The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 266

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube video:  https://youtu.be/WY7-vWmoOps   Chapters with time-stamps generously provided by Adam Holmes Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 09:26 Since you have taken down fences around your apiary, what's the brand of the noise-maker you are using? 20:13 I tried to introduce replacement queens two times, the queens disappeared. One seller suggested it was due to direct release. Do you have any ideas? 32:12 I have two deeps under one Flow-Hive. When is the best time to remove a deep and replace with a medium? 40:18 My Bee Suit does not seem thick enough to defeat a stinger. 45:35 I want to re-use my wood frames. Any suggestions for getting wax out of the groove? 48:17 One of my hives is bringing out dead drone brood, is it varroa or something else? 52:09 I thought soybeans are wind pollinated. I've never seen a bee of any type on any bean flowers. 56:52 I've noticed an abundance of pollen on frames. Can they become pollen-bound? 01:02:07 We can't seem to get our bees to use the Flow-Super. Any suggestions? 01:10:15 With the Long Langstroth Hive, Where do you add frames when you add them? 01:16:54 I videoed bees collecting was from rendered beeswax. Would it be good to leave some out for them?

Hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, July the 12th, and this is backyard beekeeping questions and answers episode number 266. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. There's a lot going on out there, and of course it's hot. Lots of storms came through it is 81 degrees Fahrenheit outside right now 27 degrees Celsius hottest day this weekend is going to be Sunday that's a great day northeastern United States State of Pennsylvania Sunday is your day to get out there in your B yard and work work work because there's a lot going on how windy is it I know you want to know that two miles per hour so basically no wind which adds to the feeling of the heat

and then you say well if it's 81 degrees Fahrenheit what is the heat index in other words what's it feel like well it feels like 87 degrees Fahrenheit 78% relative humidity so the bees aren't bearding too bad they can actually cool down and also dehydrate their honey pretty easily and so we've had one and three quarters inches of rain during the week and i know in other parts of the country there's been flooding there's flooding in other parts of the world so i hope that's not happening where you are you So if it did, you know, our thoughts are with you. I don't know what else to say. I hope the losses weren't too great. Anyway, and walking around outside, what's blooming? Borage is finally blooming.

I planted a lot of that this year. Borage is supposed to be fantastic. It's supposed to be a big nectar source for the honeybees and other pollinators. But haven't seen any honeybees on it yet. But here's what I think. I think there just aren't enough of the bloom. in play yet to get their attention away from other blossoms. What other blossoms are they paying attention to? I'm glad you asked. Sunflowers are about to open white clover. Heavy attention on white clover right now so the bees are down there and if you have to mow, please mow in the early evening so that there aren't a bunch of your own foragers out on your clover when you cut it. And clover can by the way take over big sections of your lawn and I hope it does.

in fact it wouldn't hurt you maybe to hand out clover seed to a bunch of your neighbors and encourage them not to use weed and seed which is a slap and a hug you know weed and seed weed and feed kill the weeds feed the grass so that there's a monoculture that feeds nothing by the way be an activist stand up for weeds anyway Cosmo's starting to bloom so the bees are going to be on that pretty soon spreading dog bane I think it's in the milkweed fan people don't like it why because it's spreading because it's invasive it goes everywhere but the good side the upside of that is in farmer fields that the white

flowers that are on it are providing nectar for the honeybees maybe some pollen but guaranteed nectar because the bees I'm looking at are using their proboscis what continues to be the heavy hitter in the landscape right now yes milkweed milkweed you can just smell it from way off before you get anywhere near it. You just can't have enough milkweed. I'm telling you it's working fantastic. I am adding six varieties of milkweed to my property. It is tough to start. However, once it starts and gets going, then you're going to have it year after year after year. So I highly recommend investing in milkweed. Elder berries, the blooms are coming to an end. So the bees are

marginally attentive to that right now. Here's the good news because some people think, well, I planted this plant. It's supposed to be a great nectar source. The honeybees are not on it. What's going on, Fred? What is the problem with my bees? You told me to plant this. Where's the thing? The good news is your bees are foraging. Go look at the landing board. They are coming and going. They are taking off. They've got stuff to do. So they're finding resources somewhere because they're filling the supers. They're capping the honey. So what that means is they're just finding a better resource somewhere else. because when things get really bad, really lean,

you'll see them on self-heel and other low-growing lawn plants and stuff like that. So they're actually doing really well. Elderberry, it's finished, it's wrapping up. Bees are not on that anymore. And all I can tell you is please make sure to have water sources available to your bees during these hot periods. And well, year-round, they need it year-round. But we want to keep the bees out of your neighbor's pools,

out of the kids' swimming pools and things like that, out of the bird feeders. Here's something I get a question about frequently. I appreciate that you think I might have the answer, but how to keep honeybees out of your Baltimore Oriole jelly feeders. Are you ready for the answer? Me too, because I don't know. I don't know how to keep them out. Anything that would be small enough to keep the honeybees out would also prohibit your Orioles from getting to the jelly also. Because jelly's not like a syrup. It's easy to keep them out of hummingbird feeders. You just have the feed lower in the dish than the honeybee's tongues can reach. But when it comes to orio feeders with jelly, they need to be able to get their beaks in and

their tongues down farther. So these openings are things that the bees can get through. So if one of you is watching right now, some genius sitting at home staring at this video or listening as a podcast on Podbean, The Way to Be, maybe you've got an idea. Maybe you already have something that you've implemented for the Baltimore. more orio jelly feeders that will feed the orioles but keep honey bees out. Because right now the honeybees can drive off your orioles. So I'd be interested in knowing that myself. Please comment down below.

Now if you've got a comment or a question that you want to make sure that I read, please go to the way to be.org and click on the page, also titled The Way to Be, fill out the form, and now we're in touch. That's how it works. So that's about it. All the questions and topics that we're going to hit on today were submitted over the past week. If you've got a question that's burning you up right now,

you just have to have an answer, and you can't wait till next Friday. Please join the Fellowship, The Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook. If you don't have Facebook, you can't go to the fellowship. By the way, this entire thing is a playlist. It's a podcast through Podbean. Just do a Google search, The Way to be,

podcast and then you can just listen to it while you do your work and you don't have to look at the screen and see all the stuff that's going on on screen and then when we hit on a topic where maybe I'm showing something you want to check it out there'll be a timestamp likely submitted by adam holmes who does all the time stamps for almost every video we've done for years so shout out to Adam Holmes and when you see him post that please click likes on his comment and tell him how much we appreciate it because he's just a contributor just like me. I share the information absolutely free just so you can be more aware of honey bees and what they do or maybe even be a better beekeeper. You never know. Something might be useful. So let's get right into it.

All the topics are listed down in the video description. You can scope it out. First one comes from Linda from New Providence, Pennsylvania. I heard you say that you've taken down the fences around your apiary in favor of motion sensor alarms would you please share the model you have found effective here in southern lancaster county a wandering bear is rare that last one wandered through about three years ago but neighbors tell me one was cited this week i only have four hives in three different locations so a fence isn't practical once such an alarm is activated can it remotely be silenced or Must it manually be turned off? Thank you so much.

I want to thank Linda for that question because I was hesitant. I've been doing this for years. I am right in bear country. So, and that, I mean black bears. We don't have polar bears or big grizzlies or the Codiac bears or anything like that. But black bears are mischievous. They're troublemakers. They come right through the woods and they pass.

Well, I chased one off. That was right up against our house recently. And that made me run. and buy a bunch of more of my noisemakers and that's what the thumbnail is today. First I want you to see this. This is a motion activated noise maker. This has been out there for years and they're battery powered when you first get them. They charge up. There's a plug in the back. It charges equal to or less than one hour and you're not supposed to use the super fast chargers to do it. I'm holding up the one I don't like.

So why don't I like it? Because this particular version and this They don't have a model number on it, but you'll know it by the way it looks. It's not as loud. I want loud. I want it to be really loud. So here's the model that I've used and am using now. I've used it for years. This is the solar panel up here on top.

Note the angle on that, which is a much better incident angle for the sun to get it. And because I turn them on only at night. So you have modes to choose from. In fact, there's four modes. If you just push it and it flashes one time, that is daytime flash alarm. Let me tell you, I'm going to show you what that looks like right now. You push that one time, the flash alarm. That's all it does.

