The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 257

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/bXygFuRrNu0

So hello and welcome happy Friday. This is backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 257. I'm frederick done and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here on May the 10th and we got a lot going on outside. In fact it's probably not a great day to be making this video. I should be out checking up on the bees because they could be swarming at any minute and I know you're wondering what's the temperature outside where we are. Well, 60 degrees Fahrenheit, that's 16 degrees Celsius and it's sunny. Rain is in the forecast.

So four mile per hour winds, not bad at all, that's six kilometers per hour. 58% relative humidity. So for all the nectar that they're bringing in right now, what does that mean? There should not be a lot of bearding on the outside of your hives unless there's a problem. So the allergy forecast right now, low to medium. So that means the pollen that's available to your bees is also much reduced right now. because it's a 3.4. And how do I know that? I go to the apps that are designed to alert allergy sufferers. So this particular one is called allergy plus. I put it on my phone and that

way I know when there's a high pollen count that I should be seeing a lot of pollen coming into the hives. It just goes hand in hand. So if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look in the video description down below and you'll see all the topics listed in order. If you have a topic or a question that you would like to have considered for one of these Fridays, please go to my main website, which is the wayto-be.org, and there's a page called The Way to Be. There's a form there. You fill it out. And you send your question into me. So what else is going on? You may be wondering about hive number six, which was the self-hiving swarm that I showed earlier this week. And they're doing great. They stayed where they came from. I have no idea.

They were a huge swarm occupied hive that was empty. We'll talk a little bit about that in the fluff section. And if you've got a question right now, maybe you're watching this later, you've got to talk to somebody. There's a fellowship called The Way to Be fellowship, 100% free, 100% friendly, and it's on Facebook. You can talk to people around the world. There's always somebody there ready to share ideas. answer questions, nothing is too basic, nothing is too sophisticated. So with that, I think we can jump right into today's questions and answers. So the very first question comes from Keith. Keith says, what bees transfer the nectar from the forager to the honey souper

and are these transfer bees another job title within the hive or maybe grounded foragers? Just curious where the duty falls in the job progression of the progression of the hive. So for those you that are new, and by the way, this station and this YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, by the way, is set up for back air beekeeping. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're a novice or a beginning beekeeper. It means that you keep your bees in your backyard, small numbers of hives, and you have the time. To do things with them, the commercial beekeepers can't or won't or don't. So anyway, these jobs inside the hive, The way the colony of bees is set up and the jobs that are established in there are designed to protect the hive.

Nourge the queen, the queen lays eggs, they reproduce so there are more workers and even some drones, and of course everything inside the hive is designed to keep it clean. So they protect themselves. They protect themselves by not going out. If they're one of those, it's in direct contact with the queen, which is really good. You think about hygiene, for example. Those that attend the queen are young nurse bees. So there's a progression in there.

So their storykeeper bees is what I call them. I don't think there's an actual official entomological assignment for their name. But when a foraging bee comes in from outside, they don't get to go straight in and put their nectar that they've collected into a nectar cell, which later becomes honey, of course. What they do is they pass it on to storykeeper bees. These bees have never been out of the hive. What they are is not unemployed foragers,

they're actually older in hive bees that have not yet progressed out onto the landing board for guard duty and things like that, and then outside the hive. Even sometimes you'll see, for example, Undertaker bees. Those are the bees that go around, find the dead, drag them out,

and it's rare to see an Undertaker bee drag a dead bee from inside the hive onto the landing board and then fly away with it. What you more often see is the Undertaker Bee, cleaning up that detritus inside the hive and dead bees and dragging them onto the landing board and then just leaving them there. And then another bee comes along, grabs it, flies off, and then they land with it somewhere else far away. Because that's our goal. Get dirty things away from the hive, keep clean things in the hive. And they have a lot of ways of doing that.

But it's efficient, by the way, to have a storekeeper bee inside the hive that meets those foragers at the point where they come into the hive. I changed my thinking of these a long time ago because I thought by having an upper entrance on my hive what I was doing is keeping my foragers from tracking outside dirt and pollen and resources through the brood nest to get their nectar up into nectar storage and I thought by having that open you know upper entrance that they would go straight to the nectar storage and they could unload their stuff right there that really doesn't change very much so your bees that are foraging can come in through the main entrance and there's a dirty area. There's the dance floor by the way,

which is usually very close to the entrance and that's where waggle dances are performed to show where the nectar is that they've collected and also to show other bees in the hive that are about to go out and forage themselves where the pollen is being collected and they can also taste test everything there too. You'll see a lot of trophlaxis going on there so they're paying attention and this was interesting because it's considered the dirty part of the hive because all the other stuff is up above it. So actually the cleanest part of your hive if you do not have an upper entrance, the cleanest part of your hive is where the honey is stored. So that's also very interesting. So the storekeeper bees are taking that resource off of those bees that are coming in and they're taking it up and then they're deciding where to put it in those cells in the upper portions of your hive or if it's a horizontal hive, whichever points are farthest away from the entrance. related to, of course, your brood, which is closest to the entrance. So it's very interesting stuff, and it's not an actual job assignment,

but they're interior worker bees. There probably could be a lot more job assignments or descriptions. Not Every bee, for example, becomes a storykeeper bee. Just like not every bee becomes a guard bee. Even though there's a listed in the progression, you'll see that these things overlap. And some of the studies have shown that, for example, Undertaker Bs that do a very good job of running around finding dead bees. I don't know how smart they are.

And the reason I say that is when you look at Undertaker bees in the observation hive, they'll often find a dead bee, and the entrance is five inches from where they found the dead bee. Sometimes it's just laying on the bottom of the hive. And instead of running it out that door and leaving on the landing board, that entrance, they scoot around with it and drag it all over, zigzagging it all over the hive. Now that doesn't sound very hygienic to me, there are still questions about a lot of the jobs that happen. But yep, they're not flyers, they're just storekeeper bees that are inside the hive,

they're near graduation to outside jobs. Also, some of the senior jobs inside the hive, wax making, comb construction. And those that come in from outside that are gathering propolis, for example, they need help from the other bees inside the hive to work the propolis. And a lot of those bees are inside bees that are about to migrate. out and start collecting resources just like the proplice bees do. So it's really interesting stuff and that's an interesting question. But yeah, now when it comes to pollen, for those of you don't know, those who come in with pollen on their hind legs, bring it in and they get to scratch that off

into any open cell that they can find and usually they try to put it near the brood because that's where it's going to be the most efficiently used to feed brood, right? So if it were far away, a lot of work has to go on. But then once they unload that, they don't do any of the processing. Nurse bees come along, and then they start to mix that with their own fluids, and they turn it into bee bread, so it ferments.

And then a 48-hour, 48-hour pollen inside the hive, smells pretty strong. In fact, some people were in my way to be academy building, which has three observation hives in it, and you can smell the bread, bee bread, pollen, fermenting, becoming what's going to be ultimately utilized to feed the queen. Now they're not directly feeding her pollen, but these nurse bees use it and metabolize it,

and then they cycle it back in the protein variations that they're going to give different developing brood, whether that's a worker, whether that's a drone, whether that's a queen. Very complex structure. Can't get into that, but there are bees assigned for every job, and the interior bees are doing the feeding.

Okay, question number two comes from Debbie from Eden, Utah. So as you've mentioned, the integrated inner cover that you designed and used. I've not been able to find an image of what it looks like, and I'm curious to see what you came up with. Would you please share? Okay, so here's the thing I've made changes, but that inner cover is really called my feeder shim. I don't think it's particularly revolutionary.

