The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Beekeeping Q&A 261 preventing queen losses, and assessing non-productive colonies

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/532WbaTPZYo   If you have a question or want to have a topic addressed in a future issue, please fill out this form: https://www.fredsfinefowl.com/thewaytobee.html   CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction 06:10 My honey was at 20.5% can I put it in my convection oven to dry it down? 10:48 When should I add a second deep if the bees aren't warming the space they are currently in? 15:05 I have a hive that appears queenless on day 10 or 11 after swarming. Can I use QMP to test if they have a queen or not? 25:17 Made a split, the split has eggs, the original colony doesn't. Any thoughts on this? 33:27 I tried to put my $40 queen into the Queen Isolation Cage, but she did a 180 and flew off. I tried putting the wooden queen cage inside the QIC and it was tough to get out later on. What are your thoughts on this? 49:52 I used double-bubble as insulation on top of my hives until ants moved in. I've removed all Double-Bubble, have you seen anything like this? 56:42 If you have a queenless colony, what are your thoughts on combining them with pheromones rather than the paper method? 01:03:25 Will 2:1 Sugar Syrup help a colony accept a new queen when she arrives?

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, June the 7th, and this is Backyard Bekeeping, questions and answers episode number 261. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is the Way to Be. So I want to thank you for being here. This is a YouTube video, of course, which you're probably watching, but it's also a podcast, which is titled The Way to Be, and you can find it on Podbean, or just by Googling, Podcasts the Way to Be, and you can listen without wrecking your lawnmower or something. and you can continue doing your work without interruption. If you want to know what we're going to talk about today, please look down in the video description,

and you'll see all the topics listed in order. And this time, there are some important links that you're going to want to check out. So let's say you've got something on your mind and you're facing an issue with your bees and you just have to have an answer right away. So where do you go? You go to the Way to Be Fellowship, which is on Facebook.

And some of you don't go to Facebook, and that's okay, you can't get to the fellowship, 100% free, experts on every level, and you can bring your most basic questions. Maybe you see something your beehive that looks weird, you're not sure what's going on, take a picture, post it there, and ask for lots of opinions, and I guess you'll find out beekeepers all have opinions, so nobody will be rude there. What else is going on? Well, it's terrible outside right now. Well, terrible, that's a relative term.

It's raining right now. it's gusty, it's windy, it is 62 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 17 Celsius, and 8 mile per wind's constant, 22 mile per hour gusts right now, and of course, as I mentioned, it's raining and it's been raining. We got over two inches of rain over the past week for some people that might sound like nothing, because here in the United States, there have been a series of storms come through, people have lost their homes, cities have been demolished in some cases by tornadoes. We've got standing water everywhere our garden right now. You can't even plant anything in it because every little hole that was dug is full of water. So my wife has to wait to put her plants in.

And good news the deer are not munching on my service berry trees anymore. So the deer away stuff that I've been spraying on there once a week roughly has kept them from eating the leaves. They've also stopped eating the leaves on my linden trees, which have not blossomed yet. but there's going to be a lot of blossoms on there because they're kind of pre-blossom. They're in the bud stage still. So those are going to be fantastic. Can't wait. I'm going to video and share that when that happens. And the beads are on the raspberries. And white clover has opened up here finally 1,300 feet above sea level, Ag Zone 4 in the northwestern part of Pennsylvania.

In the wintertime, what's known as the snow belt. But right now, I guess we're in the rain belt. So they're on clover, raspberries, and we have 30% of our super's honor ready. The supervisor was here yesterday, wanting to make sure that he got his flow super on his beehive. And for those of you who don't know who that is, that's my grandson, Quinn. He's eight years old and he wants to make sure that he doesn't miss an opportunity to get maximum honey from his colony of bees. He has also pointed out that I might not be paying a lot of attention to some of my other colonies, and he is volunteering to take them over as well as any.