When things go by, it flashes. Is that going to scare away a bear? No. The neighborhood cat? No way. Going to scare a bunny rabbit? They don't care. They're going to eat right in front of it.

Is it going to scare off a skunk? You get the picture. No. A skunk is going to walk right up. So the flashing light by itself. nothing. Don't rely on that. Number two, full day of flash. Now listen to that. That's what bothers them. I apologize for that if you were sleeping. And then you get to the end and when it flashes once, that's mode one, flashes twice, mode two. And then when it goes to four, that's the end of it. So you don't want to have that alarm going off if you live in a neighborhood because it's loud. How loud is it?

29 decibels. At what distance is it 129 decibels? I don't know, but let me tell you I have a whole series of videos Because I believe in what I see. We have these out In the B yard at different heights facing different angles. This is the old worn out one. This is what they look like when they're brand spanking new So the good news is put it anywhere as far away as you want You live in town as I mentioned before your neighbors will hate your guts and the probably report you to the police because these noisemakers are going to come on. I said it only for nighttime. And so the flashing light comes on and the audible alarm goes off. And this is about 80 feet from where I'm sitting right now. And when they go off in the middle of the night, I hear them.

So then I get a chance to decide, hmm, is just one alarm going off or is all 15? Are all 15 alarm sounding and if they are something's going on in my B yard and that gives me a chance to run out there and respond. Although when all the alarms are going off and we walk through just for kicks and giggles just to make all the alarms go off part of the question was do we have to turn that off manually do I have to go out there and turn it off no they run for 45 seconds so if something dashes through and sets it off and yes glad you asked a deer mouse can set off one of these alarms so that's the sensor that's the sensor that that detects the motion. So you decide how high off the ground you want.

If I've got a beehive that's very close to the ground, right on 14 or 15 inches, technically that is skunk range. So I want this, actually, I hook strings on it. I use parachute cord. I put bricks on top of the parachute cord on top of the hive and I put this right down there right in front of the entrance. That way when a skunk is right here,

it gives them a really big blast of sound right in there, annoying little, years. And so then the skunk will run away. Skunks don't mind if it's 10 feet away though. So if a skunk finds a resource, starts eating it and this is going off, I've seen skunks just eat away while these are 10 or 15 feet away from where the skunk is eating. So these have to be in very close proximity to the target activity. Whatever you want to annoy. If you're trying to get your grandkids out of the candy, this stuff doesn't work for grandkids. They just laugh it off.

So the other part of it is they last for years. And as you can see, the solar panels deteriorate. Look at the condition of this one. It's all corroded over. So would you think that this one works or doesn't work? It's still working. I went out in the B yard and picked it up just so you can see how well they hold it to the weather. And we get weather here.

I'm in the snow belt year round. Those are out there. They work in the cold. I've never had it so cold that they didn't activate. the brand new ones are on hot standby so if one goes out and they lose a zone I put one of these out there right away and they charge with the sun I haven't had to plug them in so very easy to use I guess it's enough talking about that one of the reasons I don't like this particular model and I have to give you a link because there's no model on it if you see this box this is what the box will look like if you can find it in you know your favorite outdoor store or and center maybe carries them and things like that they have built-in batteries you can't change out the battery either once the battery is shot so you might get five years out of it and runs on solar energy has a lithium ion battery in it it is

waterproof it says I can tell you this one's not waterproof I don't know if you can see it on camera but there's little beads of water in there this particular one still works but it's really low-key compared to the others and my game is to make noise. Bears don't care about flashing lights. Bears don't care about the big spotlight, the floodlight that comes on in your backyard because they have those two. They don't care to be lit up. What they don't like is noise. They don't like to be surprised. So when the bear comes nosing around, the key is to have these layered. So the bear will activate one that's well away from your apiary first. If you decides to pick up speed and

run into the area more and more of them will activate. Bears don't like noise. So that is what has worked for all these years in bear country so far. Now I have to put this disclaimer on there. If a bear walks right past all of these and destroys all your beehives, that's not my fault. I'm going by my personal experience. I've seen it. They work. If you've got a bear that has already discovered that your backyard apiary is a great resource for brood and honey, then chances are that bear's coming back. If you're like me, you would camp out there all night long just to give the bear an additional surprise and make loud noises, to quote the guy from Anchorman. Anyway, so make loud noises, scare the bear,

give them an unpleasant experience before it gets a chance to eat any of your stuff. So that's it. There'll be a link down below or you can just Google search, motion activated solar powered noise makers, or if you want to classify it. It's real creative here. Solar alarm lamp remote controlled. By the way, I don't care about the remote control. They come with the remote controls,

but it was the only way I could get this model. The remote control means you can go through all the modes from your remote control, and if you had several of them together, you would be switching their modes all at the same time from one controller. I don't care about it, don't want it, don't like it this is what that looks like pull this little antenna up and now you slide this

down and all the modes are right there but like i said i don't use it because they're set and forget they're only running at night and uh that's it what else do they they work on raccoons raccoons don't like the noises i've got lots of sequences of raccoons turning and running away i've had a possum that runs around in the b-yard like a pin ball and just keeps running one direction one goes off it runs back it goes off it runs another way another one goes off that poor possum was highly stressed now I should also mention that when I mentioned that when I mentioned what I was doing to the game commission guys they were not impressed they think that noises like this at night are stressful for wildlife including nesting birds so I have to say that

what you're doing to get things out of your B yard although in my defense they don't go off all the time only when something's coming into the bee yard so you're going to have to make your own judgment call on that number one is it worth not having an electric fence up for me yes it's been so freeing i don't have to weed whack around an electric fence if i go to mow everything i don't have an electric fence to take down i don't have to worry about the fence having plants growing up and contacting it and reducing the power i don't have to worry about other things going under the electric fence and so on you get the picture so way better than an electric fence in my opinion and works anywhere so moving on question number two comes from matt st

thomas pennsylvania so two p a people so far says i started a hive from a nuke this spring with an overwintered queen the hive thrived until a month ago when i found no queen or eggs during an inspection we checked the hive every seven days since getting it and thoroughly inspected each frame There was no evidence of swarming, so I suspect the queen was either killed or died. Okay, so I introduced a new queen in a cage without candy, following the seller's advice to release her after three days and check in a week. This happened twice, both times the queens disappeared without laying any eggs. By the way, that disappearing part, just because she's not there, doesn't mean they didn't kill her,

drag her out and fly her away because workers will sometimes kill queens and i then got a queen from another seller and this time in a cage with candy and he suggested the issue might have been the direct release after three days do you have any ideas on what might be happening i'll be checking on the candy release queen in a week also should i try adding a frame of fresh eggs from another hive once a week for three weeks to see if they will raise their own queen. I've seen some beekeepers that think that some hives prefer to raise their own queen. I'm a new beekeeper at a loss. Okay, what do you think I'm going to talk about? According to the people that make these, this is the 21st video where I've mentioned their products. The reason I mention them is because they work. This is a queen

introduction cage. If you were at the North American Honey Bee Expo and you visited the Better Bee booth, you saw these sitting right on the counter. And one of them had my name on it. Not because they gave it to me. They made me pay for it like everybody else, but because I reserved one there. This is a Queen Introduction Cage. This is very different from a Queen isolation cage. Queen isolation cage, workers come and go right through it. Queen Introduction cage, workers cannot get through it. That's why your valuable queen is protected. And in this particular instance, this is what I'm going to recommend and I'm going to explain why. Because I think there could actually be a queen still in that hive. We don't know for sure, but this is the best way to find out, right?

So here's the thing. You get, because one of the options here that Matt wants to try, and there's nothing wrong with it. I don't like, by the way, getting into a hive every seven days. That's too much. You can force and abscond. You are stressing your bees too much. Bees that get visited frequently, and it happens because new beekeepers just have to see what's going on in there. They want to know what's going on. They want to check everything. Look at every frame. This is incredibly disruptive to the bees. So I want to help alleviate that as well. But one of the things that's going on here in the United States, this happens to be in St. Thomas, But there are some areas where if you're getting your queens through the mail, but it sounds like these were handoffs.

