The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 262 getting brood out of honey supers and more...

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/IDVbPovl05Y   Topics and time stamps generously provided by Adam Holmes CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction 06:21 The rapid round feeders are not in stock on Amazon, any other suggestions? 12:56 We're having a dearth, what are your thoughts on my mite treatment plan? 16:20 Made a walk-away split 3 weeks ago. Should I wait, or do something? 17:40 I want to change my setup from 2-deeps and a Flow-Super to One Deep and a Medium while making a split. Is there enough time left? 24:14 Where can I find the tags you use on your hives? What do I need to attach them? 28:57 A farmer will plant anything I want. What are your thoughts? 36:40 Trying to salvage colonies by introducing swarm cells, but they didn't take. Would it be better to just buy queens? 42:55 Have a deep brood box with four medium supers on, there is brood in every box. Not really sure what to do with this hive. 48:44 How do you prepare your apiary when you go on vacation? 51:19 I have a queen with spotty brood. What's the best way to requeen this hive? 58:40 I put a swarm into a nucleus hive and it all got smashed up. No idea if I killed the queen. 01:02:15 Queen flew off to greener pastures during queen isolation cage installation... UPDATE 01:03:40 3 weeks ago, I had pollen coming in at more than 10 loads per minute. Now only 1 or 2 loads a minute. Do bees bring pollen in when there are laying workers producing drones?

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, June the 14th, and this is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 262. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here. If this is your first time, welcome. If you're returning and you knew I was going to be here, thanks for coming back. So if you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics and reference links listed in order down below. So if you've got a question right now that's burning a hole in your mind and you just have to get an answer, please go to the way to be fellowship on Facebook. Join the group and get answers to your questions.

Find out what's going on all over the world 24-7. Someone is always there. I know what you want to know. What's going on outside in my neck of the woods? Well, first of all, where is my neck of the woods? Northeastern United States, the state of Pennsylvania, and the northwest corner of the state. 77 degrees Fahrenheit right now. That's not too bad, which is 25 degrees Celsius and it's 51% relative humidity, so the bees are not bearding as much as they were yesterday when the humidity

was much higher. We have a light wind, three miles an hour, which is five kilometers per hour and no rain for the next few days. That's not good news because temperatures are also going to rise and it's going to challenge our bees. 90s all through the next week. Now I really really some of you 90 degrees Fahrenheit that would be a break because in the desert southwest of the United States for example you're in triple digits so we need rain anyway water everything so your bees need water we'll talk about this at the end during the fluff section also you might be wondering what the bees are getting outside right now because whatever it is they're super busy

so they're on raspberries for sure if you want to know what's going on in your neck of the woods take a nature hike. Get an app for your phone and ID plants while you're out there. See what's going on. So right now we see them here on raspberries, clover, milkweed, not open yet, but we're seeing evidence that other pollinators like the monarch butterfly, their caterpillars are chewing away on the milkweed leaves, which is good. That's what they're out there for. The milkweed is the only thing that monarch butterflies can reproduce on. So that's interesting. Anyway, the linen tree is still hanging in there not blooming when it does I'm going to show you videos and photos and you're going to be

impressed elder berries those are coming near an end already which is interesting black cherry trees and those are the wild black cherry trees that just occur on the forest edges lots of white blossoms and crabapple trees are still in bloom right now so that's what my bees are on I'm sure they're doing other things that I'm unaware of white clover all over the place try to let it grow up a little bit if you can get away with it in your yard if you've got clover let it grow to five or six inches let the blossoms go and if you're going to mow at all please mow in the early evening then you'll have fewer bees out there what's worse than mowing your yard mowing your yard when there's bees all over the clover and you chop them up just so that you can meet the standards of your homeowners association thank goodness

i don't have one here so that's it if you want to know how to submit your own question please go to the way to be.org and click on the page mark the way to be fill out the form and you will have your topic or question considered for a future Friday Q&A. Let's get started. This is a long wind today. So settle down. This is also a podcast. It's on Podbean or you can just Google podcast. The Way to Be. And you'll find out it's on Iheart radio and everything else. I appreciate those who are listening. And I apologize to people that listen to the podcast. and try to make comments there. I just don't have the time to go through and respond to comments. It's all I can do to keep up with YouTube, for example, a pint can't hold a quart.

I'm a one-man show here. So anyway, here comes the very first question from Megan Kids. That's interesting. Darn it, every time I check this feeder on Amazon, it isn't available. Any other suggestions you have? Also, it's been hard to find,

be-keeping YouTube video, based in Utah where I lived you happen to know of any this is the beehive state and you think it would be simple to find a YouTuber from Utah so this is a shout-out to my viewers if you're in Utah and you know of a good YouTube channel in that state that's going to give relevant you know regional information about beekeeping please write down in the comment section below this video also you'll notice whenever you put a link or something like that it won't show up right away. Don't panic. You're not blocked. What happens is anything that's got a link has to be

released by me so I have to look at it and then let it go out. So if you've got a YouTube channel from Utah, make a recommendation, something that's good. The other thing is, for those of you who are wondering, where can you get beekeeping resources in your area? Go to your Department of Agriculture, go to the extension offices. They all have educational programs. And there may be a state beekeepers association that would also list all local associations. Those can be a great resource for you if you're trying to find a mentor, a like-minded group, maybe there's a top bar hive only group or a horizontal hive only group or a Langstroth hive. You get the picture. Go there and find people that are doing what you want to be doing with beekeeping and you'll find lots of those resources.

So this is a question about the rapid round. Wouldn't you know it? I don't even have one sitting here, but I have a solution. The rapid round, by the way, so many people, I don't want to say rip it off because I don't think it was ever patented. But the rapid round feeder system is a hive top feeder system. It looks like a bunt cake pan, kind of, but it's all plastic. It has a cover on it, and it's suitable for dry feed or syrup. This is the bee buffet. It's also good for dry feed or syrup. This sits on the inner cover of your beehive and there's that opening on your inner cover which by the way used to double as a bee escape There's an insert that went into it so it was never really designed for venting It's always been designed as a feeder access

So this sits over the top of that your bees come up in here Here's the cover on it and then you can put a quart jar you know a pint jar anything with a large or small mouth mason jar top can sit on top of here I prefer these over just putting inverted jars on your hives because this won't let the syrup drip down into your hive when your bees are not consuming it I have bad news about the bee buffet the people that are selling it it's a US product but the company only had a couple of products the be buffet which was number one for me and they also had some bucket feeder floats that your bees

could sit on but they're closing up shop they're going out of business so if you can get these of course I took care of myself first I have a bunch of these and that's why I have enough for every one of my hives because look this fits in a nucleus hive too it fits all hive sizes so going out of business if you can find them get them and you'll probably find out they are looking for another company of course to pick it up maybe a bigger company that has more diversity as far as product offerings go and they would be probably willing to bring this on board who knows maybe better be we'll carry them but a good quality product like this when it's the only thing they sell

couldn't make it on the market i'm super disappointed about that and i'll miss them as far as rapid rounds go down on amazon if you've got a favorite seller there again please feel free to link that down in the video description below i'll look it over and see if it's got good reviews if it does we'll put it out and share with other people so the wrap it around is still a good feeder serosel makes hive top feeders too that are also very good the nuke feeders that i prefer right now aside from the bee buffet these are cirrocell nuke feeders look how the interior accesses are to one side if your hive were tipped this way a little bit then your bees can get up and get all the syrup out of these that's a really good product

And I like it because it fits on the nukes, as is, ready to go. And those are dry and wet feed also, so that's another option. And Cirrus cell sells a full 10-frame or 8-frame feeder. The thing I kind of don't like about that is it takes up the whole top of the hive. And if you're going to leave it in place, you really can't. So you're putting it on when you need it and taking it off and you don't. And one of the reasons I don't like it, I mean, it functions. perfectly is exactly as designed. It's also good for dry and wet feed, but when you go to do an

inspection, you've got a gallon of syrup sitting on top with a free surface area. It does not close up. Be buffet, for example, I need to do an inspection. I just pull the jar off or take this whole thing out and set it aside. When it's the whole top of your hive and it's a 10 frame hive, that's a lot of syrup. So something to think about free surface area, how much spillage you might have. do that on a day when the bees are looking for stuff to eat. And you'll get yourself a feeding frenzy. We had robbing going on on a hive this morning that I did a recent swarm install on. And it happened to be an Appameh hive, and it didn't occur to me that I can stop the swarming right now.