profit there may be from any honey surplus that they produce. So that's pretty funny. If you want to know how to submit a topic for discussion or a question that you might have, please go to my main website, which is the way to be.org, and there's a page there marked the way to be. There's a form on it. You fill it out. You can be anonymous. So nothing ever gets discovered about you. We don't share information. You don't have to put in your email. although if you have something going on that you need an immediate response for it's free I don't charge for that I will respond and then of course possibly add you to the list of topics like those that we're going to discuss today so I think that's just about it

what's the relative humidity outside that's another question 72% but I think that probably shot up because now as I mentioned it's raining so let's get right into it the very first question question number one comes from David from Houston, Texas, tiny little town in a very small state here in the United States. So they harvested two frames of capped honey on my flow hive. Moisture content is 20.5 percent. So for those of you don't know, 20.5 percent means that's the water content, which is high, by the way. Almost 15 inches of rain over the past three weeks. Wow, 15 inches. I can't even imagine that. Here I am bragging about getting over two

inches this week. Anyway, will my convection oven set at 110 degrees Fahrenheit properly dry the honey to 18%. At first I thought, no, no, don't put it in your oven because putting in your oven you risk what, overheating it, ruining it. But if you have a convection oven, for those you who don't know, look it up. It means that air gets circulated, which means there's no stratification, no hot spots, even cooking. So it's very interesting that there's an oven that will go to 1.10 Fahrenheit. So I actually think that would work. Because it's the air movement. Just as when the bees are inside the hive and they're trying to dehydrate the honey that they put in the cells,

they are fanning their wings and sometimes it's very hot, it's very humid, and of course what does humidity mean anyway? Like I said, it's 72% relative humidity. That means it's already holding 72% moisture, which means the remainder of 100% can take on. can take on more moisture. So the lower the humidity, the more moisture capacity the air around it has. So you can even use desiccants, by the way, but I hope that he does it. I want to hear how it went. Convection oven sounds kind of expensive. You have the blowers going, but I suppose the fans don't cost a lot.

And then, of course, you're only heating to 110, and I would probably crack the door a little bit. I don't know, bring in some fresh air. And it all depends, too, on how you. humid the air is around the oven. But I would expect that you're going to be running that for over 24 hours. The next question somebody listening might have is, well, if it's at 20 and a half percent, how low should it go to be stable so the honey doesn't ferment because that's the risk of high water content honey. So I'm going to say 18%. Now if you're a state inspector, you can talk to those guys. They approve honey at 19%. So here's the thing. From 19 to 20, 20% it might ferment.

20% above, so at 20 or over, it will ferment eventually. How do you stop fermentation of honey that store that has a high water content? Freezer. It doesn't mean the honey will freeze, but at the temperatures in the freezer, it will not change, crystallize, or ferment. It's when it comes out and is warmer that can start to happen because yeast is going to get access to it. And here's the other thing too.

Sometimes people have seen that the honey is capped. The cells are capped with wax, and they just make an assumption the bees know what they're doing. They cap the wax, therefore it's probably 18% or under, right? So when they do that, they're putting a lot of confidence in the bees. I highly suggest that you get a refractometer. because some people also pull honey frames that are capped with honey and they put them in storage before they process them. So all the big companies, all those who do this for a business, have what's called a hot room and they'll stage their honey in there.

And hot rooms not only keep the honey warm so it's easier to process, but they also keep the humidity down to make sure that no added moisture gets into the honey. It's what's called hygroscopic, which means it takes on moisture from the air around it. so we have to be very careful about that but the bees move air across it and you can dry out your honey that way convection oven sounds like it would work so I think that's it for question number one and why the 110 Fahrenheit by the way keep it at 110 or below if you heat it up hotter than that you can actually ruin your honey a little bit some people that are commercial level will heat it more higher temps but if you're trying to preserve the delicate flavors and smells that come with the honey, then keeping your temperatures lower is better.

So you want the minimum necessary to achieve what you want to achieve with it. In this case, that's dehydrating it. So question number two comes from Mike, who lives in Roseburg, Oregon. It started with two hives. One is a nuke, and the other is a package. And the nuke was installed in late April, the package early May. Also, brood-minder, temp, humidity sensors were installed in each high. So for those you don't know what those are, there are sensors that they're very thin and you slip them in the box.

And usually it's just over your brood or you can put it in your top box just under the inner cover. And it's going to give you readouts just as described here, temp and humidity. You go by and you check it with your phone. So then you have data that shows all the highs and lows. and you know that when there's a sudden temperature drop or when the data that's coming into that doesn't seem right in concert with the other colonies that you currently have, it means that you should check them out, see what's going on.

I have a bunch of breed minder sensors. I've never put them in my hives. So anyway, it's mostly been in the low 40s at night and the 60s, the 70s during the day. And let's see, so the question is, when to add a second deep? If the bees have not developed good thermo regulation, should the deep still be added when 70% to 80% of the foundation has been drawn out.