In other words, they're buying from a queen breeder who's given them the cage with the queen in it, and it's got a candy plug, and they introduce this into the hive, and they're in business. But if the queens are disappearing, I want to know some things about the queen that I'm putting in. And a queen introduction cage, queen introduction cage is what we want to be using in this. case. So we get a frame of brood because Matt has other colonies that had frames of brood that he wanted to put in to see if they would rear their own queen. But we have a queen. So we shake the bees off of a brood frame from another hive. Let's pretend this is the frame of brood. So that means capped brood. As much capped as possible, there can be some open cells, open brood. That's okay too.

but we really need bees to be hatching and emerging from their cells so hatching from eggs emerging from cells once they're adults okay so we put this in here do to do to do you centered up in your frame holder queen introduction cage you take your queen that you have in her cage you direct release her down into this now this is where I have to tell you we've done it again but it's important enough that I'm going to talk about it again before I told people to put this into a queen muff right and it also happens to be sold by better B which is where these cages are sold so you put it in the muff and that's a screen that goes around the whole thing your hands go in it reminds me of working in a drape in nuclear power right

so when they're doing nuclear repairs they don't want anything to get outside of this control area we're going to pretend that our free radicals are the bees themselves and we don't want them out of there We don't want particulates out of there. So now we're in the drape or in a room where if the queen flies away, go in your bathroom, close everything up if you don't want to do it that way. So have a room that the queen can't get out of. If she flies away, you can catch her again. So we get her in here and we open up the cage that your queen came in and we turn her loose.

You want to see her go down onto the face somewhere. If the queen is on top of the back of this frame, don't you dare put the lid on when that's happening because this lid has closed ends, which is a really good idea. But people grab it and go like this really quick and they can smash their queen because there's no clearance on the top of this frame with the adjacent sidebars. So when you put that cover on there, if you don't scoot along and make sure that you see the queen down on the front, you could smash her and there goes your investment. All right, let's pretend we did this right. The queen is in there. You did this in a closed room where the queen wouldn't get away or used them off.

So if she flew away, you can still grab her off the interior surface and put her in there. Now, we've got her. She's in here. There's capped brood that is emerging. And we put this into the hive that we want to install the queen. So the queen's out. She's in there. How soon should you be inspecting her? We know this is a queen that's in production. So we don't know what her egg pattern is. We don't know if she's even fertile, if she's productive, if she was damaged in shipping. Maybe the person that sold you the queen. I'm not saying this is the case. I'm giving you the hypotheticals.

Maybe the person that sold you the queen bought the queen in bulk from someone else or bought her as a virgin. queen and then they did some mating and then now that they have a laying queen then turn around and sell it this is often also how nucleus hives are made so this gives us a chance to evaluate the queen while protecting her inside your brood box so to make this fit we have to pull two frames out so you're going to probably pull your number one and your number 10 frame those are the ones that are least productive right now and you'll put this one right in the brood area where all the easy pushover nurse bees are that will be feeding the queen through these bars. They can feed the queen through the bars, they can't get to her.

So then the workers that otherwise might reject the queen, cannot get a hold of her, can I get through there, and sting her to death? They can't kill her. They can't drive her out of the hive because she's protected in this queen introduction cage. Now, you have an advantage. A week later, you're going to see worker bees that have emerged from that brood frame and they're also going to take over the duties of attending to the queen they become her retinue which are the workers that attend the queen follow her around and clean up after her

and you might be thinking they can't get out they can't defecate well guess what they don't do that anyway when nurse bees are newly emerged they're not flying out they don't have any outdoor jobs all of their duties are in the brood area so you've got that in this micro environment Now, one of the things you get to see you right away, which is going to help you rate the person who sold you the queen. Is she laying eggs? Is she fertile? Because she would be doing that in there, and you would see it firsthand before you even turn her loose. Now, second part of this, which is very important. It also gives you a chance to look at the frames that are outside of this cage and see if miraculously some eggs don't start showing up.

And by that I mean worker eggs. You could still have a queen that you. you just weren't aware of or she for some reason was out of production or she had recently been replaced and was not producing eggs because she still had to be mated mature come back and start producing so when you do all of that then you'll find out that you still had a queen now you're in a pickle you have a queen that's in production inside the frame and you've also got a queen in production outside but here's the thing you didn't lose them so now we can make a nucleus colony or we can use her as a resource or if she's performing better and her laying pattern is better

and the other one is in some way faulty you can get rid of the one that you like the least so there you go all the options are on the table so once you establish that if she's the only queen in the hive and her pheromone now you see has been spread through all of the workers that are inside the introduction cage that means that now she's coming in strong it's not just a queen by herself being introduced to a colony and then potentially being rejected due to her unfamiliar queen mandibular pheromone so now when you open this up now when you take this out and you put her in fully exposed we have all of the pheromone of the workers that are with her and she has her own crew with her and they'll be much more apt to be accepted then so and you know maybe

Matt doesn't have one of these. I'm saying this for all of you and here's a piece of gear. Now let's admit that I like I like gadgets. So I talk to people about gadgets all the time. I collect things sometimes they're necessary sometimes they're just convenient. I'm going to say even for new beekeepers if you're getting equipment so that you can manage queens, I am going to suggest that you get two pieces of here that help you manage queens and brood boxes one is a queen introduction cage the other is the queen isolation cage two separate functions you don't need them very often but when you need one it works perfectly they're absolutely fantastic i 100% back that up so when you go to better be which is where those are sold make sure to tell them

that I mentioned it, that I sent you, and so you can pay the same price I do, which is the same price everybody else pays. So that's it. You'll know the queen. If she doesn't lay during that period, if she's not producing eggs, then you get a problem with your cellar. And when your cellar says, yeah, well, how did you prove that? Well, I watched Fred on YouTube, and he told me to use this cage, and I did,

and your queen is a dud. Thank you very little. May I please have another? And then you go from there. Yes, you can use my... question number three comes from Benji so I've seen one of your videos about you're having a lower deep box and a second medium box and then the flow hive I want to do that also right now I have two deeps under one flow hive and

it's pretty high and heavy for me to work with the other hive is newer and only has one brood box under the super should I add a medium to this hive so we're talking two deep boxes then a medium and at the end of the season or wait until next spring also when would be the best time to switch out okay so here's i'm just going to clear it up here's my configuration this comes up so often i know it's a retread not from benjie but you know obviously people are having the same problem over and over this is my configuration bottom board. I prefer solid bottom boards or a screen bottom board that's enclosed with a removable tray. Flow hives have those. Okay, the next box is a deep. Whether it's an eight frame or a 10 frame,

it's a deep. That's your brood box. It's just for your bees to produce, brood in, and have their own resources now. Those who manufacture the flow hive, which is honeyflow.com. When they manufacture those, they're in an area where they have honey production year round. So they put a queen excluder on top of that box, and then they put the flow super straight on top of that. There are no other boxes. A deep and a single, which is the equivalent of a deep super, so double deep. With the queen excluder in between. So here's what I'm doing where I am.

A single deep, whether it's the 8 or 10 frame. The configuration is the same. bottom board single deep then a medium now the deep is for the brood so we need that to build out 80% full before we put the medium super on when you put the medium super on i wait for that to be full of honey eight to 10 8 out of 10 frames 6 out of 8 frames whatever it is not until it's completely full because then that becomes a honey cap which can reduce them going through it and into your flow super so the reason i do that is basic bee biology. I show it frequently. I did show a video recently where it shows a distribution

of bee resources inside a hive. It is a very short video inside the hive and it shows when you have a single entrance, no additional venting, how they arrange themselves and you would not then need a queen excluder. If you have no upper vent for your bees to have their brood in a higher part of the hive, they tend to keep their brood 99.99% of the time down nearer the entrance. Everything else cascades up until you have nothing but honey. So deep box, medium box, all for the bees, nothing for the keeper. If they never get beyond that, if they never work the medium box until it's 80% full, then you can't put the flow super on there. I know that it gets exciting for new beekeepers and they want to show.

a honey yield and the pressure is on, you keep bees, you have honey. No, I don't have any honey. Well, then you must not be a very good beekeeper. Or it could be a new colony. There could be weather conditions. There could be forage that's scarce. There are a lot of reasons. Don't get your ego in the way and take honey from a colony that's not yet set up for themselves to survive winter because that's what the bees are doing. Now, let's move on from that. In this circumstance, We have two deep boxes and one of the things that Benji wants to do is reduce it to this configuration of a single deep and a medium. So since we have potentially brewed in both boxes, what do you think I'm going to recommend? I'm going to recommend a queen excluder.

