The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers Episode 278 Lost Queens, Absconding, Drying your honey down on a budget.

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

This is the audio track from Today's YouTube video:  https://youtu.be/7IKMR6jFP4c October 4th 2024

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, October the 4th of 2024. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and answers episode number 278. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here with me today. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please go down in the video description and look at all the information there.

There will be links and additional stuff that you might be interested in. And of course topic by topic. It's all going to be in order there. So you might be wondering before we get started, what's going on outside? Well I'm glad you asked because it's super nice out there. 72 degrees Fahrenheit and 1.5 milliner are wind. So basically no wind and guess what? The bees can dry out their late season honey because it is only 57% relative humidity here in the northeastern United States state of Pennsylvania, the Keystone State.

So you might be wondering what's going on outside as far as the blooms go? Well, sad but true. Golden rod is gone. It's done. It's turned brown. It's not golden anymore. But we do have asters, so that's good news. The cosmos are still blooming.

And of course, I plant those. The asters are just everywhere. They're fantastic. By the way, I think the app is called Eye Nature. And you can take a picture of any wildfire that you find here in the United States, of course. And click on that and find out exactly what the species of plant is that you're looking at. It's fantastic because it's classified by the leaf or the fruit or the flower or the bark in case of many trees. And it's fantastic because there's so many asters out there. I had no idea.

New England aster's are the coolest ones right now. In my opinion, Maximilian sunflowers are blooming fantastic. I have the tallest maximum sunflower stalks I have ever had. They come back every year on their own, the cosmos I have to plant. Maximilian sunflowers are just visited by a lot of different pollinators. And right now I have some of their 12, 13 feet. I haven't measured them, but they're so high. I don't even know what to say about it. I wonder if that's the case for you too.

There may be some subtypes of the Maximilian sunflower, but I planted a bunch of them well worth it. and let's see there's some white clover it's not very good right now borage is still holding its own not a lot of blossom so not very many bees on it because if there's borage over here and there are asters over there by the thousands you can't drive down a highway in the state of pennsylvania right now especially the state highway system and look at all the asters in the ditches there's a lot out there So what else? Let's see. Oh yeah, for those of you who are asking about the smoker fuel, the switchgrass smoker pellets that we were selling through the nonprofit, the Northwest Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association.

I'm sorry to say that those are suspended until further notice. Why, Fred, did they work? Were they bad? What was wrong with them? No, the amount of work that it was taking to ship them out to people was just too much for the volunteers. so now we're taking a break. So I do appreciate those who supported that fundraiser to help with honeybee education and our outreach programs. So that's pretty much it. If you want to know how to submit your own topic for consideration,

please go to my main website, which is the way to be.org, and there's a page marked The Way to Be. You click on that tab. There's a form. You fill it out, and you send it to me. Some people depending on the browser that you're on have noted that it might look like an unsecure site. That is not a big deal.

It is a secure site. It has a certificate. It has a security certificate. But that is only a big concern if you're actually shopping on a website. Like if you're downloading stuff or if you are using some kind of online wallet system or you're buying products direct, there's none of that going on to the website. So go ahead and click, I feel safe and get right in there because it also might alert you because the title of the website might differ from the way to be.org because it's also Fred's Finefowl.com because I'm also a poultry technician. So there you go. It's all in one website. Otherwise it'd have to pay for all these things individually. So you can submit a topic that's interesting to you or a question that you might have. And maybe you've got a question that can't wait. You have to know right now. Join the fellowship. The Way to Be Fellowship on Facebook, 100% free.

The only requirement is that it be about bees, you can't post any spam, and there are zero politics there. So, that's refreshing. Go and join the Way to Be Fellowship. Fantastic. Great moderators. All right, I'm going to jump right into the very first question of the day, which comes from Brad. And Brad is a longtime viewer, long-time commenter. and also a photographer, by the way. So it says right here, Frederick, I have a super that is mostly uncapped,

and I want to dry and dehydrate. Do you have any ideas for me on how to do this without buying anything? Or if there's something you would recommend, please do. Grateful. Okay, so here's a thing. This is something that a lot of us are facing, depending on what part of the country you're in,

it doesn't matter, really. here in the northeastern US we get a lot of wet weather this time of year and you have to pack down your hives as things get cold because we've got temps that night into the 30s right now Brad is also in the northeastern United States so you probably have similar weather when you go to pull these things off you may find that half of the frame half of the face of the comb is uncapped even though you're pulling the honey is it good so the first thing I would recommend because I'm going to tell you lots of things to do. It's a tough sell because Brad doesn't want me to mention anything that you would buy. So in other words, I don't know what's out in your tool shed or your garage or your kitchen or

your basement or your attic. I don't know what things you have available. So there's a risk that I could recommend that you buy something. But before you do that, the number one thing that you should have, see I didn't say buy, a refractometer. If you don't know what a refractometer is, please Google it. Go to the YouTube. Go to my YouTube. channel which is Frederick Dunn and in the top right there's a line with a little search magnifying glass there type in refractometer and I do comparisons of a bunch of different ones from the cheapest one to the most expensive one that I know about that's used by state inspectors food inspectors and stuff like that if you don't have a refractometer you're kind of flying blind to begin with

there are some cheap ones 29 30 bucks and just go for the ones that have good reviews and learn to use them. And that's what, of course, the tutorials for online. So first of all, test those open cells because I've been doing that. Now, we did come across some wet honey because I pulled off a whole super because I'm packing down for winter. And I'll explain a little bit about that later too, but it was wet honey. What is wet honey? How much moisture is too much moisture? Okay. If you're above 19% water in your honey, to me, that's too much. If you talk to a state inspector, what passes this honey for bottling and processing and stuff like that. Under 20% is what one of them told me.

So I'm voting for 18-something. Because if you go from 19 to 20, there's a risk of fermentation, depending on how you store and care for your honey. The other thing is above 20-year guarantee fermentation and it doesn't pass any inspection. So the other thing you have to consider is the tolerance of the equipment that you're using.

So if you've got a refractometer that's inexpensive and maybe it has an accuracy of plus or minus 3% or something like that, then you need to fail safe. So you need to have a calibration standard for that refractometer. So you find somebody that has a more expensive system, a more accurate system like the MISCO unit that tests, and that's what inspectors use. Inspectors have to have the tightest tolerances when it comes to refractometers. Why? Because they may be rejecting a ton, a literal ton of honey. So they have to be right when they say it's too wet and so on. And there's a low limit too, by the way, which is really interesting to me. And I don't know right off the top of my head what it is, but if it's at 13% moisture, that honey becomes suspect, according to the inspectors. So look up that parameter too. Honey can be too dry. So for me, the target zone, 17 to 18% right around in there. Now the question here is, how can I dehydrate it without spending any money?