It's just a practical thing that I did. It looks a lot like a quilt box absent the quilt. So it has a built-in inner cover, and I've stopped using them. And because at the very same time, I was putting those on every single hive and building them up, and they were made out of red oak, so they were very heavy, by the way. But with the integrated inner cover, it was a one-stop thing. You pull off the feeder shim. It was about the depth of a medium super, over two inches for sure,

because I wanted to be able to put the rapid round. feeders in there. So some things have changed since I did that. But they still work. They're still good. It takes a lot of resources and material to build one, but it's called the feeder shim. I'm going to put the link down in the video description and it's going to be right under question number two if you want to see the video of what it looks like and how it's made. So you might be wondering, well, what did I switch it out with? Well, some things have changed because there's more insulation now. There's an insulated inner cover that came out from B-smart designs and you're going to see those on the very first year that those came out I put them on half of my

Langstroth hives. The second year after they came out, I put them on almost all of my Langstroth hives. So this is just a normal progression of gradually changing your equipment through the years that better suits the bees, but it also saved me a huge amount of time and resources. So I could pick up then with the B-smart Design's insulated intercover, I could just pick up a medium super or even a shallow super, put it on top of the B-smart inner cover. Why aren't I showing it to you? This is what the B-Smart Design's insulated intercover looks like.

Plastic on the bottom, polystyrene inserts. Now, this is not perfect. By the way, it just happens to be the best thing on the market right now. You can pull off this plastic cover, you can put your feeder over the top of it, and there's storage for it here. Now you might notice, if you look close at this, that there is aluminum foil around that entrance. Because we found out that there was a little gap here. If we put fondant on this, for example, the bees were coming out and chewing the polystyrene. If you put a layer of aluminum foil there, they can't chew the polystyrene. We also put aluminum foil around the edges of this because guess what else chews it makes nests in it?

Ants. But ants will not chew through an aluminum foil. So I'm talking about Reynolds aluminum wrap. Aluminum foil. It works. They don't chew through it. But anyway, this system is just easy to put on all of the hives. It has a domed surface gradually in here.

So if any condensation formed against it, although there has not been. evidence that I've seen so far that any condensation forms above it because this is the warmest part of the hive interior But if there were condensation driplets in here they follow each other over to the sides and then down the sides Or your bees can walk around and lick them off of this if it's warm enough in the winter for them to move around But these have worked so well for me that this is what I currently use and this is replaced my feeder chims that I was building And but for those of you who don't like plastic don't want polystyrene this is the alternative. The wooden feeder shim.

Because it works really well and it creates an airspace in there and creates the same thing, a heat dome over the top or an insulated barrier. So that's what that is for Debbie. I already responded to Debbie and sent her that information,

but that's it. It's a feeder shim. And it's not an invention. It's not something that, you know, it's fancy and new and some extraordinary concept. It just makes sense that you would marry an inner cover to a box, medium or shallow super,

glue up the entire periphery of that, so there's no venting through there because I've also stopped that through the years. I've stopped upper entrances and I've stopped venting gradually, step by step, until it demonstrated that those without vending were working better where I live. So that's what I use now.

And double bubble is another thing that does really well as far as insulating your covers and stuff. like that. So anyway, moving on to question number three from Terry, Jacksonville, North Carolina. This is my second year as a beekeeper and I've mostly horizontal hives. I recently built one using your plans. Thanks. For those of you don't know, the plans that we've generated for the horizontal hive and to show also my current Langstroth configurations or even a nucleus hive configuration, those are on the way to be.org and they're on the page marked prints and plans. guess how much they cost nothing they're free it's a reference for you to build as is

or a starting point for you to make the modifications that you would need to make for the part of the country and the climate that you live in so anyway he goes on to say I baited it and caught a swarm on April 7th I waited a week and treated with oxalic acid when I inspected the hive on May 3rd I discovered that they have a laying worker so I believe it's laying workers but anyway Only drone brood on three of the frames and very spotty along with queen cups. How would you suggest I fix the situation? Okay, so queen cups are not queen cells.

Queen cups look like little acorn caps and they're empty. So when does a queen cup become a queen cell when a queen lays an ag in it? So the fact that they're building queen cups, if they're empty, then it doesn't sound like you've got a laying queen. So it says I do have some temp queen and the queen introduction cage that you mentioned. Could I put the pheromone in the hive and wait a few days and then place a queen inside the queen introduction cage on a frame of brood? So the frame of brood is what I'm wondering about.

I didn't get any answers from Terry about this, but are they just producing drones or are there any worker brood left? So here's the best of both worlds. If you're trying to re-queen it, and I agree, based on the description, you need a new queen. So the question is how to install the queen if you suspect laying workers. So if there is, in fact, any capped worker brood still in the hive, that's good news. Because that's the frame that I would clear the bees off of, put it inside the queen introduction cage. And then you mention the QMP noodle.

QMP is queen mandibular pheromone it's sold as temp queen if you just Google it you'll find it it sold by Better Bee in other places the point of that is to put it in the hive and make them think they have a queen so they don't reproduce and have a new queen but the only way they can do that is if they have young larva and or eggs so by young larva I mean like an egg is just hatched and become a larvae so if there is worker-capped brood that that's perfect, I would put that in a cage, the queen introduction cage, and I would get my replacement queen in as quickly as possible. And then you'll have your answers, by the way. You can

get rid of the existing queen. It doesn't say here whether you could find the existing queen or not, but if she is a drone laying queen, because sometimes that's the case, it would be a good idea to go ahead and just get rid of her. So you can get rid of that queen. If she's not producing any worker brood anymore and do that before the new queen comes in. And you could do the cage just to make sure the queen introduction cage is different from a queen isolation cage for those who are sitting there with question marks over their heads. The queen isolation cage allows workers to go through the sidewall so it's basically a queen excluder and then the queen just can't get out and can't leave the hive.

So you would be able to find out for example if you still had a queen, somewhere in your hive, if you took your new queen and put her in the queen introduction or isolation cage, she would not be able to lay in any other frames in the brood area in your hive. So then later, if you see eggs being produced there for work or brood, then you know that you've got another queen still. So then you wouldn't waste her. She wouldn't be killed by the other bees if she's in a queen introduction cage. And then you'd be able to pull her out, save her, and go ahead and install and make another nucleus.

or a resource hive or something like that. But the key there is you wouldn't lose her. And then you could find the queen that's performing poorly, remove her altogether, and then bring her back. There are so many options with that to see what you're going to do. But that's it. And the purpose of the queen mandibular pheromone is if the queen's gone completely, no worker brood is being produced.

You put the queen mandibular pheromone QMP noodle in there, and that makes them think they have a queen, and therefore they don't start making queen cells if they had eggs or freshly hatched larva, and then they will suppress their laying tendencies. So worker bees have the potential to activate their ovaries and become laying workers, which means they're going to lay drones, right?

Okay, hopefully that works out. Question number four comes from Brian. says there has been, now this is a favorite thing of mine. This was an interesting one, and I think a lot of you might be dealing with this this time of year if you're in the northeastern United States, because swarm season, of course. So Brian says there has been a cluster of my bees under the hive for almost 14 days. Think about that. So there's a cluster under the hive for 14 days. We're going to talk a little bit about this. I tried offering a deep withdrawn comb and better comb but they seem to like the cluster. Even after I scooped some

into the hive I'm on Long Island and so we're in the same temp zone I plan on putting a queen excluder in between two deeps and removing the entire cluster to see if my queen or a queen is present. First is this a good or bad idea second if no queen is there I will purchase a queen and introduce her to those bees. Okay, and here's one of those areas. It's not that beekeepers, you know, whoever you ask has the answer, right? They all have different answers. Frequently, beekeepers have different answers because there are different ways to do the same thing. So what we want to do here is we want to deal with a cluster, first of all.

