The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 259, The Way To Bee

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

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

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, May the 24th, and this is Backyard Bekeeping questions and answers episode number 259. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I want to thank you a lot for being here again on a Friday, and of course, it could be the weekend. I don't know what's going on. I know in Australia it's Saturday already, so hello to you, down under. I hope everything is going fantastic. It's going great here. Dynamic weather. you might have seen in the opening lots of storms came through the wind blew everything was pretty intense around here and other parts of the country too and it's 75 degrees Fahrenheit outside right now nice and sunny that's 24 degrees Celsius and that's one mile per hour wind low wind which makes the heat feel all the worse by the way it's 44% relative humidity which is really good

because recently with the high humidity we've had lots of bees bearding on the front of the hive collecting on the front, hanging on the bottom board, and even underneath the hive visors, and now they're all in. Why? Because the air is so dry. They can dry out the new nectar they've brought in. They're making honey. Everything is good. We're going to talk a little bit about that. At the end, and guess what's going to happen? We have a three-day weekend, which means Monday. A lot of people are going to gather and have parties. And there's no different for us here in the northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania, northeastern United States. But we've got a 70% chance of rain.

But maybe it'll just blast through. The good news is it's going to water all the seeds that I planted. I planted, it's not a large number, but 54 giant hyssop plants, for starters. So I planted Cosmos. I planted more than an acre of sunflowers this year. Maybe the deer won't eat them all. That would be fantastic if they didn't.

And I've added borage this year, a lot of it. That better come up strong. It's all planted by seed, except for those that we started. And the other plants that I started indoors first, I put out butterfly milkweed, which should do really well in full sun, and it handles rough ground. So clay, gravel, things like that. It does really well. And then later on, I want to try again with swamp milkweed. That hasn't happened. And I did something new this year, too. I planted the Goliath striped sunflowers. They're supposed to be giants. We're going to see how that goes.

So lots going on out there. Great weekend for planting. So if you haven't done it yet, this is it. Get your stuff out there. Get ready. Plant for pollinators. And a lot of people, this is interesting to me, watch and listen to these episodes.

By the way, this is also a podcast. So if you do a Google search, podcast, The Way to Be. And you'll find it. It's all over the place. So people that listen that are not beekeepers. So what could you do if you're not a beekeeper? you live in an area where you can't keep bees yet, or maybe you just have ants in your pants.

You want to get started, you want to do something, but you don't feel ready for bees. Plant for pollinators, plant for all the pollinators. That would be fantastic. And that way you're already building the habitat for your bees. If you want to submit a question or topic that you'd like to see covered on one of these Friday episodes, please go to the way to be.org and click on the page mark the way to be,

and then you fill out a form, and voila. maybe I'll talk about it one of these days. So that's it. Look down to the video description and find out what the topic's going to be for today. So we'll thank Adam Holmes ahead of time because he puts the time stamps on those things for us. When you see that and if I didn't get a chance to pin it yet, go ahead and thank Adam for the work that he does to help us find a way through what could be a lengthy presentation, although I hope not because I have stuff to do. I have two swarms right now in Colorado Beach. VAC boxes. So probably before we get started, I should mention, you can end up with too many bees this time of year. That's the situation here for us. We had a very good winter survival rate, which means that the apiary is expanding again, and I don't want that. So my 8-year-old grandson had a great idea. Why don't we take weaker colonies or small swarms that we find

and combine them with colonies of bees that are also low performance that look like they could use a boost and you know what from the mouth of an eight-year-old that was a very good idea so of course his assignment was to walk around and see which of the hives look like they could need a boost manpower-wise or bee power in this case because sometimes this time of year they do lose their queens or they get they haven't got a fully mated queen yet so this is actually a great time for usurpation now i know usurpation doesn't normally involve the beekeeper that's a term that's assigned to normally Africanized honeybees. The queen zips in, the workers come with her and they actually do a hostile takeover of an existing beehive. So we can do that. We can help the hostile takeover, but it's not as hostile as you might think.

You're just going to add a swarm that you collected, hopefully from your own apiary, to a smaller colony, and let them sort out which queen they prefer if there's another queen present. And then voila, you've got a larger population in your hive and you didn't have to worry about shifting around all the woodenware. So in other words, you didn't have to add in frames, swap out frames, decide which ones you keep. Because it's a swarm. They don't have frames yet.

What a perfect time to do it. So I ordered more Colorado BVAC collection boxes. And I got mine from BetterB. I don't know if they're sold somewhere else. But what that means is the vacuum unit, the hose and all that stuff, you keep with you, right? And I mentor some other people. So what I like to do is get the extra swarms and it's in a 10 frame standard deep Langstroth box.

It has no frames in it. It's part of the bee bag. It has a screen in it so it's ready for transport. But my problem in the past was I load the bees up into that box and then there's another swarm. So I can't combine them into the same box. It's not a good thing to do. The other thing is what if I want to give away those bees so they can take them home, put them on their hive, hive them and then bring me the box back. In the meantime, there's another swarm. So now I have three Colorado BeVoc, Colorado BeeVAC collection boxes. So I can give them away and still have, not give away the box, by the way,

giving the bees away, I get the box back. Write your name on it, really big, by the way. So anyway, more of those, and even my, if anyone's listening, my everything BeVac, we even used that. That's the backpack style, you know, it's in a yellow, five, gallon bucket looking thing. Anyway, I wish they sold the buckets by themselves. I don't want to buy a whole other everything BVAC. I just want the yellow bucket with no lid because it has a screen insert. I want the bucket and the screen insert so I can do the same thing. Put that one on the shelf

and of course send the bucket off with whoever's taking the swarm home and then I have an adapter plate so they can do that. But then there's this delay. They have to bring it back to me. so I'd like to have a couple of those buckets hanging out if anyone's listening. It would be great if they did that. So that's enough whining on my part. So we covered things that are planted, sunflowers, cosmos. Oh yeah, maximum millions. I decided I had this big frontage area that's outside of my woven wire fence,

which is where I used to keep fainting goats and stuff like that. And it wasn't using it. you know it goes all the way to a dirt road so I decided this year mow all that down till it up and we're going to plant the whole thing out with max a million sunflowers because they're going to come back every single year they grow really tall six seven feet and higher and so as we get into the end of the year we get a nice curtain there that stops the dust from coming from the road and it makes it look nice from the outside looking onto my property you don't see the fence anymore you'll just see the max of million sunflowers so that can be great now the honeybees use them but it's not a main nectar or pollen source for them but all the other pollinators use it too even birds so it'll be fun.

