The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 260 recorded during a LIVE chat.

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

This is the audio track from today's LIVE Q&A Session:  https://youtube.com/live/SQpoSv-X2Xs?feature=share   Today's CHAPTERS: 00:00 introduction  (Contributed by Adam Holmes) 06:10 Thoughts on moving my very successful resource hive into a full 10 frame hive box? 11:28 Is diatomaceous earth safe to use near bees? 13:34 What is the best indication of swarm season? 18:05 I've collected several swarms in my bee vac that had several shb in the bivouac. Do you know how common this is? 21:13 How many times in a row would you treat with OA? 28:04 I had a nuc die. There were partially emerged brood that died with their tongues out. What might have caused this? 43:03 What is your favorite bee escape for getting bees out of a honey super? 53:05 Special Guest How is your hive doing? 01:00:55 Can I move a frame of brood from a stronger hive into a weaker hive? 

So hello and welcome happy Friday. I'm glad to see that we already have people over in the chat. So do continue to talk to yourselves over there. And this is Friday. I want to welcome you in Friday, May the 31st, last Friday of the month. And for those of you don't already know, the last Friday of every month is a live stream, just like this one. You're more than welcome to talk to one another over in the chat side. And if you have a question, that's for me, just so it stands out, just so I know that. it's a question, please type it in all caps. That's not considered shouting for this situation. So, this is Backyard Beekeeping episode number 260, by the way, and what's it doing outside?

This morning, it started out at 35 degrees Fahrenheit where I am, and you might be wondering where I'm located, northeastern United States, northwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania. So, but that changed, 35 degrees this morning, and it bumped right up to 68 degrees, which is it is right now nice and sunny and i don't know about your b yards but mine sounds like something is swarming all the time because that's how high the activity is so and in celsius by the way 35 degrees is 2 celsius and 20 degrees Celsius for 68 Fahrenheit so normally um we just take questions as we go and i'm going to start off by responding to some of the questions that were submitted over the past week. So Mark Bidwell's here. I'm not going to say hello to people individually because I know

I'm going to overlook someone, but I'm just glad that everyone found the time to be here. Now, the supervisor is in the house, so he might show up in the last 10 minutes. He has permission to come in. I can't let him come in any earlier than that. I did have a huge disappointment that I should probably talk about. I spent part of the winter. There's Jimmy's neighborhood bees. Hey Jimmy, glad to have you here. Anyway, I planted a lot of hyssup, giant hyssup inside. I set up a special rack. I grew everything, started off fantastic, transferred everything here. Darren's here from the UK. Glad to have everybody here. So the plants were growing good. I had a great time. I grew 54 of those hyssop plants,

and I was really excited to put them outside when the weather broke. And I did it just ahead of a series of rainy days, which is also when we planted acres of sunflowers, Comfrey, Cosmos, Borage this year, and even the giant sunflowers, by the way. But here's what happened. I went out there and I was all proud of it, ready to make videos about the giant hyssop,

the blue hyssop. and they were disappearing three, four at a time. Guess how many are left? Out of 54 that I planted that I watched for weeks, there are none left. Zero. Thanks to voles. Vols this year are wrecking some of my plantings. So all that work for nothing.

I think next year I'm just going to put them in. Mark Bidwell says, deer. It's not the deer. In fact, I got the deer under control this year for the first time ever. And what did I use? I'm glad he mentioned that. This is not an advertisement, but deer repellent, this stuff by Bobex. You can Google it, look it up, it's in concentrate, you mix it up.

This is the first year that the deer have not eaten all of the leaves off of my linden trees. They're also not eating any of my holly bushes. And I think it's pretty successful at keeping them off of some of my other plantings. and I refreshed that once a week, it works great. I haven't had linden lower leaves at all. The other thing is I added this year, service berry trees. Those are fantastic for pollinators.

They come in bush form, shrubs, and trees. These are considered, I guess, in between bush form, but they grow 20 feet tall in this particular variety, 20 feet in diameter also. And so when I was asking the guy at the nursery before I dropped my hard-earned cash on it. Do I have to do anything about the deer when it comes to service periods? Some people know it as Shadbush, by the way.

He said, no, deer don't touch it. So there I went. I went out there and I planted them. I planted 22 trees. And guess what happened? The deer munched them overnight right away. That's what led me on a search for something to repel deer. This was it.

This is what I'm trying. I have another one that's supposed to repel rabbit. too. But I sprayed that on there and they haven't touched it since. They don't like the smell. So that's good news, but I'm losing stuff out here. I think the warm winter had a lot to do with the survivability of shrews and all the other things that crawl around. So the metal mice and voles, I think those are the same thing, but having to deal with them. So we're going to get right into it. Let's talk about what's happening. Wait, somebody says, are these sprays eco-friendly? that's from PMJ.

If it's not, I don't spray it. So here's the thing. It's about smell. It's not a toxin at all. So it's just something that the deer don't like. It has something to do with egg also. So it's very important. Look up the ingredients.

I will never put toxins. I will never put vol bait, for example. If you start doing research on voles, you'll find a lot of people put poisons out for them. I don't do that. So just going to have to overplay. But the sprays are eco-friendly. That is not going to do any damage.

If it did, I wouldn't buy it because I'm not going to cast my vote for that. I'm going to start right off with Shirley's question here. And it says there's been, this is, by the way, something that I think a lot of people are facing right now, the last week of May and tomorrow is June, of course. So fourth year beekeeper here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And there's been a strong nectar flow here on the sea coast of New Hampshire. All of my hives are thriving, bringing in lots of resources. And this year I found myself with an extra queen and decided to throw together a resource hive with her the first week of May.

I placed her in an empty nuke with two frames of brood and shook two frames of bees from one of my stronger hives, along with an empty frame and two frames of resources. The girls have done a great job filling the nuke with bees and resources. I have three other hives, all doing well. and recently considered turning the resource hive into a normal hive. I have an empty 10-frame deep box set up in my apiary that I would like to move the nuke into, but I'm unsure if I can just shake out the five frames from the nuke and place them into the empty hive. The nuke has been sitting on top of the empty hive that I wanted to use, not sure if this would help with the transition into an empty box.

Any thoughts on this? Yes, I have lots of thoughts on this. because this is something that a lot of people are thinking about, and maybe that term resource hive throws some people for a loop. I use five-frame deep nucleus hives, and I stack them up, as tall as three. That's my limit. So that's 15 deep frames.