What are they doing? Why are they clustering for so long? I had this recently on one of my hives. And what they did is we use hive visors on my hives. So that's another thing you can look up. If you want to, hive visors, I put them on the fronts of my Langstroth hives. It provides shelter for the landing board. Mid-summer heat. It cools the front of the hive, which are south-facing where I live, by at least 15 degrees during the day.

So on these hot summer days, hive visors are good. But what else happens? Bees cluster underneath of them. So it keeps them out of the weather and the elements. Now, here's the thing. A normal cluster, which would happen on the outside of the hive, and sometimes it's bearding where they collect underneath the landing board usually and look like the hive's got a beard, just what it says.

So then what happens is, though, as it cools down at night, or on a day like today, we said the humidity levels are in the 50% rain, right, relative humidity. So if the humidity is really low, then that means that inside the hive, they're successfully venting and drying out any new nectar that's in there that they're converting to honey. So then what happens is these bees that are on the outside migrate in. So overnight, we've had temps in the 50s. So when that happens, they would not stay out unless if the cluster stays the same and does not get larger during the day and smaller at night, and by smaller at night, I don't mean that they just get tighter and closer because they're

condensing themselves to protect themselves from the cold. I mean the numbers are reduced, right? So if the cluster is staying the same day and night, I 99.9% guarantee you that there is a queen in there. And here's what's happened. Because this works out in my own apiary, because what's the purpose of my apiary, to fiddle with the bees and learn about them and then share what I've learned. So those bees that run underneath the visor. I did what was described here by Brian. I took my hand and I scooped underneath the visor and I carried handfuls of bees. and I put them over into another hive and what do they do? They walked off my hand straight into the hive.

Why won't they just walk down the front of the hive that they're on or up from the bottom if that's the case as described here? Why would they just come out from there and go back in and join the hive that they're attached to? Because they each have a queen. So now we need to establish a new location for them. So what they're really doing is bivouacking. Normally what the bees would have done is flown out with their queen and landed on a tree or a fence post or somebody's lamp post or something like that

and then they would hold that position there while they send out scouts to find the final position and location that they're going to occupy but instead of going to a new place like that they collected right on the hive that they came out of pretty convenient if the beekeeper can figure that out so then i scoop off the handfuls and i put them over there and in the hive they go and then i waited to see them going back and forth. Now if they have their own queen, here's what they don't do. If they have their own queen, they don't go back to the original hive other than to get the rest of them to come with them. Right. So you'll start to see little waggle dances, which looks like a round dance. If it's really close together, not much waggling. They just turn and you're looking for the direction relevant to the sun of where the hive is that you try to get them to go into.

So I just keep scooping handfuls, scooping handfuls and putting them over there, letting them go in and influencing the group until they finally clear out and go in. If there's no queen, they'll just go back to the hive and then you'll see them going in after that. If there is a queen, then you'll see Nassanoff fanning at the entrance and then they will start going over there because they need instinctively they need a new space to occupy. Now sometimes when these clusters are really small and they're stubborn like that, you'll often find a virgin queen. She doesn't have much of a following and They're not very good at sticking with her but a very small cluster size of your fist will stay together and get stubborn and that's because they instinctively Surround the queen protect her feed her the other thing is look at this time frame. They've been there for 14 days So 14 days a long time and you might be thinking as my

wife often thinks aren't they just starving aren't they just dying out right there no because what you'll see happening is during the day like right now they'll be flying out getting resources and coming back and nourishing the other members of the cluster so they are sending out scouts they just haven't found a space to occupy so you can scoop those bees up and collect them hive them and then you'll find out they stay right there they won't stay in a new hive or a new location that you give them unless it's miles and miles away if it's in your same apiary and you move them into a nucleus hive or something like that and it sounds like they're small enough to occupy a nuke if they stay there then you know you got a queen in a perfect world you'll see the queen

good chance she's not mated which means once they set up house she will fly out and do a mating flight so guarantee it i'm sure she will so that's it and i'm looking forward to brian giving us an an update on that and what he discovers but i would not go through the whole rigamarole that was described which was if you had a brood box there with a laying queen lifting up the brood box putting a queen excluder in another box underneath or whatever however you rotate them you're keeping your queen in and then you'll know if there's any egg laying down below from this cluster that then you've got two queens right so the same thing works in horizontal hive configurations you put a divider board in there that's got a queen

an excludeer in it and you want to know if you have multiple queens or if you even have a queen at all you can control where the queen's allowed to go and you can create divisions within that hive until you decide to go ahead and create new splits and things like that i don't like the method it's a lot of manipulation we're pulling apart a whole hive when all we really need to do is deal with those that have already decided to leave and collect their influencers put them in a new location let them come back and convince the others to go and join them so check it out. For those of you are dealing with that, I've had that happen twice

this year and it works really well. Just take your time. It's a great chance to just sit out there and fiddle with the bees and see what you can get them to do and see all this communication going back and forth. And when it works perfectly, it's exciting. It gives you confidence that you're finally figuring out

beekeeping. Question number five comes from CJ from Muskegon, Michigan. says, I made a stupid newbie mistake. I picked up some packages of local bees to increase my apiary. The bees weren't marked. After a few days, I marked and manually released them. I tried to be careful, but when transferring a queen to the marking container, she slipped out and flew away. She was small and fast. I couldn't see where she went,

and the hive was open so there's a chance she made it home. If not, then how do I wait to see if the hive has a queen? Should I be able to tell by pollen counts coming in or do I need to disturb them again after a few days and buy a queen in? Okay, so let's deal with the very first problem of this. If you're buying in queens and packages, that's tough. It's very expensive, by the way, and it would be frustrated to have the queen fly away because the queen, queen when they put these packages together they're collecting thousands of bees usually so a pound package or a five pound package if you're lucky and they just put queens in cages mated queens they put the cage in the package the package ships out they're supposed to get to know each other

on their way to your place right so they really haven't fully connected and none of these workers are from that queen so one of the things too and why i'd like to talk about this now people that buy packages, they often find out that, well, the package, the bees are mean or something like that. So then they think, well, they gave me a mean queen. Well, you don't even know what the bees are like in your package. You don't know what the genetics of the queen are going to be like until more than a month from now. Because the queen that's in there, these are not her offspring. These workers did not come from that queen. So you don't know what they're going to be like until your queen is producing eggs and those eggs are going through the cycle and they're emerging as adults

and then of course they're taking over the colony and then they start to do their outdoor jobs. So that's what the package is. It provides a bunch of workers that can do the jobs until the queen goes into full production and until her offspring more than a month down the road are are starting to show you what their personalities are and what the colony is going to be like. So when you pick up the package and the queen's flew away this is an easy one because if that package has described the queens sometimes can find their way back and this is what I've learned too about queens that fly away if she flew and landed on a tree somewhere a tree branch landed in the

yard you know what's going to happen she's going to generate a scent that other bees in the area like and they're going to cluster around her so you might find a small cluster of bees on a tree nearby or something like that and that would be your queen the flip side of that she can actually come back and get back in the hive. How would we know if she did that? So within a week, if they are bringing in pollen at all, then that means something inside that hive is laying eggs. If something is laying eggs, then after the third day when that egg hatches, they need to be fed. So by the time there are eggs present, your worker bees are bringing in pollen to prepare because remember they have to

process pollen and make bee bread and they need, you know, 24 hours or 48 hours, 72 hours, before it's ready for then the nurse bees to turn that into food for those developing larvae. So any pollen coming in, great sign, she made it back. No pollen coming in, nothing going on for a solid week. You have a maximum of three weeks to put another queen in there. Now keep in mind, you are losing bees every single day. Probably an average of 500 workers are dying from that colony every single day. So if you wait too long to replace the queen, then chances are you won't have a very strong colony at all.