But you should know, I care about your back, about your posture, and I don't want a thick wallet to make you sit crooked and maybe hurt your lumbar region. So I recommend thinning the wallet by shopping for new stuff. And I hope you understand that that's a joke, that I'm being funny. Okay, let's think about how the bees dry out there, honey. First of all, make sure it's honey. because sometimes depending on the time of year although it's not a risk right now but if you did this at some times of the year they're trying to control the humidity inside the hive and some bees actually bring in water and they can actually put water in some cells so in a dry area so they also paint the surfaces but

make sure it's actually honey so when the bees get the nectar from the flower that is sucrose so they collect the sucrose and guess what there are enzymes in their honey stomach which is also known as the honey crop because it really isn't an area where anything gets digested but this enzyme is called invertase. Now what it does is even while the bee is bringing this home to the hive it is starting to invert the sugar. Okay so invertase creates invert sugar and then that end up ends up being glucose and fructose and those percentages of glucose and fructose can change

and I'm not going to get deep into that because I don't think that's while you're here. You just want to dry it down, but what I'm suggesting is it's being processed into honey already by the bees on their way back. Now when that bee hits the landing board, gets inside the hive, and like right now, it sounds like there are swarms in every tiny bee yard right now because we have temperatures in the 70s, a sunny day, and we have lots of nectar and lots of pollen out there for them to get. So they're zipping really fast. Bees are efficient. So when those foragers come in with that nectar in their crop, they go immediately to another bee.

Now, they might do a waggle dance, but I think most of the bees in the hive right now, most of the foragers know where to go. So not every bee coming back will do a waggle dance, particularly if that same waggle dance of the same location is already going on. So they'll pass it off to what I call storekeeper bees. Those are bees who have never left the hive. So this is they're healthy, they're clean, they haven't been out in the dirt.

and they take the nectar from the bee that flies in that foraged for it. So when they do that, guess what they're doing? There is some drying that's going on when they're passing from B to B, and also there's more of that enzyme being added to alter the sugars. And so they may pass that to a couple of different ones, but at least one other bee, aside from the forager, is going to transfer that resource, and they will put it into a cell.

Now when they first put it into the cell, it occupies depending on the source of it. We're assuming they're not robbers, because if they're robber bees, that's honey that requires no further processing. That means they get in there, they stole the honey from some other bees, they flew back to the hive, they passed that on, it goes immediately into the cell, they fill cells with that, and they start capping it right away. So the 100% gain for the bees with the least amount of effort is to rob other bees, but that's not what we're going to talk about. So let's say they got it from flowers. They didn't mug the neighborhood, you know, other bees that couldn't hold their own. And so then when that bee puts it in, the storekeeper bee, they spread it out. They create more surface area.

So bees are telling us more surface area that quicker it will dry down. Now how do they dry it? Well, they don't pick up a dehumidifier, which I'm going to suggest that you get if you don't already have one. But they fan it. So for us, let's think about that. Could we fan or honey? Sure could. So we turn on a fan. Fans are cheap, by the way.

So I'm sure Brad's already got one. I'm not telling him to go out and get one. Maybe borrow one from a neighbor. Oscillating fans, unnecessary. You want to aim it right at the surface of whatever your container of honey is. You can even do this to the frames themselves because I've done that. Put them on a rack. Put the whole box into my dehydrator, which isn't,

free, sorry, and then you blow fans at it and you circulate the air. And what else do the bees do? The colony is probably pretty warm in there. So this combination of warmth and air movement accelerates the evaporation of the water from the honey. So even though they spread it out over all of the cells on a frame, I'm sure you've seen that before, within a couple of days, it's right down to about half that space and it's more dense. So they've evaporated off the water and that's when they start topping off those cells and that's when they start capping them so we want to do that we want to dry it down before we extract it so air movement dry air so there is something i want to mention i use a indoor plant growing tent those things are

very inexpensive it is never going to wear out vivarium vivo sun is the company that I use. And I'm sure it was sold in the past to people that were growing cannabis and stuff like that, but I use it to dry out honey. So I can even put jars of honey on a rack in this space. And why do I put it inside a drape? Because the larger room that it's in has a much higher humidity level. So if I put these into a smaller drape like a Vivo sun, and it's not a big one, although I would recommend getting the biggest one that you can put in the space that you hope to use it for. And so I put fans in there, they clip to the frame, I put a dehumidifier in there, and just the fan

from the dehumidifier runs. So it's not dehumidifying per se. So how do I get the moisture out of the air? I'm glad you asked. I'm sorry if this would cost you money. This stuff is called damp rid. This is a big bucket of it. It says high capacity. This is four pounds. This is a four pound bucket. Now I have this in a lot of rooms in my house, specifically storage rooms like your basement and stuff. Since I have these things in my basement, I don't have any musty smell. So the moisture is way down. So this helps in a lot of different ways. But now we're talking about drying out the honey. So I have two of these sitting on the floor in my Vivo son. They come just like this. You pull off the top and you're in business. How long does this last?

How much moisture does it collect? Well, it doesn't really have to collect much moisture. And I've had it in there. I haven't replaced one of these buckets for two years. And there is a gauge on the side. There's the level. Right here is a little window on it. that shows when the moisture gets up to here or whatever, that discard when absorbed moisture reaches this line. It couldn't be simpler than that. So damp rid four pound size. Because they don't play games.

Got a whole bunch of them. Now, I was talking to somebody else recently who said, you know what they used to dry out their honey? They put it in their bathroom. And they run the dehumidifier in there. Do humidifiers use of a lot of energy, by the way? Now think about your bathroom. When somebody says they put it in their bathroom,

I also ask this questions when people put it in the basement. Where do they use? Usually the utility room is the laundry room also. What else is in there? Well, in my neck of the woods, there's a sun pump in there. So the sun pump often has a basket that goes under grade, and there's about six inches of water standing in it. Is that a problem if you're trying to dehumidify your honey

over here in the corner? Sure, because that's also contributing moisture to the air and challenging your dehumidification system. Bathroom, what's in there? Your toilet. You just close a toilet lid? That doesn't do it because there's little vent spaces around the rim of the toilet lid. So you're going to have to saran wrap that thing. Also, you're going to close all your drains. Why? Because there's a pea trap under your sink. There's a pea trap under your shower and there's another p trap under your tub which might also be your shower. But that pea trap, it's called the p trap because it's shaped like a p. Anyway, you cover it so that there's no water surface exposure because if we're trying to dry things down, close off all the

things under your control and make the space as dry as possible. Now turn on your fans have the heat. So at a bare minimum, we need three things. Refractometer. Because we have to know. Otherwise, how do we know if it's doing any good? You need a fan. You need air movement. Stagnant air. We all know what that's like. You go out and stagnant air on a hot summer night after a rain and it gets really hot. There's no relief from the rain because there's no air movement that can help you evaporate the perspiration from your skin, for example. So we need air movement to get the moisture out of the honey. So you need a fan, you need a refractometer, and I think that's the bare minimum and a way to increase the heat unless you want it to be there for a long time.