And it makes it very easy to transition them into full-size, eight-frame deep-brew boxes or 10 frames, which is the case here with Shirley. So it's very easy to do. And this was demonstrated with my grandson who was here. We had to transfer an old hive and get rid of the old box and just transfer the frames into a new box. And that's pretty much what we're talking about here. So the difference is that we have five frames in a nucleus hive.

By the way, if you have a question for me, please write it in all caps. Otherwise, I'm just going to lose it in the discussion. So this is easy to do. you go out and I much prefer that you bring a garden cart or that you because they make garden carts that have the sides are flat so it's easy to transition onto the garden cart. You can also take a hive stand which I have extra hive stands and they use the plastic ones from B-smart designs are black plastic lightweight easy to tote around also a great temporary chair to sit on and you can take your let's say you had a two box hive and you wanted to just pull all the frames out of it so you take the

box off first, you set it on your stand, and then you leave everything in it, all the bees, all the frames, all together. Take the deep box, lift that off. If it's a heavy box with lots of nectar and resources in it, we're going to stack that on top of what is probably your medium box. In this case, it's a new super easy. So you take the nucleus hive, set that on your temporary stand, and this is your chance to clean everything up, level everything up, and get it ready to go. then just set up your 10 frame deep brood box right there now for those who are wondering i didn't make surely wait i answered right away because i want to make sure that she can get going on that so then you just it's very important in my opinion to keep all these frames in order so we have

five frames that have brood and they're in rapid expansion take those and make those the center frames on your 10 frame box right now we have an odd number of frames we have two to put on one side and three to put on the other side. I highly recommend that the two frames go on your eastern side if your high faces south. They tend to build their brood towards the warmer sides first, and so we go from there. But it's easy to do. So then those can be foundation. So heavy waxed foundation, by the way. I had one of my mentees who's probably listening right now. Trade me out some medium plastic foundation. I gave her heavy wax foundation, and she gave me back some orange or yellow foundation from somewhere that she got on Amazon or something. You couldn't even smell

the wax on it. So the more wax you have, you want heavy wax foundation. If you use in plastic, you can also let them draw out comb if you want to go foundationless, which is perfectly okay for brood boxes. They're not going through extraction anyway. So park those five frames right in the middle, slightly off by one frame, and then put three on one side, two on the other, close it up, and they're good to go. Super easy. So that was a very easy thing to do and just keep an eye on them. We already know that they're set and keep it at the single deep brood box for now.

Wait until they fill out eight out of ten frames and start working on the number one and the number 10 frame. And then as they start to work those, that's when you add your super. If you super it up too soon, at a medium, for example, they'll start to build higher quicker, and they'll start to ignore the farthest frames on either end. But they do build where I live at least on the east side first, and then they move to the west side last. And that, I think, has a lot to do with early morning.

So we do have a question here from Eric Holbrook. It says, Fred, is diatomaceous earth safe to use around bees? on our garden. Okay, so here's the thing. Diatomaceous Earth, for those of you don't know, DE, there are a bunch of grades of it, by the way. So if you've got a swimming pool, you may even have diatomaceous Earth

as part of your filter system. So diatomaceous Earth is just diatoms, by the way, and you want the food grade diatoms, even though you might be using it for best control. I'm not a big fan of diatomaceous Earth, but if you want to use it on your garden, the problem is it's an indiscriminate, killer. So, and it is a mechanical killer. So that's what you need to understand when the small,

soft-bodied, aphids and things like that crawl over and get exposed to diatomaceous Earth, it lacerates their exoskeleton, and it's also incredibly absorbent. So what it does is dries them out, kills them that way. So lacerates them, damages the cuticle on the insect that's targeted, and then dries them out so they die. I will tell you where I do like to put it on my chickens because it takes care of feather mites and things like that. You can put it in nest boxes where your chickens lay their eggs, keeps things dry. By the way, to give you a sense of it, a pound of diatomaceous earth can receive a pound of water and it will still act as a powder. That's how absorbent it is. When you puff it all over plants and things like that,

I don't think that bees are really at risk too much because they're adult bees that are on it. These are covered in hair. They're going to have very limited exposure. They're going to go to your blossoms specifically. And I think the risk is very low, but it is going to be an indiscriminate killer. The other thing is, after it rains, you have to refresh diatomaceous earth. But of all the things that you can be using to kill aphids or deal with pest insects in your garden, I think DE is very low as far as the risk goes to other insects that are adults.

So now we have PMJ says, you said it is swarm season. What is the best indication of this? Is it better to preempt swarms or can that cause damage? Thinking of splitting around now. So swarm season, by the way, how do you know? And I want you guys to write this down. B-Scape.org. B-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-D-R.

Now, I'm sorry, that's not going to be good for people that are in other countries around the world. It's for the United States right now. But it does let you know when your greatest nectar flows are and whether or not you even have a dearth. So where I am here in the northeastern United States and the state that I live in, I don't have a dearth. I just have some times of year that are stronger than others. So your biggest warm season for us is coming to an end right now. but we get a second swarm season at the end of August, about mid-September, so we need to really keep up with our bees or we risk losing a lot of them.

It has to do with it being timed, with resources being available in the environment, coming in through the hive entrance, and the bees that are also in a state of rapid increase. Those things go hand-to-hand because your queen gets triggered, the nurse bees get triggered by an abundance of resources, nectar and pollen. coming into the hive. So as the broods up, they naturally have an instinct to swarm when it's combined with warm weather, which we have now, and abundant resources kicking in, which we also have right now.

Clover's kicking in where I am. They're on wild raspberries. They're on black cherry trees, wild cherry trees, and there are a whole bunch of other resources that are out there. Confri is what they're active on right now, which is really interesting. interesting. So it's based on where you are, but B-scape, if you're in the United States, will really be able to help you. And so preemptive does not cause damage. This is classic, and why I highly recommend that if you have an apiary that you're inspecting your hives

every couple of weeks, and that you're looking for the development of queen cells. If you see Quinn cells being built out, then they're making a decision to swarm. So the question is, it's preemptive, but some people call it an artificial swarm. You take the existing queen with some brood. You create what we just discussed here for Shirley, a resource hive, and you put them in there, and that takes away some of that swarm instinct. So then you've relieved congestion, so the population is down. We took away some brood, which is another trigger, high brood levels. and then they're going to make a new queen, so we have a fresh queen. I don't recommend cutting away all of the queen cells that you find, leave a few.