And the fact that you had a big package to begin with means that it just dwindled while you waited for the new queen to come in. Another scenario that often happens, depending on how your apiary is set up, if you bought a bunch of packages in, spent the fat stacks and bought all that stuff, and then you put them all in hives, one right after another, and this one, the queen flew away.

So you know what those workers will do? The bulk of those workers, we have to be careful when we say they will do it. They have a propensity to do this, and that is drift to colonies that are queen right. So you could actually think that one of your brand-new installs actually absconded or swarmed or did something weird.

But what they really did is they drifted to queen pheromones that were Queen-Rite and other packages that you used. installed and they're accepted there so they end up with a really tiny cluster of bees in that hive because there's no queen to keep them there and this is also an example where a queen mandibular pheromone noodle would keep your workers there and would make them think there's a queen present so you don't lose them and you still will be able to do that test where if you see pollen coming in then you know that something has returned and is laying and that's going to be your laying queen So I hope we get feedback from CJ because I'm interested to see how this goes.

But the other thing is when you get a queen, if you're going to take her out of her package, you're going to mark her something like that, look this up. It's called a queen muff. And all it is, just like those winter muffs that people back in the day, stick their hands in it and it covered both hands together, it's a cage that goes around both of your hands. You take your queen in her cage, put it inside the screen muff. I know Better Be sells them. I have one. It's just not in this room.

And then you can open it up and when you're going to handle the queen or transfer the queen to a marking like your one-handed queen grabber, whatever used to mark your queen, inside the cage, if she flies away in there, you can still get her again. You're not in a panic. So a queen muff is worth the investment. And I have one. I've only used it a couple of times because I don't generally handle the queens like that. It is convenient, though, because you did buy the package. You've got a queen in a cage.

She's accessible. You can get a hold of her, and you could do the marking. You can also just pay the seller to mark your queen and have it come marked, right? So, and then you would not be dealing with all the stress of thinking about that. So I'm going to be interested to find out what happens for CJ and what I expect good news. I hope that in a perfect world she came right back. question number six this comes from will and it says two of my three hives made it through the winter and appear to be thriving i'm not sure what happened to the hive that didn't make it it was very active

in february during a warm spell and then it just died out my guess is mites i treated all the hives in the fall with formic pro but maybe it was too late my question is should i be treating now and if not when and with what I have an extra formic pro from the fall. Thank you. Okay, so here's the thing. The other thing I want to address is late season dieouts, right? So they made it through winter. They were looking great. In February, they were flying and everything,

and this is why I always caution people in February and March that you are not out of the woods, but the number one reason for them dying out that time of year is actually starvation. And what happens is, and I just did a clean-out demonstration, this past week where I took a part of nuke and I was using low pressure air to blow out the cells and clean the brood frames. Works really well by the way so if you want to see that piteo it's only three minutes long. You know they start if you open up the debt out and there's no food anywhere in it.

There's no stored honey. There might be some pollen but they can't process pollen without the presence of honey. So they need our carbohydrate. And what happened is in this neck of the woods anyway. We had these warm-ups and the brood was building. They were bringing in a lot of pollen. And this was a problem because when you look at that, there's so much pollen coming in, the brood is building up, the weather is warm, and what are they lacking? They're lacking nectar. So the nectar resources are weak, pollen resources early were strong. And there are some nectar resources, just not enough to support the amount of brew that they were building. So I noticed in one of my hives, they were pretty smart about it.

They laid full patterns of brood, right? But then as soon as the cold and wet weather hit, the nurse bees went through and ate all of it up, cleaned it out. They did not even let them get to the pupa state. So that was a smart move on their part because they could not feed them. And also, they didn't have enough resources to feed the workers that are in the hive that are necessary to keep the brood warm. Remember that your brood has to be, even once they're capped,

they're not eating anymore. but once they're capped they have to be from 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit. That takes a lot of energy from your bees and if they don't have the carbohydrates to do it, they can't keep them warm, they chill and they die. That's what happened to the nuke that I pulled apart. It was clearly evident that that's what happened. Now, if you're a Darwinian beekeeper and you just want to live and let die, then that's what would happen to a lot of the colonies.

Now, other colonies obviously made it. They stored up enough honey. this was one of my resource nukes, for example, that I always bragged about that no matter what you do to them, they just make it. Like, I never feed these nukes, and I just let them store up there, honey. That nuke had several frames of full brood and just not enough workers to cover it and keep them warm. And then when the bees get chilled and you have chilled brood, they have to uncap and excavate those and get them out of the hive. because if they can't, if they don't have the workforce necessary to get these dead and dying brute out of the hive, they just cluster there and then once they're dead, they hold moisture and condensation forms on them,

and then you're going to see a bunch of mold on the dead bees. So it's just a dead cycle, and that, those nucleus hives do not have feeders on them. So even if I wanted to feed them back in March, I would not have been able to do it because I don't have feed. systems on them. So going in, this is one of the things I'm changing this year. I don't like the idea that I could have saved an entire colony with just a quart of sugar syrup. And there are people that get really mad about that because they want us to have bees that don't require any subsequent feeding, bees that don't require any treatment for mites, and bees that don't require any treatment or management for diseases. And then in the end, of course, the theory is that you'll end up with all.

all these great bees that can handle themselves on their own without these treatments or without that care. But for me as a backyard beekeeper, and I always explained both sides of it. So you can pick the route that you want. If you want to clean out a bunch of deadouts, because they didn't have what it took to survive through winter, but I have been messing with those bees. So to some degree, it's my fault that they didn't have the numbers that they otherwise would have because I pull a frame of root out of them once in a while. I've taken their queen and had them make new one. So I'm already in the kitchen, you know, messing things up for those bees. So I should have put a feeder shim on that hive and fed those bees. So the same thing, and I don't know this for sure,

but for Will, I highly suspect it was not mites because usually by the time mites have destroyed or impacted your bees to the point where they would actually die out from it. They historically and percentage-wise, they die out about midwinter. So those are not your bees that you're seeing in spring, February and March, that would then die from mites because your mite numbers are actually at their absolute lowest by then. And then your mite numbers pick up again in spring. And there are other things, too, that I'd like to explain about my idea. It's not my idea, but I mean it's what nature demonstrates. You don't have upper vending. You don't have upper entrances and there are people in my own club that I talk to that they run entrances,

they run venting and they have equal results with their bees vented not vented and so on right but there are other parts of that right there are other studies that you should look into for example I was talking with Dr. Thomas Seeley about high CO2 levels in the hive and your bees control it they manage that they manage the humidity they manage the CO2 guess what suffers under high CO2 levels inside your hive varroa destructor mites guess what suffers from high humidity inside your hive varroa destructor mites and you can look up you can go to google scholar and you can look up studies that have been done on humidity and mite reproduction and CO2 levels and mite reproduction. So maybe the bees that are on their own that are not vented,

that don't have upper entrances in the winter time, are actually on an advantage compared to those who have venting beyond their control and you're actually helping potentially the mites reproduction during winter. So there's a lot going on and it's climate related too. There are examples of exhalic acid vaporization not working extremely well down in Georgia and some of the higher humidity areas, for example. While in other parts of the country, the exact same treatment can have a much higher effective rate on killing borough destructor mites. So this is another example of, it's not that other beekeepers are wrong. They're just wrong possibly for where you live and where you keep your mites. And this, keep your mites. It's where you

keep your bees. So it's up to you to figure it out incrementally, exactly what is going to work the best for your bees where you live. So I'm making changes. I'm going to have feeder shims on all of my nucleus hives, even the resource hives, going into winter next year. And because I don't want to repeat, I don't want to have to clean out one. The other nukes are all doing fantastic. So there you have it.