Alright let's jump right into it question number one comes from backyard beakyman adventure 335 that's the youtube channel name Hey for I've got a quick question for you I had a bear get into several of my hives last night I'm needing a quick fix to keep them out as I'm headed out in the morning for a several day work meeting. I've seen you say that you's motion noise makers was wondering which ones you have and where you got them from. And anyway, here's the thing. Backyard Bekeeping Adventure 335. I have those noise makers out and I will put a link to that down to the video just

description here for those but here's the problem that we have they need to deter bears before they've gotten into your apiary and before they've benefited from eating your larvae and you know dragging out your frames because they also drag frames away and scatter them off in fields and take them into the woods and stuff like that so the key there was to deter the bears from coming in at all in other words while they're sensitive to a new area, the noise makers work. But once the bear has been in your apiary, now we're at another level. I already wrote this person back and I said, you're going to want to put up an electric fence now and you need to do it ASAP being that

you're leaving town. So they sell them at tractor supply. They sell them an agway, all these other farm and fleet and stuff. So you can, because you have to go get them right away. You got no time. Me personally, I was talking this over with my wife. By the way, whose birthday, It is tomorrow, so happy birthday to her. Anyway, I'd wait the bear out. I'd be out there when the bear came to the apiary. Because they're going to come back. If they've been there the first night, they're going to be back the next night and the next night because they're in the area. You need to be out there to make sure that their experience is not a pleasant one. You need to make sure that they're surprised, that they're stressed, that they're unhappy, that they go somewhere else to find their resources. And this time of year, don't feel bad about it.

There's lots of resources out there. We just don't want to create a specialist bear that goes around sniffing for honey and then going in and tearing apart your apiary just to grab out a few frames. The damage they do is impressive. The second part of that is you should report it to fishing game

and check in with your state to see if there's a fund because listen to this. In the state of Pennsylvania where I live, if you have evidence of what it costs you for the equipment that the bear destroyed, they actually will reimburse you the first time. Even if you are a total, I don't want to say you were negligent, but if you had no protection for your apiary at all, they still pay. They pay once. And they give you advice regarding what you need to do to deter bears, and I guarantee an electric fence is going to be part of the advice

that they give. Now, I used to do electric fencing. I had it. So I had poultry fence. I had a 30 mile rated fence. And I put that around the B.R. The other thing while I'm talking about that that I'd like to explain because they're a new beekeeper passenger thinking about protecting your apiary. I often see people put up an electric fence. Let's say you have four beehives. You bunch all your beehives together and then three or four feet from the beehive, there's the electric fence and it goes around the apiary. Barely enough room for the people to walk around. And here's my thing. Put your electric fence. way out there away from your bees. Maybe it's a cosmetic thing. You know, maybe it's aesthetics for your

yard. You don't want people to see this electric fence out there. But leave yourself lots of room. These things are rated. Electric fences are not built for a tiny corral. You know, they're built to cover miles, acres, right? So make your electric fence out and well away. So here's the reason that I think about that. If the bears come very close to the hives, they're smelling everything and their appetite for whatever is on the other side of that fence gets stronger the closer they are. So I would think having your electric fence farther out

prevents them farther away before they even get the hive. So a tiny deterrent works farther from the hives. The closer they are to the hive, the stronger the deterrent needs to be because the stronger their intention is towards whatever is inside that hive, inside that apiary, right? So other than you sitting there in your lawn chair with your red light and something that makes a lot of noise like an air horn or something, so when the bear shows up and shows an interest and is sniffing around down wind,

they're going to sniff that you're there. They might not like that already. Some people hang a radio underneath the soffit and they play public radio because there's talk going on and the sound of people's voices would deter wild So there's lots of things you can do, but now we're at electric fence stage. So for those of you who have never had a bear, visit your ape area yet, you can use the noise makers. Now, I have said this before, I have to say it again. I accept no responsibility if it walks right past all your noise makers and does a lot of damage. I will also say this.

I have motion activated cameras out everywhere. When I put up these noise makers are about 129 dbs they have a night mode they're solar powered and I put 15 of them out and they face all different directions you cannot walk up to that they even go off sometimes very annoying they go off when a mouse goes through if it's very close to the hive because I had some that were aiming right close to the landing board because I wanted to deter a specific skunk from that landing board they work all right but just like with the bears if you you do this after a skunk has shown up and after it's been feeding skunks will actually start to ignore the noisemaker so that's interesting too but skunks are kind of stubborn bears don't like noise above everything else

they don't like to be surprised they don't like loud noises and we provide them all of those things with those flashing lights so if you want to know about them check them out they've worked for me 100%. I have videos of raccoons running away, possums running away, possums, zinging around like a ping pong ball, because everywhere they went, another alarm went off and he ran this way, another alarm went off and he ran that way. And so it can confuse the animals. And by the way, the game commission, when I talked to them about that,

they were not impressed. They did not like that I was using noise makers because they also said it disrupts wildlife. And my point to them was, I'm hoping to disrupt wildlife with my noise makers. and they need to stop getting into my apiary and making those noises if they don't want to be disrupted. Moving on in question number two. This comes from Craig, Green Bay, Wisconsin. I had two swarms moving over the weekend, and by the size of them about three frames of bees,

I suspect they're after swarms with Virgin Queens. I would like to move them into my bee yard about 30 to 50 yards. How long should I wait to move them? Should I move them? all at once or a little each day until they're relocated. The weather has been rain or high winds every two out of three days. Would that affect the mating flights? And if so, should add time before I begin to move them.

Thanks. Okay, here we're into the territory of what each beekeeper does. So these are the opinions. Now, often beekeepers have different opinions if you're a new beekeeper, can be very frustrating. Well, so-and-so just told me to do this. And so-and-so just said, don't do that, do this. And you know why? Both of those things can work and one might work a little bit better than another, but here's the thing. I'll just tell you what I do.

And I do this because I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of bees. When I collect a swarm, I move it right into the apiary right away, particularly if it's one of mine. It sounds like this one belongs to Craig because it's only 30 to 50 yards away, depending on how many other bees are in the area. but I set them up, install them right away. Have very good luck. Here's the thing. What will happen potentially is that some of those scouts and foragers that came with a swarm, they're all flying because they swarms to that new location, so they're all flying. Some of them will acclimate back to their old and orient back to their old hive, right?

But they've chosen the queen that they left with. Maid it or not, they chose her, they followed her fair and. and they're committed to her so it's rare for them to go back what you can do now is that I recommend that you do it right away as quick as possible and you find a swarm in your swarm trap transfer them into the hive as quick as you can I put it right back in the same apiary and they go right to work let's provide some incentive for them to stay there you can put sugar syrup on it and that's because they're ready to build comb providing them a little bit of sugar syrup also helps them continue that now I'm not saying you have

have to because some people don't want any sugar syrup on any of their hives at any time. That's okay. You don't have to. They will find the resources but look we have storms and stuff coming through. If you had sugar syrup on they could continue while the weather's warm to build new comb inside the hive while they're unable to forage. So there are benefits to that and by sugar syrup I mean one to one by weight. So a gallon of water and eight pounds of dry sugar mix together so that would work really well the other thing is if you had a frame of brood you wanted to put in there to keep them there uh go and put it in we don't want to put a queen excluder on there or put them in a queen isolation cage because uh it sounds like she might not be mated yet so we need