If the colony is really populated, you can pull more than one frame of brood because there might be queen cells on several frames in a row, usually right in the middle of your brood right at the edge of the frame. And what you do then is some people will say, well, I don't want to lose all those bees. I want to put them all back together. So if you take the queen out with a couple of frames of brood, really weaken them. And then you relieved congestion. And then let them build back. If they make a replacement queen, great. If they don't, that's okay too. Now you have two choices. The queen that they make

may be a fantastic layer. You'll know this in 30 days. So it's quite a long time to wait. You'll start to see her brood maturing and you'll see what their behaviors like. And you also see how productive they are. And then you can also keep an eye on your resource hive and later recombine them. I realize that for some people this is hard to do because they don't want to get rid of one of their queens, but you'll have to make a choice on one of the queens that you're going to keep. Some people just combine them together and let them choose which queen they'll have, but you do risk losing both queens. So it's an opportunity to feed, bring your bees right back. So it doesn't harm them.

It just reduces the number of bees in each colony. And if that's your goal, if you're building an apiary, you might not mind that they don't end up with a big surplus of bees. So here's Kelly per year. Hello, Kelly. It says, hi, Fred. I collected several swarms in my Colorado beevac. I noticed several with small hive beetles as part of the bivouac.

I can't find research on how common this is, any thoughts small high beetles in the bee veact i can't believe they clung to the bees that is annoying on top of annoying um i don't have any information on how common that is here's my problem which would be good for some of you i don't have small high beetles i never see them they're not under my intercovers they don't scoot around i never deal with them i have people that want me to test and look at small-high beetle traps, I guess that's the next thing I would be looking at right away. If you've collected a swarm,

I would be trapping those small-high beetles right away. The other thing is for them to get a foothold in a new colony that you're setting up, this is an example of why it's very important to size the hive for the swarm that you're putting in it. If you take a swarm of bees, regardless of what kind of pest, they might be bringing with them.

Small hay beetles, really weird. They've even come in packages I've heard. I've never seen it. Some people have purchased packages and had small high beetles come with it. If the hive is small enough that your bees can manage all the space, then they chase out Perel.

They also propylize small hive beetles. So this is another thing that, although again, I can't test it here because I don't have the small hive, but the propala hives or any hive that's got a rough interior that encourages them to use a lot of propolis. That tends to make it difficult for the

small high beetles also. What we don't want those little beetles to do is to start laying eggs and have their larvae developing inside your honey comb, right? Then they make a big mess. They slime everything out and now you're in a pickle there. But I just don't have any experience with it. If I had a swarm. If they have varro-destructor mites in the swarm, I know exactly what to do about that. When it comes to small-high beetles, I don't know of an entrance even that you

could have any way to sift the beetles off. So keep a healthy colony, have them sized right for the space that they're going to be in, and at least they can stop the reproduction of the small hive beetles in the hive. I think that would be great. Let's see.

Eric Calbrook, is there anything that you can recommend to use on a garden that is be safe. Yes, wasps. And for aphids, ladybugs, that's it. I'm not a big veggie gardener. My wife is,

and she's worried about voles. I think she's worried about horn beetles or something like that. I don't get into pest control very much, so I'm sorry. I'm going to have to leave you hanging on that one. So let's move down here.

Vince, Fred, how many treatments of acid vaporization in a row for mites? Thanks, from Ontario, Canada. So acid vaporization, by the way, the word acid freaks a lot of people out. It's exalic acid. If you drop the acid off it, you just say, we're going to treat with exalic. Exalic acid is an organic treatment. So let's just start with that. And there are a lot of ways to deliberate. So one of the preferred methods and the most effective method is excelic acid vaporization, although I do have to throw out there that Randy Oliver has a new glycerin mix, and you can find out about that at scientific beekeeping. And he claims that it has the same efficacy as the excelic acid vaporization is. Now, the difference here is with vaporization, you treat the vapor travels throughout

your hive. I do those treatments for a quarter inch diameter hole that's drilled into the back of the hive. And the vaporization goes everywhere on its own. If you're using a dribble method or a glycerin method, now I understand the big benefit there is super safe for the beekeeper. You don't have to wear respiratory protection as you do with exhalic acid vaporization. The dribble method, safer for the beekeeper. But you do have to get your hive apart and you do have to dribble down between the seams, in between frames in the brood area of your hive to get that to work. The number of treatments, by the way, when it first came out, they were encouraging people to do them seven days apart, three treatments, 21 days. Later, they came out with a more effective treatment

because it was every five days, and the whole point was because exhalic acid vaporization is not effective on varodistructor mites beneath pupa caps. So you needed to do repeated treatments so that you got the mites back then. It was in their dispersal, their ferretic phase. Today it's the dispersal phase. All they have to do is be exposed to the vapor. And one of the problems I had with that is that people were treating with exhalic acid vaporization, dribble, whatever they were using.

They felt like it was working. they felt like it was working, if you don't count your mites, you won't know how effective that is. So one of the things that you do when you're doing an exhalic acid repeated series is you look at the mite drop within 48 hours of the treatment.

This requires that you have access to the bottom of your hive. So you would have to have a removable insert that you can count mites on or you would have to have a removable tray, which, by the way, these are my favorite hive. base designs that have removable trays underneath the screen. Other than that, if you have a standard,

solid bottom board, you can't really see the mites. So now you're into counting mites. We interviewed with Dr. Zachary Lomas, who found out early in the year, which is what we're dealing with right now, the rapid expansion, that there were more mites attached to drones, and we weren't counting drones. We were counting nurse bees. So just like what's going on right now, my mite numbers are incredibly low unless you count drones. I have a problem with counting my drones because I don't have solid frames of drones to deal with. They're making little pockets, little corners of drones. On average, you could have up to 20% of your colony population, be drones if it's a really productive, healthy, rapidly growing colony of bees. You don't usually have this problem with your

newer colonies of bees. So we mentioned the nucleus hives. For example, after you have a nuke, collect a swarm, they are exposed. The varroa destructor mites can be hit with a single treatment of exhalic acid vaporization, and the reports are pretty conclusive that you get 96% efficacy. So 96 out of 100 of those, varro destructor mites will be dead. So the series is you really have to look at them. You have to count or have a means of seeing if there's a drop. So those you have removable trays under screen bottom boards.