Now that's key too. Foundation drawn out. That means the bees have built the cells out of bees wax. So they drew it off of the foundation. Now for me, the key is what's the level of processing that's occurred? In other words, how much honey is there? If you look at it sometimes when you do an inspection and you pull it up, and these cells are all uncapped but they're all full they appear full and they feel nice and heavy

you could think oh man they're running out of space and they're almost done however it can occupy less than half that space once they dehydrate it down so fresh nectar that's in the process of being turned into honey takes up a lot of space and then they condense it down and some beekeepers think they're losing it or they're consuming it or something but really what they're doing is what we referred to in the first question they are drying it out, dehydrating it, condensing it. And so what we should look for when we're thinking about whether or not they're ready to be capped is ready to be capped, ready to be supered is we're looking for capped cells, finished cells. So drawn foundation, that's the beeswax coming out,

forming the cells, then they fill it with the resources. Then when they cap it, that's finished honey. So if you have eight out of ten frames of finished honey or six out of eight frames of finished honey, yes, it's time to super. If you're planning to go on summer vacation or something like that and they're two-thirds of the way there, then I would suggest supering anyway because you're not going to be home to do it just in time. So then what's the drawback? The drawback is that if they're not finished capping the honey that they have in the super that's already on the hive, then what they do is they tend to move up into the next box too early without finishing out those other lateral frames.

They move vertical first. So the reason that we wait, 70 or 80%, so then the next question might be, hey Fred, why don't you just wait until they have all the frames capped, then add the next one. Because then what happens is the bees inside the hive perceive that that's actually the cap

or the top of the hive. And they may not move up into another box if they finished all the frames, 1 through 10 or 1 through 8, when we're talking about Langstroth boxes. That's why when they're at 80% of that, that's the time when they're still working it, still expanding, still storing, that's the time to sneak in that honey super.

And if your honey supers are all the same depth, so they're all mediums or all deeps or whatever, then it's easy to, you can also shift frames up above and create the new space directly underneath. And I would create that new space right in the, the center where it's the warmest and where they're most likely to work it. So should I still do it? So yes, Mike should go ahead and do that. Let's move on to question number three. Tim and Vicki from Fergus Ontario. So I've read we have a QMP question for you.

So for those of you don't know QMP, Queen, Queen mandibular pheromone. And in this case, It's synthetic. It's sold as temp queen, and I get it from Betterby. You can get it, and we'll talk a little bit about what that means if you've never heard of it before. Like a lot of people, we've had swarms this spring, and we have some newly hived swarms that we believe had virgin queens initially, but that have since disappeared. Let's see, it says we've read that a virgin queen typically doesn't begin to produce pheromones until six to 10 days after emerging. I'm going to stop right there.

All living bees emit pheromones. So even the larvae, for example, when a larva hatches from an egg, it emits a pheromone that tells nurse bees to feed it. So throughout their lives, they're putting out a pheromone. Now there are variables in what the pheromone is being put out is, what the pheromone is, and also what the worker's response.

is going to be to the pheromone that they're putting out. So if you've got a young queen, a virgin queen that's just emerged, then she has her own pheromone, and she also has hormones. So hormones are internal, pheromones are external, pheromones are external. So the pheromones are what the other bees sense and smell. Hormones are what drive her changes in behavior and move her through different periods of her life.

So after emerging, it's true, virgin, queens get very little attention. I've found swarms before, collected a queen out of swarm, and thought, aha, I have the queen, and then I put her right next to the bees in the cluster, and they ignore her completely. So what does that tell me? Well, number one, her pheromones are low. It's not that they're not existent, they're low, and she doesn't have the pheromone that says, I'm producing eggs, or that I've been mated. So a virgin queen has a different pheromone, and she constantly gets fed, of course, by nurse bees in the high. as well. But as she matures, when she flies out, when she gets mated, and when she comes back,

she has a whole different pheromone that lets the other bees know that she has been mated, and this is the queen mandibular pheromone. So, yes, they ignore her until she matures and has been mated. So anyway, it says, with that in mind, if QMP were introduced into a hive that appears queenless on day 10 or 11 after swarming, and the, bees moved to it, do you think this would be confirmation that the hive is without a queen? So listen to what's being said. We take a queen mandibular pheromone synthetic lure, which is designed to make the bees there think a queen is present. And it's through a synthetic pheromone.