her to be able to fly out and come back now given all that depending on the size of the area you have dedicated to your bees try to put this new colony well away from the others as far away as they can be and still be in the area that you've designated for your bees. If you can put them next to a bush or some other geographic feature, right, that helps them orient better to that same hive. It benefits them. The other thing that will be interesting is, and I've seen it over and over again,

when she does make her mating flight, you'll see a boost in productivity. It seems like to some observers that when the bee comes back from a mating flight, wow, they realize, yes, she's made it, she's going to lay eggs, and there's all this activity on the landing board. But what more often happens is she flies out to the drone congregation area. She gets made and when she comes back, she picks up other bees that fly through her pheromone stream

as she returns to the hive and you can pick up hundreds if not thousands of new workers for that hive that are not even from that original swarm. It's really interesting. You'll also often see a bunch of drones come back with her and they'll show up, they'll get fed, and then they'll all leave, and then she'll start her laying. So I put them right in the apiary right away where they're ultimately going to be. There's this part about moving them a little bit at a time. That's an established colony that you're thinking about relocating,

and you can move them in increments every day until you get them to the new location within your apiary. That's a different thing. This is a swarm. They're already prepared. to establish themselves in a new cavity and so they'll accept that new box and that new location even though it's just 10 feet from where they were before much better than if it were an actual entire colony that you're moving that was not planning to split so i hope that makes sense question number three comes from dmitri i hope i don't mess up this name akanama walk

Okanamo Walk, Wisconsin. Anyway, it says here I live in southeastern Wisconsin and it's my first spring as a beekeeper. On April the 30th I was going to do an inspection and make a split right after I came back home from work. While I was getting my equipment ready, I heard a loud buzzing noise and guess what I was late. The bees were heading up on a spruce tree. That is close to the land's hive that they were flying from. And the bad thing is that they bivouacked 30 feet high, and there was nothing I could do about it. Even though I was really disappointed that I was losing at least half of the bees and a really good queen, I did proceed to the inspection. I found that at least five open queen cups and two fully drawn capped queen cells.

Two weeks later, I did another inspection to make sure that the queen was there. I didn't see the queen or any eggs. A week later, I did another inspection. And same situation again. So that's key. Two weeks, no queen or eggs. Three weeks. Same situation. No eggs, no evidence of a queen laying. I didn't see the queen or any eggs or brewed. So at this point, I put a queen mandibular pheromone in between two frames. And my question is, what will happen if the queen is less, Let's say I missed her for some reason and she is there in the same space, which I doubt with my QMP. Are the workers going to kill her? Okay, for those of you that don't know, no, QMP, Queen mandibular pheromone. It's a synthetic pheromone that imitates the scent of the queen, also known as queen's scent. It's what binds them there. Now, the time for the queen mandibular pherom to be put in would be at the end of the second week,

and that's to keep your worker bees from activating their ovaries and becoming laying workers, because that can happen at the 21st day, see, if they're missing the queen. But here's the other side of this. It's been three weeks, and there's no evidence of the queen, or worried about whether or not the queen mandibular pheromone would conflict with the actual queen if she is present. If she has not made it in return in three weeks, by the way, I would replace that queen anyway. So, good news. bring in another queen. And go ahead and put the QMP in there.

It's not going to do anything. It may suppress if you're not too late the creation of laying worker bees. We don't want them to do that because that's another hurdle that we have to get over. And if you had QMP and a queen present, you know what they would do? They would show favoritism for the actual live queen.

Because I've done that test. QMP on a branch, live queen in a cage on a branch. here's the Q&P gets a tiny cluster, the queen that's real, and not related to the bees around the branch, by the way, they cluster around the real queen. Okay. So keep us posted on what happens,

but QMP will not cause them to create this allegiance to the fake queen, the temp queen, and then when they see a real queen attack and kill her, which they have the ability to do if we had two real living queens, they can show a preference for one, and then they can surround the other, generate a lot of heat, and kill her, and then kick her out. So they won't take a fake queen over a real one, but a fake queen in the absence of anything else,

they treat it like it's a real queen, and that suppresses their need to reproduce in a ditch effort. That's what happens. That's why we get laying workers. The queen's absent. They're desperately trying to continue their genetics. That's why these worker bees become layers. They're only capable of laying non-fertilized eggs, which means that these will be drones,

and then they're sending out their genetics in the form of drones. So the other thing is the drones that they make are undersized. They're a little bit runty. They're not the best. So in the bigger world of competition out at the drone congregation area, they're not going to do the biggest, the fastest, the best flyers, and their chances of mating are very low. But it is a ditch effort that they have just inherent in their job.

design to continue their genetics. So question number four comes in from Ellen from the state of misery. So as comments, what do you recommend? Is there a good honey refractometer for less than $100? Thank you. So here's the thing. I've done several videos on refractometers and here's the deal. I do have the real expensive refractometer, the misgo, by the way, For those you who want to spend a lot of money on a refractometer, the MISCO is the good one. It's the one that state inspectors use. Food inspectors use it to make sure that the water content is correct in your honey. So it's a water refractometer.

Now there are some that detect, when I say water refractometer, it's determining the percentage of water to honey. So they come from the factory, calibrated, ready to go. Those are the best. Now here's the thing. The other ones, they're all basically under $100. So the ones that you go to Amazon and look up, and I'll give you a link to the ones that I've used. We have honey refractometer calibration days at our bee club, the Northwest Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. So sometimes we'll do it after our meeting.

So we'll bring the MISCO in or we'll have a breakfast at IHOP, which is one of my favorite things to do, by the way. And we'll tell everyone, just bring your refractometers the manual ones. You know, you have to adjust them and you have to calibrate them. And often they're in a very good calibration range. are ready but we'll create a honey calibration sample so we'll take some honey in and we'll get everybody together so this is key everything in the room is at the same temperature step number one and so the next thing is we take this honey sample and we take little dipsticks and we put that on the misco unit and we see what it reads oh 17.7% water now we take that same

honey and everyone else takes their little dipsticks and they put it on each of their refractometers and they get a little training on making sure that that window is completely covered that it's not leaving air bubbles and things like that in it and then they calibrate it to match with the misco said and guess what happens with these refractometers that are pretty darn inexpensive they stay in cow so once there's a screwdriver that comes with it you adjust that and there's a meter in there and it reads exact I will give you a link to the video that shows how these things work.

And then what you have is your refractometer is dialed in. So the $35 refractometer performed just as well as the $79 refractometers. So it comes down to personal preference, how good the ratings are on Amazon, see what people said about who sold it, how well it holds up. They come at their own case and everything else.