By the third or fourth treatment cycle that you do, you should see a reduction in the number of dead mites that show up on those bottom boards. And that's what I do. So it's very interesting. Let me see what else is going on here. Who am I missing? Okay, so this is from, I want to make sure that I'm not missing. This is a little red bird.

good afternoon fred what are your thoughts on creating a nuke five frame and adding a second nuke on top let them fill it out then move them to a standard 10 frame deep you can absolutely do that totally easy peasy you can in fact letting them build like that and then transferring them to the bigger boxes actually works out better because this is flipped on when i used to um not use nukes at all so i was slow learning and figuring out nukes really cause a colony to expand fast. Really great way to get comb drawn out. You know, they handle the warmth better, tall, narrow columns. I used to start them out in the 8 frame and 10 frame deeps.

If it was a nuke and just let them go. Now I have nucleus highs, five frame. Wooden hives, by the way, not a fan at all of the plastic nukes. Those are temporary. They're designed to be temporary. those that are core flute, you know, they look like politician signs that core flute material. I don't like that either. Your nucleus hive boxes, I highly recommend that they be made out of wood and that they be just as good as your other hives.

Now, starting them off like that, so five over five and then breaking that up and setting them down and have them 10 and then go to a medium super right after that, nothing wrong with it. It's a great way to kick them off fast. be ready to work a lot because they do expand so fast that you end up with swarm generators. We just super at our nukes. So they were doing really well and we super just in time. So I'm talking two weeks ago, which means tomorrow, Saturday, is going to be a very busy day in the bee yard because we've had bees that swarm, we've had colonies that swarm, time for a follow-up. And we need to stay ahead as far as providing space for them because, as I mentioned before,

We have now a lot of new nectar sources that are coming out. So thoughts on creating, so I hope I answered that question. Here is Larry. It says Fred, it had a dead out in a nuke recently. Notice that the brood that was emerging had gotten only partly out of its cells and all died with their tongue sticking out. What might have caused this? Okay, that description, dying in your cells with your tongue sticking out,

partially emerged brood generally tells me that you have an undersized colony for the amount of brood that they produced and that they were likely starving. So what I like to look at in a colony or a hive if we're doing a, you know, we're doing an autopsy on your beehive. We need to look around. What were the resources like? Sometimes they have a lot of pollen and that looks really good. And we say, wow, lots of pollen. That was all they needed to feed that brood. And then we look further and we find out there's no honey in the hive. There's no open nectar in the cells adjacent to the brood area. So this can turn on your bees in an incredibly short amount of time, particularly this time of year when they brood up and they get a lot of protein coming in. You can get a series of

rainstorms, which swept through the United States recently. It shuts off your bees' ability to forage and refresh their nectar. And this is where the kind of beekeeper you are gets put to the test. Are you going to be a Darwinian beekeeper who simply decides, well, those bees overproduced and did not respond to environmental cues? Or are we going to say, wow, that was an unexpected weather condition. If I just put one-to-one sugar syrup on that hive, I can save all of those bees. Another thing that happens is based on what I described today, we had 35-degree Fahrenheit weather. If the colony is already small and challenged, then you can also have chilled brood. And they kind of look the same.

They have partially emerged caps, and so partly cut open caps, their tongues are out. They want to be fed. The nurse bees aren't feeding them because the nurse bees don't have enough for themselves. And they use up a lot of resources trying to keep the brood at from 94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Think about the energy they have to expend to do that. So either that's a lot of bees in there that are trading themselves out, the heater bees that are keeping the brood warm, or you've got a few bees in there. So a small number of bees working overtime, they burn themselves out. They consume a lot of the resources they have.

And because it's a smaller colony, they don't have the bees to go out and replenish those resources. So it sounds like that's what happened to them. Now, of course, let's see. So for Larry, did you find a lot of honey and nectar still in the hive? And did you offer them an emergency resource like sugar syrup? Or did you simply say, we're going to find out if these bees have what it takes to survive where I live? And there is something to that, by the way, the genetics of the bees. Some of them keep their brood small, while others ramp up.

Italian lines are just famous for brooding up really fast, which makes them super productive. But if that's in a cold weather environment, they can also risk chilling the brood and not being able to support them because it's just too cold. And if they're a southern climate line of bees, then their response to the environment is very different. Karniolans, for example, would do very well in the northern climate, and they're more conservative in their production of brood. So here we go, Craig. What do you do with the colony that had a non-laying queen followed by killing the replacement queen, then waiting a month for the emergency queen to emerge, mate, and must not have returned. Seven weeks now.

Okay, for Craig, that's all bad news. Because three weeks without a queen and you can have laying workers, which compounds your problems. I think some of the others who listen to me a lot know what I'm going to say about, about the introduction of queens when you think, here's the problem, we think we're queenless. So we have a tendency to bring in a new queen and introduce that queen, only to have the bees turn on the queen and killer.

So what could you do? You could have a queen introduction cage around the frame that your new queen is on. And pull brood and sweep the bees off of the capped brood, put that inside the frame, your new queen that you're introducing in that cage. And these bars on these queen introduction cages are too small for even workers to go through, but it's an insurance policy because the queen can be fed through these bars by other bees. It seems to not matter how hostile the colony is to a new queen.

some of the bees in the colony will still feed a queen that they're unfamiliar with. Now, a lot of others will try to kill her. To kill her, they have to get a hold of her, get their stingers in her. They can't do that through a queen introduction cage. I'm just going to show you the sticker on that one. That comes from Better Bee, which is different from a queen isolation cage. So you would put her in the queen introduction cage. Now, if you find that while she's in that introduction cage, you still have eggs or you find that

they're not really interested in her at all, then you may have a queen and it buys time. Because what can she do on a deep frame like that? The brood starts to emerge out of there and she can start to lay in those cells. And the nurse bees that are in there can attend to her. Who's going to feed those nurse bees? The other bees that are in the colony will be feeding the nurse bees through those bars again, even though they can't pass through them themselves. And you might be sitting there thinking, well, those bees can't even get out then. How do they do cleansing flights and stuff like that?