So that's why the big time beekeepers have hot rooms where they stage all their stuff, all the pallets come in with everything, and it's warmed up into the 90 degree area, 98, 99 degrees Fahrenheit, and they move the air around and they have several industrial size dehumidifiers going on in there. We don't need that. Besides that, it would cost Brad a lot of money to set that up. So let's talk about what these things cost just for kicks. If you went to Home Depot, Menards, Lowe's, whatever your home center is, the two pounds, so the half-sized ones of that, because you don't need a four-pounder. They're $12.97 a piece if you buy them online and they ship them to you. So, uh, the other thing is, uh,

the space heater. Let's say you're trying to do this in your basement. You're going to want to warm things up. Look, I just happen to have a space heater here. These things are cheap. Now, this one happens to be set to exactly 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So these work for controlling the temperature. And look, it even has a little plunger on the bottom. So if it fell over, it would shut itself off. But where I'm setting it up, there's no movement. So as a backup plan, let's say I had to dry down some honey midwinter. It never happens. but it could better to have it not need it as they say so i set this inside my vivo sun growing tent designed for cannabis used for honey so this oscillates if you needed to i don't need it to do that so this moves air around in that closed environment it also provides the heat necessary to

accelerate that process so now we have if you're willing to spend some money so maybe you're You're not like Brad. You're willing to spend money on things that you don't have to buy a lot of, by the way. Just think of all the money you're going to get for the honey, which rhymes with money. And that's not funny. It's a great way for you to make a living, a sideline living off of your honeybees. Okay, so I think that's it for Brad. Without buying anything, you better have stuff around or friends you can borrow from. But that's it. I think I covered it.

That's how we dry it down. And then once it's dry, get that stuff, run it through a 200 micron filter. While it's hot, by the way, it's another advantage to warming it up because that 200 micron filter, it's hard to get your honey through it if it's only going to be 70 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit. You want that up into the 90s. 105 would be perfect because your honey processing time then is really fast. Moving on to question number two. This comes from Captain Brian's bees.

Had a late season swarm, I was able to catch and retain the queen. Will she be able to lay enough winter brood? And will the hive she swarmed from be able to get their new queen mated and laying? This is a question I'm getting a lot this time of year. So would I, now in the past, let's cover all angles here to some degree. In the past, like let's say I walk in. outside right now. You know, we're in October. Let's say I see a swarm, you know, that my bees demonstrate poor judgment. They swarm out. They're on a tree branch. What am I going to do with them now?

Well, what I do with them now would be different than what I'd done with them would have done with them years ago. So years ago, I just like to see if they could make it. So I get underdog swarms like that. I have them up to see what happens and celebrate myself, my own achievement, if the bees somehow make it through winter. This year I don't do that anymore. Why? Because I'm at capacity. I don't want any more bees, right? So this presents us with a pickle, right? Because part of this is too late to get their new queen mated and laying before winter. I would say it is. If nothing else, huge demand on them because what's happening right now. Test me out on this. Go out at sunrise, look at your landing boards and see how many drones are

being tossed out, a lot of them. They're kicking the drones out right and left. So it's not a good drone time. So it's not a good time for them to fly. The drone congregation areas probably don't have very many males hanging out. So the queen may have to make multiple flights. Here's the other problem. Okay. The environment now is different than it was in spring. And by that I mean, there are more predators out there that have maximized their capability to hunt queens on the wing. So speaking specifically about the Northeastern United States, there are more dragonflies on the wing right now than there would be in June. Right now, in June, there would be Queen Wasp, the Vespaday would all be out there hunting things,

but there aren't very many of them because they're all just getting started out. So what's going on here now? All of these wasp nests are maxed out. They have their biggest populations, their biggest numbers, their biggest numbers. They have the most hunters on the wing of any other time of year. So it is more treacherous for your queen to get out there, get mated, and make it back without being nabbed right out of the air by one of these masters of the sky known as a dragonfly. They're big, they're capable, and you know what? They have a hundred percent success rate

once they target something, which I find very interesting. So this is not the time of year. to count on them to do it but let's say you wanted to let them do their thing i'm going to recommend a nucleus hold for the queen so if we've got the queen you collected the swarm put the swarm in a tiny nucleus hive two or three frames and this is your insurance policy this is just what i would do so i mean there may be other people that'll say to do different things and many different things could still work i'm going to suggest that you do this as an insurance policy So you take your queen isolation cage. I'm going to explain why this is a win-win.

You take this queen isolation cage and this is with your swarm that you just hived. And look, there's frames in here. These happen to be better comb, better frames. Okay, better be frames by better comb. Okay, also known as hexa-sel if you're in Hungary. Now we put her in here, look this, this is a double one. And what's going to happen is, let's say the queen is super productive, but we don't care about production in this.

We just want to retain the queen for a while, right? So, keep her long enough to get the new queen mated. So how much time do we need to figure that out? So we'll put the queen in here and we'll put a single frame of brute. So pull one of these combs, that's full, and put in a single frame of brood. Now would I put this in the hive that we took them out to take care of the swarm? No, I would put empty placeholders in there, not frames of the bees would start to work. So what kind of placeholder am I talking about?

I'm talking about frame feeders, which I don't use to feed the bees inside the hive. I put frame feeders in the hive that I'm taking these frames out of as a placeholder because I'll have two frames in here, therefore I need two spaces in the hive, because when that colony fails to replace their queen, and the queen fails to get maided, and she doesn't come back and start producing eggs in two to three weeks, because now we're in the last couple of weeks of October. If she's not doing that, they're in trouble, or are they?

They're not in trouble. Why? Because Captain Brian saved the queen, and the queen was productive in this queen isolation cage, and she's been laying eggs in here and she's got brood with her that take care and they're taking care of the brood. She's got enough bees to do that work.

And then, because it's a swarm, right, they're ready to do stuff. And then after that failure, we come back like heroes. Now, the reason they're all here and kept on this is because we don't want brood spread out through multiple frames. We only want two because we're only going to be able

to put two back in the original hive after their failure and we get to come back and save the colony. In the meantime, there's no lost time because the queen has continued to produce her eggs. The old queen did, and they fed them in their larvae and everything else now. And on the eighth day, they're going to be kept. So now they're in the pupa state. So they're low maintenance by that point.

They only need to be kept warm. And so that second week to the third week, when we're sure that there's no new queen in there and they're desperate for a new queen, we don't just bring back the queen. we bring back brood and they're in full production and they're fine. They're going to survive. I think that's a much better way to go. What are your thoughts about that? Now let's say you're like Brad.

You don't want to buy anything. You're done buying stuff. You don't want to buy a queen isolation cage and you don't have one. And by the way, for those of you are wondering, those come from Better Bees. So you can go get one. I highly recommend you have these on the shelf ready together. There's so many uses for them. Okay, so we don't want to do all that.