So I'm going to put that link down there. But just read review. Just read reviews, wherever you want to buy your refractometer, and they come in a kit and they're ready to go. And then I highly recommend that you get with someone else who has a high-end refractometer. And then make sure that you calibrate yours to match theirs. I did the same thing with inexpensive thermometers and stuff too, by the way. When I was incubating chicks, we'd get these inexpensive thermometers that we put in there. And then we'd go to the local drugstore and talk to the guys that are,

back there, the pharmacist, because they had some climate-controlled storage areas that had calibrated, verifiable, traceable, thermometers in them. And then I would say, hey, can you stick my thermometer in there? You make friends with a pharmacy technician, and then they put that in there, and then you see what their thing says the temperature actually is, and then you're right. If your little bulb-style thermometer was a degree off or two degrees off, then you mark that it's off by two degrees high, low whatever if it happens to be spot on excellent some of them were just stabled onto the cards a little bit so you could actually slide the thermometer a little up and down until it match exactly what the high-end calibrated

thermometers we're doing so look for a calibration standard and then take your inexpensive one and match it up you're good to go so that's an easy one but important because a lot of new beekeepers this will be their first honey harvest coming up and they want to make sure that they have the right moisture content and you'll often hear people say well if the bees capped it it's at 18 percent i have had honey bees cap honey that was at 19 and a half and even 20 percent in some cases and the honey even had little little air bubbles in it which is troubling the other thing is when you pull out frames of honey if it smells sour you may have high water content in the honey even though

it's capped so it's not always guaranteed verify it check it out question number five submitted by carol ann which is 14623 carol ann that's the youtube channel name trying to get rid of carpenter ants on be smart inner covers they love to chew the insulation oh man i don't have that here i must have taken my be smart cover out of here but here's the thing uh they do chew the insulation those be smart insulated inner covers that I used I celebrated so much the bees can get up inside it is a hard plastic base the part that goes in contact with your bees but they go up through the central comb and then there's a little air channel in there and that's open to their polystyrene which is the insulation and bees can chew it and ants like to move into it and excavate living spaces so we came up with

a fix for that which was to put a little so let's continue to read this I glued the wooden inner covers to the B smart insulated covers like you did because we created a feeder shim on that because the way they come they just want you to put the B smart outer cover on and just have that insulation but you can't feed there so you have to create a space which is a medium super usually a shallow super would work I brushed apple cider vinegar on the wood tops I put aluminum foil around the legs of my hive stand and brushed on some apple cider vinegar. I'm going to pause right there for a second because you don't need to wrap the legs in aluminum foil.

Keep in mind honeybees and ants are related. They're all social insects. Guess what drives them. Faramones. That's why you see a bunch of ants going somewhere. They're following other ants. They're following the pheromone trail. If you see them, maybe they're going across your kitchen counter or your kitchen floor. and if you rub your finger through the trail that they're following or rub your whole hand through it, you'll see the next ant that comes along, kind of loses the trail and does a little zigzag around until they find the pheromone trail again and they pick up and they keep going. This is why disrupting their pheromone trail can disrupt the ant's path. So you can take gel or mint toothpaste, something like that,

and rub that right on the legs of your hive stand and it will last a really long time. Now, if the ants are already up there, and they're in your inner cover, that's usually where they hang out under the outer cover and on top of your inner cover because it's out of reach of the bees. And in this case, they excavate into the polystyrene, so we want to get them out of there. So it's time to get your blower out and puff them right out of there. Before you, of course, put the pheromone interrupting gel toothpaste around the legs. Now let's move on. It says, I just read, aluminum foil disrupts.

the magnetic field and could make the bees flee. Should I take the foil off the legs of my stands? I also put foil inside one of my telescoping covers. She says telescopic covers, but it's telescoping, just like because the cover slides off, it lays over. Anyway, so here's the thing. The aluminum foil, I can find nothing scientifically to support that, having aluminum foil on the legs of your hive or inside your inner cover around that polysyrene to keep

the ants and bees from chewing it i find no evidence that it would disrupt the electromagnetic energy the electromagnetic flux that might be around or the alignment of magnetic flux lines to be disrupted enough to get your bees to depart i can find nothing so i think you're safe if you want to put aluminum foil on the legs if you want to put aluminum foil on the legs if you want to put aluminum foil on those polystyrene sheets between the plastic to cover the hole and things like that, the bees won't chew it. And I've had no evidence that the bees were bothered in the least by the presence of the aluminum foil. And they do put peripolis on it, by the way.

So I'd rather have carbon or ants in small high beetles because it also commented that the, you know, the presence of the ants resulted in low small high beetle residency. So since the small high beetle, are often going right through the main entrance and they're in a different part of the hive they're inside because you need to get the resources from the bees ants are seeking shelter it's a little different the ants are rarely if at all rating actual bees or bee resources they're just finding a shelter spot so that's it let me see you'd rather have the ants than the small high beetles that's probably a good thing too because the ants don't impact your bees small hay beetles do they can slime out your stuff you don't want it

I don't have them, can't test it. So that's my recommendation. Don't worry about aluminum disrupting the magnetic flux flow of your bees into serving them to the point that they would actually depart the hive. Question number six. Call me Ishmael. 7452. That's the YouTube channel name.

I like that name. Two questions. If I may, can I put back an older super from last year with old rat. of comb and some honey onto this year's new hive. Now the best part of that here's the thing is coming from your own apiary. This is not chipping honey around other people. This isn't buying any equipment from somebody else. This is your equipment, your stuff, your honey. If it doesn't smell like it's off because honey in storage, by the way, you can take on moisture even through the wax cappings it can become

spoiled. So how does it smell? It still smell like good honey. If you want to be be safe flush it out heat it up extract it clean up the frames before you introduce them to the hive the drawn comb and frames themselves are extremely valuable to your bees if you think there's any chance that anything could be off about the honey after a winter of storage and now we're in spring uh using that at all if it's questionable at all just flush it out with fresh water dry it and then now you can use the comb and it says will the new queen and bees use and accept these old racks in the old top box? Yes, they like beeswax, period. When you get beeswax from any source, bees warm right up to beeswax.

It doesn't matter if they made it or if it's from their hive, it's beeswax. They like it. The lower box is getting full of honey. So yes, use it. Put it on there. That's what frames are for. Clean them up, put them in. Question number two.

Is it normal on a hot afternoon for my bee? bees to come out in forest and fly around in a group. Not saying a swarm here of 200 to 300 bees in the air in front of the hive lasts about one to two hours and then they settle back into the hive with unusual with the usual 50 bees flying in and out. So remember that we are producing by the way that number 200 to 300 that's not necessarily a very big number because here's the thing. What's your queen doing? Your queen after spring started and all the resources started piling in which is why we're all flaming swarms. She is laying eggs. Let's be conservative, 1,000 eggs a day. So 21 days from laying 1,000 eggs the first day, what's happening? Well, 21 days later, we have 1,000 emerging

brand new worker peas. And so every day, let's say she laid 1,500. Well, 1,500 are going to be emerging 21 days later. And then they go into their normal routine of different jobs that they're doing inside the hive. They're cleaning, they're doing nurse duties, they're cleaning cells. They're feeding pupae and larvae. Well, they don't feed pupae because they're capped, but they feed the larvae. And they do all these in hive tasks. And then ultimately, they migrate to landing board activities and outdoor activities. And so what do they have to do? They have to orient. So when they do that, usually it's in the middle of the day when it's nice and warm and the sun's at its peak and they fly out. And you'll see the orientation flights, these figure eights that they do.

and forth in front of the hive. They're just hovering, facing the hive. Sometimes they look around in different directions and they do this in big groups and then they all go back in later. They're doing a couple of things. One, they're exercising their flight muscles. They're working out. They're getting ready. They're marathoners, whatever you want to compare it to. And then they're going to go back in and they're getting toughened up until eventually they go out and forage on their own. And they do this in big groups. It just tends to happen. So this specifically, this kind of comes after storms because a lot of them have graduated to being outdoor bees, but they haven't been able to fly yet because we have storms and rain and bad weather.