These are newly emerged bees on a brood frame that were in pupa state when they were put in there with the new queen. They don't go outside anyway at all. They have to progress through their interior jobs before they end up on the landing board as a guard bee or an undertaker bee or something like that. So you haven't done anything to those bees when you restrict them to an introduction cage, which is different from the isolation cage. So then when you realize if you find eggs out there, now you have to make another colony because you've, but you've saved your queen and you didn't lose her. They also didn't engage in some kind of combat and kill them both. So let's look here. Dut-to-do non-lane queen.

Darn those non-lane queens. Now sometimes the non-line queen could just be young. She may not be mated. Give them a little time, but seven weeks, too much time. So definitely low performance. I swap them out. And this year I have personally taken to letting them sort out which queen they want. Like I have combined small swarms.

Sometimes we get those little clusters of swarms on branches. They have no hope of surviving on. their own you can put those together in a hive and you can put you can just let them decide which of the queens they're going to show a preference for and it's not so much that they go after her and perform that heat ball around her the queen that they don't like they simply don't feed and they don't support and eventually she goes out on her own and that's the one that you find in the grass with a golf ball sized collection of workers that are with her that really can't do do anything for her. So I've had really good success with that this year. So the little swarms

that most people would ignore, I've been collecting and just combining them together to see what they do and they're succeeding. So it's really interesting there. So here is Zulik. It says, Hi, Fred. I'm in New York zone five or six. I've not been cutting the grass and there's lots of clover. Why don't I see bees on it? So the first question I have is what kind of clover is it? Not all clover is accessible to your bees. If it's the white clover, sweet clover, they would likely be on it. But here's the good news.

If you have clover and your bees are not on it, and it is a variety of clover that is considered a strong nectar resource, they also get pollen from clover, which a lot of people seem not to realize, but it's a dark brown, almost a tan, olive-colored pollen. And so often you miss it. You don't see it coming in on their legs. You think they're not bringing in pollen when actually they are. But it means that they've got another resource out there. As I mentioned, raspberries are plentiful right now. You hear along the woodlands where they are near meadows and things,

they're just humming with bee activity right now. So even where I am, they're not after the clover is just starting. So it's where I am at least, it's not abundant. so often the bees wait until a resource becomes abundant, like there's thousands of them before they'll even waste their time foraging those. While we know there are definitely thousands of raspberries out there. So by not cutting it, the other thing is when clover gets so high, go ahead and cut it and let it come up again because it refreshes itself all summer long if it's the right kind of clover.

So do to do to do let's see I just saw a question there. Larry says I was thinking possibly heat. They had resources, was a low population. So the low population was a concern. So we're talking about the ones that looked like they were starving. A Lambrick farm, I had a 25 frame lay-ins that wintered with nine frames. Added six frames in early April that he pulled out two splits with Queen'swells and left Queen's. and left queen cells in the hive, eight queen cells total, two weeks in my area.

So those land hives that can really kick into overdrive. I had massive, massive, we overuse these terms, but a big swarm, almost too big for my VAC. That came out of a layens hive. And the land's hive, here's the funny part. If I didn't see that, and I had the layans from Dr. Leo Shirashkin, I have two of those. and there were all the walled bees in there. If I hadn't seen the swarm, this always amazes me. The number of bees that formed that swarm,

and there's a queen in there, of course, and you would think there's nothing left of the hive that they came out of. And then you go and inspect the hive, and there were all the walled bees, and no great wonder they swarmed. They had no room for more bees in that layans hive. So we do have to make splits and things like that, even from the layans because there are just so many.

Bees in there, but if I hadn't been there to see it, and if I hadn't found the swarm, I would think, oh, yeah, they're fine. Look at that. Look at all the bees in here. I wonder why they don't swarm. But then as you search through them, you may find the remnants of queen cells that have, queens have emerged from. So you see some of that residues, and you realize, well, they did swarm. It's just so strong. They just recover so fast.

These are insulated with sheep's wool, too, by the way, pretty darn interesting. But, yeah, lands. They're growing. Patrick says, I've always wondered about nurse bees taking cleansing flights. Yeah, they just don't. So I'm glad I answered that. Mystery solved. And then PMJ says, Frederick, as I understand, you are a chicken expert.

Why do chickens cluck? Would it not just attract predators? Okay, for PMJ. Chickens attracting, why do they cluck? Okay. Well, first of all, when it comes to, and this will, a lot of people will just probably leave this live stream if we start talking about chickens, but I'm happy to. First of all, which one's got the biggest vocabulary? Roosters or hens? Hens do because they talk to chicks. The thing that

bothers me about chickens is because, by the way, there's a company called Fox Pro that creates these hunting audible recordings so that you can bring in a fox, so that you can bring in coyotes and things like that. One of the options in there was a chicken crowing and clucking and making these noises. So you would think it would bring them in. Also, I've had hens that would lay an egg and announce that they laid an egg, like for a very long time. It seems like forever. But chicken squawk, so just because you don't have roosters, doesn't mean they're not making noise. And it should, you would think, bring in predators. And mine don't. So, but it definitely lets anything that's around know that you've got chickens. Those hens are just squawk and brag. And

about the eggs they've laid, you know, we all know the call. And they just keep going and going and go and going. And, of course, the hens come running over. The roosters come running over to see what all the fuss is. And, of course, they laid an egg. They do it every day. But one of the ways, what are the predators? So that's the other thing we have to think about.

Hawks would come in after your chickens. And so I encourage crows to nest in the area. And they run off hawks because they don't put up with them because they're having their own babies. So I haven't had good luck. I haven't had problems with the coyotes or fox at all this year. And I use Monorca hens right now. So the Monarcha line, they're a Mediterranean bird, and they can fly.

They're very alert. They're very aware of their environment. They barely touch the feed that we put in the chicken coop. So they're also foraging, and for most of their diet, and incredibly healthy eggs that you get from those birds. So I think that's about enough of that. So next, Kyle's from New Zealand. This is Kyle Actinson, by the way, you guys.

Inventor of the HiveGate. So he's right here in the chat. If you have questions for Kyle, hit him up about that, the HiveGate. So Dick Sines just stopped in to say hello. hello and I hope everything is going great for you there. Baloo says, are there differences in the effectiveness of bee scapes? If so, which form do you recommend? I'm not sure what the question is.