Slide the entrance shut. That was the easiest robbing event control move I've ever had. I didn't have to put a robbing screen on it. A lot of companies make robbing screens. But all I had to do is slide it shut and open the vents for the hive. So the vents for the bees are inside, so they're not overheated. And then it would stop the robbing event. How easy was that?

Sliding entrances for Appamehives. They sell the entrances separate too, so you can put them on your wooden hives while we're talking. Let's move on to question number two, which is Dustin from Bolverty, Texas. said that right. Down in Texas, we're starting our summer dearth and wanted your thoughts on my planned mite treatment. My plan right now is to remove all-capped brood at the end of June. Place them into a split and treat the parent colony with O-A-V. O-A-V is exhalic acid vaporization, organic treatment. And the same day while others, while there's no capped root and in the hive after the split emerges treat them with two rounds of OAV and then introduce the queen so OAV to my

knowledge has I've never had a queen damaged in one of my hides I've never lost a queen after a treatment series so I suppose if you're overdosing you need to watch it so you could actually damage that so anyway and then introduce the queen how does that sound that all sounds good to me if you can introduce you can make a brute break that's when exhalic acid vapor or drizzle is the most effective and in fact it doesn't even treat mites underneath the capped pupa caps right so you have to do it when the mites are in the dispersal phase they're exposed this is interesting too I recently collected a swarm somebody contacted me via a social media area called

Facebook and they said they had a swarm in a tree branch it was somebody that I knew I really wasn't that interested in the swarm but there were storms coming in so long story short we zipped out there I used my be vac and I collected them and then the supervisor showed up the following day to see how it was going and we started looking at the bees on the landing board and so on as they were going into the hive and there were varomites on the thorax of the bees if you see that that is a heavy mite load in fact it may have something to do with why the bees left the bees left

their parent hive in the first place. Bees can abscond when there's a heavy infestation, whether it's small high beetles, whether it's rare. You almost never have wax moss and drive out a colony of bees. They usually move in after a colony's empty. But if you have enough for rohamites to where they're not even on the abdomen, they're on the thorax of the bee moving around, you have a big issue. So this is one of the reasons I don't like bringing in swarms that don't believe. to me. I don't know how they've been cared for. I don't know whether they were treated. I don't know what genetics they are. I don't know if it's a package and so on. You understand that this is an unknown quantity. So if ever there was a time when you should set up a satellite bee yard,

it's a place to keep your swarms of unknown origin until you figure out how well off they are, if they're healthy, if they're going to do well in your own apiary in your own backyard. have a quarantine yard somewhere so you can check them out and we're going to be treating those mites tomorrow as a matter of fact so there you go get them under control while they're exposed before they can build up their resources and of course before they can get in the pupa state which is when they're captain protected from away so let's get a question number three from veto uh the country is europe doesn't say where in europe okay so i made a walkway split three weeks ago go. There were three cells. Two were hatched. The third got destroyed after that. The weather was and

is good. Now one queen is walking around for about a week, but I see no eggs. Bees are calm. Should I wait for more or do something? Wait longer. Brand new colony, brand new queen. We just got mated. It's very normal. You can get these early birds that emerge out of the queen's cell. They scoot around they're flying they do an orientation flight or whatever and they're gone and then people are seeing new uh they're seeing eggs and new larvae in there in 12 days which that's pretty darn quick for me so i give them two weeks so three weeks ago walk away split that means walk away split they had to make a queen so there's 14 15 days right there then the queen had to mature so there's another on average nine days and then she had to do a mating flight she had to come back I would say you're still

within the realm of that being a good queen. Weight it out, I think you're going to get good news. I think things are going to work out. You saw the queen, that's the good news, and, you know, she's in there. So check her out in another week and see what happens. I'll bet there's going to be eggs. Question number four comes from Sarah. I'm reconsidering my current setup of double deeps plus a flow super

and considering transitioning to a deep brood box with a medium super, followed by the flow super. It's puzzling to me why two beekeepers in my area insist on two deep boxes for winter. So would it be possible to take the second box off my current setup and start a new hive as long as there are eggs in the top box for them to build a new queen and the queen is in the bottom box? Will the bees have enough time to fill the medium super before winter? Okay, so here's the thing. What's the date today? We're in June. This is a fantastic time of year to be doing splits and changing hive configurations and things like that, giving your bees plenty of time for recovery. So here's what we do. And I face this issue myself too, so it's a very easy answer. Are you ready? So we have two deep boxes and double deeps are something that some people swear by and think they need. The thing that changed that for me, I've done double deeps in the past. And, and, uh, I've always found myself in a pickle when I wanted to do something with that. Usually it happened when I combined two colonies together.

In other words, I had one that was found queenless. It was too late in the year to build them up. So we're talking September, early October. And it was easy to just take that deep brood box and put it on top of another deep brood box of a strong colony. But the situation we have here is somebody is building a double deep brood box. So that's double brood boxes. And then going up from there and the flow super which by you know itself is another deep box so it's triple deeps this is too big for most beehive

configurations in an area where you get a decent winter so uh i couldn't you know it wouldn't be a successful colony here for me to have it in that configuration so the figs is really easy particularly since the brood is up into the second box so now we have two boxes with brood in it hopefully of all ages and as described here eggs in each brood box so it's very very easy first of all get the flow super off put that in temporary storage if there's speeds in it you know you use a bee escape and so on but it's too early in my opinion you know to put the flow super on a hive that's that size the second part of this is now we have to create a completely new hive so you need a bottom board set up for the brood box that you're

going to move over onto that so the other question is which of these two brood boxes would you move over to the new location and which would you keep in the existing location. So you want to take the box that has the least number of bees in it, has eggs, some larvae, and no queen, right? So this is the one that we're hoping to have them create a new queen in. So we're going to force that. It's called a walkaway split, but in this case we're being very organized about it.

So now let's say it's the bottom box that's loaded with more brood and it's also got the queen in there. That's the box. That deep is the one I'm going to move onto the new bottom board and create a new colony with. Then I'm going to take the second deep, which is the one that has all the brood in it, but no queen, and take a bunch of nurse bees that are already on there with it and put those right down onto the bottom board of the existing hive site. So now we have a need for a new queen. They'll notice that the queen is gone.

