The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 275 The Way To Bee

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube: https://youtu.be/VGPivsB1DxI

Welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, September the 13th, and this is back here, beekeeping questions and answers. Episode number 275, I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here, and if you want to know what we're going to talk about today's Q&A, please look down in the video description and all the topics will be listed in order. How do you submit a question of your own for future consideration? You go to the website, the way to be.org, click on the page mark the way to be, fill out the form, and then maybe your topic will show up on one of these Friday Q&As. There's a lot going on outside. Weather is pretty darn good today. I know you're wondering. It's 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 27 Celsius. That's 50% relative humidity. That's good for the bees because we're in the middle of a nectar flow.

This is our last big nectar flow here in the northeastern nexus. state state of Pennsylvania so the things that are going on here may be different than what's going on where you are so I invite you to go outside stare at your bees look at the environment see what's going on see what your bees are doing 2.9 mile per hour winds zero chance of rain and that's 4.6 kilometers per hour and uh no rain for today light chance of rain over the weekend so we have a pretty decent weekend too that sounds pretty good to me and the supervisor is not here he's second school. So he is in elementary school. He is very satisfied with his fellow classmates and he even approves of his teacher right now. So things are good for the third grade. Now what are the bees on

outside? Let's talk about that. Goldenrod for starters. Golden rod is everywhere. Some people don't like golden rod honey. The bees are spending a lot of time on the golden rod plants and it looks like they're getting a lot of nectar and they're loaded with pollen. Go to your beehives. Look at the landing boards and count the pollen loads coming in between 11 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. If you got more than 10 per minute, you're set. They are building. They're doing great. Borge is great. Borage is everywhere. I have started to prepare some of the plots that I want to use for fall seeding this year. I usually wait until spring to seed. So this year, though, I'm going to try doing it in the fall and let those seeds try to find their own

and see if they'll just kick off on their own in spring. Who knows, if you've got the land and a chance to play around, why not do it? Borage is one of those that I'm going to see this fall. What am I doing for preps? Somebody wrote and asked me that, and I dodged it because I'm really not a gardener, not much of a gardener,

and I always recommend that you go to your local gardening experts. Most beekeeping clubs have master gardeners in their membership. We do. So it's great to have these people available, and they're the ones that really should be giving the advice about soil type and how to prep it and how to put your seeds out, when to do it, and all this other stuff. Because I'm just a willy-nilly, very casual gardener, and I tend to just throw seeds around. Happens to work, so there you go.

But I do it in spring. This year I'm doing it in the fall. Borage is fantastic. I just want to plant a whole bunch more of it. Cosmos going strong. They are a nectar source. They are a source of pollen. the bees are on them, and there's a lot of bee density on those blossoms,

which tells me that they replace and restore their nectar very quick because the same blossoms get visited in pretty quick sequences there. Sunflowers are still around, although the squirrels are climbing them, breaking them down and stealing the seeds before the seeds are even ready. It's very annoying. We have red squirrels here, gray squirrels, and fox squirrels. So they're all after the seeds ahead of time, but we see. I still have sunflowers. I thought they were pretty much wrapped up last week, but they're still going.

There's another variety of sunflower that does very well, and I highly recommend it for borders of your property. If you want some kind of late season privacy screen, it also has floral content, max a million sunflowers. I have the really tall ones. They're like seven or eight feet tall by now, and this is year after year. They're perennial, so you don't plan them every year. They come up on their own. They get nice and tall. And so I've been bordering my lower field, which is to the west with max a million sunflowers. They're doing great. And the good news about them is they go right until frost.

So to the cosmos. So these things have a very long bloom time. We have ragweed. Ragweed is something a lot of people really despise, particularly if they have ragweed allergies and things like that, but the bees are collecting pollen from those. So I don't like ragweed very much. So I'm trying to like beat that down a little.

And also when we're driving down the river, we see acres and acres of golden rod. So I think I should be replacing golden rod on my property with something else, even though right now it looks fantastic. So if you're taking pictures, but if you're going to plant something, check in with the Xerxes Society and some of these pollinator resources that might have some great ideas for natives that you can plant. So, fall seed site preps.

Hissup, still going strong. You can't go wrong with Hissup. Blue Giant Hissop does fantastic. Anise Hissip does fantastic, Agostaki, all of it is just great. And it's so nice to walk up and just grab a handful of it and smell it. Good stuff. So that's all going on. Bees are all over it. And native pollinators too. Don't forget your native pollinators just because they're backyard beekeepers. Also a little side note before we get going.

This is a great opportunity to promote things to your neighbors. I don't really think we should tell everybody to become a beekeeper. I think that we should be promoting. pollinator gardens and pollinator plots and get people to turn their green spaces into pollinator friendly spaces and then you know what they'll be doing feeding your bees so what else can we talk about if you have a question that's just burning you up right now and you have to get an answer please google the way to be fellowship and you'll go to facebook some people don't use facebook if you don't you can't join the fellowship It's a good group of people, more than 8,000 members, and they're super friendly, and they have answers for every person in every part of the world. So, it's all good stuff.

I guess we'll get right into it now with question number one, which comes from, oh man, I can't pronounce the name, D-A-J-U-R-Y-N-I-T-A-T-A-T-E. So that's the YouTube name. Hello, I have two hives. One has been doing great all years. the other has two deeps, but they have only used the bottom deep. They never went up to the upper deep. I tried changing out comb, but no positive results. They have been like this since they came out of winter.