If you're practicing the Darwinian or live and let die approach, then I have other colonies that are very strong under identical circumstances, configured exactly the same, three stacks, five frames per stack. But you know what? Looking at the brood in every other way, it was perfectly healthy. So under the control of the beekeeper, what are your thoughts on that? Would you feed them if only a quart would keep them alive through a rainy period? Or would you just let them expire and stick with the ones that made it through the raining period

and that they had the instinct or the drive or capability of storing enough resources and not building so much brood that they couldn't survive it. It's very interesting. So, and the other thing is I want to explain Formic Pro. Okay, Formic Pro, I have two cases of it sitting over there. Guess what? It's all expired. I never used it.

It's my backup plan. So here's the thing that I want people that are new to be keeping to know about Formic Pro. It does work to kill Verro Destructor Mites. Not only that, it works to kill Verroo Destructor Mites. beneath the cappings of pupae. So that's when we're doing xcalic acid vaporization. There people say, ah, it doesn't work, doesn't do anything. It won't if your bees are keeping the vera underneath their cappings, right? Because exhalic acid vaporization requires direct contact for the varodistrictor mites to suffer and die, right? That's our goal. We want these to get off

the bees and to die. So, if you use Formic Pro, you'll hear lots of lectures about it and always, and this is why I don't actually talk a lot about my treatments, my decides. The reason is I don't want something I said 10 years ago to be assigned to a treatment today. And because they're learning, often the formulas are changing and the treatment regimen can change as well. So I always want to defer to whatever the instructions say on that miticide now. So there's a split. There are synthetic miticides and there are organic miticides. I personally would only ever use organic miticides.

So then if you put Formic Pro, Patty's in there, you have a choice. Two at a time or one after the other. And if you do two at a time, it kills. much better underneath the cappings. However, this is where new beekeepers or people that have never used it before panic because you really have to ventilate your hive. And again, I'm not gonna get into the details of it.

I want you to read the instructions because the manufacturers have done the studies, the formula may change, and you'll see thousands in some cases of dead bees in front of your hive when you put in Formic Pro. So the irony of it is, it's only something you should

use on some of your strongest colonies and that's because they have to be able to take that hit. Other people do it in conjunction with changing out their queens. So there has been some evidence of impact on your queen's fertility and queen reproduction, right? So some people remove the queens and while they do the treatment, then bring the queens back in. Or if you're a queen breeder, they treat the hives and then they install the new queens into those hives. So that causes panic for some people. Right. So I've never had to use it. And the reason is I've got my mite numbers under control through integrated pest management practices. If you haven't noticed already, my colonies swarm a lot. I would say it's safe to say 50% of my colonies in my apiary swarm every year. It gives me an opportunity. After they've swarmed, you know that I'm going to go in. I'm going to get the mites because they're going to go broodless. And so I want to get that period after the remaining. bees have emerged from all of their cells all of the developing larvae and pupa that are in there once they've gone through all their cycles and they're

all exposed that means all of the mites in the hive are in a dispersal phase which used to be the ferretic phase and that means they're exposed to exhalic acid vaporization and we can kill them with it which is what I'm more than happy to do now what else so formic pro I wouldn't use it but I also think the reason that died, I highly suspect, was not due to mice. It was due to this weird weather that we had. And this warm season, which fooled all your bees into going into production, partnered with a bunch of pollen coming in.

And then this cold extended period came and really challenged them. And so your bees would either make it or they wouldn't. And I do want to talk a little bit about the Darwinian beekeeping approach because some people are very upset that we seem to be perpetuating the problem. if we have to treat the bees and we keep these bees going. The problem I have if I lived on an island, right, like Dr. Seeley was able to study bees on Appledore Island, right? So he's seven miles off the coast of the United States.

When you do that, then you have perfect control. So there are areas where there were no mites, for example. So you would have control and then you could realistically come up with survival, driver traits, right? For the backyard beekeeper, what was described in an earlier question? Packages came in. Okay. Packages are almost never 100% mite free. So when we're bringing in bees from other areas, we are constantly mixing them together and we're reinforcing genetics at a minimum. So even if they came 100% free of mites, if you, the backyard beekeeper, decides,

I'm only going to breed for these traits. I'm going to selectively breed my bees. I have gulls. I'm going to select for temperament. I'm going to select for productivity, for honey, and for lots of pollen, and for low mites. And then I'm going to work from there. We don't have the numbers, and we don't have control of the geography to do it.

Even big beekeepers, like the Bee Weaver family down in Texas, they migrated and they had their, reproduction yards set up and another commercial beekeeper came in and took what were extremely successful colonized bees with very low mite loads changed them in one season by parking commercial bees that require treatment right in the flight path of where those bees are being bred right so we need control over the drone congregation areas and everything else to breathe these bees so the backer beekeeper who's got a beekeeper in my case straight across the road don't know anything about their bees i have less than a mile away to the northeast of me another apiary that i don't know

anything about those genetics or then i hope that those are mine going out all the time but the problem is you have to constantly remain vigilant about your bees and you can't just assume that they're doing great i mean you could you know and then just fly blind and not know if they're successfully controlling mite loads because in your own backyard apiary it is rare that you can separate your bee colonies by a quarter mile each and things like that if you're like me all of your hives are in very close proximity to one another taking advantage of you know being next to a tree or a bush or some other landmark that helps your bees orient to that but they are drifting to one another so i have to look at my apiary as a community and

that's affected anytime I make a new queen, my bees make a new queen and she flies out and mates with a drone somewhere at a drone congregation area with an unknown queen from another colony somewhere else. And then what happens? My traits are gone. So I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. You have to be aware of what's constantly going on and you never hit an arrival point. What you hit is an effective management point that will help you keep your bees healthy through hopefully generations. Put away my soapbox now. Said more on that than I had planned to,

but I'm trying to get you to bring into focus the big picture of what a backyard beekeeper can do and can't do. And this is also my personal justification for why I do keep records of every colony, what their behavior, what their development is, what their strengths are, and then those that could be helped with

very little effort get the help that's just how it goes question number seven comes from johnno from foothill ranch california now that your bees are in full nectar flow and uh chance you will make a comparison of honey fill rates now this comes up a lot by the way but i'm going to address it because johnno asked a 10 frame brood box topped with a medium then a flow super versus two times five frame brood boxes, two times five frame honey bridge topped with 10 frame flow hive. I'm sure the nukes will fill the flow hive faster. Okay, so the nukes brood boxes. Anytime, by the way, I'll give a shout out to another method if you're after honey and you want real high honey production. It doesn't so much come from, you know, did the nukes produce more? Did the lankstroth standard produce