Are there differences in the effectiveness of bee escapes? Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, B escapes. There are differences. Big differences. This is my favorite B escape right here. This particular bee escape is made by Cirrus Cell, but here's the thing. There's another bee escape, probably the oldest design out there that a lot of people see.

And for those who don't understand what we're talking about, bee escape, what are we using that for? It's willing you want to get your bees out of your honey super. So you take your honey super, you put it on top of this. I leave them overnight, roughly 24 hours. So I put a bunch of these, one on every hive, and then the bees all go down through it. and they go through these cones, so they're underneath. Now, this is why, and I have a bunch of the triangle-shaped ones, bees are smart.

They go out through the triangles, and then if you leave these on for a little too long, you get busy, you get sidetracked, you'll find the bees coming back up through it, and here's why. With the triangle version, there's a screen dead center. The bees smell what's up above, and they're trying to get back, and they're able to follow that and go back. back up in. Cirousel, if you notice, has holes all over it, which means that the bees smell was up above. They come up underneath and then they try to get to it, but they fail to go back

through the cones because they're following the scent trail. Now, if you've got one of the triangle wooden versions, I recommend that you cut in the corners of that, little two inch diameter holes or whatever, put number eight screen on it. It doesn't have to be specific, but stainless steel screen. And then that lets them smell what's up above and they'll go to the screens and they won't be as quick to go back through the triangles. So if you've got those older wooden versions, keep them. They're still good. But you need to, if you want to improve how well they keep your bees down below once it goes through the escape, add other ways that they can smell what's up above that attracts them to that. So by far, that is my best. Okay, so Zulik wants to know, how do I encourage

crows to nest in my yard? I used to actually call them in. There's always crows around where I live. And the best way that you have crows, stay where you are, is by not shooting them. They're super smart. They're called feathered apes, by the way. And they remember you. And they have a call for a man, and they have a call for a man with a gun. And so if they determine that your area is safe for them to have their babies, they also have a crow's nest, obviously high spot. And they've got the environment that's suitable for them to nest. I just used to call them in and make sure that they weren't ever threatened where I live.

Now, I don't feed them. Don't get into that. You will have crows after you every day. And I don't recommend that. but all you're doing is providing an area that's like a sanctuary for crows where then they don't get threatened or attacked, right? And then they're going to chase away hawks. They chase away the sharp-shinned hawks, red-tailed hawks, castrills.

They run out everything the minute it shows up on the horizon. I had a call, still have it. It's called the old crow. And I learned what the different calls are. There's a threatening call. There's a curious call. There's a check-it-out call. And I demonstrated it to my wife.

I stepped out on the porch and gave the alarm call and crows flew up out of the trees from all over. If they see you one time with that call, you just lost your opportunity to manipulate the crows. It's a voice they don't recognize. They come right away and you can weaponize your crows against hawks. So that's how we did it. You make friends with them. And let's see. everybody's saying hi to Kyle.

Kyle is the other side of the world, by the way. So don't miss this opportunity. And check out, you can go on YouTube, not right now, but later. You can go on YouTube, look up the Hivegate. They have a channel and B.I.Q. And you can check it out. Learn more about it if you've never heard of it. So Patrick says, can the HiveGate have a screen bottom and a part of it with an oil

trap for hive beetles. What I'm going to say to that is, I'm going to recommend that you go to their YouTube channel or to their website, which has a bunch of videos on it as well, which will demonstrate those configurations that work best. As far as using it for small hive beetles, there is a way to set up the hive gate where it sticks through, if this were the front of your hive, it sticks out through the front a little bit, and it's off the bottom board. So that, if you've ever seen small high beetles, land on a hive or try to go in, they walk these ridges. So they're not good at flying straight in. And remember, small high beetles can't hover in front of a hive like your bees do, and then go in,

they have to land. So when they land and crawl up, they run into a barrier if this sticks out, and it should. so there are ways to configure it to help reduce or prevent the entrance of adult small height beetles so what else are we doing here this is lambbrook farm fred what is the meaning of the telephone crow call i don't know what the telephone crow call is the meaning of the telephone crawl call. Now, unless you're talking about, do you know the game telephone? If we're talking about that game where I tell you something, you tell someone else something, they tell someone else something, and then we see what the story is at the end of it. Crows have the ability to do that. In other

words, a crow sees me. I go out there with my slingshot. I shoot that crow with an acorn and it's mad at me. It passes on a description of me and we don't know how. Now, two other crows that have never seen me before, and they know if you see that face, that beard, those glasses, you're going to get hit with an acorn, and it's going to be bad. So they communicate to others. They can also pass on generational information. This is mind-blowing when it comes to a bird and its ability to pass on information. So if we're talking about telephone, crow call, I don't know exactly what they do. is, but if it's like the game telephone or grapevine where they pass on information,

they're letting others know and they know what it means without seeing you. Very interesting stuff. So let's see. Kimberly is excited because it's caught a live, even a minute. Okay. So sounds like telephone ringing. Okay, well, they can mimic so crows can imitate sounds that they heard like a mockingbird. I don't know if you've ever heard those. We have those here. And it sounds like a bunch of different birds in the same tree. And it's a mocking bird going through every other sound it's ever heard. And crows can do that to some degree too. So yeah, they can make a sound. I've never heard the, you know, the telephone sound from a crow. And so PMJ says weaponize crows. Absolutely. Get the crows to do what you need them to do. Make them do your dirty work.

mess with their heads a little bit and sick them on hawks for you. So the telephone crawl call and sounds like telephone ringing, Lambert Farm. So that would be cool to get a recording of that if you could do it. And how's your horizontal hive doing? This is from, yes, you can come in. So I promise you guys that my grandson might join us for the last 10 minutes and he's here. So if anybody has questions for Quinn, feel free to ask those in caps and we'll see what's going on. The horizontal hives are doing fantastic.

So they're populated heavily. They require frequent splits. So my favorite horizontal hive, of course, is the lanes are doing great. But for versatility and everything else, the long landing stroth hive is what I prefer. And they're doing great. I think they're easy for management. if people are getting older and they want a colony or a hive that they can access easily that requires no lifting and you can put as many amenities on it as you want you tip the lid back

and you can have shelves in it um thanks you know you can do anything what are you saying thank you to so once i like your hoodie oh yeah show them your hoodie by the way the way to be academy how many students do we have i mean i'm one one how many graduates will we have one so that's the way to be one student by the way oh this one says lamb brick farm Quinn is your grandfather the coolest yes I said that without hesitation didn't even have to pay him so I think Quinn has been doing a great job thank you jimmy by the way you think she'd been doing a great job what specifically Jimmy did you think he did a great job at to get down there so Kimberly Paulson hi Quinn how's your highs doing tell him how's your hive doing great They're going to be starting to bring Pauling since the queen has been laying eggs, hopefully.