So when it clears, you'll see a rush of activity afterwards. In fact, it can sound like a swarm. I don't know about you, but I imagine that I hear swarms all the time. And that's just because the activity is so intense in the apiary that it sounds like somebody, something is swarming somewhere. But it's just a lot of bees on the wing. So that's very normal and please remember this phrase, when it's warm after a storm, expect a swarm.

Because that's what we're going to have. When, Monday we have storms. Tuesday we have swarms. Watch and see what happens. We're still in swarm prime time right now. So yes, that's totally normal. Oh, we're in the fluff section. So that's it for the questions for today.

Now we have the fluff, which is just. just going to talk about the plant of the week coming up we already know we have storms coming we have hot weather here the first thing we want to talk about is the smoker pellets by the way i've mentioned it before we have smoker pellets that are made of switchgrass and the switch grass pellets are actually used for a lot of different things they happen to be very good for smoker fuel they come from urn's seeds you'll find out that if you go to buy smoker pellets direct from earned seeds they don't sell them so we are selling the switch grass pellets has smoker fuel for beehive smokers and it is the best smoker fuel i have ever used in my smoker and i'm being totally unbiased

because i've used a lot of different stuff i've tried a lot of different things pine needles pine shavings i've tried the grass clippings that are all smashed together you scrape away from underneath your mower deck and I've got really dense smoke out of those but the switch grass smoker pellets the reports are for outstanding from the people that have bought them it's a fundraiser for a non-profit organization called the northwest pennsylvania beekeepers association and you can look at their website the northwest pennsylvania beekeepers association and you'll see right on the cover page a picture of a smoker and you click on that and you can buy smoker pellets and they ship them to you this leaves me to the next part. They come in these woven plastic bags. So I think it's eight or nine pounds of

smoker pellets that you get. Those bags are porous, which means they're not waterproof. Don't leave them out with your gear in the rain because these smoker pellets, these switchgrass smoker pellets will take on moisture and then of course they will degrade. So once you get them, keep them in, set aside a tote or a steel bucket or something and keep them in. out of the rain and keep them dry. That's going to be key to any smoker fuel, not just these pellets. The other thing is, I really appreciate those of you who bought them and supported it because it helps with our educational outreach. None of us are profiting from this. The person that's shipping the pellets, packaging them, and everything else is doing it completely as a volunteer. I'm telling you about it

as a volunteer. Also, I get nothing back from this at all. So the reports are really good. People really like them. It's a cooler smoke, a denser smoke, and the bees respond to very little smoking. Like puffs. You don't have to create the fog of war anymore. And they burn, as you'll see in comments from people all over the place, they burn for a very long time. And now that I put my cork in the end of it at the end of each inspection, they last me a long time. I'm not reloading smokers. I used to go out into the bee yard and have two or three smokers preloaded. Because if there was anything I didn't like was grabbing a smoker and going to use it and finding that the fuel was used up. The other thing is pine shavings and things like that burn pretty darn hot. And so it's really

convenient to have a smoker fuel that burns cooler, lasts longer, dense smoke. The bees react to it in a non-frenzied way. If you've ever smoked your hives and seen a really strong reaction and heard them were and make a frenzy of activity, that is what I used to get from the pine shavings that I used to use. And we have those because it's bedding for chicken coops and things like that. So these switchgrass smoker pellets, I like them and but I just want to caution you, you must keep them dry if you want them to last a long time and not fall apart because these aren't really hard pellets. They're dense and they're packed and their pellet form, but if they took on moisture, I think they would degrade pretty quick. So that's a note from the person who ships them.

And so moving on with the rest of the fluff, here's what's about to happen. You get your chance, by the way, and these are for the people in the northeast. I don't know what's going on in the southern parts of the United States. Clover is about to bloom. So up here in these elevations, we're at 1,300 feet above sea level. We are a Agzone 4, roughly. And even north of me, it's actually lower, so they're ahead of us as far as things coming into bloom. When this clover starts to bloom, you're going to see a huge nectar flow.

So this is your opportunity to organize your hives and equipment while it's light enough to move around. If you're going to line boxes, that's the other thing. I'd rather recommend, if you've been putting off supering your hives, I know I've been suggesting that you super your hives. Please do that now. Because when the nectar flow hits, they also can become honeybound so fast. It will make your headspin. You won't believe when the nectar flow.

hits and you see how many bees are covering the fronts of your hives and hanging off the landing boards and then on these hot high humidity nights they'll stay there exposed outside while they're trying to dehydrate all the honey they brought in so the nectar flow is about to happen this is your chance to get everything ready to go and consider combining your weaker colonies or as my grandson Quinn says get those small doomed swarms that we collect on branches you know the little ones are like this we anticipate that those have unmaided queen so they're kind of after swarms right and if we collect those if we could get the queen out of them i don't think that's a smart thing to do but you can put those into an existing colony that you suspect is already queenless check it out

if you have these underpowered colonies that don't seem to be doing very much maybe the queen's just not functioning well maybe it's a good opportunity now to check in on that colony and take a look at those brood patterns and if you do find that you have a brood pattern that isn't really up to speed or she's not very productive and you can find the queen it would be great opportunity to remove that queen hold your swarm in your swarm collection kit overnight and then introduce them into that now queenless hive the next day without losing numbers and all the infrastructure is there. So combine weak colonies. Add supers ahead of honey caps. By a honey cap I mean when you look at the top of your hive you pull the cover off you pull the

inner cover off if you already see all of the frames are full of capped honey you're late. Now you have to pull some of those frames. In other words don't just put a super on top of that. The bees something occurs with the bees that when they've filled all those frames that they consider that to be the honey cap in other words that's the end of the space that they can occupy and then now they're triggered to do what to swarm so now you want to pull some of those frames out this is where checkerboarding can be handy if you've already got empty drawn comb and you put those empty frames in there and now they have a place to add honey into that comb and it buys you time so that you can now add another super so be prepared inspect for that you find

wall-to-wall honey you got to break it up even if that means pulling three or four of those frames every other frame or something and go ahead and do some extracting which is another thing my grandson's always telling me to do we need to extract honey and i'm trying to tell him they're not ready for that so just be ready pay attention to solid boxes of honey break them up give them drawn comb if you just stick foundation in there when you find that situation that won't necessarily satisfy their need for expansion In other words, drawn comb is going to be critical for you if you have a colony that you find in that situation, solid frames of honey. Now, another thing you can do is pull those up, put your next box below it, and then put your honey cap on top of the new super, rather than the super on top of the honey cap. I don't like to do that, but you can do that if that's the situation you face and you're not prepared to uncap any of the cone.