more, but any time that you want a lot more honey, the ability to combine multiple colonies of bees under one honey super becomes the obvious honey production system. Collectively, they perform better. So we mentioned it in the past. It's called the Keepers Hive. Now, the Keepers Hive is an alternate method of managing bees through the Demeray method, which is to prevent swarming. that's one thing but if you go to the Keepers Hive Google it look into them they have a double hive configuration so it looks like two full Langstroth boxes and I haven't tested it but I trust the guys that do it that are that developed it they're working with it and they have double brood boxes you'll see Anglerus and then a

central looks like 10 frames size Langstroth Center and that is where your honey production comes into play so when you have So you basically combine two colonies together and you get a super colony of honey production going on. So whenever you bring in multiple colonies of bees together, you can get a lot more honey out of it. Since I'm not honey-oriented, I'm bee behavior-oriented. That doesn't appeal to me personally because I don't want to deal with, it sounds backwards, but I don't want to deal with a lot of honey. Although my grandson, who's eight, seems to have little dollar signs on his eyelids and he wants maximum honey from his.

B-hive which is going to be a flow hive. So what I want to say is when you look at your apiary regardless of the configuration of your hives, it's the strongest colonies with the most foragers. So pay attention to this. These are these are your super producers. You go out early in the morning and you see those that are flying already. You know, some hives don't even kick into high gear until it's 11 a.m. Right. And then by one or two in the afternoon, that's where you can go out and they all look like they're doing great. So what I pay attention to, if I were looking to make a lot of honey production, I want the early foraging colony, right, full strength.

So they're the ones that are out flying at 8 or 9 a.m. already. You'll also see that there's a correlation. They're also flying later than others. So this colony kicks up from sunrise to sunset. They are out and about when they shouldn't be. And so you can see all the other hives have gone quiet, but the one colony is just humming away and bees are suns. still coming in with pollen on their legs and stuff like that.

They also gain weight fast. Now, that's the other thing. You can put in brood minors. You can have scales and weights, and you can decide, you know, which hives are gaining the most weight quickly. I feel like I don't need that. And that's because I can see the production. When we do a cursory inspection, we can see those top boxes because that's what I

really look at to see the honey. And my grandson gets all excited because they're wall-to-wall honey and he wants to take it off, like right now. and we just want to expand the colony. So strong colonies that are productive through the day produce more resources and more surplus than other colonies do. And it doesn't have to do with the configuration of the hive so much.

Now, I do notice that it seems alarming how fast they build comb and store resources in these nucleus hives. And so it seems natural to put two nucleus hives together and then I have a honey super on top. So for example, I think even better B sells a double nucleus base and a double nucleus bottom box. And then you just put them, you keep them separate, but then you can put a queen excluder over the top of it, and then you have the full 10 frame supers going above that. So now I don't have personal experience with whether or not that produces a pile of honey.

It makes sense that it would. they're benefiting from the warms. It's like when you live in a condo or something, and if you're not the very end condo, you're benefiting from the heat from the other one next to you. There's a common wall, and if they're warming their house, you're warming your house,

you're spending less to warm that wall. You have somebody above you, they're spending less to heat their apartment or their condo, whatever it is, because the warmth from your apartment or condominium is rising through their floor and saving them energy. So those that are on the upper floors actually save more except the top floor and so on so by putting colonies and bunching them together

they have a communal you know maintenance level so here's the thing often people say well it's a really hot day you know it's 80 degrees outside of 79 degrees we need to really open up those hives and you know give them a lot of ventilation right now but here's the thing remember what I said earlier 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit in the brood area so if it's not that temperature from the surrounding area, right, then they are still warming the hive. So venting that off again can work against you. So again, even in summertime, insulation is key. So that's the other thing I want to harp on again, too.

If you're trying to increase production, insulation on the hives, and then you see people with these massive storage areas with stacks of insulation board and stuff in them. What was that from? that was from winter insulation and now that it's summer now that it's warmer we took it all off why did you do that if they need you can retain heat in winter you can protect them from heat in summer with insulation so these insulation boards if you're going to spend all the money and have all that elaborate stuff unless it's painted black or something where it works against you but insulation is good summer and winter and it's going to help them economic

and it's going to help them control the climate inside the hive so if you're maximizing honey production you're going to reduce swarming right because if you lose a bunch of bees you have to catch that swarm get that queen out of there and get that swarm right back in the hide that they came from that's why that Demeray method exists right and once again it's something I personally don't care about so if you need to keep enough bees to to produce maximum resources. So, and the Honeybridge thing for keeping,

when you have your hive, and this is something that I do with the flow hives. When you have the flow hive, it comes with all the gear, brood box, queen excluder, super, top of the hive. That configuration, the way it comes from flow hive, does not work for me here in the snow belt of Pennsylvania. So I have to modify it.

The other thing is I don't like Queen Excluders. Haven't for years. And here's why. So I wait until that brood box builds up. Now Quinn, my grandson just put together his beehive. We're going to be swapping everything out. He wants to put everything together. All the boxes on right away.

Sure, a lot of new people want to do that. I mean, that's the way it came. You get all the stuff. Let's put it all out there. Let's put the bees in. Let it go. But you always start with just the nucleus box. Let them establish themselves.

Let them start filling the frames out. And let them fill 80%, 90% of available space in there. Then you add the next box. And for me, with the flow hives, and it works with any other hive configuration. So forget that I said flow hive. Let's talk Langstroth. It's the same configuration. The next box that goes on is a medium super.

That's a honey super. In some cases, they've run brood right up into that second box. So a deep and a medium. I need to see solid honey. No brood. No drones. I need to see solid honey in that second box. If I don't, I go to a third.

So now I have two medium boxes. It's rare that I have to do this, but on some colonies it has happened. So then the second box needs to be all honey. That's what I call the honey bridge. When it's all honey, then the super over that, I'm 99.9% remember nothing's 100%. I'm 99.9% sure that no queen is going past all that honey because it's impractical and bees are efficient.

She's not going to put her eggs all the way up in the flow super. So I benefit from that in those supers that are directly over the brood box. usually it's one medium that's enough to get them through winter if that's covered and capped wall-to-wall honey the box above that is the honey super that i can draw off later now if i have any suspicion at all that they are laying eggs up in that top box for some reason i need to look into that and you need to know that that's what they're doing so i need to inspect so when they start putting in the nectar that's when you're going to get those great resources from it, but you get higher honey production if you do not have a queen excluder.