And so where are we checking them out? Today. I might be going down. Today or tomorrow, hottest day of the week. Tomorrow could be great. We'll find out. He wants the super his hive. Here's a problem.

Why didn't we super right away when we transferred your bees? What did we discover? That there wasn't enough honey. Not enough honey. What else? We found an empty queen cell. What did that? that mean? A no one queen cell means there is a, um, the queen just hatched. The queen just emerged.

And so we know that they swarmed. Yes. So we know that now we can't really expand and soup or the hive right away. We have to let them build back up. So that's what we're doing. And how many days? Here's the question. Queen laid an egg, a bunch of eggs. When will they be adult bees? How many days? 21 days. How many days does it take for a chicken? to hatch after that egg has been laid? Six weeks. 21. That was a trick question.

Okay. So, oh, here's one from Keith. It says, hey, Quinn, that photo of you with the storm clouds in the background was awesome. Tell them why that happened. Why did we do that? We've been talking about having a picture and that day was the right day for the dramatic clouds. Because he specifically requested drawing. Dramatic stormy skies to have his picture taken out in the bee yard.

And we'll have to put that on the website. The Way to be.org will put Quinn's picture in there because it was pretty epic. It almost looks like a fake sky because we had cumulus clouds rising up, unstable air. Everything was fantastic. So he got the dramatic picture he always wanted. It looks like it's edited, but it's not. It's too good to be true.

It is a little bit too good to be true. And you kept puffing your smoker like a crazy man too. Anyway, swarm catching Quinn is the best. And I also got the queen mode transferred. He saw that in the video. He found the queen and he got the queen in his little queen cage. So that was fantastic. He's a good queen spotter.

If you've got an eight-year-old around, they do fantastic at spotting queens once you teach them what they look like. So use those junior beekeepers every chance you get. And what else do we have here? Swirm catching is the best. we catch swarms and what do we use to catch them? A net or vacuum. What's your favorite method of collecting a swarm? The vacuum is much easier because it goes way faster.

So which vacuum? We've got a couple types, right? So we've got the one that's like a beehive box, a Colorado BVAC, and then there's a big yellow everything BVAC that goes on your backpack. I like the vacuum's better because the net, it's harder to find the queen. But if you have a vacuum, there would be bees going circling around it or on the vacuum trying to get the queen. Oh, that's a good point. So what he's talking about is when you're vacuuming the bees off of a tree branch or a fence post or something like that,

we know that once a queen gets in the vacuum, the exhaust port on that back has the queen's pheromone in it. So when we see a bunch of bees swirling back and forth around the exhaust that we know we've got the queen inside. The other part of that is when we think we've got the queen and the bee vac and we look at the branch or whatever it is that we collected them from, what would we see if the queen was missing? We would see bees going around, just looking around for the queen. Looking around for the queen. And then after a certain amount of time passes, would we still find bees on that post or on that tree branch? If we got the queen, the bees would be in the net. but if she did not get to queen,

they would still be on the post or the phone. Right. So they actually leave the branch eventually or the post, and they go back to whatever colony that they came from. So it's a great opportunity to teach kids when it comes to swarms and things like that. So here's Nick's bees. This is, hi, Fred.

Would you consider a brood and a half suitable and a good idea for a flow hive in the UK climate? So a brood box and a half, I guess, is what we're talking about. I found the Langstroth double brood too big, a space for the bees. So here's what I would like to, anybody, this is Nick's bees, but anyone who wants to see what configuration works best in cold climates, we have set up the flow hive with a deep brood box,

which was the question here, and then a medium super above that. I did try the double deeps, and that is, you're right, it's too big for the colony usually. And then you want to, because you want to get to the point where you can put flow super on and flow supers are the equivalent of a deep hive box. So depending on which one you have, you might have seven frames in it. And those frames are a half a gallon of nectar each. So if you go to the way to be.org and you click on the page marked the flow hive experience, we have everything from assembling those hives, which Quinn has done. He's put his flow hive together and it's now

out in the B yard. Now we have to wait for it to build up. But I show you step by step, these different configurations and how to make your flow hive winter hardy because in New South Wales where it comes from they want you to put the deep brood box up and of course then go straight to the flow super with a queen excluder in between and since I don't use the queen excluder we go with a medium super and we wait for that of course to be full and have a nice capped honey section there before we go into the flow super so it's very interesting No, there's nobody that in my age is. Friends, I mean, I do have friends with me, but they're not beekeepers.

I'm the only person in my age that, in my school, that is a beekeeper in my age. Which we don't say where you live because we don't want people to come and take all your honey. Okay. I mean, tear. So a brood and a half, yes, that's suitable. And of course, when it comes to wintertime, you have to take the flow super off if you're in a cold climate. we can't leave queen excluders so for those of you who are just talking about any any other standard langstroth hive your queen excluders need to come off well before winter sets in and that's because

if the bees migrated up where the honey was they would be leaving the queen behind and you have a brood below and there's too much division going on there so always when it comes to wintertime make sure your queen excluder is off so again we don't use the queen excluders here but we're not commercial so we don't have a problem where when we're inspecting a super to look for honey, if we find that a couple of those frames have some brood in the bottom of the frame, we simply don't remove it for extraction. And that rarely happens, but it can happen. So here is PJ. It says, Quinn, did you know your grandfather is a crow expert? No. No, he doesn't. We keep secrets from him sometimes. Let's see, does Quinn have any other beekeeping friends his age? Oh, is that what you were answering?