So you can do some checkerboarding and things like that too. So that's another way to handle it. And what else? Move colonies as far from each other as possible. Entrance configurations are remembered more than the location. So here's what I'm thinking about. When you have a bunch of hives, let's say you have a small backyard and you've got four or five beehives in there and they look very similar.

I did this, which was really funny to me because I'm entertained easily. I put a queen, you know, excluder on the front of the hive because I had hived a swarm and I did not want them to leave. So I didn't want the queen to be able to get out. And I left it there for three days. Now I already knew that she's a laying queen because after three days, when I would take it off so that she could fly if she needed to mate, there was already pollen coming in. So that means she started laying the very first day.

And by the end of the third day, we already had eggs hatching, and we had larvae that required feeding, right? So then what I did is because the bees were all going through the queen excluder, I just took the queen excluder, and I moved it up four inches off the landing board. Now, this was after the days, foragers are out and about, right? Just curiosity. Why didn't I just take it away? Because I want to see.

Do they care that the entrance configuration has changed? And you know what they were doing? They were flying back not to the entrance, which is the physical location where they were entering the hive. They flew to the queen excluder that has a wooden frame around it. They'd go through that. Then they'd walk down the front of the hive. Then they went through the entrance.

Which tells me what. The location wasn't as important as the way the entrance looks. So it was the physical dimensionality of that queen excluder frame that when they fly into where they know their hive is, they then go to what they see as a familiar entrance. So the reason this is important to the backyard beekeeper, when you put geometric 3D shapes on the front of your hive and wherever you locate them to identify where that entrance is,

that's meaningful to your bees and they fly to the familiar shape. the physical dimensions. And then when they get to the actual entrance, that's when they're like, through pheromones, is this where I live? And then they get checked out by the TSA, and then they get to go in. So the guard bees being the TSA.

So physical configurations of the entrances, and I did this already on my way to be Academy building, all of those entrances to the observation hives are configured physically different, so that when the bees come in, they recognize the shape of things, and in they go. So just a little food for thought.

Swarm Reacher update. And people are doing really well with the swarm reacher. So some people had a rough start with it. If you don't know what it is, look up Swarm Reacher. It's a plastic clip that holds your frame so that you can access bees that you otherwise wouldn't be able to when they're bit whacking high in a tree somewhere. So the thing is, and this is consensus base.

So this is people telling me that they've used the swarm reacher and what they got the bees to go on. And now, instead of the brood frames, which is what we told everyone, because that's, by the way, what the originator of the swarm reacher suggested that use old brood comb, and those pheromones remaining on that comb, draw the bees off the tree onto the frame. But actually, it's extracted honey frames now that are outperforming brood comb. So if you've got extracted honey frames, that means all the honey's been taken off, but there's still that honey sticky residue on there.

So this can have a lot to do with the fact that it's bees wax, the fact that it's a resource that they need because bees load up on honey when they're on their way out of the hive, when they're going to swarm. So the longer they're on a tree or the longer in the Bivouac location, they're actually desperate for carbohydrates.

And by putting that frame up there, people are saying that they get them onto those frames quickest, and you need several of them because the method is they keep bringing each frame down full of bees and sticking it into the hive box sticking another frame up there bringing that down covered in bees putting that in the hive box until we get bees flying back and forth between the spot of the tree and the box you're trying to get them to go in and then they all go in the box and if you're super lucky the queen joins the group that's on that frame and then her pheromone gets fan and you see their

nassanoff glands fanning in front of the hive and then they eventually get them all down how do you know when the cluster that's still on the tree has lost the queen. They start scrambling all over the place. They're searching the branch. They're going up and down. They're checking each other out. They look like they're in disarray now because they've lost the queen's pheromone.

And some of them will launch off of the branches of the central column of the tree and they do a little flying around and then they go back and they're sniffing the air. And they get larger and larger in their search for the queen until they encounter that pheromone. where should your box be that's got the bees in it that are from the swarm upwind? I'm not saying they can't find it if they're downwind. I'm saying if you put that box

upwind if there's a breeze at all put it upwind of the tree that's got the big whack on it and then their pheromones waft down that way and they pick up on it and they'll more quickly find the queen in her box so if you move them downwind you just gave them an extra challenge so Swarm Reacher Update, it's working good, they're getting bees you never would have had otherwise. The other thing is bar clamps. If you don't have those as a beekeeper, I highly recommend you get them. These are the ones with the screw handles on them, right? It's a bar clamp that every beekeeper should have any way it pushes your stuff together when you're gluing up boxes or whatever you're doing. But this time of year, as the boxes start to get full, they're heavy.

You walk out there and you're drinking your coffee and you're celebrating what a fantastic beekeeper. you are and how much your bees are benefiting from your maintenance and your presence and everything else and you look at a hive and it's a little crooked one of the boxes that shifted a little bit or heaven forbid you didn't put it back in perfect alignment with a box underneath on hot days these things can shift they're using propolis they're gluing it up anyway the bar clamp you just line it up the box that's a little too far off with the box that is below it and you use the bar clamp handle and you just turn that and it pulls it slowly into alignment. You don't have to use smoke, you don't have to do anything else. Don't walk around there with a rubber mallet and do your calibration on your hives that way. Nice and slow. Just turn the bark clamp and draw them into alignment, draw them this way and that way. The bees never know what's going on. The boxes get realigned and you start to look like you're paying attention to your hives. The other thing is keep your hives level, level, level, level.

You don't want them to make wonky comb and stuff like that, particularly if you have foundationless frames, right? So bar clamps, horizontal hives, adjust the follower boards. Leave a full honey frame at the end. So there's nothing I can do about my lay-ins hives. They're full. They're full all the way to the end. Now, of course, I can't say there's nothing I can do. I could extract honey right now.

I don't have a land size honey extractor, so now we're talking about cutting comb and things like that. But they're full and their populations are full and I have no room to expand. So my number one complaint about the land hives that I have. I bought Dr. Leo Sharashkin's top quality lands hives insulated with sheep's wool and all of that. And they're great hives. The colonies are great. they have pushed out some of the biggest swarms I've ever seen. So anyway, what I really wish was that I had room to add more frames down the line. Because when you open up the hive, every frame has beats on it.

It's not like you can condense it. So the other thing is with your horizontal hives, those you're using the long Langstroth hives, super convenient. Everything fits them, by the way. The frames are, you can swap frames with other Langstroth style hives and things like that. So it's really compatible. huge advantage if you haven't made a commitment to what kind of horizontal hive you like.