Now, if they make it through winter, great. Unlikely any info on what I did wrong. It would replace the queen nearly and maybe early, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so here's an area where we just share what we would do. me personally what if I had a hive like this at this time a year by the way part of the problem with the question is and that's why I want you to know if you're submitting a question or a topic let me know where you are what the climate is it may be profoundly different than what we're dealing with here so let's say let's assign it to

right here I find a colony that have known all year just plotted along their brood got a decent size maybe we're talking three or four frames and some bees do that three or four frames the brute the rest is pollen and nectar and honey and then they just plot along and it never gets any bigger than that which means what you can't put a super on it you're not going to get any honey from that now here's the thing while I'm thinking while I'm talking see sometimes if you put too much space I don't know why bees do this but this is a double deep situation so if you give them too much space too soon the bees kind of back off on using the space. I don't know why they do that. It seems like they

would just go, wow, lots of space, and they would expand into it, bring in lots of stores, and just keep growing. But if they don't, and you leave the space open and they just don't add any, they won't draw a comb, they won't fill it with resources, so you've got a second box with nothing in it and they all stayed in the first box. First of all, in my neck of the woods, particularly the southern parts of the state of Pennsylvania, there are a bunch of beekeepers, commercial level keepers that stick with one deep brood box systems so what that means is they set up a single deep brood box 10 frame usually sometimes 8 they put a queen excluter on top everything above that is a medium box and

they expand box by box as the bees consistently expand their honey stores up there Steve Raspki comes to mind he is one of the people that is really kind of drill that in that you can do a single deep. So but what would I do if I had a colony that just failed to expand? They didn't store anything. They didn't do anything extra. Well, so if I were advising you brand new before this all happened, because somebody listening may have this idea. Just add medium supers above the deep.

Don't go double deeps. They tend to backfire. Backfired on me this year with more than one hive. Because they did double deeps just to see what would happen. I was using the premier specially treated boxes that are to encourage propolis spreading on the interior surface of it. They have that roughed up surface on the inside. And so I've been looking at those ever since I got them after the North American Honeybee Expo. Back in January, we implemented those boxes. And so they only come in deeps.

So they didn't have any mediums. So I did double deeps on some just so I could see how it works. Well, they filled the two boxes and didn't do anything else. So the good news is it's double deeps. The bad news is it didn't expand beyond that. So something happens to the bees if you give them too much space too soon. Now as the colonies grow, if you end up with one of the super colonies with lots of frames of brood, an hour at six or seven frames of brood,

which by the way happens a lot with my horizontal hives, when they do that, they expand easily. But if you expand it too soon, I guess you get the picture. For some reason, they block. at that. The colonies that build faster and better are the narrower, more vertical columns. So six frames, seven frame appamase, the five frame nucleus hives, the six frame polystyrene hives. So there are several companies out there that make these intermediate sizes. Now what's good about that is, well, there's several things that are good about it. One that they fill the spaces quicker,

they tend to use that better and easier for you to lift so i don't know if you've walked up and grabbed even a medium super that's wall-to-wall honey that's hefty and if you're not ready for that if you're not physically capable of lifting that now what you're down to is removing the frames in the bee yard and transferring frame by frame into another box so you can take it away back to wherever you're going to uncap and spin out your honey so the good news is you would be leaving that medium right on and hopefully you've got drawn comb to replace it with while you're out there. That's a perfect world. But otherwise the lifting, it's heavy, you know, so five frames deep, even like the Keepers hive, which by the way is going gangbusters right now, it has nothing but

nucleus hives going up and it's built off a base that's the size of a 10 frame, but they only have eight frames in it because it's constructed so that it will support these nucleus size hives going up. something else that's coming up that we're paying attention to but what would I do with this one I would remove the queen now would I remove the queen and let them replace a queen halfway through September no because it really doesn't give them enough time I would remove the queen and then I would combine them with another colony of bees now the problem with that is now we have all these boxes right so combine it just makes a big mess but

But that's what I personally would do is combine the population of that hive with another hive that's going strong or maybe needs a little help but is bigger and better off than this current hive. Now here's the problem and this is also why and why I'm explaining it to you. Some beekeepers use only medium size boxes, the whole thing, all of them. Every box, all the breed boxes, all the supers, everything, all mediums. And the reason they do that is because then every frame is medium, every box is compatible, whether it's brood or honey super makes no difference. Also they can rotate their boxes, which is something I don't practice. But if you're doing that, here's an example, here's a case where it would be so much easier if all their hives had all the same equipment because then they can interchange these boxes and the frames equally. Because I run into this myself.

sometimes if I want to combine two colonies together but they both have deep brood boxes and they're all down in the brood boxes now I'm in a pickle because I can't just combine them all unless I luck out and maybe six of the ten frames and one of the hives does not have frames that are working that are involved in resource production resources we can pull away and we can just take the bees it's the brood that becomes the complicating issue because we have to accommodate all of our brood in the new box. See the mess we have? So fix number three. So combine them, get rid of the queen, put them together so that they merge. Here's the other thing. Let's say we want to keep it just like that, but we want to try to repair things. If we let them make their own queen, we're 15 days out more than that before you see a mature queen coming out and then she has to sexually mature and then she has to fly out she has to mate and look

where we are when October already so there isn't time to do that here so the next is get rid of the existing queen bring in a new queen and install her a laying queen from a reputable queen breeder and then you've put her in you can take them out in very close proximity in other words remove your current queen today let's say and then on Sunday, install the replacement. And they will be more than happy to accept that replacement. Although you don't do a direct release, you still want to assess your bees, make sure they're accepting her, trying to feed her, welcoming the new queen.