Okay. So he really doesn't. He has admirers, by the way, on YouTube that have sent him notices. Let's see. And what else? Here we go. He double hockey stick. That's an interesting name. What is meant by that H.E. Double Hockey sticks. 7-734 inverted and backwards. What are we? It says, hey, from Sweden, made two nukes from my favorite colony. one, nuke got three frames and the other got just two frames. Can they pull out a frame of brood from another colony? Yes, here's the thing about brood. Brood has, even if you bring the nurseries with it, these are the most passive, easygoing bees. And when you introduce a frame of brood into a colony that just needs to be fortified, they just need that extra boost of bee power,

they're very accepting of that. And that includes open brood, capped brood. they just accept it. Here's the thing. What is on your brood frames to begin with? The nurse bees. Your guards are generally guarding, sometimes they're guarding honey,

but often they're a congregator around your entrance. And so you get your most hostile bees there. But yeah, you can definitely fortify them. And if they're all capped, we know that they're going to be emerging soon. And then you fortify the numbers right away. Easier to tell if you see garter bees, if you stay at a hive,

you'll save at least a couple of bees staying. Those might be staring at you and having their mandibles open and having their little front feet up. Yep. So did Quinn ever do a talk about beekeeping in school? That's an interesting question. Have you been asked to talk about bees in school? No, but my whole class knows, though.

His whole class knows he's a beekeeper, but he has not been invited to give a presentation, although you did give a presentation on Monday. Tell us about that. not in school, what did you do? You gave a tour. I forgot. Have you drawn a blank?

Monday, we had a big party here, and you went outside and gave people a tour of the apiary. Did you get any interesting questions? I forgot. So he forgot. Anyway, he did give a pretty good tour of the people that were here for Memorial Day weekend, so Saturday, or Sunday and Monday. And so on Monday, everyone is here,

even though it was a rainy day, and he walked them around and explained all of the bees. Also got soaked. Got what? I also got soaked. You got soaked. Yes, these are the hazards of being in a place known as outside. Okay, so Rodney Middleton says hello and hello to you.

So PMJ says, I never see guards at my entrance. Well, let me tell you something. That is exactly where the guards should be. You don't want to, maybe your bees are so passive, or maybe they don't need to defend themselves. there are not any pressures occurring with your colony at all that requires them to guard. So that's interesting. We always see some guards, although during heavy nectar flow periods, which is what we're getting

into now, which is also why the apiary sounds like a swarm, they're so busy bringing in nectar that all of the colonies are not competing with one another. They're getting what they need out of the environment. So I would expect that you would not see a lot of card activity there. So we're after five now. So I want to thank everyone for joining us today. Unless someone else has a final question that they'd like to ask, please put it in caps.

Otherwise, we're going to wrap it up. PMJ says they may have formed an alliance with weaponized crows. I have taken this too far. So do bees align themselves with weaponized crows? No. No, crows and bees. You don't gang up on things together. So did you notice any aggression during the solar storm a few weeks back? The solar storm. So that's any bee aggression. No, we noticed no differences. In fact, the bees haven't been aggressive overall all spring. Although somebody got stung right on the nose. But it wasn't, where was that? Was that? Uncle Justice? Yeah, that was somebody else's apiary. So he put on his whole B-suit, Word of the Wise,

and did not put his veil on. So he's just walking around with his B-suit with a veil down and got stung on the tip of the nose. So here's another thing I'd like to mention. If you're looking for a piece of gear to keep in your B-shed, put a mirror up somewhere. Check your B-suit. Make sure that you're zipped up good. If you're working by yourself, sometimes you forget. Sometimes you get in a hurry.

Shout out to Martha, who found out that she had bees inside her beehive, and she got stung on the face. You do not want to see bees inside your veil. If you're looking at the backside of a bee, it's inside your veil. You don't want it. So, MMB says, thanks, Quinn. And hi, Fred, you mentioned that you let the bees clear the flow frames at the end of the season. Yes, I do. You'll see me a lot more. Okay, so we're going to talk about this.

I'm going to mention one more thing. Flow frames, cleaning flow frames. These are the plastic, mechanized things. We let the bees, okay, easiest to get honey out of. However, they do require maintenance. And we've had them since 2015, so we have really old ones. So coming up, we are going to be cleaning them with hot water. And we're going to see how that goes. So other than that, Historically, we've just put them in the closed position, which means the cells are complete. Man, the cells are complete. And then this is a flow frame. Yeah, keep everything.

Queen is impressed that I have everything in the world related to beekeeping here. These are in the closed position. So that means the beast can access them to do all the cleaning. But when we look in this channel. Right here. It looks up the bottom, I'm pretty sure. Okay. There's a channel here that the honey comes out of when you're running your flow, right? And the bees can't access that.

They can't really clean it out very well. We don't want little bits and pieces in there. We also have a channel up here that it's not accessible to the bees. So I asked Cedar Anderson, who's the inventor of the flow hive. What is the maximum temperature we can stick this plastic in and not risk damaging or deforming the plastic. And he gave it in Celsius, but it turned out to be 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's much hotter than I need it to be. So what did I do? I bought from a Expo, I bought a Maxent wax melter. So these things, they have, you know, thermostats on them, you control the temperature. We're going to run it up to 155. So we're going to leave ourselves a 5 degree. safety tolerance where we won't impact the plastic.

And we're going to be dipping the oldest ones. And we're going to see what those results are good or bad. We're going to make a video. And we're going to show you exactly whether or not we can just agitate those frames in a wax melter that's going to be full of water instead of wax. And we're going to see how that goes. And that's going to be my process. Because I don't want to have to take them apart.

What a pain. A lot of the videos that you see require us to take the wires off, pull the leaves apart, and individually scrub and clean them. Okay. So anyway, that's pretty much it. I tried to close above an inner cover, close the hole down, maybe five Bs, and they refill the flow frames.

So, oh, yeah, so if they refill the flow frames, the other thing I do is at the end of the year, we try to shut down here near the last couple of weeks of September, so they still have time into October to backfill, what we've taken off from the hives. But if they're filling them back up, you can take your flow frames out and we put them on racks

and I have a dehydrator. So we just dry them out. We don't wait. We just, if they're partially full or three quarters full of a frame and it's the end of the year and there's bad weather coming, we pull them and take them off.

We don't wait for that to happen. So we just make sure that the moisture content is at 18% water, no, 18% honey or lower water content than that, so it won't ferment. That's it. So I want to thank everybody for joining us, and I hope that you have a fantastic weekend ahead.

Any closing words? I'll take a chair for next live. Thanks for that comment. A chair for the next slide? Yeah, one of the comments. Okay, no, no, no. Grandkids don't get chairs. I don't know what's going on.

That's...