The long Langstroth hives use deep frames. Those are very versatile. And there's some discussion about whether they would make honey horizontal and everything else. Yes, they do. They're full of honey. Horizontally, full, full. Are they better honey producers than a vertical hive? I don't know that they would be, but I don't know that the difference is significant because there's a lot of honey in both of them. I do know this. My 8-year-old grandson can work a horizontal hive,

particularly the Langstroth because the frames are in there about 6 pounds full of honey. Nice drawn-out deep Langstroth frame full of honey. An 8-year-old can lift it. On the flip side of that, really old people with arthritic fingers and arthritis in their wrists and things like that can lift those frames. The layins frames full of honey,

are actually pretty heavy and hard on the fingers when you pick them up by the ears. So there are some things to think about if you haven't made your decision yet. But with my long Langstroth hive is five feet long. So I've got a bunch of frames in there and they always manage to size themselves without taking up every frame in the hive. With the land hives, they don't stop two-thirds the way down. They fill every frame all the way to the end. So that leads me with an at-capacity hive, which is why I had to buy another land's hive, which is why I had to expand it. So I had room to put the stuff.

And then there's follower boards in there that from the B's perspective, that is the full size of the hive. So if you did five or six frames, you're just starting them out, they think that's all there is there. And then you've got all your spare frames beyond the follower board. And as you need more, you just pull it out, slide your follow board over, and here's what I recommend. and why I bring it up. The last frame that has honey on it, I keep that one next to the follower board. So as I'm putting a new frame in, it's between that last frame and the brood area and the other stored honey that's already in the hide. So I don't make the new frame without foundation, the one right next to the follower board. I use a frame that's full of what of

comb and drawn beeswax are ready, right? And that they seem to work it quicker that way. So the horizontal highest follower boards leave full honey frame on the end that's a note to myself which now I'm sharing to you in the plan of the week And oh yeah, it's the year of the hornet in fact before I even came in here to do this talk today I had an email from someone who has The European hornets getting into her kitchen by the way and the European hornet is the only true hornet that's here in the United States We don't have to worry about the murder hornet anymore that's Ves Vespa Mandarinia and that was in Washington State and nobody's finding it. I don't mean to be dismissive about that. I'm glad those people are vigilant.

I'm glad that the public turned out and everybody waged war on those hornets. But here's the problem. People see the European hornet now and they think it's the Asian giant hornet, but it's not. It's the European Hornet. It's V-P-C-R-B-R-R-O. So if you want to look it up, V-E-S-P-A-C-R-O. So easy way to remember. Remember it is cray bro. Like you cray, bro. See what I'm saying? It's easy. If you're teaching kids, they latch onto that right away. So anyway, what happened? We had a mild winter. What does that mean for us in the Northeast? Now, this is probably just old hat for people that are in the south. They're probably dealing with yellow jackets that nests never even go dormant through winter.

But up here where we are, we don't like it when there's piles of them out there. Right now, the European Hornets are queens in my now. of the woods. I see them five at a time on the same willow tree that's growing out of my pond. Now the reason that is annoying to me is because it's curious. However, each one of those hornets is a queen, which means that represents five nests under construction. So guess what I did? I found one of the nests under construction. I found the queen. So the queen, year, and I know you're here for the bees but bear with me for a second. She creates from 9 to 11 eggs so she's got cells in there hexagonal cells made out of paper. She's

making her paper nest out of the cellulose that she's gathered. So I'm doing time-lapse video of this and I wait for her to fly away from her nest and then I zip up in there and I take macro photos over eggs and things like that. I invade her space but I also get out of there before she comes back because I don't want to have to wear protective And they're actually very passive, but I'm going to show their progress. The eggs are going to hatch that she's going to have larvae. The larvae are going to have to be fed. This is where the animal protein comes in.

This is where they become hunters, right? Because she doesn't eat animal protein. She collects animal protein to feed her larvae. The larvae are going to mature, and then they're going to get into their pupa state. And then when they emerge, that's when the nests, instruction really starts to go. So right now she's doing a little work. She sleeps a lot. She coils up right up on top of that little umbrella-shaped pack of hexagonal cells that she's made, and she sleeps for a long time. So I sit there sometimes for 20 minutes waiting for her to go away.

I think we're going to be in a pickle. Because last year, maybe I saw three European Hornets all year. They were never an issue. Now, one of the things that they do is they go after other, Vespids. So they go after the bald-faced hornets. They go after yellow jackets. They kill them. In fact, when they snip them apart, it's so efficient, it's kind of surprising. You will, if you're lucky enough to see it, right? The European Hornet flies in. They nab honeybees too, by the way, and a honeybee is like butter to them. They grab a honeybee right off a landing board, no problem, fly it to a nearby branch. You see the head the abdomen fall off they roll the thorax around they make a protein pellet they fly back and they feed it to

their hungry flesh-eating larvae that are packing that paper nests guess what the yellow jackets they're doing the exact same thing so what you're seeing right now yellow jacket queens so if you're trapping or collecting those or reducing the numbers where you live you're getting more bang for your buck this time of year because everyone that you're collecting is a queen every one of those represents a nest okay but in the fall you're going to have to be vigilant so this means that your weaker colonies will need protection from these larger the hornets aren't that big a deal the yellow jacket wass are so i look at this as an indicator that right now we're having a really high number of these present in the environment so that means pest control

they also can hunt at night that should make you sleep well so they can hunt in the dark which is interesting. And that means they catch moths and things like that. So I got into a yellow jacket nest once thinking I would find a bunch of honeybee parts in there. Now it's hard to recognize the honeybee parts. You have to see them catching and getting them in there because they chew them into a little pellet. But I actually found one that was killing and bringing back a whole bunch of these little crab spiders. And if you've never seen those, they're bright colors and they sit right on daisies and things like that.

that little spider is waiting to nab a bee or a fly or something like that and so they are kind of helping you out here so if you had to make a choice me personally would i choose a european hornet over the bald-faced hornet any day bald-faced hornets something's wrong with them they come after you and they wait in other words i don't mean they wait an hour they wait weeks months and the nests is building and building and their numbers are building and building and then one day you walk down a familiar trail that you been walking all the time and zing they come at you and you find out why they have the nickname bullet hornet and sometimes bull hornet none of those things are good so the european hornet that's the real hornet the baldface hornet isn't even a hornet at all they just get the name it's weird so anyway we're going to be in for it be prepared protect your colonies keep things up to speed you're going to see a lot of it the other thing is mice and voles i don't know about you guys but moan or whatever I see more voles scooting off than I've ever seen so another thing mild winter more survival of deer mice and voles and I'm sure moles and other

species of rodents that are out there so and I also caught my first and I almost said elephant shrew that's not even from here I did make a video of an elephant shrew which was really interesting but the pygmy shrew I got the tini shrew and that was really really interesting to me because I had never seen them before so there's a lot going on warm winter these things happen so mice are abundant now so for the shrew mice things like that a lot of you again are configuring your hives for the first time so here's something I want to suggest that you try if you're going to use solid bottom boards and that is the

most common bottom board to put on a length straw style hive. You'll see that most of your bottom boards are reversible and it's supposed to be a winter and then a summer setting right so the summer setting is when it's deeper and wide open the winter setting is narrow so you look when you flip it the narrow side guess what that dimension is it's most likely three-eighths of an inch. You know what's good about that entrance even though it were full width for example a mouse cannot get through the three-eighths-inch opening even that tiny pygmy shrew cannot get its noggin because that's the measurement the skull can't

compress that can't get through the 3 eighth inch opening so my question to you is why not leave all of your hives in the winter side up in other words that 3.8 of an inch opening and you can even narrow it more of a putting little inserts and so create a 3 eighth inch by 4 inch wide opening and you've got something that mice can't get into and then you don't have to worry that you might have forgotten when it comes October or November and that's when the mice are trying to move into your hives. And usually it's the weaker or lower populated hives that they do it and they do it when it's cold. And if it's at 3.8 of an inch already, there's nothing they can do.