And here's the good news about that. There's only a couple of days of egg production interruption when you do that. So we brought in a laying queen. She goes to work right away. And most of those when you buy them, they're laying within a day or two. And so now we have eggs, and we've got a fully. stocked hive that is ready. Now this time of year we're not expanding that much, but you would see an improvement over the queen that you removed, which has stayed neutral all year long. So if you really

want to beef that up, go ahead. The other thing is you could just feed them, try to get them through winter, wait until spring, and then replace your queen then. When there's lots of drones, everybody wintered, everything's great. You have this small colony. Small colonies, can surprise us when it comes to winter time as long as your cover is insulated as long as you have a single entrance down below and if you needed to bolster their resources i would get rid of that second deep by the way i've put them all into one bogs we're in you have two deeps the second one's not very involved take your best frames with the best resources in them pack them all down to one and then get rid of the other deep if you need more space replace it with a medium and now back feed them there's time to do that I realize I'm kind of all over the chart on this.

But if you're bringing a new queen, you're going to start fresh, and then she can produce new stock for you going into winter. But all the resources are there that establish your foragers know what they're doing. You're good to go. Let us know what you decide to do. And then whether or not it was good or not, how things worked out. Let's go on to question number two. Now that I completely muddied the waters on what to do,

going into winter with a double deep box that never got past the bottom box. So super annoying there I know from beekeeping management. Number two, this is Mike from Lower Hudson Valley, New York. I have a five-gallon bucket of honey that I harvested this season. I want to check the moisture content. Does it make a difference where I pull the sample of honey from in the bucket? Should I pull the sample from the top? Should I pull the honey gate at the bottom?

Just wondering if the moisture content differs depending on where it is in the bucket and the answer is it can differ. So here's the thing. Sometimes when you put your honey in the bucket, and most of you've heard me recommend get it out of that bucket as quick as possible so that if it ever crystallizes or something,

you can deal with smaller amounts and so on. But if there's any stratification inside the bucket, Sometimes you see it. You'll see crystallization happening along the edges sometimes, along the bottom, and it creeps through the rest of it. Or sometimes it'll just leave part of it uncrystallized. It's pretty interesting. The other thing is sometimes in storage, these buckets, you can see a very white thin foam of bubbles on top. And I wonder what that's about. Well, if you've left it out in a storage shed or if you're in honey room, which most backyard beekeepers have sheds or garages or barns or something like that, They have outside temperature. So in the morning, what happens?

The air around it warms up. We've got this bucket of honey that's acclimated to the nighttime temperature. And then what happens at the top of the honey? Condensation happens. And then this white foam shows up. So then what that is, is the honey trying to protect itself because condensation means water. Water is going to try to make its way into the honey, right?

and so the honey defends itself and it's hygroscopic so it would eventually homogenize in theory and so what happens is we want to take our samples from the top couple of inches of your bucket of honey and here's why if there's going to be a higher water content it's going to be up there because the little white foamy stuff by the way is hydrogen peroxide honey defends itself with that antibacterial hydrogen peroxide it makes it on its own. It's not always there. It's a response to contact with water. Sometimes you can see it even in dead out beehives that have honey that's exposed, you'll see hydrogen peroxide on the surface of that too. It cuts down on bacteria. So anyway, pull the sample from the top just to be safe, because if there is drier honey, it's going to be down at the bottom. So if you have 19% or something like that or higher at the top of that, You want to dry that down right away. This is also why some people pour out their honey and get big surface area

when they blow fans on it to dry things down. I don't personally do that because if you set buckets or jars or things like that, this is right after you've harvested, which, by the way, is another reason why you want to get your stuff in your jars right away. So you can test the water content of the honey. And I just blow fans on it and I use a dehumidifier. and I put it in a tent. So grow tent is what I use,

and it drops at about 1% of water every 24 hours, which isn't too bad. And that means that, remember, the moisture content is concentrated at the top. So by blowing fans at the top, I really don't need to bring up what's at the bottom because it will homogenize. It will equalize the water content throughout the honey eventually.

And you can stir it up, of course, which I don't recommend you do, but if you want to know the highest water content, test it from the top. If it already starts to smell off, you can have trouble. So this is why I want people to process and manage your honey right away. So anyway, just wondering with moisture content differs where it is in the bucket. So yeah, it can. Question number 2A, I'm calling this one, because it's a relevant aspect of this.

And it comes from Michelle Armstrong, 46C, which is a YouTube channel name. After melting the crystals, how long will the honey stay liquid? But it depends on the floral source, but do you know a range of times? So this is something that I talked to my wife about because what did I say was coming in? Oh, I totally forgot the asters. Those are those have kicked in. Asters are kind of a marker for really heavy nectar flow along with everything else is going on. So the reason I brought that up is because my wife doesn't like astor honey because it crystallizes.

so fast she's had honey crystallized in the jars within two weeks of bottling right so because this is probably a popular thing that people are talking about right now i looked into some stuff just to verify my facts on this because i realize that some of you may be taking this for action so to reduce crystallization but here's the thing it does depend heavily on the floral content and this is where things can get kind of complicated um we know that the bees are collecting sucrose from different plants from different sources, right? They're also getting particulates all over themselves and it gets into the honey too. And the particulates that we're talking about would be pollen.