Her QMP, queen menadabella pheromone, will be greatly reduced and they'll start to behave differently, almost right away. And that's good news because what they're going to do then is realize that they're queenless and they're then going to pay attention to the eggs that they have. And this is where bees are better than beekeepers when it comes to selecting eggs that they are going to turn into replacement queens. So your queen that was existing is in the new location and so the foragers won't be coming back to that spot. The foragers that are out and about, that's why the time of day is important too. We want to do this between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Right. And most foragers are out and about so they're out of your way. They're less bees to contend with. And then the foragers that come back are

going to come back to what used to be the second box. Now it's the bottom box. And they'll be bringing their resources and helping bolster that while those nurse bees that are in that box are going to start feeding and caring for the next egg that hatches. And they're going to turn that into a queen. They're going to build queen cells around it, probably more than one. And when they do that, the other box is going to be fine too. So in the event that they don't requeen themselves, then we have other manipulation opportunities and methods that we can use later. But I think based on the description here, I think we're going to do just fine. So now we have two deep boxes. And then once they start to fill up, so if the one that we took off, which was the

bottom box with the queen in it. If we put that in the new location and let's say that's a 10 frame and 8 out of 10 frames are in production, drawn comb, resources, brood and everything else, you can go ahead and put the medium super on right now and then put the inner cover on top of that and then the outer cover. So that's the new colony and allow them, of course, to build up and store resources in that medium box. Now the other hive, the weaker one, is probably going to need more time, so we'll leave it as a deep box while they make their new queen, while the queen gets mated, and does everything we described for the previous question. It has to mature, has to fly out, has to get mated at a drone congregation area, return, and go into production. So letting the bees

pick those eggs is actually the best method I found. And I have a lot of drones around. So we have drones all over the place and my grandson was out here yesterday he spent the bulk of the afternoon walking around marking drones so he's practicing he really wants to mark a queen i won't let him he has to mark a bunch of drones first and show me that he can do that consistently and handle the drones and get those taken care of but i think everything's going to do well and wait for those resources to build back up and we hope to hear from sarah later that everything went perfectly and that the advice was above average. So that's our target goal here.

Next question number five comes from Diane in Warren, New Jersey. I'm a second year beekeeper, nurturing two smallish colonies from secondary swarms. Virgin queens successfully mated and they are building up successfully. While you mentioned a while back using valve tags to permanently label your hive boxes, have you found a particular screw or fastener that works, best length or size. How do you decide where to put the tag screw? Is it okay to drill a pilot hole and attach a tag on an inhabited hive box? Those are all great questions and have easy answers. And yes, I often put tags on beehives that already have bees in them. You're not hammering it.

If you're attacking it, hitting it with a tack hammer, something like that. It always is interesting to me when I see someone inspecting a beehive and they pull frames and they bang them on the on the hive itself or they taking the cover board off and they bang it on the hive to get stuff off of it don't bang your hives don't knock your hives bees don't like vibration if you're trying to get a response that's a great way to do it so i'm going to show you these are the tags they are valve tags and they come mark their brass and what i've noticed over the years now they come they already have all them so if you want to put a self-tapping wood screw on there i much prefer that you use a stainless steel screw we don't want rust the other thing is this is bi-metallic so this is brass if you put

steel and brass together there's a cathotic exchange between the dissimilar metals so you can put a screw on here but guess what i've been doing this works on plastic hives polystyrene appame wooden hives and everything else i use hot glue i just heat up the hot glue there is outdoor hot glue gorilla makes it for example there are other companies I put a glove on a dead center I put this right where I want it to be and I hold it and I wear my gloves because it's going to get hot and it'll stick right on there and I haven't had one fall off yet so the other thing I noticed is through the years because I've used these for a long time you pick the number series

that you want like 20 to 40 and so when I think there's 20 in a pack and I'll put a link down in the video description for these I did buy these on Ambit and so the numbers can become hard to read so what would you mark them with the same paint pens that are used for queens This is called a competitive advantage mpd 15 paint marker this one happens to be white that's what they look like And so you can use this paint marker and it says right on it that it's good for metal wood glass and everything else the other thing is all these paint markers are not created equal some of them are considered gardening markers what would be the difference it means the pigment is uv resistant so in other words it's not going to bleach out in the sun i don't know if you've ever gone out and marked a bunch of plants or things

like that on those little plastic tags that are supposed to let you know what you planted there only to find out six months later you can't even read it in a completely bleached away that's because it was not a garden marking pen and it wasn't good for uv right so you can mark these on your tag so you can use bright red, green, whatever's going to help you keep records better and identify your hives from a distance. So they're brass. I will put links down or you can just Google. They are brass valve tags. And I love them. They're fantastic. They work great. They last forever. And they make it look like you know what you're doing. And only that you pick your numbers. So if you only have three hives out there and you pick tags that start with number 30 or whatever, it makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you have more hives than you do. So and if you're using a screw, three quarter inch screw because it's going to not penetrate all the way to the interior of your beehive if you have a standard three quarter inch wooden hive box. So they work and you can put them on the lid, bottom board, something like that. I find it's good to put them on the bottom board or on your slatted rack for example.

For me because when I do videos of the bottom boards, entrances, things like that, I see the number right there and it helps me with my log keeping and that partly why I make the videos is so I see what the conditions are throughout the year. And the other thing is if you're changing boxes around, you're not changing numbers. So it might be a good idea to put it on the lid or the bottom, you know, the bottom board of your hive so that it stays constant. Question number six here from Fred says, I have a bee yard in a beautiful farm and the owners have offered to plant whatever to help with honey production. Looking especially for something that might fill in the traditional dearth.

I'm thinking lavender, sourwood trees, any suggestions would be great, thinking sunflower, but not sure if that is more pollen than nectar. I'm not far from you in the town of Eden. So here's the thing. You're going to find there's a lot of resources. I cannot imagine a farmer saying, hey I'll plant anything you want that brings honey well my mind would just explode because there's so many different things to do so what resources are there first of all I'm going to

mention this this is Ernst Seeds catalog why on earth would I mention a catalog of earths seeds here's why because what's really cool about it is it's not just a catalog This is an information resource. So here's what I recommend you do. Now I'm not saying get them to send you this big catalog, spiral bound with all this information and not buy seeds from them. However, they describe all the seeds in here,

the soil conditions, the environment that you're going to plant in, and what the options are, what the benefits are to the soil itself, cover crops, building a field that's going to be grazed by livestock, for example. it also has, when you look at the different flowers that they list in here, earth seeds, 2024, 225 catalog tells you pollinator value. Nectar, low, medium, high, extremely high. So they rate all of this stuff.

It also tells you the bloom period. And here's why that's important. If you're setting up an area and you're describing a dearth period, we want something if we're going to plant it, then we want something that's going to provide nectar and pollen resources to your bees at a time when the environment generally is not doing that. And so if we can get a perennial me going, that would be the perfect world for me, for all pollinators. This is where you can make friends with the people that love nature in general and maybe have a little pushback towards you

keeping bees because they're non-native and they want you to help the other pollinators. So there are lots of ways to do that. In fact, all the different milkweeds and everything they talk about natives, non-natives and things. So I recommend going to Ernstseed.com, ERN-S-T-S-E-E-D dot com, and getting them to send you the catalog. It's like getting a book for free about plants. And you can make your choices there because I can't tell you, I can tell you what I like right now. This year I'm liking. Borage, for one, it's coming up great. My hyssup was a because the voles took it all out. However, if I could just get a big area of hyssop going, blue giant hissop that the bees use, the nectar from that is enormous.