Now, I haven't tested it, but I don't know if a European hornet cannot get through a 3.8 inch opening. I can't say that for sure. I will say this. When it came to these hive gate entrances, mice can't get through it. and I'm looking at that at 3 eighths of an inch. I'm going to have to do some testing on that. This is an easy backyard citizen science test we can still do here. If I set this up in an entrance that's open

and we get the hornets to come and feed on sugar syrup. Now I'm talking about the end of the year when these things are populated and they start to get desperate for nectar. The new batch of queens that are headed into winter are desperate for sugar syrup. So if you put out a feeder and we get them to pass through this opening but then we put these in there

and we have sugar syrup here and we would be able then to directly observe whether or not that European Hornet can get through, we know that Bespamandirinia can't get through these. We also know that people that used hive gates on their hives in the northwest, Washington State,

in areas like that. When they had these on their hives, they had previously lost entire colonies to yellow jackets at the end of the year. These create a long channel for the yellow jackets to go through, and they reduce losses due to predation from yellow jackets. Now, there's other stuff that the inventor claims that it does as far as thermal dynamics inside the hive and things like that, but we know for sure, based on two years of going through winters,

that those in the Northwest reduce their losses, by having Hivegates. If you want to read more about this, you can go to the wayto-be.org and look at the page called the HiveGate. And we've got videos on their information and how they get used. You can also just Google HiveGate, H-I-V-E-G-A-T-E,

and then look for videos for the inventory. It comes out of New Zealand. The guy's name is Kyle. He's done a lot of work on this, and it does work in a lot of areas. But the most easy to prove is preventing losses due to attacks from vespids on your bees. So that's a good one too.

So 3.87 inch, get the mice out. I see no benefit to having it larger because we've learned through the years that that summer setting isn't necessary. Most people don't pull their hives apart and flip these bottom boards. It's whatever they set it up as they leave it as, leave it on the summer setting or the winter setting,

3.8.7 inch. And they'll still be able to do what they need to do in the summertime. And it stops, helps reduce attacks from mice and things. Next thing is the eco wood update. When it comes to doing wood treatments for your new hive equipment, because I have a bunch of it stacked out there right now that I have to put a finish on. I am going to put eco wood.

It's a treatment, not a finish. A finish is something you paint on the surface. Eco wood, you immerse your whole hive in it. after you've glued everything up. So I want to talk about it real quick. The number one failure point. Eco wood has not stopped some of your, like if you had a hive top or something,

migratory covers and things like that, it did not live up to its reputation, saying that like if they're little cracks and stuff, that it would heal those or stop those from happening. It doesn't stop that. It also doesn't stop your wood from distorting a little bit. What it does do is stops it from rotting. So that's a good news.

that's it now when you use ecow wood when you have that rabbit joint where your frames rest on the end of the box where it comes to the corner that is the number one failure point on all of my woodenware where that little thin rabbit joint is and it comes to the corner that has a tendency to dry out and arch away and then you'll see the bee is sealing with that opening there and they can propolize it or whatever I highly recommend that you glue that together and that you put a screw through that very thin end of the corner where your rabbit joints are. If you don't screw and glue any other part of that box, I highly recommend you do at least that. That's a failure point for my boxes that have been put together with Ecowood as the finish.

The other hives that are holding up really well, getting in the first year with it, though. Propola hives, and they're made by Premier. and their joinery on the ends is much better than the standard box joints or finger joints that we see on our beehives. So Premier hives with their joinery is fantastic, and then they have another layer of protection on that. I don't know if you've heard of Greg Burns and Nature's Image Farm, they have those treated hives. So if you want to know more about that, go to those websites.

I think Premier is also selling them. So those are waxed and they're dipped and now partnered with those joints. I think what we have on our hands there is going to be the longest lasting wooden hiveware, right? The other stuff that's up in the air is how long is it going to last? Like Appame hives and things like that. How long do they go? I don't know. But I wanted you to know that eco wood is great preservative.

It's a treatment. It does not stop your wood from warping a little. and shifting around. So just know that if that's what you choose to use. But you can fix that, gluing it, screwing it together, and making sure that that stuff is really good. Okay.

So that's it for today. I want to thank you for watching and listening. And I hope that you're not just running around. By the way, if you're looking for freebies, they're out there. How do you find out? You go to a website called Be Swarmed, B-E-E-E, S-W-A-R-M-E-D.org, and you register as a beekeeper.

You pick the amount of distance you're willing to travel. So if you want to go five miles, you register there. You also put the word out whenever someone is reporting that they've spotted a swarm somewhere, they've got it on the school ground, it's on their house, it's on their fence posts, you see it on social media. Encourage those people to report it on B-swarmed.org. and that way to get the most immediate response for that swarm of bees from a beekeeper already in the area who's registered and ready to go and get it. It gets you out of it. You don't have to start this phone tree and email everybody and somebody want to get this swarm.

And before you know it, somebody else is there, but nobody knows that they went and it's a mess. B swarmed.org is a central area where now everybody can register collectors of bees and those who are posting that they found bees. Finding beekeepers to register for free bees is not hard at all. It's getting the public to understand that this is an area. So you contact your local volunteer fire department, make sure they know about it. The point is they can get the information through the website quicker, and it works really well. I've received multiple alerts for it.

I've never had the time to be able to go and collect one of them, but they're five miles away, six miles away. And I like to check up on it and see because the person that responds to get it, It says swarm claimed and it just says the first name of the person. The other advantage of that is we're not putting out everybody's information. Your information as a collector, you don't have to post on social media, call me at this number, or they're posing their address and their phone number and everything else that's sent away with. They register on the site, they report it on the site,

and only the beekeeper that claims it gets to see the information about the specifics of where it's located. They also post pictures of what the swarm looks like and how big it is. You decide if you want to go get it. So thanks a lot for watching. I hope you have a really great holiday weekend ahead. And I hope that your bees are healthy and that your hides are well cared for. Thanks again. Have a nice week. Thank you.