Next recommendation, send all those bees back where you got them from. So we get them on frames in the new, where you've hived your swarm. Find the queen, remove the queen. So their swarm mode, here's the thing. You remove their queen, her pheromone's gone. We cannot have eggs in there. So we don't want her in production. This has to happen fast.

because if she lays eggs even though it's a swarm and then you kill the queen what are they going to do they're going to try to replace their queen so they're going to start to make queen cells is an impossible thing at this time of year so well okay not impossible highly improbable so you take the queen away and you move them right back into the original colony strong queen pheromone they won't be building queen cells and all that and they're all good to go so you bring it back together if by some they made of their new queen and everything is good there. We get rid of the old queen and put them back because now we can see that she's laying and stuff. What do you think about that? I think those are great options. So and you have this option straight away, which by the way, I will talk about this because I played around with some late season swarms already last month. So the month of September, I took a seven gallon bucket, which I highly recommend. This is things are really tall standard five gallon white plastic food grape bucket is what some people use I like the sevens and I took a queen excluder look I just happen to have one here I like the queen excluders to have wooden frames on them like this one I took the bucket I shook all the bees off the tree branch that they were on into the bucket slick sided bucket put this on as the lid sat it down in the bee yard right I want to make sure the queen's in there so what do they do well they did

their scouting they checked everything out and they tried to go and move to a new location but their queen couldn't go with them now that means I have this queen under my control and I can get rid of her there's still in swarm mode if I wanted to get rid of the queen and by that I mean killer make queen lure if you want to some people do that by putting her body in isopropanol I guess it makes them feel good that the queen wasn't wasted. But if you kill the queen and they come back and they can't get her to go anywhere because now she's gone, thanks to you, the jerk, who took away the queen, maybe you've got a friend who's queenless, you could give her to them.

And then what happens to the swarm population? They end up going back to the original colony and guess what else they do? They disperse amongst the other colonies in your apiary. It's pretty interesting. They drift all over the place. So they don't all just go back. Early on, when I started keeping bees and I used to play with swarms all the time, I was obsessed with it. Catch the queen, see what they do, put the queen over here, see if they follow her,

all this stuff. And you begin to learn that those foragers are up for any new home. Not just that. What makes them a welcome addition to any colony of bees that you have? The fact that they're fully loaded, they're full of resources. They loaded up before they swarmed. they're capable of making new beeswax features inside a hive. So this time of year, that's rare. They would be in demand. So they will not have troubles finding a home. So that saved you from having to start a handicapped colony.

The colony is going to need help all the time until they get up to full strength. So you can remove the queen. Queen Excluter on top of the bucket that I shook this worm in that helps me find the queen if nothing else. So when they swarm away, because guess what, I'll stick with this for a minute. When they think they found a new area to go to, which is going to be better than the bucket that you provided them so generously, the seven-gallon white food grade bucket, when they all fly away to this new location,

the only one left in here is going to be the queen and a handful of other beads that didn't depart with the rest of them. It makes it so easy for you to find it. And that was my goal, was to find a way to isolate the queen to make sure I had her. And doing that, queen excluder on a bucket. Works great. All right, question number three. And if you have more questions, if I didn't explain something very well, please write in the comment section. I'm glad to add information that will help clear up the fuzzy picture that I've created for you.

Michael here says, honey leaves, stains. in porous stone. Maybe you have noticed that honey leaves a dark stain in porous stone. I've tried pressure washing and that removes some of the dark stain. I'm guessing it's the hydrophilic nature. Do you have any ideas or other ideas to remove these stains? So here's the thing. I don't have an answer for Michael.

So why is it part of my Q&A today? Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to crowdsource this. You are now being tasked because I want to know we have all these viewers we have all of these people that pay attention that check in and like to know things like to learn things but also like to share what they know so I'm inviting you to share what you know about getting stains from honey out of porous stone what's your method what do you do how does it work does somebody have a YouTube video on that I couldn't find one So if you have a way of doing that, cleaning that up, one of the things I think about, this has nothing to do with bees, but it has to do with stained stone. When I was photographing bats in bat caves and places where, and barns where the bats would be in the summertime with all their offspring, so each bat has a single baby bat, right? And they heavily stain the surface that they're clinging to, not to mention the guano that falls straight down below. them but I see lots of stained stone up there and that's what I visualized is that stained stone that you would find in caves and stuff when honey also stains for a

stone how would you get it out how would you get it out share your thoughts let's help Michael out and the rest of us who may have that question or concern I know how to get beeswax out of things just through heat and then use an absorbent material to draw it out but the honey itself staining things I I don't know. I couldn't find an answer, don't have an answer, and I don't have any to test it on. I guess I would have to actively stain something and then try to reverse what I did. But that's it. How do you get honey out of honey stains out of porous stone? Moving on to question number four comes from David.

The case of the vanished bees. Hi Fred, my stepfather lives in Carmel Heights just south of Monterey, California. Monterey Bay. Fantastic area. I've been up there. I love that part of the country. Anyway, California in May this year was lucky enough to have a large swarm bivouac on a dwarf magnolia tree in easy reach. As it happens, I had gifted him a six-frame layens swarm trap in which he had a local beekeeper transferred the swarm. There's an old local feral hive in a hollow eucalyptus tree, just down the road from the house, and I assume that was a source of the bees. The bees were extremely gentle and appeared to be doing very well.

One thing notable was they were very late risers, probably due to the temperatures there, being always on the cool side. They rarely ventured out before 11 a.m. in late July, and I watched numerous bees bring in pollen and observed several drones outside the hive. Ooh, that's key. Several drones outside the hive. This ties in to what I think happened. By September, something went terribly wrong and the bees appear to have absconded.

When I examined the hive, there were no bees living or dead in or around the hive. The hive was spotlessly clean, except for some torn caps, which were clear signs of robbing. whatever honey had been left behind. Anyway, since there were no dead bees, it seemed to me that the robbing occurred after they left. The frames were all fully built out, which is significant since, this is another part, only half started with foundation. As can be seen in the photos, so a bunch of photos were sent with this. Anyway, all looked like they were used for brood with minimal honey stores near the tops of the frames. It looks like there may be some queen cells, but I'm not an expert. enough to know if they were used. Question is, did the bees abscond? And if so, why did the bees abscond?

Okay, so I actually like this kind of stuff. Why did the bees abscond? And we need a thorough history. We need good records on what's been going on with this colony. But listen to these descriptions, bad beekeeper overall. Sorry to be the one to point that out. Because here's the thing. We noticed earlier on, right? These have been there since May of this year. So full summer. There were some issues though, look, only drones outside the hive. What's that tell you? Which be inside a hive will produce drones? Laying workers.

Why would there be laying workers? No queen. Or a queen that's not productive, right? So by September, something went terribly wrong. Okay, so July, we saw nothing with drones, and in September something went terribly wrong. wrong. So we had the entire month of August to take a look. This is why I recommend if you're a backyard beekeeper. First of all, get out in your bee yard as often as you can. It doesn't bother your bees

one bit for you to take your coffee or whatever you like drinking, sit out there and stare at the landing boards and see what the activity is like. See who's coming and going. See what they're doing. And then you'll start to notice, wow, there's nothing but drones in this one. What's going on? it wouldn't have hurt to open the hive then and look inside and find out the way at a queenless situation. Now, the abscond claim, right? Listen to this, though. Did they abscond or did they dwindle down to nothing? Because then the colony was robbed, but here's the thing.