Milkweed is another thing that grows. Very few people actually plant milkweed, but if they did, that would be a fantastic nectar flow. Now here's what I like. I don't like annual so much, even though I do plant cosmos. Cosmos are not good at reseeding on their own, and so I have to plant Cosmos every year. The value to the honeybees is very small compared to the value to other pollinators. So once again, it's a feel-good plant to put out there for the pollinators overall. The other thing is sunflowers. You can stagger your planting of the sunflowers.

And the reason that I suggest that is there are a lot of different varieties of sunflowers. Be careful about the selection of sunflowers because some of them are actually pollen-free. How annoying is that. but they're sold because they're designed to grow for cuttings and people don't want pollen falling out to their sunflowers when they're sitting on their dining room table and so on whereas a beekeeper we want those sunflowers one of the cheapest sunflowers i found to plant and this is really interesting too so i'm putting a little tidbit out here for you the black oil sunflower seed that we get for bird feeders they say if you talk to those people at tractor supply or you go to agway or you go to agway or or you go to all these places they say, oh, those don't grow because they've been treated or whatever. So they're designed to be bird seed only and then they just won't grow. Yes, they do.

I put a bunch of seeds out in a trap that I won't talk about. But anyway, the sunflowers grew inside this box. So all they needed was damp soil. Here's the thing. You can grow bird seed. Look how cheap that is. You get a 40 pound bag of seed for $25, $30, and you could seed a big area with that. So the reason you cascade it is we want them to come into bloom at different times

so they don't just bloom, provide a bunch of nectar and pollen, and then that's the end of it. We want others to come up and cascade that through. But here's the thing. That's not a perennial. So there again, it feeds songbirds. It's great for all pollinators. In fact, there are native bees that are specialists that only go to sunflowers.

So when you've got this big feed, at your disposal, things like clover are fantastic. It's good for the soil, good for grazers, it'll build the soil, and if it's the white sweet clover, it's going to take care of your bees also. And the other thing to that is it's going to be perennial. The borage that I'm planting this year, this is my first year with it. But from everything that I've read and all the research that I've done, I found that apparently it sells. It's considered an annual, but one becomes three and five and ten and so on as each year progresses because they seed so heavily. And that is a really strong nectar plant. So we want the longest bloom in periods where other

plants don't. So if one of the reasons that you have a dearth, for example, is because you just don't have enough rainfall, then you're looking for plants that are drought tolerant and still provide resources for your bees. So there's a lot of decisions out there. The other thing is the Zirxie Society, X-E-R-C-E-S Society. They produce a book called the Top 100 Plants for Pollinators, and they list, of course, what their value is for the honeypeas, as well as other pollinators too, and they have little icons of different bees, butterflies, and birds, and things like that so you know what it's benefiting. So if I had a large area, unlimited budget, that's the other thing. Take a thumb through the Ernst Seeds Catalog

and find out what's going on there. And for me, hiss up, porridge, sunflowers, cosmos, because the clover's already established. Goldenrod, there's so many, by the way, when it comes to golden rod, if this exists already in environment, why plant it? There are hundreds of acres of it already in existence.

Why not add something that would benefit your bees? You mentioned a couple trees here too, but I don't know if they're going to plant trees for you, but that's a possibility, but that's the long game, like my basswood trees, the linen trees, they're going to take so long

to get big, that's the slow game, you get flowers and stuff immediately. So, I like that. See what happens. Let us know what you choose and how it goes. That's the end of question number six. Moving on to number seven. This comes from Scott.

Lions, Kansas. This is my third summer, keeping bees, and so far the hardest. That's true, by the way. The third year of bee that's when the honeymoon's over, so to speak. Things can become challenging. Toxins have had an opportunity to build up. Parasite numbers have had an opportunity to build up. And for the studies that were done when it came to treatment and treatment-free beekeeping by Penn State, for example, the untreated colonies were crashing on the third

year. So it's a lot to think about. And this also may have something to do with why so many new beekeepers quit the third year. So if you're in your your fourth or fifth year, you're in that smaller group of beekeepers that has made it past the threshold. So it says they have six hives going into last winter. I had back surgery in February, wasn't able to manage the hives, as I should this spring. One was a dead out. I over-treated one with exhalic acid and they absconded. The other four swarmed. Only one of the Virgin Queens made it back and she is laying a shotgun pattern so far. I tried to, it plays swarm cells and emergency cells in the other hives but they didn't take now i'd like to know

more about how the swarm cells were placed in the other hives to try to cut them out and had some way of holding them on there what kind of treatment did they have by the way when you're pulling out cells with queens and them when you're pulling frames with queens on them the management the handling of those frames and cells is very important you want to keep them up You want to keep them very carefully handled, no jarring and banging and slamming around. And you may find out that one of the reasons that they don't produce well is because of handling a loan. I'm not saying that's absolutely the reason, but I'm saying that treat these things like extremely delicate. Keep them in the upright position and very carefully move them when we have queen in a pupa state, right?

So I bought a new Caucasian queen for one of the hives and installed her three weeks ago. We're in a dearth, and she is just now starting to lay. Do you think there is enough time left this summer to take frames from her as she lays them and place into the other hives for them to try and re-queen themselves, or would it be better to just buy new queens for the queenless hives? There are still some drones in my hives. I so consider myself a rickie. Would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Okay, so here's the thing. We have dwindling hives. no queens, but we introduced queen cells. That's why I need to know more about the introduction of the queen cells. Why would they reject them? In other words, were they injured? Did something happen to them when they're being transferred? Were they not viable?

There are a lot of things that can go on there. The other thing is you have a struggling colony with a new queen in it that's just starting to lay. And this isn't a time to make splits with that. So here's where personal management comes in and what you really want out of your bees. because one of the things that as the season progresses, that I start looking at these colonies, if they end up queenless for one reason or another, maybe there's a swarm,

and then they never successfully requeen themselves, when it happens, we do have to consider the time of year, but we're in June, and this is still a good time to allow your bees to recover. If they're rejecting queen cells that are viable, then we have to be careful that they actually may have queens in those colonies. Now, for 100% sure they do not, I would consider not breaking it up a lot,

but rather combining those queenless colonies into one, and then I would take a frame of brood with eggs and place it in that colony after I'm 100% sure there is no queen and let them produce the replacement queen. Rather than tiny struggling colonies, combining weaker colonies together can end up with a very strong colony altogether. So that's just what I personally would do.

There are a lot of ways to manage this situation, and you could split them all up. The other thing is, if we're making these small colonies and you don't have enough brood, you're weakening everything. So I much prefer to leave this established colony that's doing well, that's building gradually, right? We've got the new queen in there.

If you want to pull one frame, then we need to really help them long. So you're going to be providing supplemental feeding and things like that to get that colony going, particularly since the environment is not probably going to provide a lot right now, depending on where you are, but you have to be able to assess it. I would combine weaker colonies into one, give them one frame with the eggs on it, and let them produce a replacement queen, and then keep tabs on them in 12, 13 days, see what's going on. Let's say that failed too, and they're just in a dwindling state. Combine them all.

to your colony that's queen right how would you do that you would put a queen excluder on top of that hive that has the queen right status and then let all your bees migrate down into that hive and then pull that if it's another deep box pull that off and go from there there are a lot of things to do but a lot of this is wait and see how things go first so combine the weaker colonies pull a frame with eggs on it prude resources put them in there let them care for them see what happens and that way you're not devastating the colony so for example the hive

they have right now that you install the queen in if there are full frames they're full of eggs and everything and there are these little fringe frames on the outboard parts of that and they just have you know a few rows of eggs and you know a few rows of developing larvae that's the one I would pull the transfer over I wouldn't take the prime frame that's full that's got the most activity on it and I would make certain that I'm not transferring my queen with them. So see how it goes. I hope we get updated. That would be great.