No queen, just a pheromone, which makes them think that there's a queen that's in production, which means they don't have to do anything else. So it keeps the bees from creating new queens. cells. It keeps the bees from activating their own ovaries. The worker bees can activate their ovaries and become layers. And those are the ones that are laying drones. And that happens, usually 21 days absent a queen mandibular pheromone or absent the pheromone of a queen that has been made it and is in production. So I'm going to say that would not necessarily mean that you don't have a queen. it would mean that your queen mandibular pheromone has drawn the cluster even though they have a queen present and that queen present may not be mated yet and may not be producing enough of the queen mandibular pheromone for her to override a synthetic pheromone and I've seen this when I've put it on tree branches

real queen in a cage over here mated has all the right pheromones gets a huge cluster take a queen mandibular pheromone lure put that over here on the tree branches branch, zip tie it there, and see if I can split this cluster. And you can, and in some cases, more of those bees go to my synthetic fake queen, and a small cluster remains on the actual mated living queen. So that's not a predictor of whether or not you have a queen in your hive. So, let's see, after forming the bees, move to it. to it do you think this could be confirmation that I was without a queen so no I don't and here's the thing that I'm going to say so it says without a queen and so a new queen could be

introduced thanks again so here's the thing what would I do and I'm going to say the same thing frequently because I want there to be consistency in what I suggest unless I prove that it doesn't work out but the things I'm telling you I share because I practice them in my own apiary and I get really good results so I always wait 14 days because even ethical queen sellers will ask you how long the colony has been without a queen and some people say well 12 days 13 days I want to buy a queen from you and I want it now I need it overnight because I don't want them to be without a queen some of your most informed sellers will say well give it another six days and because what frequently happens is people order a queen

They see that there are no eggs. They see that it doesn't seem any evidence that there is a queen present. And they may not be very good at spotting the queen. And she may not be yet productive. And she may have been made and come back, but just not laying right away. There are a lot of things that contribute to that. But anyway, so when you're selling queens to people, it's important to ask all these questions.

I know it's very easy just to take the order, send the queen, and off it goes. Because then if the bees kill the queen, that's not the seller's fault, that's the recipient's fault, right? So what I want you to do is wait longer to make sure. Now you don't wait 21 days. Why? Because what I said at the beginning, if you have workers that have been without queen pheromone all that time, then you can end up with laying workers at the end of the 21st day at the earliest. And then that's when we have to overcome now competing pheromones from now laying. workers that will only produce drones. So that's why I like the inspections to happen at the 14th day in a couple of days after that, but not waiting until the full 21-day cycle is complete before you bring in an emergency. Now let's say, well Fred, you told us to wait 14 days, but now I can't get a queen

for another week. Now what do I do? Now I'll have laying workers or something potentially. Well, that's when you go to your freezer because that's where you keep your queen mandibular pfarmone your queen qm p lures that are in there that are designed to be placeholders and you put those in while you wait for your queen to arrive and you don't pull it out until you know the queen has arrived and is alive and healthy from shipping so and that suppresses those otherwise changes in the worker bees that cause them to activate their ovaries and if they're part way there but then this pherom comes in the QMP, it shuts them down, stops them in place. They stop with their production. Okay. So, but here's the thing. Often, um, you saw a queen, you know you had a queen. The chances of her

still being there are very high. Here's the next solution for that. Um, you've got another colony or several other colonies that you know are queen. Right, because you've seen resources there. So we see eggs and things like that. So you can take a frame of eggs, a frame of brood that has eggs present, open larvae probably, and other stages of development. You put that frame in with the colony you think is queenless. If they immediately go to work on building emergency cells around some of those eggs that you have, and they're producing what's called emergency queen cells, and these often happen in the field of the frame. If they start doing that, and you know right away, because they're going to start doing that as soon as that egg hatches, and they've selected it,

and they're in an emergency state. So they're going to start building beeswax around it, and you're going to see possibly several of them in progress. So they needed a queen. They're trying to make one right now. On the flip side of that, you put that frame in there, you inspect it five days later, and you see no evidence of them having tried to build queen cells

from those eggs that you just provided them with. Chances are you have a queen present. So then for peace of mind, so that you're not awake all night, wondering what's going on with your bees, carefully go frame by frame with someone that's good at spotting queens if you've missed her all these times and see if you can't find the queen and then hopefully she goes but i was talking with steve rapaski who's the author of swarm essentials and he stopped selling people queens which i thought was just really good on his part because they were kind of jumping the gun and so often it happened

that he would send them queens and they would then find that they would kill the queen or drive it out or they'd find the queen dead on the ground because it just didn't wait that extra into the 14th, 15th, 16th day to see what they have. Because if your environment is also not cooperating, if it's not bringing in resources, your queen may be held back in her egg production. So there are a lot of things at play and just a game of patience. So give them 14 days. See what happens. And then update us all. so that we can celebrate with you the fact that you found your queen and that everything's great. So question four, she could be gone, but we'll find out, and there are a lot of ways to do it, just as I described.