So they get a lot of pollen in their honey. And that's one of the ways that we validate raw honey, by the way. So I'm sure a lot of you have heard this discussion that, you know, snowflakes have a little speck of dirt in the middle of each of them, that kind of thing. Because snow on its way down, it has to collide and connect with something. the crystals form out from that and that's 90% of the time true it can still get so cold that things just automatically start freezing but particulates are what these crystals form on and out they go. So the particulates in your honey much the same. So if you were trying to keep your honey from crystallizing,

you can really filter it down if you wanted to. I don't personally like to do that. The finest filter that I use is a two hundred micron filter. Now if you go much finer than that, for example, if you go to the Pierce manufacturing and you get their own capping tank, they also give you this big net that goes around underneath the encapping tank to catch the big debris. That's a 600 micron filters. The opening is 600 microns. So a little bits and pieces do get through. Now if you wanted to go finer than a 200 micron filter, you have to heat the to get it through it because otherwise you'll pour it in that filter and it'll just sit there

and not go anywhere. So by filtering out more of the particulates is what I'm getting at is you cut down on crystallization but you would also be potentially filtering out the goodness of the honey which some people really want and need to see which is bits of pollen and stuff in there. So I think even some of the cheaters, some of the I won't name the countries but some of the countries that are shipping us funny honey actually seed the honey later with pollen and the funny part is some of the pollen comes from sources that would not produce nectar and therefore would not be used in honey production so really interesting what people try to do but the particulates would cause crystallization the other thing is they collect sucrose there's glucose and fructose bees have inverteates it's an enzyme that helps them break

it down. So there are some plants that break down more readily into sucrose and glucose. And here's the thing. The sucrose and glucose percentages. So the more fructose that you have, once it's inverted, an invert sugar, that's what they're talking about. High fructose, less crystallization. High glucose, more crystallization. You're not going to be able to go out and pick what your bees are going to get their sucrose from. So you're just going to deal with what they have. Spring honey is my wife's favorite and the reason is it stays liquid longer. The other thing that you have control over if you're collecting the end of the year is a temperature that you store it at. So the temperature that you stored at might surprise you.

Colder storage doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to not crystallize quicker because colder storage when we're talking about 45 degrees Fahrenheit for example would accelerate crystallization isn't that backwards but if you kept it here's a sweet spot because that was part of the question here between 55 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit is a good storage temperature it can reduce the crystallization if you kept it at 65 or 70 you just accelerated crystallization which doesn't make sense because people think that a warmer temp would not it then stay liquid longer. You're trying to keep these particles from interacting with each other and

performing a platform or shaping a platform that your crystallization happens on. So you could go to the freezer. I bring this up time and time again, but your backyard beekeepers maybe have the freezer space. Most beekeepers would not. If you've got 100 pounds or 10 gallons or 15 gallons of honey, you probably don't have the freezer space. But if you do have a nice horizontal freezer that you could put them in because you may have bought it just for honey storage that locks it in and it's not going to crystallize then you just break it out a couple days before you're going to sell it use it give it away whatever you're going to do so that kind of arrests it there so i'm giving you layers i like raw honey 200 microns or larger and i don't mind that it crystallizes so that's the

other end of it who cares if it crystallizes now in buckets and big containers that's a challenge but in the smaller jars who cares let it crystallize let it set and then warm it up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and let it all reliquify if that's what you want but here's the thing we have lots of friends that want the crystallized honey and one of the things about that is for some people it's validation that's real honey if you have honey that doesn't crystallize at all it's very thick and very dense and things like that we have to be concerned that maybe it was overheated.

Some people fall for that. Really cook your honey and then it will never crystallize. So I'm kind of not on that side of the fence when it comes to taking care of honey. There could be something to it, getting it hotter than it needs to be. But then you just end up with a sweetener. All the good stuff is gone. It doesn't smell right. It doesn't taste as good as it otherwise would.

Freezing it is the ultimate. And by the way, when you put it in the freezer, I don't mean the cheese. freezing the honey because honey has a much lower freezing temperature than what is obtained inside a freezer so what you get is a great preservation of all the flavors all the scents and everything else so it is if you're looking for a way to store your honey and you don't have a lot of it right to the freezer right after extraction so that's what I would recommend but yeah it does not all crystallize the same and these are very loose at 55 to 60 degree Fahrenheit. If you've got the kind of honey that we have

coming in right now today, that stuff is going to crystallize no matter what we do. So you're left with ultra filtration or freezing or overheating it, which I don't recommend. Okay, that was it for 2 and 2 alpha. Moving on to question number three which comes from the first name just says Sean's City South Dakota forgot to know sometimes you do shoutouts I do I haven't done one in a long time and to other YouTube channels and here's one I came across that you might like for that purpose he doesn't have a bunch of subscribers now normally and there are people that reach out to me to say hey this needs a shout out this needs a shout out

usually if it's coming from the person that owns the channel hey give me a shout on my channel because I need views I tend to shy away from that but when it's somebody else Sean's from South Dakota saying give me the shoutout I gave it a look see you should know I spend hours every day looking at emails and responding to all those I can so I did I looked at this and I liked what I saw that's why we're doing the shout out right now let me just give you the channel name the YouTube channel name is technically beekeeping. And the title of this particular video is I redesigned my DIY jar feeder and got a hundred times the results. So what was really interesting

here is technically beekeeping the YouTube channel. He goes through a very lengthy process of evaluating in this case quart feeder jars that people have historically put on top of their inner covers with the little cutouts for the lid so that you could feed your bees with an upside down jar through a lid that has holes in it. And you may know if you've been listening to me for a long time, I do not use that method of feeding my bees. And before we get into what's going on here, I don't use it because the jars that are inverted, the canning jars, whatever you want to use that have little holes in them, as long as the bees are consuming, them and keeping up with that and that is great but here's what happens they get half full

a third down to a third full and we get a cold night we get the following warm-up and what happens is that airspace in that jar expands and expresses the syrup right down into the beehive whether the bees need it or want it or not so there's some things that i look for number one i don't like that the feeder hole is dead center on that inner cover And the reason I don't like it is if it expresses its liquid down where's it going? Straight down ultimately right onto the brood and it doesn't take a lot of sugar syrup to drown Larby. So it can overwhelm your bees. But here's some of the things that I like that I noticed right away in his test board The feeder holes are actually around the periphery not through the center. They access through the center and they go long story short