Question number eight comes from James in Delhi, New York. I'm super successful hive, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. It's already one deep with four medium boxes. And when I went there today, it was entirely filled to the top. The problem is there was brood, or eggs in every level covering five to seven frames. Most frames also have the halo of honey,

but I'm concerned because there is brood all the way up to the top box. I've checked for queen cells, still none, but I'm really not sure what to do with this hive. I'll likely split it into two or three hives, but I've never had my bees have brewed in the entire stack like this before. Any thoughts thoughts on what may be causing this, there's only one entrance at the bottom. So aside from the entrance, my next question for the setup is, what's the venting status? In other words, if they're venting at the top, because there's no queen excluder, the way I personally keep my bees down towards that single entrance is by having no venting, no upper entrances, and an insulated top, right? So let's move on and say, now we're going to solve this problem, right? So we've got a deep

in a medium and then three mediums above that. So my preferred configuration for the core group that's the brood area is the deep and the medium. So how do we get these bees out of these medium supers, what should be supers, but now they're brood boxes because there's brood in them? How do we get that under control and get it all down to a deep and a medium, which is my personal preferred configuration? We're going to use something that don't often use. So we'll put a queen exclude her in there here's what you have to be careful to do we want to free up those three medium supers that have brood in them right so to do that we have to find her queen so we have to make sure that she is in fact in the brood box the bottom box and or the medium super directly above it

once we find that we have to pull all these boxes off until we find the queen this is going to be a lot of work and if you're not good at finding a queen bring your best friend that's good finding the queen and you can start spotting them so you can do a queen excluder you know to match the size your box my preferred personal preferred queen excluder if i'm going to use one is the metal queen excluder that has the wooden frame around it just my personal preference you can find something else maybe you already have a queen excluder handy so once i know for sure the queen is in those bottom two boxes i've pulled the top three boxes off and i put the queen excluder right there then i put those three

upper boxes back on what's going to happen they're going to go through the cycle of all of the brood that's up there emerging and then of course they're going to be adult bees and they can pass through the queen excluder because they're workers now what happens if some of that brood up there turns out to be drones they can't get through the queen excluder and we have no upper vent we have no upper entrance how do they get out well those drones are going to get out when you do your inspections so drones just like other members of your honeybee colony they have to emerge and they have to also mature and you'll know it by the size of their cells so you'll know right away if you've got drone cells up there one of the solutions there is once you do this

re-sacking your boxes and put your queen down below the queen excluder you can find the frames that have drone cells on them and just go ahead and cut the drone cells out if you want to or uncap them and that prevents you having to deal with drones at all in the upper boxes so then once they've moved down below through your queen excluder or not you know even if there are some workers that can't get through the queen excluder all of them eventually can squeeze through they can just do it with a lot of effort to get out and if there's the only way to get in or out they're going to have to and then uh you'll realize that there's no new eggs up there so you'll become confident then in your subsequent inspections that you did in fact get

the queen down below and that there's not a second queen in that box because that's another reason on rare occasions you'll find sister queens usually one of them is inlay and one of them is not. But sometimes even with the queen excluded in place you can find eggs being produced above and below it. That means you've got a queen that's trapped up there that stays in the upper part above your queen excluder. Now a lot of people think it's not a problem. How did she go to the bathroom? How does the queen get out? What happens? Well a queen doesn't have to get out at all. In fact the only time a queen is going to leave the hive if she's in

production is going to be when you have a swarm and she's leaving for good. They don't fly out to eliminate. They don't do cleansing flights the way worker bees do. And it's the nurse bees that take care of all the waste material of the queen. So she does not have to get out. But what you're looking for is evidence that you may have more than one queen by the fact that you're going to see eggs below your queen excluder and above the queen excluder. And this of course assumes that your queen exclusion is in really good shape and your queen can't pass through it so i hope that works that's my recommendation again lots of ways to do it you could start other colonies with those boxes and we didn't describe in the question here whether those are mediums or deeps or what they are

but uh if they are yes it says four medium boxes and so i wouldn't want to start new colonies with medium boxes by themselves unless you're going all medium now we end up with a medium and then a deep over the top of it in an arrangement annoyance so hope that works let's move on to question number nine which comes from Marie of Jacksonville Florida hello how do you prepare your apiary when you go on a three-week vacation first of all I don't go on three-week vacations I barely ever leave the yard so but if you were going to do that this time of year I'm going to there's a lot going on down there it just depends on what's going on with your bees with your hives but three weeks is no problem in just a general rule of thumb we like to look in on our bees every two to three weeks so most of that though is done by observing landing board activity and knowing what kind of resources they're storing and the big concern is we don't want to kick off a swarm

while you're gone so you want to make sure that you have enough space in your hive so do an assessment of all your hives and see that they've got space to store resources, you may have to super a couple of the hives. So the other thing is you don't want pests or people bothering your bees. So sometimes you can put a camera out there. And it's helpful to have a camera system that you can check on your phone. So like Arlo's systems work for that. And there's a lot of other different home security style cameras that are wireless that you can check on your phone or get alerts when there's movement and things like that.

So that's another thing. You also want to have bear protection. I don't know, you know, what kind of predators are where you live, raccoons, if they harass your bees, skunks if they come in and bother your bees. So think about predation of your beehives and make sure that you've made arrangements that they don't get attacked, although that could easily happen while you're still home. So really, honeybees, when it comes to taking off and going somewhere, this is after the prime swarm season for where we are. You're going to be gone for three weeks. You're probably going to think about your bees a lot. I'm only thinking about my bees when I'm not in the bee aviary. So I think strapping them down in case there's stormy weather coming through, things like that, maybe do a

little maintenance, mow things down and stuff like that. But I think it's okay to go away. If you've got a friend that can pop in and check on your bees, if that gives you peace of mind, have them show up and give you a report that everything looks good. And I don't see it as a huge deal. There are people that never leave home that forget to check on their bees for weeks on end. And Dr. Leo Shirashkin, for example, checks his bees twice a year. Twice a year, that's all. So he could go on an extended vacation. And that would be easy-peasy.

Moving on to question number 10, which comes from Rick in Pennsylvania. I have a package from this year where the queen just hasn't been a good laying queen, spotty brood pattern and the colony size is dwindling what is the best way to requeen this hive kill the queen and wait a few days to install a caged queen okay so here again personal methods and management techniques and things like that I have nucleus hives I like them and they're deeps so all my nukes are five frame style deeps this is what I would do I need them to make a new queen. Now, a lot of people would think, but it's got a spotty brood pattern. Why do you want those genetics? So the thing is, there is brood, and the fact that she's laying eggs mean that

there's a viable future for that colony, but we do want them to replace the queen. So here's the thing. Don't toss the queen out. She's still an insurance policy, as poorly producing as she is. So I would personally, and again, it's just my personal approach to it, I would take the queen, and I would put that queen and a frame of brood in a nucleus hive with other frames of drawn comb. I would put one-to-one sugar syrup on that hive, that nucleus with the queen until whenever. I would just keep them fed. Set them aside and here's the advantage. Now the frames that I pulled out to make the nuke, I want to replace those in the existing colony

with frames that they will not build out because we're trying to get them to recover. We want them to make a new queen and then we want to see what the new queen does. So I put in frame feeders. The Mother Lode, M-O-T-H-E-R-L-O-D-E is the company that makes the ones that I like. They hold a gallon apiece and you can put sugar syrup in them if you want to or just use them as placeholders because in the future here's what we'll. we're doing. So I've taken the queen out that's producing spotty brood. I've given her with some nurse bees. I've put her in a nucleus hive and this is already a dwindling colony of bees. So the other thing is

you want to rule out disease. You want to look that over and make sure that everything is going well. And I think I would provide nutrition for these bees. Now what's going to happen? While I'm in the nucleus hive where I move the queen rather than killing her, she is still in production, even though the production doesn't meet your standard. She's not doing great. So she may be having to try to manage a much larger space than she can. And sometimes this results in dwindling bees because the space is too big, there's too many frames,

there's too much for them to manage while they continue to do all the duties associated with maintaining the hive. And foraging and bringing in resources and so on. So we're going to reduce some of that responsibility in the nucleus hive. So it's going to be a two-frame nucleus hive. And even though it's a five-frame box, right, again, we'll put placeholders in there. And we can use frame feeders in there too.

