought, huh, I'll just go out in the backyard and I'll put a little you know swarm reacher on the frame i put it on not swarm reacher swarm commander put a little bit on this have that telescoping pole i put it down the pole and then i zip tied the pole to a tree branch and walked away huge mistake don't do it now what do i have a queenless swarm of bees so what it did is it just swarm commander is powerful stuff it attracted a whole

bunch of bees no queen have a cluster of bees out there that's like this no queen in it how do i know because they break cluster they fly away trying to go to the new location the swarm reacher and the pole that it's on don't go anywhere because it's not a real queen and they come back and re-cluster so here's the advice i want to give to those who are using any kind of clamp with a brood frame as a lure to pull a swarm of bees off of a tree onto your frame. Don't put swarm commander on anything that you are not going to take and put in your beehive. So use the frame only. And because we're in prime swarm season,

there are bees out there that are ready to bag their queens and go to another colony like that, just because they happen to be outforaging. But that's not the intent. The intent is to get a swarming. that's already clustered on its own. We're not trying to make a swarm. We're collecting a swarm that we find. So put the swarm commander just loosely in little corners on the frame that you're using only the frame because that's going to go with them and it's going to go in the hive box. We don't want anything that we leave out there. I did another test with Swarm Commander, which is a failure. A win because Swarm Commander attracts the bees. A failure because it's not a swarm. It's just a cluster of bees that don't have.

So it's working kind of like the queen mandibular pheromone, which makes them think there's a queen, and so, you know, there's a bunch of orphan bees attached to that. I dabbed a little bit of it, again, like a troublemaker on a tree branch, and just dab some of these. And, of course, there's a cluster of bees on that with no queen. So it complicates things. All I want to distill this down to is get your old brood frames,

the deep brood frames that you're going to use on your clip. just dab it lightly with swarm commander a little bit wear gloves put in a zip like bag when you're not using it because you don't want the bees all over you and then watch how quickly they go to the frame it's like a secret weapon only take it out when there is a swarm don't just leave it out in the yard

because now it becomes a magnet for bees and then you have to deal with them you have to be creative and you have to win them over then you have to deliver them to some other hive that you want to reinforce or something like that. So it works. Please go to South Florida Beekeeper with Rich. How well does the swarm reacher work?

It is not all good. But maybe you'll watch it. Maybe you'll get some ideas. And maybe you'll play with them a little bit. And the other thing is when I go after swarms, then I want to bag them. So if they're out on a branch where I can just shake them into a branch, I'm not going to be using a swarm reacher.

if they're reachable, right? The swarm reaches for things that are out of reach. So if they're in the bag, I have already pre-set up my squirt bottles with one-to-one sugar syrup, and I also use Honeybee Healthy. The reason I put Honeybee Healthy in there, just a teaspoon,

is because it will keep that sugar syrup from spoiling right into September. So you mix these things up now, they're with your Go Kit, your swarm kit, whatever it is. And I want to talk a little bit about that because I saw something interesting on TV, which I thought was weird.

There was a baseball game. I think it was a baseball game. I don't follow sports, but it was in the news. A bunch of bees showed up. They collected on a wire, and they had to shut down the game, the sports event, whatever it was. They called a pesticide company.

A beekeeper showed up, and he went up, and collected the swarm, but he sprayed them down and then vacuumed them. So I was looking at that and I was thinking, no, don't add liquid to a bunch of bees that you're going to collect into a vacuum because it makes them all wet and heavy. It doesn't, I'm going to guess that that was sugar syrup. I hope it was sugar syrup.

The guy's an exterminator. I don't know what it was. but he soaked down the bees with it and then he vacuumed them into a regular corrugated intake vacuum hose. Again, that's a rough ride for the bees through there because it's not a smooth lined interior diameter. But if you're going to vacuum bees, leave them dry. You want them to dry tumble through there with the lightest amount of suction necessary just to get them into the vacuum cleaner. So, and it's a be vac designed to spread out. the exhaust inside so the bees again don't suck all up and block the exhaust of course

because it depends on that to create the vacuum but they should be dry going in there so that's it when you have sugar syrup and you sprit them down then that lets them fall off the branch easier into my butterfly net and then I just unscrew the end drop it into what a hive butler and then I drive them home then what do I do I do I take that loop out I put it back on the handle I take the loop full of bees because it's a net full of bees and by net I don't mean the kind of netting that gets their feet caught it's like pillowcase material it's cotton it's like unbleached muslin it handles the bees nicely they can breathe through it there's no way to snag their feet and stuff

I set that on a landing board they're in an entirely new location now I just let them walk up and into the hive and it lets me spot the queen when she goes in and I take notes so that's how I hive them I only sprit some if it's a hanging swarm that I'm not going to vacuum So on the honey be healthy that's all it does extends it and you can sniff the bottle and know that it's good to go And that's it for today So I want to thank you for watching and spending your time with me I do want to do a quick promo here This was the cover shot for today

Someone comment last time because I answered a question about chalk brood and that there are other brood disorders which could be confused for chalk brood so I want to reckon I have no shame in recommending this book because first of all no profit for me not associated with them this is from Penn State Extension Office it is called honeybees and their maladies I've mentioned it before I'm mentioning it again because it's that valuable a resource. It is full of photos and descriptions, valuable information. I think it's around $12. You go to extension, E-X-T-E-N-S-I-O-N dot P-S-U dot E-D-U. So that is where you get

honeybees and their maladies. It's a field guide. It belongs in every beekeeper's. kit if you're going to sit idle thumb through it there's fantastic information but when it comes to breaking down what different diseases and disorders look like what your bees behave like when they're not well these things are all described extremely well and this version was a collaboration of course with a lot of entomologists and researchers and of course one of the key people there was Dr. Robin Underwood. So I want to thank you for watching. I hope you have a great weekend ahead and get out there.

And if you're in my neck of the woods, it is time to super your hives. They are going to gain resources so fast. We're going to get congested. You risk being honeybound. And this is where beekeeping kicks in. Thanks a lot for watching.