I want you to look at the video Give me your thoughts on that leave comments tell them that I see sent you there because here's what he's looking for by the way testers he's looking for people to participate and evaluating what he's come up with which is a method of putting a sponge on the lid so he goes for all these different holes and all these different surface textures and stuff because some of the metal lids and things the bees upside down were falling off of having a difficult time collecting on so they could get the nectar and the sponge system seem to work for a lot of reasons watch the video let me know what you think the title of the video again is I was redesigned my

DIY jar feeder got a hundred times of results the channel is technically beekeeping okay so that's it that's a good one check it out see if you become a part of his test group and then maybe get yourself some lids with sponges on them and see how that goes see how it feeds I would also I guess an afterthought here I would like to take the lid design that he's come up with with a sponge on it, see if it puts enough resistance on that lid to where, if you left it unattended upside down under normal temperatures that a beehive

would be exposed to and see once it's half full, once there's a airspace in it, see if it empties itself without the bees. Find out. That's kind of the test that I would do. This is why I like the bee buffet, for example, because it doesn't express down in. And it's also why I like the rapid round and some of the other feeders because they don't empty themselves into the hive even without the bees trying to draw it off. Question number four comes from Lauren from Cheshire, Connecticut. I'm new to back here beekeeping this year. I have Italian bees, which were overwintered and treated for mites already this year before I got them.

I ordered Formic Pro to treat for the first time. I plan to check in for mites using a little cup with a lid and a strainer. Maybe that's something like this. Cup. Cup for bees. Strainer goes into this. A lid. So you can shake it.

This one comes from cirrhicelt. It's the best one I know of. Anyway, doing all of this and then after checking for the mites doing a treatment any advice for myself using formic pro as a first-time beekeeper i have a langstroth hive two boxes now as with any because i want the advice that i give you here to be timeless uh if doses change and if temperature parameters and things like that changed down the road i want you to look at the information that comes with the formic pro that you purchase because they could be coming out with a new method there was formic first then

there's Swarmic Pro, there could be another iteration down the line. Always look at what they're recommending, recommending because they give you temperature parameters. In other words, the environment. What are the temperatures going to be during your period of treatment? Whether you should use one packet or two. So Dr. Robin Underwood gave a great presentation about this. And she uses the two packs at once, but when you do that, it's shocking for some new beekeepers. Now here's the thing. You don't want to breathe that stuff and you want to put some gloves on your hands and here's why. It is aromatic. It is very volatile when you first open the packs and put them out. It smells very strong and for some people when they see their bees trying to pile out of the hive, they get very upset about it. Okay. If the temperatures are really hot and you don't follow all the parameters recommended in the right up there, one of those being that you have to have open entrances, your hive needs to be fully vented during this tree.

Some people automatically assume their queen is going to be damaged and they replace their queen in conjunction with in concert with giving this treatment, right? Now there are other people to say that they do it, they follow the instructions and the queen does just fine. Other people have put their queen in a queen cage and moved her to a safe location kind of like banking a queen for the period of the treatment. Now if you're doing the double treatment right now I believe that's a 10-day treatment. So you're in and out in 10 days, your packets are gone. Don't leave them there. Follow those established guidelines. So if they say it's a 10-day treatment or an 11-day treatment or wherever they say it is, on that 11th day, you remove it. Don't just leave it assuming that, well, you just get a little trickle down and get it whenever you get to it. So you have to be actively

engaged in the treatment and following the parameters as closely as you possibly can. You also need to remove supers to get it down onto the brood frames. It is approved in most days. but you have to check with your own state too not every state has the same approvals for treatments it is considered an organic treatment and it has always been my number two go-to if i didn't get the results i needed out of oxalic acid vaporization the other thing is it has shelf life don't buy more than you're going to use because i believe it's good for a couple of years and after that you've got an unusable product that you're just going to be throwing away so there's an expense there So my advice is follow all guidelines that come with it, personal protective equipment,

follow the venting and configurations, watch your forecast, make sure that the temperatures outside are going to be within range of the treatment. So that's it. It was too hot. You kill a bunch of bees. We had people in my bee club use it in the past. Piles of dead bees in front of their hives. It was very dramatic.

But then we realized trying to trouble. shoot that that the temperatures were way high during that period so there's a lot going on the other thing is the mite check is really important check your mites count them make sure the treatment is required because if they have a very low mite number if you're getting one or two mites out of 300 bees counted this time of year particularly too because as the drones start thinning down by the way you can expect to see higher numbers of varomites on your actual nurse bees so check for mites before and after always good because you want to know what the efficacy was if you have a insertible tray if you've got a mite sticky

board that some people have they've got screen bottoms the sticky boards underneath the be smart designs tray for example the bottom board there's a tray that goes underneath after treatment you should see a bunch of dead mites laying down there if you do a treatment and there's only one or two dead mites at the end of it that was not a very mite-loaded colony. I have people that like to send me pictures that there might count on their bottom boards, and there will be hundreds of dead mice on the bottoms of their hives

when they remove the tray or the board. And that would really alarm me where I am. I have never had mite loads like that. Many years ago, I might have, but with the bee stock that I'm currently using and the mild treatments that I'm doing, I more than have the mite loads under control, but I don't bring in unknown stock to my apiary either.

So this is, you know, I've cautioned people and tried to get people to get their mites under control before now because they're making those fat-bodied winter bees coming very soon. The health of the bees that make those bees is very important. Those are the nourished bees.