So we will keep them fed and cared for while they're over there. Because one of the things we're doing is we're not losing production time. So while the residual frame of brood of all ages is in the hive that we pull the queen out of, they will immediately go to work on producing their replacement queen. And when they're producing a replacement queen, we want their nutrition to be maxed out. Here's an example of where I would use hive alive pollen patties on that hive or something else if you just like global patties or something like that,

but we're talking protein patties. We're not talking about winter patties or sugar patties. They need to have pollen. why. They have a reduced ability to forage because their numbers are small. And I'm assuming that you're wanting to resuscitate the colony, right? Because if you didn't, we wouldn't be messing with them at all, right? So we've got the queen still in production. We're not going to lose anything. We have replaced the frames that we pulled out for that nucleus colony with frame placeholders in the existing colony. We are going to provide them with maximum nutrition, whatever that means,

for you, right? And that means a carbohydrate, which is sugar syrup, and that means the proteins, which is going to be pollen patties. Now, and that reduces their forage stress, and so now they can build up. So what are they going to do? They're going to produce that queen. She's going to fly out.

She's going to get mated. So you're going to make these observations. Don't inspect the hive a lot either. Inspecting your hives over and over is a stressor for the bees. So look in on them after 12 days. Keep the food and resources on there. Make landing board observations. see if there's pollen coming in, see what's going on,

and see if they're calm and everything is good. Now, let's say it fails. They don't make a new queen. They make some attempts, right? So the brood has been emerging that's residual in that hive, and we have not lost time, because now that they're queenless, we're no worse off than they were before

other than the cost of the resources that you might have fed them, and then we're going to take the queen that's now in her temporary holding pattern, she's been productive the whole time. so we take those frames and bees back and we combine the colonies again and they go right back into the spots where the frames were pulled from to begin with so no last time and now yes replace the queen buy one in or whatever it is that you feel like you need to do but we gave them a chance to do it now let's say it does work and they produce a queen and the queen flies out the queen gets mated we have actually changed her genetics so she first of all when she flies up out and gets mated. She is mating with drones of unknown origin from around the area. Hopefully they're going to be the fastest, strongest, healthiest drones that there are. If you've ever seen a drone comet chasing a queen, a virgin queen, there's often thousands of them and multiple drones mate with her. And so they're only the fastest moving, quickest acting

drones out there. Then she returns and now she's producing eggs. from both her history and of course the genetics that come from the drones and multiple drones she's made it with so there will even be genetic diversity within that colony and then wait to see what kind of brood pattern she has now let's say that all succeeds what do you do with the nuke that you have over here you can still now get rid of that queen and restore those frames and let the colony continue on its way because the frames now will be empty of brood if that queen once you pulled her and she said that's stop producing you can bring that brood back and you haven't lost the workforce that otherwise would have had. So then we restore it. See how it goes. I hope that all makes sense. Yeah, I hope that makes sense. And you're getting rid of the queen. So that was question number 10. Moving on to question number 11, which comes from Peter. Hi Fred, it's Pete from Virginia. Just caught my first swarm. But putting it into the nuke deep, all the comb just mashed up. Let's see. From Virginia, and you caught my first swarm, but putting it into the nuke deep, all the comb just mashed up.

So it sounds like a cutout almost. It was just a mess, and it was at night. So I just put it in there as best I could, brought it back to my house. So this sounds more like a cutout rather than just a swarm or mashing things up. I don't know it gets mashed up. If we're collecting a swarm, they shouldn't have comb or anything in there. So I have no idea if I killed the queen or what should I do. Should I just leave the nuke five frame deep alone for a few days and then try to go in and straighten it out? See the straightening out is apart

There are questions here for Peter that I don't understand So let's assume mashed up means comb So this is something that when people are collecting or cleaning out an area where bees had moved into If they collect comb that has honey in it, that has the potential to kill off the bees in the hive that you put them in So if you are harvesting from an enclosed space in some feral location somewhere and you're cutting out comb, and you're trying to put rubber bands on it to put it in foundationless frames and things like that, the only frames like that that that I would put in that nuke would be those with brood on them, not the honeycomb that's capped or uncapped or full of honey,

because that's the risky business right there. If you put honeycomb from a cutout into a nuke and you're transiting, you're driving over the roads and everything else, you run the risk. First of all, when you've cut the comb, there's leaking honey everywhere. Nothing will kill your bees quicker than leaking honey in a hive or comb of honey that has fallen over on top of your bees. That is a high risk venture for the bees. So if you're doing cutouts, the only comb, again, I'll just say it to be clear, please put only the brood frames in the frames that are going into the nucleus hive to kick it off. there will be plenty of bees to go out and salvage things.

Because remember, they have to repair the honeycomb that you put in there. They have to make their own beeswax to do that. The brood is your most valuable commodity when you're doing a cutout. If I misunderstand it, I hope Pete will fill us in, but it sounded like a cutout because there's frames and it's lumped and turned into a mess. And that sounds like honeycomb with honey in it was also included in that collection process. So just word to the wise.

Bees and honeycomb that's been cut and moved around. And if you're trying to reestablish it, it needs to be cleaned out first. So brood frames only. Those are tough. Brood comb. And so leave the nuke and find out. But I would definitely pull out honeycomb or comb that's damaged. It's not cooperating.

Get it out of there and see what their behavior is. And you'll find out shortly. In the drawn comb for the brood cells, you'll find out shortly. if there is a laying queen in there. So, and I hope there is. But I needed more information about what the mess was caused by. What's going on? Question number 11 comes from Harvey.

Oh, this is from last week. Had problems with the acronym, the acronym QIC, which is queen isolation or queen introduction cage. Long story short, Harvey says, as a follow-up to the hive that the new queen, which had hit the road, In other words, what Harvey was trying to do is install a new queen in the queen isolation cage or introduction cage so that she would not get away while she's setting up a new colony.

And what happened is she did a 180 flew away to greener pastures for those who don't know. And so it was pretty uptight about that as anyone would who bought a queen and had her turn around and scoot away. That's why last Friday we talked in detail about how to keep your queen from getting away. here's the good news though the queen hit the road but i went back about five days later planning to install a queen from one of my resource nukes and lo and behold i found eggs larvae and a queen not a clue where she came from never saw emergency cells supersed seizure cells or swarm cells maybe my queen found greener pastures in the hive she was supposed to be in so the queen flew out

apparently and came back. That by the way is a very common story. I don't think there are many orphaned queens out there in the environment. So moving on to question number 12. Last question of the day. So this is a hard name for me. Dejarini, D-A-J-U-R-Y-N-I. Okay, so got another question for you. I think I might have lost my queen, did an inspection, very little brood, didn't see the queen or eggs. What the question is, three weeks ago, I had pollen coming in 10 per minute. Now, only one or two per minute. If I have a laying worker, do the bees still need pollen for drones? And the question is yes.