So because I don't use them, but I do have some handy now as soon as I find it. This is an eight-frame queen excluder because this is a special tool in this case. This isn't something I keep on my eyes all the time. We're going to do it to remedy a problem. So we will try to find the queen. We're going to look at where her eggs are and we're going to look at the brood frames and we're going to run our hands over the tops. See where most of the bees are concentrated.

See where it's the warmest and the queen is likely to be there. Now, so we have two deep frames. but fred what if they're kind of equal what if it's like a basketball right between both of these boxes two deep boxes how do we know if the queen's above or below if you don't want to search her out doesn't matter here's why when you pull the boxes apart put the queen excluder this is the wooden frame queen excluder that uh i like and by the way guess who makes the queen excluder it's from better be and uh who makes that i think the same people that make these cages because I see similar material being used here. I do queen

excluder evaluations ever since I've been keeping bees because they always thought they impede work inside the hive. It's not natural. It's not something that the bees would ever be facing inside a hive. If you're a backyard beekeeper, you don't need it because when you're pulling honey you can look at the frames and see if you've got brewed up there or not much easier. So let's move on to this. So we put this on top of your body. Brood Box which is a deep and you put the deep back on and then you come back in 12 days Because we want to see which of those now if there's still brood eggs and larvae open larvae up above

Then down below you wouldn't find the queen so that would be clear so now we know that the upper box becomes the bottom box the other box gets pulled the medium super goes on and you can harvest resources out of the other deep that did not have the queen in it or you can use that to start another colony if you want to because if there are eggs and brood and stuff like that when you first do it you can just divide them right off the bat and then you don't need the queen excluder you can make another colony if there are eggs in both deeps so i hope that's clear then you put your medium super on and let them fill it out and if they get that far we're kind of you know we're in the middle of it now we're in july if they can fill out that medium super and then you get the flow super on there you're good to go you're in business so That is where queen excluders can be used as tools to help you identify where your queen is and it also helps you

Get the brood out of boxes that you don't want them in because they will emerge from those cells and then those workers can move freely through the queen Excluter maybe some of them have to squeeze through but they can pass through the queen excluder And then you will know where your queen is and then it helps you manage things and we did a recent interview with Swarm Essentials author Steve Rapaski, he does, he's a commercial guy, so he's got hundreds of hives, and they're all brood, deep brood boxes with queen excludes on them and all honey supers up above. So he does single brood management. I don't personally do that, but I'm not commercial. I'm a backyard guy that drinks a lot of coffee and cappuccino and likes to stare at things for hours and learn about bees. So I have not the economic pressures and the productivity pressures that other people have, so

finding the queen is kind of fun for us so that will solve that problem so i hope benjy gives us feedback lets us know how that worked let's move on to question number four this is an interesting name sanity is void that's interesting okay got a bee suit to remove wild bee and wasp nests it does not seem thick enough to defeat a stinger okay that's the whole question is and how to start beekeeping with out getting stung levels of productive clothing for beginners that's my YouTube video that he watched to get this okay and in that video I realized I'm not you know the normal backyard beekeeper because I do happen to have every B-suit just about that's made today so all different levels

of protection one of the companies that I used to use for maximum protection developed a suit called Max Protect, and it was natural apiary. Something happened to them. We still find their B-suits around, but narrowing down the company again is very difficult. I'm very glad to have those suits. They're very tough, very tight weave, very thick material. You're going to bake if you go out in the heat with that this time of year.

But when it comes to being stung by something really obnoxious or not, that's the suit I wear and I even have a camo version. Anyway, moving on. The whole point of your bee suit is to intercept a stinger. Now, you can do this a couple of ways. One, create distance between your skin and the stinging insect. Because it says here, bees and wasp nests. Now my grandson recently, the supervisor, he's eight years old.

He wants to go at bald-faced hornets and other nests in his fancy suit. He has 100% confidence in his triple thick, vented bee suit. We're going to test him out this weekend, in fact. So that's coming. Anyway, here's what I recommend. If you get one B-suit, get a vented B-suit. Now, Quinn, my grandson, asks me a million questions all day long about stings, insects that can sting you who can get through it.

Wasps, for example, have these long, narrow abdomens that can actually poke into little venting holes, right? So they can actually get their stingers into you, even though they're less aggressive in some cases, because we're not all talking about bald-faced hornets which really are just was getting into a big yellow jacket situation layer up so find the most breathable material that you have but layer up your clothing so I'm going to recommend one B suit Guardian B apparel and I want you to go to Guardian tell Terry he's

the owner there might be multiple owners they're the ones with a zippered veil the first ones to produce that it is extremely well made I've done videos about it. And you can always put on layers. So if it's a super hot day and you're just working with your regular bees, it's going to be a nice vented bee suit and you can get right down to your t-shirt, whatever. There are people that wear less than that. We won't go there. So anyway, you can layer up when it's colder or you can layer up when you're dealing with something that's more obnoxious, right? So they also sell a suit and separate pants. They're the only ones I know of that do that. They have vented gloves, vented on the back of your

hand. So if you're in hot areas, but now you're going to probably put cotton glove liners to produce more space. You need to know the length of the stinger of the animal that you're dealing with so that you can create enough space while being vented and cool to keep that stinger from penetrating your skin. That's all it is. So when you go to Guardian B apparel, ask for the Fred Dunn discount, and they will be happy to inform you that there is no discount. done. And that's okay, because I just dropped my cage, because you're happy to pay the same as everyone else. Just, but you need to mention, ask for it. You never know if enough people say, may I have the fred done discount? And he says, you know what? Enough people have asked about that,

I think I will give a discount because it doesn't exist, but maybe we could pressure them into doing it. So when it comes to B-suits, create more space between you and the skin. Vented B-suits, if you're going to get one suit, that would be it. And protect yourself and strength and honor and all that. Here's the other thing. I was watching a video of a guy that does nothing but African eyes B ripouts. The veil is very important. He was getting sung right on the tip of his nose.

Why that individual who does this for a living did not put a piece of tape over his nose? or you know he could have put duct tape or something double stick it triple band-aids anything he was getting stung on the nose wear a ball cap get enough distance maybe even lace in some copper wire that's easy to bend just stitch it right into the veil sides so that it holds that veil away from your face because when you lean forward to look at things my grandson does this all the time his face is right up against the veil have something that keeps you that veil extended so there is again separation from your skin and the stingers

that are sure to come your way if you're going to war so question number five comes from Michael Armstrong that is the YouTube channel I want to reuse my wood frames that have had wax foundation that was cut out the groove is still filled with wax and probably propolis any suggestions for getting that out scraping doesn't work very well that's true scraping by itself heat and scraping does. So here's some choices. You can produce a pot of boiling water, super hot water for wooden frames, and you can dip your frames in it, and it'll melt all the wax and propolis out and away. And if you do that right, it will also leave a nice coating on the wood

afterwards. Here's another option. You can get a heat gun. I have a DeWalt heat gun that plugs in. I don't like the battery powered ones, because when it comes to a heat gun, they pull a lot of wattage, they run batteries down right away. You get very little. work out of it. So a heat gun that plugs in that you can control the temperature of because you want the temperature just warm enough that it starts to melt the wax and that it makes propolis workable. And then you can scrape that right out. So and you can use your hive tool to scrape it out. You can even heat your hive tool. My grandson likes to put hive tools in hot water and heat them up. And then he finds that it scrapes the bees wax very easy. And he puts several of them in the water at one.

because he's a klepto and he seals everyone's hive tools and I hope he's listening right now and those hot hive tools you just swap them out and they just you have to wear a leather glove and you just melt the wax away with the hive tool and they have a squared off edge and you can scrape that out but heat gun melts it right out and that's what I recommend hot water dipping drying later it's easy to do there's a hive tool called the everything hive tool has the little hammer on it it has the you know the little hook on it and the scraper it has all the things in one it also has a side that has a queen excluder cleaner but it has another end that has a little it's like a you with a little notch in the middle of it that little notch is for cleaning out the back bar of your frame and that's where your wax is probably built up.