When a colony is robbed, there's usually a lot of waste material spread on the landing board on the bottom of the hive. So I don't see that address here, but it says that all the frames were cleaned. Does that also mean the bottom board was clean? and was it a solid bottom board? If it is, now it's not just a matter of being robbed out. They could have consumed their own resources because as they dwindle, what do they lose? When they start dwindling, which means that the older bees are just dying out.

So once they're foraging, they're only good for a couple of weeks, and then they're burnout and they're done. So then we have to, as we lose numbers, they start to forage earlier. In other words, they don't wait until going into their fifth week of lunch. life to start to forage outside the hive. They might be doing that at the third week or the fourth week early in the fourth week, right? And so they might be prematurely wearing themselves out because they don't have replacement brood coming up of workers. Instead, they're just making drones. Drones will be consumers. They'll put a demand and a strain on them. And I think that part of the country doesn't get

much colder than 60 degrees. I believe when I was there, it was between 60 and 80. year round like it never got colder than 60 never hotter than 80 it was that's why all those retired admirals live up there it's it's a perfect area so anyway they could have dwindled and just used up all the resources inside the hive as they tried to hold their own until they spent their lives out but you would tend to see some capped drones at the end because eventually they don't have enough bees to keep them warm while they emerge right So now, but let's look at some other things. Let's say the conditions were different.

A clean-up scound, all the bees would have to decide to go without splitting, without creating a swarm, without doing what they are genetically designed to do, which is cast a swarm, keep a colony present that they cast from, right? So if they're all just going to leave, we have to consider now, what are the conditions inside the hive, right? So one of the things is they can just flat outgrow the space, but it doesn't sound like it because this is a layens hive and there were six frames Yeah six frame lands swarm trap So it is a swarm trap but the lanes frames are pretty darn big

So they could have outgrown it, but generally when they outgrow a space like that Let's make a comparison to nucleosides that we use as resources When their populations build and they're jammed in their shoulder to shoulder what they do is they swarm they don't just leave all together So I'm going to say it's not the size of the hive that caused them to leave. So let's move on. We'll check that off. The next one, and this is speculatory, look in those cells because it says the cells are super clean, but I don't know if David knows to look for frass. What is that? Frass. We have to look for the droppings, the remains of a Roa destructor mites having been there, because when the bees are leaving the

hive, those mites will be on the bodies of the bees, the last ones to leave. That's why this time of year, when we get smaller colonies, we get attrition, right, that they're not replacing them at the rate that they're dying off. So as it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, what happens? If you've got a colony that's got a lot of road destructor mites in it, they don't have as many hosts that spread out over. So what happens is, what do we just lose? A whole bunch of drones. So now the mites have to all go on to worker bees and which worker bees do they prefer they prefer the nurse bees so now they concentrate even more on that this is why at the end of the year for those of you who do might washes and might counts and i hope you do uh you suddenly see well a whole bunch of mites now and then people

speculate well they must have robbed out a dying colony that was diseased and they got all their mites and brought them back blah blah blah um or your colony is condensing the bruise area is getting smaller, right? Fewer places for the reproductive mites to reproduce in, and therefore now they're all out. They're ferretic, which is now the dispersal phase. And they'll attach themselves to the bodies of the remaining bees, fewer bees, same number of mites. It seems like the mite load increases when actually it stays the same. It's the hosts that are running out, right? They're running out of those. So a high concentration of varodistrictor mites, annoying, feeding upon, and harassing the bees.

You know, we all, I've never seen this in real life. In other words, I've never picked up a honeybee and seen her just being jumped by drone, by varodistractor mites. You see these pictures, you know, there'll be a picture of a bee, and the mites are on the thorax, and they're on the side, and they're on the abdomen, and on the underside of the abdomen. there's another one up on the head and this one dangling from the foot. I've never seen that. I have to wonder if that picture is not for dramatic effect

or that's the last honeybee standing and therefore the last resource in the hive for these mites to dog pile onto. But if you have a varroa destructer mite problem and you are not, one, counting them so that you know you have a problem, and then two, being prepared to deal with the mites, that you have, you're leaving your bees to be fed upon to their death. Or bees don't put up with it,

they scoot off and they're gone. They took the mites with them though, so their problems are not solved. The other thing is, I wonder if there's old comb. So here's another thing. Another reason that your bees might leave a hive is because there's residue in the comb as it builds up and it can become toxic. The bees will even start to avoid. There was no mention here of pollen that's stored. So, and I don't know what goes on up in Monterey, I don't know agriculturally what's out there. But if they had pollen, then also had high pesticide loads that the bees could detect and they wouldn't use the pollen. And the pollen is being saved there. This stuff also works its way into comb construction.

And so now we get concentrations of industrial agricultural chemicals. Pesticides, by the way, includes urban. insecticides and all the other things. So it's not just insecticides, pesticides, or anything that's put out there chemically that's designed to kill something, right? That we consider a pest. So if the comb or if there's pollen in there that's toxic, your bees could leave it. Now that's a stretch. Maybe you don't want to spend the money to have your comb tested and see what kind of pesticide load there is. and it doesn't identify a target, right? So what could you do to find out if you are living in an area that has high agricultural pesticide loading?

Every farmer, every agricultural practice has to register and log in that they are using pesticides, what they are, what the dose is, what the rate of spread, blah, blah, blah, where can you find out? You put in your zip code to a website called B-Scape.org, B-E-E-S-C-A-P-E-D-O-G. You put that in, and one of the options that you have there is to click on and see if the area where you live has a high pesticide load. Where I happen to live? Extremely low. It's like a 35 or a 40, which is really low.

That's great. Now, we go to my son and daughter-in-law's house. They're only, you know, 15-minute drive to the north of us. They live in wine country, so all the vineyards are all around them. His pesticide load is over 250. Think about it. There's so much pesticide up there. And we have troubles keeping bees alive in his yard there.

It's very interesting. So you can go to Beescape and find out if that's what you're facing too. So what we're doing is we're collecting all the pieces of the potential puzzle to try to bring in a focus why those bees left. The bottom line is they're gone. So what we want to make sure is that we're not going to try to reoccupy the same hive box if there's any chance that something in that box prevents your bees from wanting to go in it. So if you ever try to install a swarm and they just wouldn't go in this hive,

and the hive, as far as we're concerned, looking at it, it's a healthy hive. It's clean. It's perfect for bees. Look, I even put sugar syrup in there. Why wouldn't they go in there? So they smell things we don't smell. They sense things we don't sense. Now, we know the varroa mites are gone, but is the fras gone?