So this is why I make that distinction. and this is one of the jobs I give to my grandson. It's not to occupy him or get him out of my hair at all, but I do send him off to count pollen going into various beehives. I think it's very important, right along with marking drones, it ties them up for hours on end, not trying to get rid of them. I love it when he's trying to steal my hive tools and wants to smoke everything on earth.

So counting pollen at the entrance. If you have consistent pollen coming in, and this is where it's important, too, to look at the other hives, your apiary because you may be in a dearth but if everything is going great and you see other landing boards where their pollen loads just zipping in there 10 or more per minute generally lets us know that there's a laying productive queen so the other part of that is when a queen is gone and you have bees that have turned to laying workers this is where the production of nothing but drones comes in

and when you have nothing with drones coming in now sure the hive behaves they're it sounds different. They're in distress. They don't have a queen, and this is their ditch effort to survive. So what they're doing is they are producing drones from laying workers, and when they do that, they do need to feed them bee bread. So, well, the bee bread is the pollen that comes in, and then it gets, of course, converted, and the nurse bees are going to turn that into food and resources that they give then to the developing larvae, which will be drawn. drones. So they still need to be fed. They still need to grow. So there is going to be pollen coming in. It's just going to be at a very small rate. So not the same as when you have a fully strong hive

that's Queen Wright. And that's why less than 10 pollen loads per minute is supposed to be inspiration for you as the beekeeper to get in there and see what's going on and figure out what happened to your queen. Or if the colony is, they might be normal. They just might have low brood. But it's to inspire you to assess the colony and find out more about what's going on. And so, yes, pollen still comes in at a lower rate when there's nothing but laying workers. So question number 12 is over with. That's the end of the day. We're into the fluff here.

So the cover shot for today. I ran into these people at the North American Honeybee Expo back in January. And I was very interested in this. So this is the cover shot. This is called Easy Ox. xalic acid. And I was a little concerned about it because they had these pellets. And the pellets seem cool and it's pre-measured so that's one gram per pellet. And when you do that, of course, you have all the instructions on this,

which is EZEox, exhalic acid, and it has the dose in here. It also have the methods of treatment. They sell both. So this is an American company, veteran-owned. So as a veteran, I like to support veterans. I hope that you do too. And they sell it in powder form, and they sell the tablets. Now, the tablets are easy to mix up, and some people are going to syrup or the dribble method,

which is also a method of delivering exhalic acids. So they sell the powder too. Now, in the past, I've bought Apioxyl, and I bought it from BetterBee. The stuff is way expensive. And so the big key is when you're looking at exhalic acid for the treatment of your bees, you have to know what's in the exhalic acid to make sure that you're not, and people will always say this, you'll get a comment, it's wood bleach with a bunch of exclamation points.

In other words, there's nothing special about it. If it's going into the treatment of your bees, it's no different than what you get on the shelf out of Home Depot, Menards, or wherever else you're getting your construction supplies. and my point to that is traceability and the material that's in it you want to know what's in it the other thing is i have to say uh that you can only use things in your beehive when it comes to miticides that are approved so i was excited to talk to these guys at the honeybee expo and they had framed right there on the table their approval through um

all of the appropriate channels to make sure that this is legal as a miticide. So it is approved. It is good to go. Vaporizer or syrup. So if you get the powder, you can do the syrup or also powder in your vaporizer, which here's the problem I had with the apobioxal, and it's the same problem with this too, by the way. I use the instant vape, which is the battery-powered system, right? I also have the probe. which is vapor vape I don't know but it's you'll hear people say insta vape it's instant vape so if you're trying to spell it and search for it it'll probably take you there anyway but it's instant vape battery powered has made everything super easy it's got a plunger that you stick into the

powder and pick it up and then you meter your dose in the plunger so in the dose is on the packet two grams or two tablets per box and that's brood box so a deep brood box would be two tablets, two grams. Okay, anyway, always follow the label. I have to say that. There's safety equipment involved if you're gonna vaporize it. Now, if I take that plunger and stick it in,

whether it's apobioxel or this stuff, it's so dry, it falls right out of the plunger. So what I have to do is upside down it, the plunger, and then I have to pour, so what I was doing is taking pill bottles, and I bought a whole bunch of those on Amazon. They're a little amber colored pill bottles, and I was metering those out in the grams.

So they were two grams in each pill bottle. And then I could just dump that in there upside down, put it in the vaporizer upside down, and then put it through the quarter inch hole in the back of the hive, and then flip it right side up, and then the powder went in. So forget the powder, I can use the pills now.

And they're approved. By the way, you do have to go to your state, and you have to look for approval from each, individual state and if you go to this website and i'm going to mention it here as soon as i find it it's easy ox ox oxac acid and it's mike's b's LLC so if you google that you're going to find them and they list everything on there including which states it's approved in it is also and this is important it's approved for treatment with your honey supers on so when you find mites and you're in the high mite load category you can use axelic acid unless your state prohibits it so check

those out and I want to thank them for this product because it is cheaper than a papyxel plus now I get to support an American company which I'm not saying that you have to do that but the combination disabled veterans American company cheaper price approved what else is there to make a decision about so that's good too I'll put a link down in the video description. So the other thing we have to talk about, this is my grandson walks around, somebody made a comment because it took a picture of him and his B-suit, and his B-suit's oversized because it's a small adult B-suit and he's eight years old, and it's vented, though. He comments frequently about how cool it is to be a vented B-suit. So this leads us to

hot weather safety, and I have to talk about it because a lot of beekeepers are solitary. beekeepers work alone. We carry cell phones now, which is probably pretty good. You don't have to have that necklace with a button that are falling and it can't get up kind of thing, which is no joke. That can save your life. So your cell phones may have a function where you have kind of a panic button on it. You have to think in terms of what's happening to you when you start to suffer from dehydration or heat exhaustion, and then the worst part of that could be heat stroke. I'm not a medical expert. the highest level of medical training I've had as I was an EMT and I was a rescue diver. So I'm just saying that health should be at the top of your list.

When you're taking care of kids around you or looking out for others in your bee yard, they should drink before they're thirsty. And by the time they feel thirsty, you're already too dehydrated. So watch out for that. And don't drink cold water. Like it shouldn't be in a big ice bucket out there. If you want your water to metabolize right away, it should be at room temperature, right? I've always seemed to know that.

I don't drink ice water or ice in my water. I don't drink ice cold drinks. Don't care about it. Everything I drink is hot or at room temperature because you want it to absorb into your body quicker. Drink frequently. So take drinks and breaks every 15 to 20 minutes. Now here's the thing. Some of you get out there and get working and you're like, I can't stop.

I don't want to stop. and you're wearing a B-suit. So what a pain to open up your B-suit to get a drink of water. And this is where I'm going to drop in a company name, Guardian Bee Apparel. There were the ones that came out with that zippered veil so that you could open that up or just zip it a little bit and stick a straw in there. And you can drink with your B-suit on so you don't have to go to complete parade rest and take everything down.