They're going to be providing the nourishment to the developing larvae, right? And then those larvae become those, winter fat-bodied nurse bees that are going to carry your colony for six months, five months, whatever it happens to be. But always, always make sure, first of all, that it's necessary to treat, my counts, and that when you do treat, follow the guidelines of the company that's providing that nod, whoever it happens to be, make sure that you're complying with everything, and that what you're using is approved by your state. So, Department of Agriculture.

so moving on question number five this comes from merlin twiggles fred i've been thinking about that green foundation for drones i thought i had one of those here i do it says i want to cut some down and throw it in my super my theory is less wax more honey what do you think there's the thing this is drone foundation this is a drone frame in fact and this is a drone frame in fact this one comes from acorn so it's heavy waxed and some people don't use it it was one of the first things that came out when people wanted to get their varomites under control you let them draw the comb out here and then of course the queen laid eggs and when she lays eggs in large cells she lays drone eggs so then the drones would get in their

capped phase here and then you would remove this frame and therefore you're removing not all of your drones are in the pupa state, but you're getting all of those varro destructor mites that are trying to reproduce in the drone cells. Now, colonies that have a lot of drone comb, and you'll see a mix sometimes. Half a frame will have worker cells, and then you'll see the drone cells, but you'll see that they're full of honey, right? So it's not a, you know, a single use cell for your bees. So if you had a frame of all drawn comb that's green like this, and they're not building drones, they may be using it for storage for honey also so to the question from merlin twiggles uh would this result in less bees wax

being used bigger cells more capacity for honey with less work for the bees and i say yeah that makes perfect sense to me uh every the smaller worker cells or be more cells on the field and therefore more cell walls and therefore more work involved in consuming honey to make those cell walls and so drone comb would be good storage for your bees. If you can get them not to use it for drones, sure. So I say, yeah, that would work and try it out. And I hope you'll share whether or not that worked, how the bees were. When you look at the flow frames, they are not quite as large as drone cells, but they are also not as small as worker cells. The key and a lot of thought went into creating cells that were too large for workers

so that your queen would not lay eggs in it. But since they use queen excluders, that doesn't matter. But not so large that a worker would lay an egg if you had laying workers, for example, in the absence of a queen. You wouldn't have a worker laying egg to produce drones. But laying workers lay their eggs in worker-sized cells in every cell they find. laying workers are just like that. So those are a little larger and deeper. So the other thing is, if we're really just trying to get more honey out of a frame without the bees doing more work and building more cells than they need to,

why not have them extend? I think this is the thinking behind why some people do nine frames in a honey super that's designed for 10 frames. They start off with all the frames very close together. As they draw out the comb, now you'll see frame spacers. Add some around here that I don't see right now. But they use frame spacers so that they're equidistant

and you get nine frames instead of 10. And then you have deeper cells, more honey. And then, of course, when you're uncapping and everything, you're not interacting with the frame itself because they've extended their honey behind, beyond the frame. I don't do that. One of the reasons I don't do it is the bees tended to create these irregular. This is the face of the honeycomb on one. This is the face of honeycomb on another. And then when you lift your frames up, if you don't pull them to the side first, they scrape into each other.

The other thing is you always have to keep your frames then. If they're deeper cells like that, you have to keep your frames in the exact same order, put them back exactly the same and so on. So none of this juxtaposing of frames around. to get like the ones that are on the ends, which are usually only half done, moving those to the middle and then taking the middle frames that are fully capped and put them to the outskirts and so on, trying to get your bees to work every frame all sides. So I think that could work, but I think before I did that, personally,

I might shift to, if that's my goal, I might shift to just nine frames, spread a little further apart, and then let them draw out deeper comb. What do you think? Sounds good to me. Question number six comes from Mike. Mike is in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. This is my first year with a lay-ins hive. The bees have been doing very well.

They quickly built out several frames with foundation and several with no foundation at all. Recently, we've had a couple of very hot temps in the hundreds and high humidity. So my lay-ins-hot. is insulated with no ventilation and in the direct sun I checked today and found a pile of dead bees in the open space of the hive the pile was approximately three inches deep by four inches wide I don't know does that mean a deep pile of dead bees during one of the hot spells a big

storm rolled in as the bees were bearded outside wondering if they had all retreated inside and subsequently died because of the heat and humidity or do I have something else to worry about. Also found some collapsed comb, no foundation. So that's foundationless comb. And that's it. So with the layens hives. Now this year where I live, northeastern United States state of Pennsylvania, we never hit 100 degrees. So I don't have these temperature issues. I will mention that the layens hives that I have, they are the ones that came from Dr. Leo Shirashkin and they came without any insulation on top you're supposed to do that yourself so they have vents on the ends at the top and they have the lambs wool insulation or

sheep's wool around the circumference wool that otherwise would be cast off that wasn't good enough to be used for wool and mills and things like that so when I looked at that and saw that it had a metal-clad roof with a very thin piece of plywood under it and then this airspace and then of course the backs of your frames which are right where your bees are there's no cover board there's no inner cover the frames themselves are they compose the cover board inside the hive so I recognize right away that for me personally I want to have insulation in there because these metal clad roofs even where I live they hit a hundred and thirty degrees plus

Fahrenheit wicked hot as it would say in Vermont. So with them getting that hot, I needed to put some kind of insulation in there. So for some I put in polystyrene, the two inch foam core, and now I use double bubble, of course. I don't want that heat transmitting to the bees. Now I'm not saying that that's what caused the death of these bees. And there's another horizontal hive company that builds lands that I want to look into Beersville Beersville Bees. B, E, A, R. s-v-v-I-L-E bees. They make really heavy-duty, well-insulated lay-ins hives. So check them out. Beersville bees. I'll try to remember to put a link down in there for them,

because it just came to mind. They do fantastic craftsmanship, and it's much heavy-duty. The hives that I got from Dr. Leo are all plywood, sides, bottoms, they're just sandwiched. and then of course that insulation inside and some of the plywood that I got bubbled out a little bit even though it's all painted Beardsville Beardsville Bees those guys it's all solid wood all really well constructed so just check them out see what's going on and I have no allegiance to either group over the other I'm just saying that there are options that seem a little better when I saw their craftsmanship at the North American Honey Bee Expo and interviewed them I was very impressed and if it didn't cost a million dollars to ship them that's just a figure of speech Very expensive to ship so you would have to be in their area. I think that's where Dr. Leo the shipping you know it's a big volume thing. It's a full-size lance because I bought his biggest one