Is there a bunch of varomite waste material in there? Is there varroa doo-doo inside the cells? So you need to break out the low-pressure air and blow out all the cells and clean them out, which, by the way, is now my favorite method of cleaning up a frame of a brood frame that still has some capped drones and things like that in it, low pressure air with a very focused little pointed nozzle. I did a quick tip on that and it works so well, it blows the bees right out of it because even though there was a tiny cluster

of dead bees that were stuck in there, because what do they do? The lost their queen. After the lost their queen, they dwindled. While they're dwindling, they're making drones. Now we have drones that are partially emerged from those frames and all the bees are gone. So now this low pressure air blows the cappings off,

the brood, and just that little remaining bit and the drones blew out and as soon as i did that i got the colony occupied by other bees right away so we think we can use the bees as a cleanup crew sometimes we can but we have to remove residue of things that your bees don't want to deal with so let me see what else and remember that was a swarm trap they should have been moved into a larger hive by then so that's the other thing and the reminder i want for everyone listening is You need to inspect, by the way, if you're in the northeast of United States, we're here in the state of Pennsylvania, tomorrow is a great inspection day.

It's going to be warm, no threat of rain, cloudless sky, low winds, perfect day to do that final checkup and maybe condense your hives a little bit. But you should be looking into potential problem hives every two to three weeks. Because past that three weeks, if you've lost your queen, that's when your layers are going to be active and your workers are going to be active, and they will start laying drone eggs. So I hope one of those ideas holds true, and maybe we'll even get a follow-up from David,

who lives in Paradise, by the way. That is a great part of the country. Kelp Forest, very creepy to dive in, by the way. Okay, question number five. This comes from, do-to-do-do-do. It just says, hi Fred, I can no longer find the form on your website for a question. I hope email is okay. Okay, oh, I am Leanne in Oregon, first year beekeeper.

I learned from you to look at the landing boards early in the morning. Wow, such good advice is what she said. I didn't just say that. She wrote it. Okay. Yesterday, September 29th, before attending the chickens, I had to look and was absolutely stunned. to see the queen had wandered out and was sitting out still in the 40 degree morning. She died not too long afterward and the bees just pushed her off the landing board like any other dead worker.

So sad. She was a young queen just as patch July. She brought this very weak hive back from near extinction due to a swarm. She was strong and performed well. there is still open larvae so this happened fast i'm a retired engineer and made a flowchart as to what may have happened okay in order to short email i would just say i'm pretty sure i eliminated all the root causes except for two and my questions are related okay so here's question number one what on earth should i do with the queen to keep her alive outside the hive during the 10 days of treatment and she asked this question because one of the things that she did that she thinks may

have caused the death of the queen i treated with formic pro three weeks ago and the directions state that the queen can die up to four weeks afterwards this is true so what should i do the queen to keep her life outside of a hive during 10 days of treatment so if you're going to treat with formic pro a lot of people do this when they're swapping out the queens and everything else anyway. So I'm going to recommend the same thing I recommended earlier. Remember, take the queen out, put her in this queen isolation cage, set her in a nucleus resource hive, use placeholders that replace the number of frames that you pull out with the queen on it during treatment. Now if we're going to do this during treatment, right, we don't want to take any varroa destructor mites with our

queen. So we don't want them to be in the state where they're reproduct. underneath pupa so we'll pull a frame of honey let's say half open half covered blah blah put that in there and put our queen in there because as the honey gets consumed by the nurse bees that we're gonna send with her some of those may have a couple of vero destructor mites on them so you can inspect them for that you can knock them out the CO2 you can do what dr. Thomas Seeley does which is he puts them in the refrigerator for 10 minutes brings them out and then you can inspect them for varro mites without any

harm to them then they warm up and they're back in business because we're just taking care of the queen and we're not taking care of a bunch of brood during this period right um we put the queen in there we put a bunch of nurse fees with her and they just attend to the queen so you will be out of the dark and the reason i say this is because formic pro is the most disastrous to queens in the first three to four days of the treatment cycle right it's the most volatile the fumes of the strong strongest, everything is going on then. So as it tapers down, then now we have a weaker exposure. So that's when you could actually bring them back to your beehive, right? Transform back. Pull her out, pull your spaceholders out, put the frames back in, with the queen on it,

you're back in business. So another part here says, could I have damaged her during a recent inspection? She looked perfect with absolutely no signs of physical damage. She wasn't curled up. No varroa or viral factors. Okay, we can't see if a queen has a virus. So we can eliminate that. Varroa destructor mites don't attach themselves to queens. Queens are just groomed too frequently. Their abdomens are extended and they have very tight plates, right?

So that the varro destructor mite has a far more difficult time trying to get up under there. If we look at the abdomen of a queen, is it nice and fuzzy? No, it's very smooth. So they're not a target for a varroa destructor mites. I've never seen a mite on a queen. So we can eliminate that too. I have seen workers kill queens when new queens were coming. So if we're 100% sure that there's no replacement queens coming in,

because it's the other thing that could actually be happening, it just happens to happen at a time. You just recently treated with Formic Pro. Formic Pro, for those of you are wondering, it's an organic treatment, and it is very effective. So that's all say about that. The other thing is, so we need to follow up and just make sure they weren't replacing the queen. Because when they do that, they stop feeding the one that they're going to send out.

My wife and I have observed bees in the observation hives attacking queens and killing them. So they didn't even leave it up to the queen to do it. They were selectively killing the queens I personally liked, by the way. And then she would eventually just be dead on the landing board, and then they would drag her out. So, and, you know, on the bottom of the observation hype. So a lot of things that could be going on, but I would also keep an eye on whether or not they have a replacement queen in the works there.

So small root on the frame, blah, blah, blah, blah, insert placeholders, and you have an option to get those mites off of any bees that you take with her, restore the queen afterwards. So in other words, if you did this, obviously this is that. the fact but the next time you did it if you remove the queen with a small cluster of workers just so they can maintain her it's kind of like um just storing your queen some people put them think of a queen finishing cage or a nuke or something like that where they have just enough workers to attend to the queen

you can do that keeps her alive it's called banking queens some people do it after they've made it before they sell them so you're effectively kind of banking a queen if you want to set her off to the the side to bring her back later after the treatment. And of course that cage is required if you want to do the nucleus resource hive method that I described earlier on. Question number six. This is one that was just interesting. It's not a big deal.

But somebody said, what does that sound? Because I don't see their wings flapping. And that's because some of the videos that I have on my YouTube channel just deal what the noises that honeybees make because it's really interesting to me. I like to video and record and get really in-depth audio recordings, full wave audio of the bee noises inside a hive. And it sounds, there's a hum, a steady hum, but that's because we have thousands of bees inside. But it is true that they make this humming sound without fanning their wings. Now sometimes they are fanning the wings, sometimes they're not. So this is a very,

beginner style questions. So if the bees were not fanning their wings but they were vibrating, they would just vibrate the muscles that otherwise would flap their wings. They just disconnect that part and they're not flapping the wings. They're vibrating the muscles, which generates warmth inside the hive. And sometimes that can actually be really loud. I have a video that I'm going to show at the North American Honeybee Expo, which has bees warming up their little motors and they are not flapping their wings. but it's very distinct and very loud. It goes, e, e, e, e, and e.