So question number four comes from Brian from Fife, Alabama. I caught my own swarm, and then I split cells from the home hive into a nuke, and left some in the original box. The nuke now has eggs, but the original box doesn't. I put a frame of eggs and larvae from a neighbor hive in to see if they would make a new cell or two, but they cannibalize all the eggs and larvae. Now that's key there. Cannibalize all the eggs and larvae. I don't know why they would do that. It sounds like a starving colony.

But anyway, from the neighbor I have. So to see if they would make a new cell or two, but that was it. any thoughts on why they did and also any options I could utilize would be greatly appreciated. So if they're cannibalizing even larvae. Now eggs, that's weird too. They do that. There's something called policing when the nurse bees will go around and eggs that are being produced in a colony that they don't want. They will just consume them. So they actually eat the eggs or cannibalize them. The larvae, cannibalizing larvae tells me that it's a starving colony. In other words, they do. don't have resources that they need so I would look it over carefully because what do they need to

sustain larvae they need numbers of workers to take care of them in the form of warmth right they also need nurse bees to feed them and they can't feed them if the pantry is empty so if they don't have enough pollen stored if they don't have enough nectar available and the bee numbers aren't sufficient to keep those bees going then a couple of things could be happening. One, they cannibalize them because they can't feed them, they're going to die anyway. The other thing is, maybe they can't provide enough physical warmth and protection, and something happened to the brood. It didn't make it, and rather than cannibalizing,

they might have just hauled them right out the front door and gotten rid of them, unless you absolutely witness them eating the larvae. Eating eggs, pretty common, eating larvae itself, pretty rare. Although there are, I don't want to say there's no example of that, but there are chewed brood examples and sometimes there's just something wrong with a brood. But my very first guess in this case is going to be, based on this description, they don't have the resources they need to continue to feed the larvae that they were provided with. So what could you have done?

These undersized colonies, there's kind of a really basic rule of thumb that I learned years ago and it was that you need for a U-Socal colony of bees, right? use social insects to exist and sustain themselves to recover. There need to be 5,000 of those. Well, that's kind of a random number because you look at the bees. How many is 5,000? How many frames is that? So when their numbers are small,

the division of labor prevents them from doing what they need to do to survive, and that's why they interphase of dwindling. So they just start to lose numbers of bees out of the hive. And what happens is often you'll inspect a hive like that that's very undersized. And you'll see that they have brood, but it's a very small brood pattern, five inches in diameter, six inches in diameter, maybe a couple of frames. And it's all they can do to keep those warm. And then if we get a cold snap or we get some dynamic weather like we're having right now where it gets too cold for them, they cannot multitask because now they can't

leave the brood. It needs to be 94 to 97 degrees. Right now outside, we're in the low 60s and it's windy, right? So they also need to forage, they need water and resources. Well, they're not going to abandon the brood to do that because they don't have the surplus workers to do it. This is why big colonies can take these big hits, these dynamics, all these problems happen, and they still sustain themselves because the brood does not disappear and the brood is the future of the hive right along with the queen. So when they can't take care of them, here's so I'm going to backtrack If it's a smaller colony and you feel like you want to nurse them along, if you don't want to combine them with another colony that you have,

then you can do something that provides them with carbohydrates and the vegetable proteins that they need. The vegetable proteins, it's the pollen proteins that they need to create bee bread. So this is for the nurse bees to make what they need to provide resources for your developing larvae without having to forage for it. So what would there be for that? these would be pollen patties. Pretty rare to do that this time a year, for example. But if I were going to put pollen patties on right now, I would test out new pollen patties by hive alive.

They also make the hive alive syrup mix, but they have hive alive pollen patties, which are made by global patties, which have a very good reputation. And you can put those on to see if that doesn't give them now the boosts that they need inside the hive. which means a smaller colony of bees can produce quicker than if they had to divide their resources as far as the number of bees go and do the foraging, the warming, the guarding, the cleaning, and everything else that they have to do to maintain the hive. So the other part of that, too, is to keep the space small until they start to recover, until you see the brood picking up, because you really are 21 days out if they're laying eggs now and they're trying to get those going before you're going to see a real benefit to that.