So that's actually in the Everything Hive tool. If you guys want to Google that, look it up. It's a really good tool. I have a few of them. And that's my favorite hive tool right now when it comes to something that can handle everything. I don't think you're going to use the hammer part. So if you can find one like that that doesn't have the hammer part,

you're still okay. So that's it for question five. Moving right along to question number six, which comes from, I can't pronounce it because I don't think it's a word, but it's VYT, BBB-7146, that's the YouTube channel. Whenever hives started bringing out almost fully developed drone brood. Is that a sign of a Roa or something else?

Looks like it's only drone brood. So here's the thing. I say this all the time, we'll say it again. Please go out early in the morning and look at the landing boards on your hives, look at the ground in front of your hives and things like that. See what's going on. When times are thin, when resources are light and when your bees are having to pull back on production,

the first thing to go is going to be the drones. And it could be Varroa also, but you would be able to inspect drone brood. You can get an uncapping fork, the kind that's just got all the little pointy tines on it, and just poke off the tops of drone brood, pull them out, see if you've got Varroa on their bodies. That's much more accurate than trying to look at drone brewed. that have been dragged out and left on the landing board. And some of them are near full development.

Sometimes it's purple-eye phase and things like that. So when they drag them out, you can look those over, but sometimes it's just a matter of economy. They're just getting rid of them because they don't want them anymore. They have resources that are thin and they don't need a bunch of drones right now. But if you find that there are varroaimites there, now you have to have an action plan for your varomites. So why not pluck out as many of the drones as you can?

and check them for yourself. So that's an easy thing to do. But those are the two primary things. The other thing is sometimes drones are in remote parts of your hive. So if it's a smaller colony, although small colonies tend not to produce much drone. So and drones for those of you who are listening and maybe wonder what we're talking about, those are the male bees. They're larger. They're in larger cells. They take longer to develop. They consume a lot of resources when they're in their larvents. state and they're fed by nurse bees so they also tend to be at edges of frames between frames and sometimes off on another level way in the back when that happens and if you got a cold snap for example unlikely based on the weather that we're looking at around here and I don't know where

vYT triple B is but if things get really cold they're going to use their force around the or brood to conserve them and the queen of course will be in that protected warm area and they would tend then also to be sparse about protecting drone brood so if we had a cold snap and things were working against the bees they face challenges they favor the workers first and the queen of course gets all the attention above all the others so if one cast of bee inside the hive is going to survive it's going to be the queen so that's the other thing so if they were chilled then then they would later uncap those pull them out and get rid of them. Another thing you might look for just for kicks,

depending on their stage of development, look at their wings and see if their wings are shriveled or not present. You could have deformed wing virus. But there again, one of the number one vectors of that would be varroa mites. So I'm also going to recommend that people that have concerns about a lot of larvae being dumped out on the landing board and it might be varroa-sensitive hygienic bees cleaning out those cells, then it would be a prompt for you to go ahead and do a varroa destructor might test,

slant count. So those are the best I can do for you. But you wouldn't even notice unless you were out there looking at your landing boards. Now, if they're doing this midday, I think you do have a problem. You'd be checking things out. The colony might be in trouble. Question number seven comes from Gigi. I thought beans, including soybeans, or wind-pollinated.

I've never seen a bee of any type on any bean flowers. So this is interesting, too, because I thought the same for many years. I have a farmer that's a crop farmer that bought out a cattle farmer near me, a dairy farmer. And in fact, this farmer has purchased several farms all up and down the state highway near where I live. And they rotate crops, corn and soy. And other people were saying the same thing. Corn, for example, doesn't need honey bees. They don't need to go after the pollen.

But then I joined that pollen study that was being hosted by the University of Vermont and to get your bees that were collecting pollen from corn. So I actually went out in the cornfield when it was tassling and I videotied and photographed bees on the corn, getting pollen, and there were a lot of them. It was an eye opener. So here's the other thing. We often look at things like soy. And so when we see fields of soy,

I used to get pretty bummed out about it because the farmers that we had before, when they were dairy farmers, they would have alfalfa, fields of alfalfa. And I knew when they did that, it was going to translate into a lot of nectar for your bees. So that would be fantastic. But here's the thing. If you go and look at the soy plants, and I'm following mine daily now, and that's because of this question from Gigi, because I'm looking at the little white flowers form. Every single soy plant in this 300-acre field has been munched down by deer. Every single plant. It amazes me because I'm wondering if they're getting the flowers and stuff too,

but the plants are still growing. The deer aren't eating them down to just the roots. But I thought, wow, the kids counted 31 deer in the field at one time. I think that's amazing. However, the whole point is I'm going to be out there photographing and videoing when these little white flowers open up because I wanted, and this is the reason I mentioned the farmer too. He's so big, he's so inaccessible.

Because I want to know the soy field is that getting a better yield if it's adjacent to an apiar. where there's lots of bees, lots of pollinators. The plant may not need the bees, but the bees might be boosting the yield and the size of the soybeans in this field. And there are commercial apiaries that get a nectar flow from soybeans. So that's what it's coming down the pike. I'm going to try to do a video for my list of pollinator-friendly plants. We're going to take a tight look at the soy.

The flowers are just now starting, but I'm going to respond to Gigi with a video that demonstrates that because there are enough people. But then I realized myself, you know, I'm just quoting others saying that, hey, there's a lot of nectar that comes off of soy. When soy comes, oh yeah, I get soy honey all the time. It's clear. It's light. It's really good stuff. And so now I have to go out there and see it for myself. And so that's what I'm going to be doing in the coming weeks because they've not yet flowered. So it's going to be great, but I think they do. The other thing that was interesting to me is even coffee plantations, coffee growers.

They don't need honeybees to produce coffee beans. However, when there are honeybee apiaries near those coffee plants, the beans are more robust, larger, more productive. So there are impacts from pollinators that are beneficial, even though the plant overall does not require honeybees or other pollinators to pollinate it for it to succeed and yield the crop. So it's very interesting. Watch for that. That's going to be coming up. And I'll show it either way. By the way, if they blossom out and I don't see a single honeybee on it, then I'm going to be like, well, whatever kind of soybeans those are, the bees don't care about them.

I also have no idea what kind of pesticide that they're using or herbicides have been sprayed. I know they sprayed because we were having a day when a bunch of people were visiting my apiary and the tractor came by and sprayed right while we were all there on a windy day and the spray carried right over my apiary I saw zero impact I had to think maybe that was fertilizer I don't know what they're doing but I had no notable impact or significant impact on my bees from that but we're going to follow it we're going to see what happens question number eight comes from autumn hill bees says during my past few inspections I have noticed an abundance of pollen on several frames and a couple of my hives. Early this year in March and April, we had an abnormal amount of rain for Southern California. And during the months of both May and June, we had abnormally cold weather.

The hives have had a slow start to the season, and now that things are warming up, it doesn't appear that the bees are consuming the pollen. My concern is, instead of being honeybound, can I become pollen bound? How would you advise solving the dilemma? So the first thing, thing is for Autumn Hill bees, how many frames of pollen are we talking about? Because it can seem like a lot. You know, you've done a hive inspection, and usually this is adjacent to the brood. So where the brood is being worked up, you'll see a brood in the periphery of, you'll see pollen in the periphery of the brood patterns and even some nectar stored there and things like that. And then as you move gradually away, instead of straight into honey, you can end up with full frames

of pollen. And that's never a problem for me because it takes a full frame of pollen to produce a full frame of brood. So it can actually be consumed pretty quick. So the question about being pollen bound, I'm not saying that can't happen, but how much pollen are we really talking about? In other words, are they out of space to produce the brood? And when that brood's central area, which just gets cycled over and over again and the queen starts laying after other bees have emerged. The workers have come out and within a day there's new eggs there and the cycle continues. So it kind of just expands and starts in the center again and expands out. And so if they're doing that and they're not filling brood cells, in other words, in the center