They're all making this buzzing sound without flapping their wings because they're warming up to deal with a predator. What's the predator, you might ask? Well, that's a cliffhanger. I'm not going to tell you because it's for my in-person presentation. But you can hear these noises

because they are up against something. So the bees have to be against something. comb, the glass in an observation hive, other bees, they vibrate themselves against objects. Bees don't hear in the way that we hear. So airborne sounds don't mean anything to the honeybees. And I've brought this up with experts in honeybee noise making, right? airborne sounds because there's a lot of kind of information out there that people think is possible, but with the bee's inability to hear, they don't communicate sending noises to one another. There is something called a near-field effect that they have with their antennae,

and even when bees are waggle-dancing, their antennae are very close, and sometimes bees will make these little buzzes and vibrations while waggle dancing, and that can be picked up airborne between the bee and the antennae of another bee that's attending to the waggle dance, but we are talking about thousands of an inch close to make that work. So bees that want to communicate through vibration, they do it through the comb. And this also leads us to, when you look at the bottom of honeycomb inside hives,

bees don't like to connect every edge. to the frames that are there, if you're using frames like the Langstroth frames, they leave a two or three inch area that comes away from the sides of the interior of the frame, and they also don't connect all the way to the bottom of the frame. And this is in the bottom of the hive. Now the upper frames they do, they connect it all together, they even fill in the spaces between the frames and upper boxes. It's down at the bottom.

So the other thing is, where's the waggle dance happening, and where are these noises happening, which just happens to be, also where I put my transducers and acoustic pickup equipment near the dance floor because that's where these interesting noises are. It even picks up their footsteps on the comb. So that comb, which is normally brood, right? Brute comb. It's tougher. It's fibrous as years go by. I try not to keep that stuff past five years because of what I mentioned earlier on. it actually becomes dense with chemicals that they're exposed to while they're foraging. But this free area that has a big empty area becomes the dance floor for waggle dances

and it's a communication center for bees inside the hive figuring out what's going on outside the hive when the workers come in to get on the dance floor. They waggle. It's where they can smell what the bees are bringing in. They can taste what the bees are bringing in. and they can of course observe the waggle dance and learn where that resource is located. And this part of the frame, this part of the comb down there, because it's not attached, has maximum vibration potential. So there's a resonance.

There's something in ultrasound we call a fundamental resonance, which means it has to do, it absolutely matches the vibration that's being made with the thickness of the material that the bee is on. So if they do a vibration that is any matching of the thickness and the material that they're on, then that thick material, that matching thickness material will vibrate or resonate, just like a bell when you hear it going to being. So if you can match the cadence of that, you'll magnify that sound capability on that material that they're on. I'm sure that was clean as mud.

but the sounds that we hear our vibrations are making against one another against materials and that's why we hear it bees aren't generating a sound so much as they're generating a vibration that we hear as a sound because we have that ability to pick it up so it's really interesting and that was on the video sounds from inside the hive if you want to check it out and all it is is a camera setup showing part of the brood frame of a beehive and just the recordings of the noises that they're making inside that hive. Question number seven comes from Jerry and it says I watch one of your videos where you add spirulina to your sugar water and I've looked for it again, could not find it, could you tell me how much to use per 10 pounds of sugar mixing it two to one?

Thank you. Okay. I did spirulina testing and because the studies there's a new compilation study out. So I was looking for cheap ways to feed spirulina to the bees and this is fun for me because I got these one gallon SC Johnson Ziploc bags. Now these are the heavy duty ones so I wanted to put them to the test. This is for open feeding because I would not put something inside a bee home. on top of the frames or up inside the feeder shim before I first find out what the leaking potential is. And I will answer the question about the percentage. In fact, I'm going to reshare the link that I shared last week down in the video description

to the study about spirulina because let's be honest, there's too much in it to simplify it to just, hey, how much spirulina should I be putting in dry sugar to mix with the water to make the syrup the best benefits the bees I will let you read that yourself because what I'm doing might not actually be enough but I'll give you my formula so what I'm doing is I'm mixing one-to-one sugar syrup so it's not even the heavy two-to-one syrup and that's because I wanted to put it out to see if these bags leak and these have holes in them which I'm sure aren't showing but if you look at the Ziploc part it has little holes in it and what it is

I took dissection needles, which people that study biology and do dissection have, but you could use any pin, it could be a safety pin or something like that. And I poked holes in here, and I did three different things to test whether or not. So I only poked holes on one side. One of these bags, the capacity is a gallon, so I filled it 100 percent until when I zipped it shut, there was no air left and then I put that pillow of syrup out for the bees and I learned some things which was fun. One is if you fill it the full gallon and you lay it on its side and you have your series of holes up here it does ooze out and starts dripping before any bees come to it. So if you fill them 100%, there would be some leaking. Now can your colony of bees keep up with that? My frame of thinking is

I don't want them to have to deal with syrup that they're not putting in demand for on my feeding system. So now this is open feeding outside. When I mix that spirulina with it, I use three heaping tablespoons of dry spirulina. And I'll put the link to the one I use. It's just the top-rated organic spirulina. It's designed for people. And I get mine off of Amazon. You can do your own research, find your own source for spirulina it has a consistency of talcum powder that stuff goes airborne easy so i take the dry four pounds of sugar i put three heaping tablespoons of spirulina in it when you mix this up and add the water it looks black that's how dark it is it's really a deep veridian green anyway you fill it to a gallon it oozes the bees do feed on it i have time lapse videos which are

kind of fun to watch. I haven't decided if I'm going to put those up. Anyway, the next bag, so I did three different features, thin and thick, and then of course half full. So if I took half a gallon and put it in a one gallon bag and poke the holes only in one side, of course, and I don't put the holes down in the corners and stuff, I keep them up near the upper center area of the cushion. And so this bag, half full, no leaks. The other thing is, what's the temperature? of your sugar syrup that you're putting out. If you put this out on a hot day and it sits in direct sunlight, which is I had it in direct sunlight,

but I'm in the northeastern United States, and it wasn't that hot that day. It was in the 60s. So over a period of three days, we tested all of these, so I learned some things. If you put really warm liquid in, it starts to ooze. If you put it at room temperature, so 70 degrees roughly,

half a gallon, one-to-one sugar syrup, with or without spirulina, made no difference, just sugar syrup. It did not leak. So that was good. Now there was a benefit to this. What's going on? I described it earlier. This time of year we have lots of hornets, lots of wasps. And by the way, hornets are wasps. Wausps are not hornets. So we have one hornet here in the state of Pennsylvania.