I have two of his If it was all wood heavy dimensional lumber it would of course be very heavy to ship and that's why it costs so much But look at the way those are made and that's a really good company so if you're going to any kind of expo or bee gathering where they're going to be it would be worth reaching out and maybe bringing one of those home so if you like the land's hives those are really good and my suspicion here with this is because my hives although i don't you know we're not in the hundred so i can't make a head-to-head comparison but insulating the hive cover goes a long way to your bees being able to control what's going on inside the hive and keeping it cool

my lands hives have done extremely well basically on their own they just do fantastic so that's my advice there if you have piles of dead bees i would be really looking into your brood issues and making sure that you do a thorough inspection of that hive to find out if there's some secondary cause there because that does not sound right to me you can unless you know right off the bat oh man i don't have any insulation on the cover of the hive. I just have the lid that closes and that's it. There's no insulating material between that and the frames of the bees. That would be my number one thing. If you did not insulate that, that's a problem. If you have insulated it, now you go to the next step. Let's find out what's wrong with these bees. So if you send bees off for testing,

you need more than 100 samples. I think they ask you to put it in 70% isopropanol, and you can send them off for testing to see if something else is wrong. The other thing is you want to look at brood disease potential. Look at the brood areas. Look at the brood frames. Do you have like chewed brood? Do you have greasy looking sunken caps and things like that? Is there any chance that you might be looking at some other issue? But these are the adults that died. So if you have foul brood, that impacts brood. But you would see like secondary problems like to form wing virus and things like that. So look at the dead bees too. Look at their physical condition. Are there examples of the wings being shriveled up or almost non-existent?

Is there other evidence that there's some other kind of issue going on with the hive? Some of you may have troubles diagnosing your hives, and that's why I'm going to recommend honey bees and their maladies. I've mentioned this before. This is not-for-profit. This is the extension.psu.edu. So that's Pennsylvania State University Extension. office publishes this honeybees and their maladies are a frequent thing that I reference when you want

to show people what they're looking for with brew disease and things like that it's pocket size it's really good this is a revised edition you can just Google that and get one I highly recommend that you'd be informed regarding how to diagnose bee problems the other thing is dead bees don't tell us a lot if they were still alive if some were still walking around you can also observe their behavior do they tremble a lot do they seem disoriented are there secondary issues that tell us that this is not just heat right very unusual to have bees get overheated and die in piles like that even with a storm that comes through unless they flooded but with the land's hive the other thing is all my

hives are well off the ground so that's something I think about too with the people that are dealing with all the water and all the rain that's going around the country in a lot of places I would definitely have steel pose driven in the ground and I would have all of my hives elevated off the ground and hopefully you're not in a floodplain that kind of thing but I think about that I've elevated all my hives because of skunks but that definitely also benefits me when it comes to if water were to rush through several inches of water would not impact any of my beehives so there are a lot of things to think about and if I were in some kind of floodplain I would

make sure that I drove some heavy-duty T posts in. I've posted videos on how to make with electrical conduit, metal conduit, how to make hive stands that adjust to any terrain. So you can drive those in and use soil friction or soil compaction to support your hive stand. And a lot of those have been out there for 17, 18 years without moving. They work really well. So that's the last question oh here we go here's question number seven here i thought i was done this comes from dustin from bilverdi texas i like this question because it's funny says good afternoon fred i made it to all of your presentations last year at the north american honeybee expo so for those you are wondering do i have any schedule that i've posted of where i will be giving presentations i'll just give you some

quick ones right now I will be at the January North American Honeybee Expo in Louisville Kentucky I will also be a keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association I will also be a keynote speaker at the Texas Beekeepers Association Austin Texas and so says here and I'm looking forward to the above average presentation that is my target zone to give you something above average and so you Dustin's going to be at all these. So I hope he says hello. Anywhere. The real purpose of me sending this message is my wife really wanted me to purchase a coffee mug with a priceless artwork that Picasso, I mean your wife, left on the fridge to remind you to feed your chickens. Okay, so long story short,

and the original artwork is not handy. It's locked away in a vault. Incredibly valuable. it's an illustration that's incredibly realistic you'll think you're looking at an actual chicken but it is just a drawing so for dustin and others and i did appreciate that at the north american honeybee expo some people had her chicken rendering on their shirts so it's almost an inside joke my wife did a sketch on a little sticky put it on the microwave so i would see it and it says don't forget the chickens and she actually illustrated a chicken which i was very impressed by so we turned it into t-shirt shirts and I'm surprised that I did not put up coffee mugs so anyway now at fred's fine products it's called on tea spring Fred's fine products and I'll put a link down in the video description also

I've added the coffee cup and you'll see right away the very distinctive I think it's a rooster not sure but you'll see what we're talking about and so those coffee cups are now available and so for Dustin, tell your wife, thank you for appreciating that. And that's it. So that's out there. Now we're in the fluff section. So Friday the 13th. I don't have to tell you, robbing pressure is rising here in the northeastern United States.