You can stay in your B-suit, stay hydrated, and make frequent tru-suit. rings, right? So guarding bee apparel makes fantastic vented bee suits and they also have zippers in them. They also make the big round veil, which is what I call the buckfast avie veil. One of my favorites, by the way, because you ever turn your head and there's a line from your veil right in your field of view, and that's extremely annoying, especially if you're doing ripouts or things like that or you're just trying to see what's going on. And so those veils also have a little zipper in it and you can stick your straw right in there. The other thing is some people wear these we use a column camel bags. I don't know what they're called now, but

there are backpacks that hold liquid. So you wear that the tube is right up next to your face. You can just reach over and you bite on it and you sip water out of it and they have different capacities. I highly recommend one of those if you're going to put on a B-suit and it does not have a zippered veil and you don't want to have to undo your B-suit while you're out there working. then water is number one, by the way. Drink as much as you need and because perspiration is going to help cool you down and keep you going.

So vented B suits are up there. If you've been to the bathroom and don't want to be too graphic, but if your urine is dark, you are not adequately hydrated. This is number one in physical performance. You have to be hydrated. So aside from regular water,

which I highly recommend, that's number one on my list right there. there are electrolyte drinks. So I'm going to name three of those that are actually really good that don't mess you up and turn you into a ping pong ball with high energy. So energy drinks, no way. But Gatorade, I cut that 50-50 myself.

Body Armor is another brand that's really good. And liquid IV, that doesn't sound right, but apparently it is very good for hydrating people. And coconut water, I guess, is a natural source of electrolytes. can be a good option however it's high in sugar so watch out for the high sugar content stuff that's not going to do anything to help you hydrate so i just want to make sure staying hydrated it's going to be top of the list don't over insert yourself we don't want anybody passing out in the bee yard and so have your phone handy everything else don't push it number three today for

the fluff is seed deals so when we get past the prime seeding seasons when everybody's buying the seeds for their gardens and everything else. This is a great time to keep an eye out for sales because companies have produced seed produce it the year before for the following year's planting year. And once that market, once a planting season passes, you can get bargains on that stuff. And we do tests on the seeds to see which ones propagate. And so I use that paper towel which means I damp in a paper towel. I put 10 seeds from a packet on the paper towel inside a Ziploc baggie, and I set it on a windowsill,

and I look to see what the germination rate is of those seeds. And so if you're getting germination on the paper towels that are damp like that, you have viable seeds, and they're still good to go. So buying seeds that are a little out of season can save you piles of money because some of the seed companies charge a premium for them. So watch for deals and think about planting. in the fall for next spring that kind of thing uh so there's another thing let's see this is another group that i run into at every conference that i go to the product is called

apa tablet this is what they look like i don't know if you've ever seen them the company is called apamanllc.com and here's the thing i talked to them and to them and to And I've talked to other people at their booth to find out if they've used them. Did they work? How is it going? And the sideline of this is, now, of course, they list their ingredients here. The ingredients are, by the way, when they list ingredients in order, you can find out supposed to be what the percentages are.

I don't know about labeling, but it's thymol, which I understand should be pronounced thymol because it's oil from the thyme plant. essential oils, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and sugars. So the problem for me is when I see a product like this and people like you who are watching ask about products like this, the very first thing I go to is research. So I try to find out, has it been used? What's the benefit of it?

I get a lot of anecdotal responses. And what that means is not through scientific testing and demonstration, but rather how people think it worked for them or they did citizen science, which brings me to why I'm mentioning to you. I want to know of my viewers, since there's more than 10 of them out there, how many of you are using or have used APA tablet and your beehives and the recommended time to use them is spring and fall?

And because other people, again, they're writing to be going, did you know that this stuff kills Roel? Well, I know time all can kill varomites. So the question is, is this a pesticide? Is this a miticide? So it really is not, according to all their stuff. If you go to their website, which is apamonlc.com, it's a great write-up about how good it is for your bees,

how it's nutritional, how it's been around for 20 years. It's made in the United States. But I cannot find scientific studies. So I'm reaching out to you my viewers. How many of you are using it? Have used it. What are the results you noticed? And this is what's important about the scientific process,

even if you're a backyard beekeeper. So if you're a citizen scientist, you don't have access to a lab. If you do everything on every hive all at once, we don't have comparisons for how things work. We don't know. Time all can cause a might drop. There was a girl in high school in the state of Connecticut

that got a scholarship to Yukon. because of her time all entrance that would automatically dose bees with time all on their way in and out of the hive. And that was going to kill off the varomites in the hive. I've heard nothing ever since she got the scholarship, got to college, and there hasn't been any updates on that. So when something new comes out, as I always mention, ask and question, ask questions, question everything, and look for real results, find out what it really does. and so if it's a nutritional supplement there are lots of nutritional supplements out there if it has a side effect that causes mites to drop dead on the bottom board that would get a lot of people's interest so my question for you is have you used apatablets if you did please write how you used it what your observations were and were the colonies that you put apatablets on stronger than those that did not receive that supplement

So I'm very interested in that. I want to know more. The other thing is with the heat and everything else, water stations. So here's the thing. Set up, if you haven't already done it, I talk about this all year long, but I'm going to beat that drum again. Consistent locations where bees can find water. It should be fresh water. And if it's an open surface for the water, like I like to put cascading pie pans and stuff.

I like the water to drizzle over cinder blocks and concrete and things like that. This year I talked a lot about moss and how bees love to go to it. So make sure you have a water station where the water is moving. If there's an open surface area and a bee lands in it, the wind blows a bee in, they're on their backs buzzing around. If there's slight movement to the water for this cascade, bees are not drowned in it. They go over to the edge. They get off and they get away.

So the other thing is we've, of course, tested and talked about salt and minerals in water too one teaspoon of sea salt one of the top performing sea salts for the bees and by top performing I mean the honeybee showed a preference for that so was Morton sea salt which comes from the salt flats here in the United States so Morton sea salt was right up there with Celtic sea salt and all the other fancy including the pink Himalayan salt and things like that which are not sea salts so there's just Himalayan salts the bees show a preference for that at different times of the year different levels of interest in it so if you

offer sea salts out in quart jars like this it's fresh water teaspoon of the sea salt in there and uh the bees will take it as they need it and you always need separately fresh water so the bees have choices and that's uh pretty much it water stations keep them going and because your bees by the way if they have access to fresh water can handle extraordinary temperature extremes and they use that water inside the hive water bees are specialists and those that go out to collect water are not collecting nectar from the flowers and things like that because water of course would dilute the sugars in the nectar and water bees come into the hive it is the one of the most in-demand things even in winter time that they have water so they can paint that over the surface of the brood

brood cannot be dehumidified in other words they're feeding this open brood these larvae and if you have extremely dry conditions inside the hive this is very interesting because we don't think about this very much as beekeepers when it's really hot and dry the bees have to work extra hard to maintain high levels of humidity inside the hive on hot days so if you have upper venting and if you have upper entrances in the hive this humidity is passively leaving the hive and your bees are working extra hard to keep the humidity levels increased so if you have a single entrance down below and they're bringing in water and keeping that humidity the bees have much more control over the climate inside the hive and as long as they have plenty of fresh water availability

they can thermo-regulate inside the hive. So that's it for today. I want to thank you for spending your time with me. I hope we cover some topics that you found useful. I also hope that you're celebrating Flag Day here in the United States by flying your flags. And I hope that your bees are doing well and you have a fantastic weekend ahead.

Thanks for watching and listening.