Now, let me throw my own logic at myself. This was me 14 years ago. So put a queen excluder in because everybody said, nobody even gave me the option, by the way. No one I listened to. They all said, brood box, queen excluder, honey supers. so i had the queen excluders in and being myself i decided to test the queen excluders to see how many bees could actually get through them and a lot of the workers could not or would not pass through the queen excluder so i wanted my bees to access the honey super unimpeded so i put an upper entrance in there and then i swore by upper entrances because sure enough all the bees were zipping in and out of that upper entrance and a very small number of bees were coming through the bottom main entrance right So, problem solved. They didn't have to go through the queen excluder. They went out, but here's what I did, right? When you do that, you also restrict movement inside the hive for the workers and the normal routine in there. There was one hive that I pulled apart that the queen excluder was propelized completely and they had done no work about it. None. That's rare. That almost never happened in any other hive. But it let me know that they weren't very happy.

with a queen excluder being there anyway. So this is long story short. I don't use queen excluders. So as far as what fills faster, the colonies with the largest workforce that have not lost their queen. And if you can keep your queens from swarming and you can replace your queens or cause a brood break or something like that to prevent them from feeling like they need to swarm, then you're going to keep a huge colony of bees. Now here's another thing you can do. You can combine colonies halfway through spring and come up with a super colony after the risk of swarming has passed. So they kind of have a spring instinct. Here where I live, we're going to have another swarm season at the end of August to the first couple of weeks of September. We're going to still have swarm

threatens because we get another big nectar flow and those things come hand in hand. Question number eight. This comes from Papa Z's Bees. That's a YouTube channel about the way you can check it out Papa Z's bees says hey Fred my question today is I have a flow hive box that's going gangbusters so we're talking flow hives again I added the super in late March because an inspection showed that they were honeybound so for those you don't know honeybound means all the available cells inside the hive are full of honey and then you even risk that encroaching on the area that your queen needs to lay her eggs and have colony reproduction. So being honeybound is another trigger for swarming.

So the other day I was, so I've been seeing more drones than usual since late March. And the other day I was looking in the side window of the flow super. And I see a lot of drones in the flow super. Is that normal or something I should be concerned about? Okay. So if I saw, Now drones, by the way, they hang out in all kinds of weird parts of the hive. When drones are not flying out looking for virgin queens, they are hanging out inside the hive on the landing board. They can go to any hive they want. And for some magical reason, they get fed by nurse bees and worker bees wherever they just happen to be. Not unusual to see drones.

You pull the outer cover of your hive. You pull the inner cover of your hive and you'll see drones up in the top with all the others. So they're spreading around. because we have these flow mechanisms and you're trying to have a flow super with flow frames in it you want to make sure that there is no brood in there so i would look at what do the cappings look on those and you have a glass panel plexiglass it's on the side of the hive some of them even have one on both sides they even for a while had a flow nuke box made by flow hive that had windows on both sides of that too that was a very short time frame and they don't sell those anymore but the flow supers have a side panel and then that's how you

can tell that they're full and getting capped so I would look just to make sure that it's 100% honey in there the other thing is lift lift the box see how heavy it feels it should feel like it's made out of lead super heavy and the last thing you can do is I haven't checked yet to see if my endoscope can go in between the frames of a flow super I think it can. I'm not sure that's something that I need to check out. So I'm going to make a note. And so you need to be able to look down at the face of it to see if there's any chance that there's brood in there. It's very unlikely, not impossible. Because I did do those tests early on because when that system first came out, there were people that were saying that

the cells are too deep. The queen can't reach the bottom to lay the eggs. The flow super frames is what we're talking about. The too big and I am. they would say so they would only produce drones if anything and unlikely for that so there was design there was research and development put into that and the size of the flow frames on the flow supers these are the parts that move they are sized a little larger than worker cells a little smaller than drone cells so they tried to optimize the bees preference for cells that they would store honey in not lay eggs in and they are in fact deeper which should have caused the queen to be unable to take her abdomen

all the way in because normally queens are going across the top and she puts her abdomen in she lays an egg and then moves on if she had to put her body in to do it i'm not saying that's impossible but you would think she wouldn't in other words if there were areas elsewhere in the hive and again, no top venting, no upper entrance, keeps the brood down near the main entrance. When you provide upper venting and or an upper entrance, you have airflow up there, which means that they could be encouraged to lay eggs up there and have brood up there. So just another thing to think about for those of you who are deciding whether or not to vent your colonies. So I did the test. I took the brood box. I put the just the way it's configured in New South Wales. I put the flow super directly on it without a queen

excluder and I wanted to see if she would lay in those cells and she did. So the next part of that was the queen certainly could lay eggs in there. The next part is are they drones or workers? Because people spoke with such absolution. They'll be drones. They'll all be drones. Now they were actually all workers and we let them all emerge so that we can verify that. Then was that the end of the world too, by the way? If they had laid eggs in the flow supers, is it ruined? No, it wasn't because then you can put your, once you verify your queen is down in the brood box, go ahead, put the queen excluder in,

let everything that's in development up in your flow super, emerge, let them come out of their cappings, and let them go about their business and clean everything up. The other thing was they did a very good job cleaning out the cells. You couldn't even tell that you had had brood in there. You don't want brood in those flow frames. So I demonstrated that it was possible that video is still out. If you want to see the videos on the flow experience and that one included to see if can the queen lay in flow frames.

It's at my website, the way to be.org. And there's a page marked the flow hive experience. And it has all the videos and tutorials that are made from putting them together to even that test that I just described. described. So I need to hear from Joel here and find out what did you learn? What did you see? And I need to find out if that endoscope fits in there. And if it does, I'll be able to tell you that because it's not even a quarter inch in diameter. That thing could get down in there. It has a side camera lens and we can get that in there and see what the face of those frames looks like without pulling anything out. Worst case

scenario you have to pull those frames which I highly recommend against doing pull the whole box if you want to and then if you see brood in the box underneath says there's a way just pry it loose tip your flow super up and look at the box directly under it and see if there's any brood up near and adjacent to your flow super and then i think you'll have your answer so that'll be cool Question number nine. Mike from Minnesota. Does it say what city? I wanted to follow up on the swarm reacher you talked about.

I had a swarm today, got some of them out of a tree with a box, but ended up using an extending pole from a store and attached the swarm reacher to it. Every 10 minutes, I would shake them in the box and put it up about 8 or 10 times, eight or 10 times. with half drawn frame anyway it worked great thanks for the tip worth the money got another hive now three because of it so this is mike p is the last name in minnesota so the swarm reacher

we're in the fluff section by the way too so question number nine is the last one uh i did have opportunity to use this over the past week and uh it's hit and miss so far I made videos of it. I have a swarm, a cluster in a tree that's 22 feet up. Now that is out of reach for my vacuums. I have the everything bee vac, have the Colorado be vac, the bees are giving me a hard time, and there's a tiny cluster of bees even up there right now. So here's what we did. We tried different things. So I tried the brood, the brood frame with drawn comb, been used many times, smells like brood. I added the swarm commander these little capsules so I took one of these and dabbed it on the

frame itself to get the bees to go onto it don't do that so I'm learning what not to do until I figure out what to do because I thought yeah we need to make it more appetizing for the bees we need them to move on to it now it did work to some degree bees crawled all over the frame they got all over the comb and I brought that down and then I put that in a hive because I had a standby hive you have to have somewhere to put them and then I took another frame and I wanted to see if they would go on heavy wax plastic foundation also tagged with swarm commander that's too much swarm commander that was a fail maybe a hundred bees went on the foundation which is plastic foundation in a wooden frame

and the wooden frame clip to this now one of the things I notice about this this little edge right here your wooden frame does not go all the way in that so this little L shaped piece goes up against wood it would be much better if this were a little wider and it actually clipped onto the frame so you might have to pre-stage your frames so set aside brood frame since I was cleaning out some a dead out I have some drawn comb that I can use but I would have to notch out the frames to accommodate this now I did not have the problem that some people commented on that their frame itself flipped. I didn't have any of that, but I did really put a load on this. So the other thing is what I learned from start to finish there is the other thing is your po, your pole that you use to get them.