That is Vespa, Crabro, the European Hornet. So that's the other thing. If you do any kind of open feeding, and by the way, it's a very inefficient way to feed. And if you haven't guessed, we are in the, fluff zone too by the way so we're just shooting the breeze that was the last question of the day so i like to open feet because i like to test things out like this but i also like to see what's around now here's the thing the little holes that i poked here i thought it would be very easy for wasps and honey bees because the honeybees pile up on these holes and they're sticking their tongues through

this definitely favors the honey bee as far as its ability to get the resources in these Ziploc baggies The wasse, the bald-faced hornets were there. The yellow jackets are there. Several different yellow jacket, by the way. And then the European Hornet didn't even waste its time. Couldn't do anything. And I was thinking when a European Hornet lands on this thing with those flesh-cutting mandibles they have,

it could cut a hole in the side of this bag, but they didn't. None of them did. Even the honeybees did not widen these holes. so this was really interesting to me because what did that just do for me I can now feed a lightweight sugar syrup and I'm going to explain why I use lightweight and not two to one this time of year remember open feeding is kind of for show you know on this scale if I'm doing because there are people let's face it that put up 55

gallon drums of sucrose for their bees and they throw a bunch of hay and stuff in it. That is not me. I am not doing that. Never say never, but that is something I would not do. Here's the thing. We're back here our beekeepers now. So what am I doing? Why am I open feeding? Because I want these scouts to be over here on these zip-like baggies of sugar syrup and not trying to rob each other out in the apiary which is the next thing they try to do if they're not otherwise occupied. So I can do a couple of things. I can put sugar syrup in here and feed only the honeybees.

Now, let's take a step further. We know that the wass can't get those resources. Honeybees do. So I just occupy the honeybees. Good job. Now here's the other thing, but I've got neighbors that have bees that are a mile away or whatever. So here's the thing. This is why I'm feeding the light syrup.

Go lighter than one to one. And here's why. Remember, I'm not trying to get a colony of bees to gain weight. This is not because you know the ones that are out foraging that are doing this, that are visiting feeding stations and stuff, these are the colonies that actually need it the least. They have the biggest workforce out there doing what they need to do. So the colonies that really need food and resources because they're so behind,

they're so lightweight and all this other stuff, they need two to one, but feed that inside the hive on top of your insulated inner cover in your feeder shim. Give it to them direct. and that will help them out because they can't put the same number of bees out to forage. So now we're dealing just with foragers. And remember last year I stopped open feeding because I was dusting the bees with powdered sugar at the open feed station to see where they're headed.

Where are they going? I'm feeding my neighbor's bees. They were heading out northeast of me. So I actually know who that is. Okay. I don't want to feed those bees. So if I lean it out, I have a look. lower sugar reward to water ratio. Eventually the only bees that are going to go to it are the ones that are economically minded and are nearby. So then I will only be feeding the bees that are in my apiary. Now what I'm doing that these bees, that light syrup that we're putting out there, you think there's zipping back there and taking it in the hive and storing it? No, it actually gets passed around through trophlaxis. That's mouth-to-mouth passing of food and resources.

So they're passing that carbohydrate to one another, and it's used as ready energy. It's like handing out mints, you know, to your friends. So we occupied the foragers that could turn robbers in a time when the resources are dwindling in the environment. And we didn't feed the neighbors bees because also they might not even want you to be feeding them sugar syrup. Think of it that way, too. It's another reason not to open feed, really. Because there's some people that just don't want to feed open sugar syrup. so they don't want their bees in it now so if that's under your control then then it down just for your bees so but the one gallon Ziploc bag is work they held up great and the holes stay the same size and everything else and you can use them again so fill them up put them on a tray in the sink blah because they'll leak a little bit at the beginning now the holes are all there and while you're filling it they leak out but then when you flip it on its side instead i use trays cafeteria style trays to carry these

and they stop leaking. So here's the other cool thing about it while we're talking. With these full of sugar syrup, one of the problems we used to have with open feeding at a robbing station, we get a big rainstorm come through, and all the rainwater comes in and dilutes the reservoir that the bees are feeding out of. Guess what happens with these bags?

No dilution. Because the rainwater just runs off of the bag that's still full of syrup, and it doesn't force its way in through these tiny holes, and dilute your sugar syrup. That's another winner. The other thing is a raccoon came through and didn't even care about them. A raccoon could have tore these up.

A possum came through. It didn't care about him either. And that's it. Easy peasy for that stuff. So let's see, Hive Alive. A lot of people have written because the easy feed that syrup that Hive Live came out with

was out of stock. It's back in stock. That's good news. And that takes the place of your heavy sugar syrup, plus it includes a dose of the hive alive, which of course benefits the microbiome to be gut health and all that other stuff. And if you want to know more about that,

you can go to my website, the way to be.org, and there's a page that's titled, Hive Alive Works. Why should you go to that page? Because it's also a discount link from Hive Alive. Let's see. So the hives that are weak, feed them direct inside the hives. hive take care of them. Fondent packs, we're down in the 30s but we're not at freezing yet.

So hold off on your fond impacts until we hit freezing temps at night. Those are in reserve because those are emergency resources. Let's see. Demand for sea salt right now is high. So if you haven't seen that and seen the observations and backyard studies that I've done on that, you can go to my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, just type C-Salt. in the search bar at the top and you'll see the comparison because for years people were telling me to talk about Himalayan salts which by the way is not sea salt those are just salts and minerals that people use on their salads and stuff like that and then there's Morton sea salt and then there's Celtic sea salt so I tested

them all for you and guess what the bees that a preference for the least expensive one which happened to be Morton sea salt So if you can get Morton C salt and mix it into quart jars that you feed with outside, this is open feeding now, you're not putting this in your hive. Two teaspoons per quart, morton sea salt, mix it up. The bees have a demand for it this time of year. Some people have made comments like bees use that to cure honey and all this other stuff. I could find, I've talked to chemists. I could find no one who could explain why or if bees are using salts and minerals as

some method of helping to dry down their honey. So if you have evidence of that, I would love to see a link and so that I could read the science behind it because right now I can find no other explanation except that the bees need salts and minerals. And so if we're offering that in addition to your fresh water that has nothing in it,

so we're having these little salt containers out and the bees are on that more than they are the freshwater right now. so and that's seasonal so this changes and the other thing is just for people that want to know i am working on my moss wall and i think uh ross millard also said he's doing some kind of moss thing and that's because i've made my own concrete drinker area for the bees i'm using a fog nozzle which is something you put on the end of the hose that puts water out in such a mist for him that's like vapor just floating in the air and this dampens your moss every day and I have cinder blocks concrete pad that I made and I find rocks in my woods

so I'm trying to be aware of the fact that some of these mosses are growing in shade so I want partial sun and shade areas so the transitional areas if I find rocks with moss on them and collect those rocks I bring them back I put them in my watering station because it's clear also that bees prefer mossy areas for collecting their drinking ones. water. So I thought, huh, moss shows up on the roof of your house for Pete's sake. So you can see north sides of people's houses just covered in ugly moss, sometimes mildew in moss and areas like that. But so I'm growing moss around my water wall and it's going to make it look way better than it does right now because right now it's just a bunch of center blocks and rocks and bricks and stuff like that but if they get covered in moss this is just a fun project going in a

winter so we can break it up I'm kind of mad at the chickens because they go through the yard every day several times a day and they pull away at all my moss so I'm growing that that's just a general information thing for the bees to have a moss drinking station I want to thank you for watching me today and joining me for today's questions and answers please go to the way to be.org click on the page mark the way to be and submit your own topic if you'd like to have it addressed on one of these Fridays. So thanks for being here. Hope you have a fantastic weekend to add.