where the queen has historically been laying her eggs and producing brood, if they're not doing that, I personally wouldn't worry too much about it. Now let's say that they do seem to be bringing in a lot of pollen. and the pollen's not being used up and it is encroaching on the brood area now it's time you know to look at what would be your oldest pollen in the hive so I look at the ones that look really waxy sometimes it looks darker sometimes it's farther away from that area from the brood area and that's where you could pull that out

and this year I did it actually but it was part of a dead out so I just wanted to know if I could use hot water and rinse those out and if they would rinse the cells clean and then we could dry it and see if the bees would clean it up afterwards so take advantage of the heat too um i took my garden hose i took a hundred feet of garden hose which is just on the hose reel anyway and i faked it out so i don't know if you've ever seen a faked line the way they lay it out so you just zigzag them back and forth overlaying and i lay that out in the hot sun and two o'clock in the afternoon while it's still cooking in the hot sun, you can get 125 degrees of water out of that and it makes flushing out those cells

a cinch. You flush them out right away and then you put your frames in the shade upside down because remember your cells are angled upside down and then I came through and blew it out with low pressure air, put it right back into service. The bees went right back into using it. So the good news about that is if you want to rinse them out, drain them. and blow them with high pressure or low pressure air, I'm sorry. When you clean them out that way and you can put them right back the same day, then you don't have to worry about, you know, putting a new frame, drawing foundation and things like that.

So you can just push all your frames together, pull the frames out that you have concerns with, the older pollen first, rinse everything out, and then put them right back in, and you're back in business. So now I'm not that worried about it unless, as I said, that they are starting to fill in your prude area to the point where the quick, has no place to lay. If that's not happening, another thing that you can do, but the bees tend to compensate for it because this struck me, you could put a pollen trap on the front of that hive. Now they make pollen traps that just sit right on the landing board. Those are my favorites. I have

tested other pollen traps. If you want to go to the YouTube channel, my main YouTube channel, and go up in the search bar, type in pollen trap. I've made pollen trap comparisons. Some of them were not very efficient which I think are actually the best ones and the reason they're the best is because they do collect a lot of pollen off of your bees as they go in but their low efficiency means that a lot of pollen is still getting through and still providing nourishment for your colony and then so you can cut down on the pollen availability for your bees by doing that but then i find out that what the bees do is they just ramp up and do more pollen collection if they're not getting what they need in the brood area so it's just something you can fiddle with you know i think it might be more feel

good but then you are also collecting pollen so that's fun so that's just another thing that i was thinking about question number nine beth we now have two flow hives our problem is we can't seem to get our bees to use the super that would be the flow frames by the way for those of you don't know our bees are saskotraz i have rubbed wax on the super sprayed with sugar water recently removed the queen excluder i know the cells are aligned correctly as i have double-checked them i'm at a loss as what to try next okay so for beth and others with the same situation um i think people wonder what do i do to my flow super's to get the bees to use them well first of all they only go on the strong the most prolific production colonies.

So that's number one. If the bees aren't storing honey and building things up in the hive, they don't get a flow super. They just don't. Now I realize you're in a pickle if all you have are flow hives and all you have for honey collection are flow supers. So I want to take you back to what I spoke about to an early question, which is

the brood box first, let them fill it. Don't put any other boxes on. other boxes on until it's 8 out of 10 frames full or 6 out of 8 frames full depending on which size you have when you buy flow hives by the way I have to mention this too some people buy knock-offs so if you didn't buy the real flow hive the materials can look identical but are not and a lot of people have reported that the knock-off flow hives are not being worked and then they assigned this to the real flow hive as being not workable. It doesn't work. The bees won't work

the frames. Even people I know personally, and I'm friends with, have bought fake flow frames and expected them to perform the same. Now, I'm not saying that's 100% of the problem, but it's just another thing to tick off the list. Okay. So once you get your brood box in full production and they're storing away what they need, the medium box goes on, the medium super. Once that is 8 or 10 frames full of capped honey, that's when, or near capped, don't wait until it's actually capped if you're close, it's good enough. Then put your flow super on, and that serves as a honey bridge, and you can put your flow super on without the queen excluder.

If you just want 100% security that you'll never see an egg in your flow super, then put the queen excluder above that medium super. Now, let's say you waited too long and that medium box, when you opened it, you got surprised. Oh my gosh, underneath the inner cover, it was wall-to-wall burcombe. All the cells are full. All the frames are packed out and they're capped with honey. And then you panic and you throw your flow super on there. When you have a full super of honey that is finished, the bees have written it off.

They have their resources for winter. they're concentrating down below. So if that is the situation that you found, this is the other part. You will need your queen excluder because now you're going to put your flow super directly on that bottom brood box. You will need a queen excluder between your flow super and that single deep brood box. You're going to take the medium super that is now honey full chaka block that goes on top of your flow super and becomes the top box. so then your bees are transiting through the flow frames and up into that honey super and now they realize wow we've got all this space to work on in between now flow supers are deep boxes it comes you get a six frame version which are six flow frames or the seven frame version which matches the langstroth 10 frame box that requires a lot of honey that requires a lot of honey that requires a lot of work you cannot put that on a medium colony that you know is just doing okay and expect them to fill out what is equivalent to another deep box they just can't they just don't have the resources to work it and do

they have to go up there and propolize and use bees wax and seal up all the joints that exist between each of those movable leaves that's in that super so each of those frames when they do get finished off going to yield about a half a gallon of honey a piece. So this is full of a lot of honey when it's finished. So only your strongest, most productive colony should receive a flow super. Now you might be sitting there thinking, well, I want to get some honey off of my bees. And if they don't do that, then this whole thing is a failure. No, it isn't. Because now you can instead of a flow super, if you're coming near the end of the season or you're halfway through the season and you don't have time for them to fill that out, you just put a standard super on there.

And I realize it goes completely against the flow. Get it? Because now you have regular super on a flow brood box, which you spent your hard-earned money for. You got a medium super, and then you put another super on top of that. It's a medium or a shallow even. And that's just so that you can have honey to uncap and extract so that your year is not a complete loss. But if it's not a strong colony, that is what's left for you to do. If you want the flow super to work, it's going to have to be on,

just like if you were putting any other deep box on. It's not just people assign that to the flow hive. It isn't. It's because it's another deep box that's going up there. If you superged your hive with a deep 10-frame Langstroth box, your bees would have a huge challenge ahead of them to fill that. These things are big. so you need a high population now you could combine smaller colonies into one you could combine weaker colonies

and make one strong productive colony and you could do that just by following the standard combination method of putting one box over the other and then we would have what i described earlier on now you've got two boxes that are in brood production because you combine probably two deep boxes and you would use that queen excluder again once they work it out and pick a queen then you would put a queen excluder in there so that then one of those boxes would be dedicated to brood and then once you've established that the workers come out of the other box it gets removed and then you've got a medium super back on and you're back to flow hive work so this is very active beekeeping we have a local instructor that teaches basic beekeeping and he cautions people not to use

flow hives if it's their first year of beekeeping because he considers it an advanced tool for honey collection. Now I think that first year beekeepers can use them, but you're going to have to really understand what you're doing with your bees, how to read the colony, when to super, when to add frames and things like that, and to get a big, robust colony of bees so that you can put a flow super on and harvest from it. So there is a page on my website. It's called the flow hives. experience and it shows everything from assembling the hives to extracting honey and all of the things that you might think about here in the United States and in climates that might be colder or a shorter year for the flow hive and things

like that and I know a lot of other people are tired of hearing about flow hives but this holds true even if it were just another deep box question number 10 moving on this comes from sue michiwaka indiana did i say that right is it michiwaka so anyway regarding the horizontal langstroth hive or the lands hive when you add additional frames do you add them just after the brood nest or at the end before the divider board okay so this is personal preference here but it also follows up sue says my concern is the colony becoming honeybound so need to know the best place is to add frames. First of all, we're onto something that I really enjoy, which is working horizontal hives, long long long stroth hives are among my favorites. So as you go through it,

single entrance, normal progression. It goes from brood to brood mix with resources to nothing but honey and then frames that are being drawn out. The thing about horizontal hives is you have a follower board there and the follower board as far as the bees are concerned is the end of the hive. So the follower board closes it off and you can expand or contract your frames available to the bees at well. And it's very easy because what are you lifting? Individual frames. You're never lifting a box. It is also very calming for the bees as best as it can be,

considering that you're raiding their living space. So when you're pulling individual cover boards off because there's the frames and there's cover boards and there's the hive cover that goes over the top of all that, you're only uncovering the areas that you're working. So, and it's true, what we find, and we recently did an inspection on the Long Langstroth Hive, and is full all the way to the end, so we had no choice but to pull a bunch of frames.