Resources will start to dwindle. The colonies are maxing out their size, which means they have a lot of extra foragers out there, which means they're inspecting every little nook and cranny looking for something to get, to bring back. to their hive. So this also means that any colonies that are in a weaker state, any colonies of bees that have a lot of resources in there, but they don't have the bee power to defend it, we need to help them defend it by reducing their entrances now. So what size entrance? Let me get specific. My year-round entrance size now is three-eight-s of an inch high because that prevents shrews, mice, everything from getting in because temperatures are going to be getting cooler,

and these weakened colonies will also be targets for rodents to move into at night when the temperatures drop so 3 eighths inch we'll keep those out three-eighths of an inch by three to four inches in width would be enough for them to defend it if you've got wide open entrances because of the nectar flow or something like that it's time to get out there and start narrowing those down prevention in this case is worth a pound to cure as always if you've get honey bees forget the wasps they're not yet the dangerous ones out there right now the danger is from other honey bees and once they get in once they get resources they're going to be all over the place

they're just like criminals they're trying to get in your back door they're checking all the little nicks and crannies i was using the new cirracell beast buster bottom board which has a little wasp trap built into the bottom in the back I took that out because it was actually collecting a lot of bees and the thing of course is, well, the only bees that would be going in back there under that piece buster bottom board would be bees looking to rob other bees. So I didn't really want to trap and kill a bunch of those. So I've pulled the trays out. I might put it back later when the culprits become wasp.

But for right now, I'm not interested in trapping even the robber honey bees. Because if they find a colony that there's a reason why they're going to the sides and the bottom and the back, They don't want to go through the entrance because there are some guard bees there. So they're trying to back door them. So keep your entrances narrow enough and size it to the colony that you have. And look at the number of guard bees that are on the landing board because there are going to be issues really quick. That's it. Swarm alerts. As you saw in the opening sequence, I had a swarm yesterday.

I collected them. I've got them. I'm going to combine them with another colony of bees. So a weaker colony. but just be aware it's not too late for swarms around here northeastern united states anyway harvest uh for me next week that's my last honey harvest for the year that's it after that everything that is going to be building for the end of september and into october those are resources that are just going to fortify the colonies to get themselves through winter hopefully without any feeding necessary of course if you've hired a swarm or something like that

you're going to have to feed them because they are going to have to have to have to have a situation where there's a lot of attrition going on. The swarms that you hive now, if you're trying to put it out there by itself, they're not having replacements. So normally a colony this time of year is seeing 1,500 new worker bees every single day. And colonies like that with a, they've newly swarmed and you've hived them up, they're losing about 500 bees every single day. So if you don't have a nice big swarm going in there, it's a little one, then it's a of attrition they're just going to be losing bees as they go and i have a lot of thoughts on that but that's not what we're here to talk about today but anyway so i'm harvesting honey next week that'll be it

after that we're starting to look at backing down next week coming up tuesday have an interview coming up with the author of that book right there Hillary kearney so we're going to talk to her i did interview her before before this book came out but now the book is published it's available on Amazon, probably other places too. It's called The Heart of the Hive by Hillary Kearney. It's a really good book. And we're going to talk to her because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. First of all, she did the audible version of that.

She narrated her own book. And you know, they made her try out for that. So I have questions for Hillary. We're going to find out exactly what that process was like and how she got through it. Yellow Jacket Update. Some people, you talk about an unpopular. video, show a video about yellow jackets in your yard sometime and see how many beekeepers are interested in learning about it. You would think beekeepers of all people would want to

understand the biology of yellow jackets and hornets and other things that may have an impact on your bees as well as the environment that your bees are getting the resources from. But people don't seem to care. I care. That's why I'm going to be showing you that my yellow jacket nest actually inside the suet cage is doing really well and I think they're doing what I thought they would do which means well you just have to watch I'm gonna leave you with a cliffhanger there for those of you the three of you out there who care about the yellow jacket was I'm going to get you up close and personal we're going to do a recap check them out if you haven't seen them already let's see what else there's a beekeeping breakfast coming up this Wednesday this is

for members of my bee club that might be watching, don't forget, Wednesday morning, 9 to 11, beekeeping breakfast. And I'll give what else? Water, water, water, I say here. Make sure, with the heat, people that are in areas that are super hot, I know this doesn't make any sense of the people that are being rained on right now.

We have a huge storm system working its way up through the south. But keep lots of water available for your bees in the same spot. over and over. Bees pick a favorite water spot. The water bees go out to that spot. They check it over and over. Dr. Seeley and his students studied water bees and found that they searched the same little four inch space. The same bees come back to that exact spot. So if they find the water's gone then they don't do such a good job of keeping your hive. The humidity where it needs to be high or low. They can fan it away to cool it down. They also spread

water all over the surface of your brood and they fan their wings to keep that nice and cool through evaporation water is in demand year round with your beehives so make sure you have plenty of fresh water a good source for them i don't want to say what i'm trying to do because of it fails i just have people asking about it and then i have to constantly say that it fails because i'm trying to make my own i have a water wall which is just a bunch of cinder blocks stacked up and i have a fog nozzle that fogs water on it until it gets all wet and trippy and I want to have Ronead I need moss all over it but then I was watching these YouTube I'm sure you've heard of it I watch a YouTube video about how to make my own in this case or

making their own concrete boulders so they were look-alike boulders but I got some ideas why don't I use this concrete mix this lightweight mix and make my own water features for my bees to feed at because you can mess with the concrete anyway of course there will be a video about that and I'm going to make my own drinkers and stuff so it won't just be the cinder blocks now I want to have this little cascading series of pools and I don't need to tell you more because I want you to obviously watch the video so that's it if you have questions please submit them in through the website the way to be go to the page mark the way to be fill out the form and you can of course comment under videos

that's potluck i do my very best respond to each and every single comment on each and every video because i don't want to miss something so i hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead and then everything is going well for you and your bees thanks so much for being here and watching