They make poles that are really long. Not all your poles have the right threads for this. So the ones that are designed to hold paint rollers and stuff like that, they seem to work really well. but have a really high-end window light light light bulb changer so for example if you walked into some huge church that has these big cathedral ceilings and they have light bulbs up there and the custodians will get in there with these really long poles that go 25 feet up that's what I have the threads don't match so I have to wrap the threads with what I have as a photographer is called gaffers tape wrap that three times and And then I can screw this down onto there and it holds its position. But that's not as good as if the threads actually matched because then I need to tape the outside of this to hold it to that pole. And now I just turn that giant pole light bulb changer into nothing but a swarm reacher. But it makes a big difference if you can stand on the ground and use it. So what works the best?

Brood frames, brood comb, no added lures. In other words, don't put Swarm Commander on it. Don't put QMP on it. Some people did that. The QMP draws bees right out of the air. So even those that are not part of the cluster, which I don't want because this is in my APRA, I don't need a bunch that I can't tell who belongs with the queen and who doesn't.

So after today, after doing this presentation and doing the Q&A, I'm going back out to experiment even more. But it's something that you're going to do when you have a lot of time handy. and so I'm glad it works really well for Mike. It's a work in progress for me. I am videoing the things that I'm doing. So in the end, I'll have a presentation about it. And I actually send cameras up.

So I get a camera view to show what the bees are doing and how they make that decision. The queen did not go on my frame. So now you end up loading the boxes as described here by Mike. And then you get the influencers to fly back up and then bring them all down eventually. to your box and this can turn into an all afternoon event and bees as we know don't always do what we want them to but this is what I explained to my wife about it they're out of reach so I don't have

anything else that can go to that height and because they're on the central here's the tree here's the branches right they're on the central part of the tree so it's not like I can get up there with a bucket and jam it and shake them off a branch or something like that that would be just too easy so the bees are not only on that tree but when I got up there with my Colorado be vac I have it I had the 30 foot hose on it and I try to vacuum them off the accessible side and what do they do they all migrated to the back so I know you don't care frustrating swarm reacher still being tested still figuring it out if you've got stories or fixes or tips and what kind of comb is drawing them please write down those tips

in the video description and I would be open to what's working for you where you are. It's really good. So anyway, I'm going to talk about the normal stuff this time of year. You know, people are filling their swimming pools. Kids are outside. Water sources for your bees provide lots of water for your bees, fresh water. If you're putting your sea salts and stuff like that out for your bees and things like this, you know, additional water resources. What's really important is that the water resources can see.

that your bees can always find it. If not, they're going to be looking for it elsewhere. I have my own pond and the bees love to be on the moss and everything else in the edge of the pond. And so we don't have to worry about swimming pools out where I live, but where you live, if it's in a residential area, you better be providing some water sources for your bees. Also, we talked about beeswarmed.org, B-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D-O-G. It's a place where beekeepers can register to collect swarms. Where does it work? Anywhere. You log into it. You register as a beekeeper.

The fun part is I've been using social media to put the word out so that people that spot bees somewhere can go to the website, but they have to know about it. So, beswarned.org, and beekeepers can put that word out through their social media and make sure that these people know that they can go there and report a swarm. And it worked perfect because in my area I registered. I registered just for five miles because I don't want to drive, you know, big distance to get a swarm.

So just for kicks and grins and I got four alerts on my phone. The way it works is the person that reports the swarm, it has a geopoint, right? So then any beekeeper that's registered for that area also, they get the alert. The first beekeeper to respond gets the rest of the information about it. and they claim it. Once they claim it, you don't get any more information. So it's not like social media where they post everybody's phone number, address, and everything else.

I don't like that myself. And it's working. So the experience so far is positive. It's only been something we've done for a little over a week. The other thing is, this is the time of year that we're planting stuff here. So I planted service berry trees. I might have, you might have heard me talk about the fact that the woods to the east of us have been harvested, heavy. Every hardwood that was in there and even some of the pines and stuff that's overfoot in diameter has been pulled out. Truckload after truckload after truckload. And then we realize we have no control over this. So it's time to plant some buffer zone trees on my property. And I wanted them to be valuable to wildlife. I wanted them to be good for the bees.

Long story short, I planted service berry trees. I planted 16 of them. so both to the east and to the west and so we're thinking about you know the areas under our control which is what works for you too whatever green space you have service berries are really good the other thing is of course we plant every year for pollinators acres of land for the pollinators and the one thing we did last year and my prep by the way is just to mow it all really close and then come in with a tiller and i know that there's are people that don't want you to tell the soil and they don't want you to damage the microbiome of the soil and everything else but it has worked really well for me and that's what I'm still doing.

So if they're just like beekeeping, there are a lot of different ways to garden or produce flowers and stuff. So last year we had a real dry spell. So I told all the soil and we put in all the seeds thousands and thousands and thousands of sunflowers. And it didn't rain for two and a half weeks after we planted the seeds. So I till it, spread the seed, and then I drive the tractor over it with a heavy roller and press it all down. And normally that works, but when it didn't rain, all the birds had a field day. They were eating it and any little sprouts that came up, we had those whistle pigs, wood chugs, whatever you want to call them, just walking through and just biting them off and then we add a dough and two fawns move right into that field and they groomed off every single sunflower no depression every single sunflower so what am I changing this year I'm going to watch the weather report so right now we have like three days of pretty consistent rain a nice soft rain that works really well and so this year I'm not going to plant my fields and I'm using cosmos maximilian sunflow

my milkweed are doing really well and my giant blue hyssop is doing really well so we're going to be planting all that stuff some perennial some annual cosmos or annual we're also going to plant borage by the way which direct sows but i'm going to wait until i see the weather report and i know that i'm going to have two or three days of rain ahead of that i'm going to plant my seeds so that's what i'm doing for that uh And by the way, people keep asking about the North American Honeybee Expo. You should know I don't have anything at all to do with the North American Honeybee Expo other than that have always been invited to it. So that's run by Cayman Reynolds.

It is the 2025 North American Honeybee Expo has tickets for sale. I have nothing to do with ticket sales. Also, people are asking who the presenters are going to be. There is a Facebook page for the North American Honeybee Expo. There's also a website for the North American Honeybee Expo. Some of the information on it is still from this past January. So you're looking at January 2025, and people are reporting that some of the motels are already booked, solid,

like from the people going to that expo. So tickets are for sale right now, and that's all I know. I don't know who the presenters are going to be. I don't know if I'm going to be a presenter. and so that's it. I also don't know how many people are going to be there. I know it's going to be a three-day event down in Louisville, Kentucky, right, at the convention center. So Google that if you're interested, but asking me questions is going to waste your time because I don't know.

I did send a message to Kamen Reynolds to ask if he had a list of who the presenters is going to be, and I have not had a response at all on that. So it's up in the air. I'm sure it's a big project. There's a lot of decisions to be made if you want to know what's going on. Facebook page, main website. The other thing is, some kids have been writing and asking about my grandson Quinn, and if he's going to be doing a video, and we are working on his video, he put his hive together.

We are going to be shifting the bees out of his hive that he caught last fall, and we're going to be setting up his new hive, so he is going to be teaching his peers. And so thank you for all the kids that have written. and encouraged my grandson. He is very serious about beekeeping. And that wraps up today's Q&A, which probably took forever. Sorry about that.

So I hope you have a great weekend ahead. I hope you have the weather that we have and that you can really get ahead of those bees. So thanks a lot for watching and for being here today, and I look forward to reading your comments down in the comments section. Have a great weekend.