We don't want the bees to think that they've done all the work. This is just like having a full super directly above them. If they think there's nothing but full frames, they've done their work, and now they won't be as productive as the otherwise, might be. So if we're trying to expand it because we have all these frames that are full, hopefully the beekeeper, like Sue, keeps up with it and finds out that as we're getting to the end, the farthest point from the entrance, you've got frames in production that are not completed.

So they've been pulling out the comb, which some people say drawing out comb. If it's got a foundation or foundationless, however it's done, we would look to those partially drawn or partially finished comb that are not completely done you would pull one of those out then scoot on over and find the frames next to the brood area so that has the first train that has no brood on it but is a full frame of capped honey I would pull that out and I would pull this partially full frame that's got drawn comb some capped honey and honey in production and I would put that just beyond the brood and then I would take the full one and I would harvest it and then if I'm adding frames at the other end I would add them farther away I also

don't mind checkerboarding when it comes to honey frames so once we're into nothing but honey and you want them to draw out a foundation that you've got or maybe you've got a heavy wax frame that you want them to do foundationless work on then I put those between already drawn and 80% capped frames because now they will work the foundation too and it's in a warmer part of the hive so they start to work that but that's what I would do I would provide them more space to work immediately adjacent but has some resources on it just beyond the last frame that has brewed on it and then if that frame that was already existing there was covered in honey I would take that and go ahead and harvest some honey draw it out and then put that at the very end

because then you know what the bees do when you just harvested the honey you get you know three or four pounds of honey off of a deep frame because you uncapped it and you spun it and how you're all excited and you put that at the end and the bees travel through everything else to go to that to clean it up let them clean it up it's their own hive it's their own frame it's their own honey and we're cycling it back to them and once they clean it now they'll pass through all these other frames they're in production between that and they'll continue to draw those out keep in mind we need warmth and we need workers to do that so those are comb producing wax producing bees so this is an age when they're a little older before they're actually going out of the hive and that wax needs to be in the 80s inside the hive or warmer in order for them to work it so those are conditions that have to be met so another thing that vastly improved and almost was too good for the hive because they're too productive which is why we can actually make entire other colonies out of them. Like I pulled five full frames of brood from my long Langstroth hive just to produce a nucleus hive to introduce a Varroa sensitive hygienic queen that is part of a research program. So once I did that, it was like I had never done anything to the hive. They were just as productive as before.

And then we just backfilled, you know, scooted everything right on down the line and closed it all back up. Please do not, since we're on the topic, don't checkerboard brood. So if you've got six, seven frames of nothing but brood, please don't put frames in between the brood. They've already set that up really well. Nurse bees are working it. And that is an area that is costly to the bees as far as resources energy-wise goes. They're tending to open brood.

They have to keep it warm, 94 to 97 degrees. So often we think, oh, it's 87 degrees out there. Those bees are hot. Well, how hot is it? inside the hive because if it's not 94 to 97 where the brood is they're still warming it so we have to stop thinking like people and think like the bees what are they doing so um that just leaves you a lot a lot of options but please don't checkerboard the brood itself just stay with me on that so horizontal hives by the way work really well and a shout out to horizontal bees check out

their website and look at the horizontal hives they make he will custom make horizontal hives to suit your purposes and we see them at all the conferences great people great craftsmanship excellent hives okay that's my shout-out let's do that horizontal beats go see them they have a youtube channel too question number 11 comes from mark belmont california hi fred i left some rendered wax out on a hot day and it attracted some bees which chewed it up and packed it into their pollen pouches. I've not really seen anything on this. Would it be good to leave some rendered wax out for them on summer days for them to reuse? Okay, several people have reported this, by the way.

Honeybees coming to bees, wax, collecting it and flying it back, which is really interesting to me because I used to see the bees, especially with cap wax, they were actually cutting it off to access the honey, and then they were dropping it on the bottom, and I saw bees flying out of the hive with cap wax. So I was thinking, why didn't they keep it? Why don't they use it? So you never saw them. Cap wax, by the way, is some of the purest wax. It's the newest wax. The bees develop it, you know, just to cap wax. off stored honey and that's like the lid on a jar for a beehive and for them to discard that was really amazing to me but if you had the ability to give the bees

wax would you personally I would not and these are the reasons we don't know whose bees are going to come to this feeding station that you're putting your bees wax out for the other thing is there are a lot of things in bees wax it's very difficult to find beeswax it's close clean, pure, and free of things like pesticides. In fact, almost every sample of beeswax that gets sent to labs for analysis, comes back positive for pesticides. And pesticides like kuma fos that are being used by beekeepers

shows up and rendered beeswax, which is really amazing. Often the beekeeper would say, well, that's not something I personally have ever used. So then this comes into play where, if bees are collecting wax from other hives from other places and bringing it home, are they then transferring people that are treating their hives with chemicals that a treatment-free beekeeper would not want in their hive, for example, then it changes the game a little bit. How does that get worked around, especially if a wax-producing bee comes in

and they chew that up and they warm it up and then they start working it onto the hive? I don't know. We kind of have to see the bee. Seeing them collecting it, and by the way, Mark has a really good short video. And if he's listening, you know, feel free to share that link. So people can look at the short, which shows the bees collecting it. What do the bees, this is what we have to know. So if we question everything, which I want you to, we have to see what the bees do with that bees wax when they get back to the hive.

Are these nutty foragers that think that that's some kind of pollen? and they're bringing that back and then they're going to get rejected and they're not going to be able to produce it do bees pick up I've seen bees reconstitute bees wax right there like you know a queen emerges from her cell and then they start chewing apart the cell and then you'll see them building up big gloves of bees wax adjacent to the cell so then it just thickens the wax it's already there I have not seen bees collect bees wax parts I just thought of a great test even while I'm answering this question the hives that I have that have removable trays underneath have a lot of

chunks of bees wax in the tray underneath including wax chingles that came from wax working bees that somehow dropped it while they're trying to get it up to their mandibles because they have these little hooks these little spurs on their legs and they spur it off of their abdomen and they bring it up forward and then the bees starts to chew it and work it into the new drawn comb so if we wanted to test this out we would take these removable trays so those of you that have them pull the movable tray out look at all the bees wax that's in it put that in the shade somewhere and make it available to the bees and see if they won't come and collect it that's interesting because that would be a

great way to see and what would be better for the bees to use than fresh beeswax shingles that fall on the bottom or chewed caps and those bits and pieces end up on the bottom of the hive which you often see bees flying out with it they fly out with chunks of wax in their mandibles and leave so if they're discarding it what are they bringing back so i guess this is going to leave us with a lot of questions but it's a great opportunity for citizen science for people that are listening that are interested in doing this uh collect a bunch of the bees wax particles that are on the bottom of your hive on your drop board on your in your tray and collect that up and make that available to the bees and see what they do with it because I see them flying it out of the hive once it's been dropped once it's been in contact with something else so what are the bees doing that are out here on Mark's video on his bees wax which is rendered bees wax and they're packing it onto their hind legs are they confused do they think that's pollen and they're actually bringing it in they're going to stuff it in a cell the way they do

when they harvest pollen. So we need to see the end use of that and where would you see it? In observation hives. So there are a lot of moving parts here in the potential to see what's going on. Share your thoughts. I think actually this would be a very interesting thing and I want to thank Mark for mentioning that because others have mentioned it too and wondered should we be grading it? Should we be like scraping or shaving down bees wax so that the bees can come get it, collect it and bring it back? Overall, I would say please don't do that. much better that you would provide resources in that hive for them to build their own wax if they needed it if it's an underdog colony that needs feeding or something like that so that's the last question of the day we're into the fluff section i think that was a great question to end on because i'm starting to really think about other ways kind of to prove what they're doing with it and then having this weird economy where if they're if they're interested in collecting wax from somewhere else why on earth are they flying out their own wax particulates out of the hive to discard it when it when it gets mishandled and dropped now i realize

when it goes through a screen and into a tray they can't access that but when it drops onto the bottom board of the hive do they collect that and run it back up and then amend bees wax in the hive with that it's interesting i have lots of questions i hope we come up with answers so here's the fluff for today July the 12th taking honey a lot of people are getting honey right now now new beekeepers are often not prepared for this and they'll put all their honey in five gallon buckets or something like that or and please don't do this they'll get the the five bucket jar lids you know the bucket lids that clamp on and they get a screw on top so like you're saving food and stuff like that don't put honey in that I'm going to please recommend, and it's just my recommendation, but, you know, voice of experience a little bit.

If the honey sets or crystallizes in a big bucket, the warming methods for reconstituting the honey and getting it liquid again so you can bottle it, actually overheat the outside portions, or it takes a long time to heat it up to get it reconstituted. So my recommendation for those of you getting honey for your first time, get it in jars as quick as possible. Quart jars, pints, one pound jars, moose jars, whatever you're doing. Get it out of the bucket and into jars as quick as possible because if it crystallizes in jars, much easier to manage, much easier to take care of, and then you're done anyway. Get it out of the way. Okay.

Come honey. A lot of people are getting comb honey for the first time. They went foundation list. They're doing cut comb and stuff like that. It has to be cycled through the freezer. I highly recommend that you do that because that's going to eliminate the potential for wax moth eggs and things like that.

So leave it in the freezer. Once it's in the packets that you're going to sell it in, in the little cases or whatever you're doing, leave it in the freezer. There's no reason to take it back out and it will not degrade anymore while it's in the freezer. So, and by the way, horizontal freezers are not that expensive, and unless you're opening the lid and stuff a lot, they run very low energy, and that can keep your honey stored. Again, we're not commercial, so we can afford to do that kind of thing.

So leave it in the freezer until a day or two when you're going to take it to market. If you're going to sell it at a, you know, I don't know if you go to an ag fair or wherever you sell your honey. But if it's comb honey, same reason I'm talking about these. buckets and stuff, you don't want the honey to set in your honeycomb. Now it can be rewarmed and you can do all of that, but it's much better while it's clear, while it's maximum palatibility, you can put that in a freezer and arrest any further degradation of the honey until you're ready to use it. I'd rather recommend it. So, and just, you know, from the fields out there, the deer did not get all my sunflowers this year. So sunflowers are about to bloom. They've got heads.

on them. Borage is in flower and the bees are not using it yet, so we're going to be updating that. I think we just need more blooms, but right now that's it. Hissup. Very disillusioned about the Hissup this year, the blue giant Hissop. A lot of my hyssup is growing, but something I've learned about Hissop. I like borage. If it turns out to be a good nectar source for the bees, I'm going to really like it. Because it competes well with a lot of weeds. We don't use weed killers and stuff like that out here. So the things that I plant, I'd like for them to be perennial. Borage is an annual, but it's supposed to recede so heavily that it comes back every year. And it is holding its own against other weeds and sticking up. It's nice and tall, so it's coming up

through the grass well. So Borage gets my vote hiss up easily overwhelmed by other weeds and stuff. So if you're kind of letting things grow natural, and I need to because the scale in which I'm working with this stuff is in acres. So when I do that, I just can't go around and weed around them and things like that. So I need plants that can really hold their own. So the other thing is milkweed seed. I'm going to be working a lot with that. And I'm going to roll out black cloth, overheat the grasses and stuff that are there, cut things as short as I can. And then I'm to try to seed some milkweed because if it blooms in 12 weeks I still have enough time I think so if I can do that in the coming week let me know if I'm wrong in my thinking by the way if you're part of our northwest

pennsylvania beekeepers association breakfast Wednesday we're going to talk about milkweets we have an expert to talk about perennials and everything else hands-off ways of getting them started in spring So follow the pollinator plant playlist. Oh, so every week or as soon as I find another pollinator plant, I'm featuring it. These are three or four minute videos. It's a playlist. If you want, and of course, it's regional. Northeastern United States, state of Pennsylvania, Ag Zone 4.

I'm coming across the things that the bees are working and then kind of showing what they're getting from it. Are they getting pollen? Are they getting nectar? Are they getting pollen and nectar? What's the value of? of the plant? How large does a plant get? Where do you need to plant it? How long will it be with you? So the feature this past week was, of course, elderberries, and that's a very good plant to have around. So clover. So here's the thing. There's sweet clover, and a couple of people wrote,

in fact, a good friend of mine, Bill, had sweet clover on his property in ditches and things like that. And this does not look like the standard clover you're thinking about. And just this morning, somebody else wrote about clover identification so please pay attention i'm going to recommend an app for your phone it works for android it works for if you've got one of those apple products it's called uh plant net so pl a n t n et and that's an app it's on google play you can look for it that for me has been the most effective app because you install it on your phone you take a picture of a leaf, you take a picture of bark, or you take a picture of the flower,

and it will let you know because when you join the app, you set up your zone like your zip code area, and then it of course helps identify things that are known to be in your region. One of the things I don't like about it is it doesn't tell us a bunch of information, so it's not like Encyclopedia Britannica for plants. But what it does a really good job of is identifying the plant and then you have an opportunity to submit that photo to the community so then they can give feedback on whether or not that was a good identification and it also gives percentages of accuracy.

So plant net, put that app on your phone and then look at the flowers, plants and things that you see coming up. It does a very good job on very young plants too, which is my toughest time of year, is looking at two inch tall plants and deciding, oh, is that what I think? it is, you know, is it really growing or not? And I planted a lot of Maximilian sunflowers this year. I had a bunch of property, an extension of my property beyond my fence. I was looking at the space between my fence and the dirt road that I live on. And I was thinking, that's like 50 feet of space that I'm not even using. So this year, Tilded it, planted the whole thing with Maximilian sunflowers. So that's a perennial. It's going to come up every year. And

they are. They're foot tall right now. It's going to be fantastic. I don't know why I didn't do that years and years ago, kicking myself a little bit because it was just golden rod and all the normal stuff that's there. But so look at places that you might have under your control that you could plant some kind of hands-off perennial that would be valuable to all kinds of pollinators. Don't just think of the honeybees, but all pollinators in general. So clover is really strong. Obviously, the bees are all over it. And the other thing is a lot of people are talking about the heat. Shading your hives and things like that, please look at the video for hive visors. And this is not something I sell. It's just I tell you how to make them.

Hive visors have been around since the 1840s. It's in the ABC and XYZ of beekeeping from way back. And I think the reason people stopped putting eye visors, which is a shade that extends out of the front. of your hive. I think the reason they just stopped doing it is it's not expedient. It's not worth the time and money for commercial people. Keep in mind most of the equipment we look at and have is design for efficiency for commercial efficiency. So the backyard beekeeper, if you want to put an awning on the front of your hive, go ahead and find some creative way to do it. Hive visors, they just screw into the sides of it. They stick out in front. You could even make them thinner than what I do. do and it makes a huge difference it drops the temperature in the shade on the front of the hive

and the landing board by 15 degrees and then the bees when they're out there if they cluster or instead of bearding under the hive they move up under the hive visor it can shield the landing board from rain and things like that it also may cut down on aerial predation and by that I've seen I mean I don't think the impact is big but it has a lot of advantages the impact when I talk about aerial attackers recently. I've been watching dragonflies. And I want to know how many, how many bees does a single dragonfly get? But here's the funny part about dragonflies. They're snatching things that looks like they're getting nothing. They're zipping through the air and they're cutting backwards and sideways. They're the best aviators on the wing out there. They're the best

at what they do. I think they have someone said 100% accuracy when they actually fly out to get something and then getting it. They're they're snatching gnats and flies and all kinds of little stuff so it's not just we imagine they're after your honeybees and they seem like squadrons and they're large and that's it. I don't want to talk too much about it. I think we're on overtime already today. Look at the high visors again go to the YouTube channel and just type in the right hand side hive visor and I have a step-by-step tutorial equipment that's handy to have you can make and easy to build and then you'll have high visors so I hope you enjoyed today's presentation question and answers backyard beekeeping I'm frederick done and this has been

the way to be thanks for being here