So an insulated small hive, and by insulated, I mean at least the cover. And that's summer or winter. I hear a lot of people saying that, well, now that spring, no, summer, no, it's warm. I pulled all my insulation off and I put it in storage. And my head scratch moment on that is always, why are we taking away insulation just because summer is hit? insulation helps them manage that interior climate even in summer. And so it's not because we think we're stuffy and it'll be stifling and everything else. But no, it's keeping the sun from beating down in your beehives. Most beehives are in the sun in the state where I am, the state of

Pennsylvania. And so if we happen to get really hot days, the exterior temperature, the kind of, you know, the wake up moment for me was when I looked at the old telescoping high, which I used to get as a lot of people that do Langstroth hives do. It's just standard three-quarter inch pine material around the trim. Then there's a thin piece of luon through the middle and there's a hole in that. And then we put this telescoping cover over that and it's clad with aluminum. And sometimes in the old ones were galvanized tin, right? And so then or galvanized steel even.

They're really old ones. And when I took thermals of that, one of them was at 135 degrees. And that's before I had started to insulate the inner covers. So of course, back then, I was having to vent the hive and you put nickels on top of your inner cover between the inner and the outer cover. So you have that vent air going through and it helps the bees. But now I've learned after all of these seasons

of just following what I always saw and what came with a kit that I first bought back in 2006. And then we realized that putting insulation, in there changes everything. Prevents that top temperature of 134, 135 degrees. Who knows what it is if you live in one of our more desert regions, you know, you definitely want to be putting insulation up there. But the insulation changed everything too. So this will help your bees when their numbers are smaller recover better because now they're not fighting the elements as much as they otherwise would be. So I hope that something in that response is helpful.

Question number five, this comes from Harvey. And says here, I would like some advice on placing a queen into better bees, Queen Isolation or QIC is a Queen Introduction Cage. My first attempt turned into a disaster. This is I purchased three Carniolan queens from a business. be supplier. I picked a nice frame with a little capped brood and a nice honey arch to put one of the queens on. I put the frame into my queen I said queen I see queen introduction cage and I've, well it says QIC so QIC could be queen introduction or queen isolation so I'm not sure which of those cages

we use here but anyway it says I pulled the fondant plug on the wooden queen cage put my finger on the open hole I just created and I pointed the open hole down from the frame in the queen isolation cage and took my finger off. I think you all can guess what happens next. Instead of going down into the frame, my $40 queen did a $180 and took off into greener pastures never to be seen again. So the fix for this, have greener pastures in your own yard so they don't want to go to the neighbors. The second queen I tried, I put the wooden cage inside the queen isolation cage, just the QIC. When I pulled the fondant plug, I pushed the wooden cage down simultaneously into the QIC with the frame. That worked, but had a lot of difficulty five days later, pulling the wooden cage off of the frames in the QIC. So we need a better acronym QIC, Queen Introduction or Queen Isolation Cages are the same.

So that queen ended up on the outside of the QIC. I was lucky enough to grab her and put her down into another frame in the hive. Your thoughts on getting a newly made queen out of the wooden shipping cage and into a frame into the QIC. So what is that? Queen isolation? Come on Harvey. Tell me in the comments section. Queen isolation or queen introduction makes no different. the information I'm going to tell you will be the same. First, I want to talk to you about how to control your queens. And there's different times when you want to control your queens and different reasons for it. I'm going to discuss many of those. So what I'm going to show you is this first queen clip. This is probably one of the most common ones. If you watch Mr. Ed, he loves to get his queens in here. So hello to Jeff. This is your, by the way, my grandson uses this too. This looks like, a hair clip kind of. Now some of these don't have very strong springs. So the good news is you open it up, you have your queen on the surface, you grab her with it, queen's in here, workers can get through these

little slats. The queen cannot. Now your queen is safe and you put her somewhere while you do your inspections and things like that. That's my grandson's favorite tool. He carries several of them. He's very good at finding the queen. He's also very good at collecting her without injury. Now I'm going to go on to what I carry in my bee belt. So this is my tool belt that I take out with me every time I check the bees. This is some people call it the hair roller. This came with my NICO system, N-I-C-O-T, and that's a system for having queens lay eggs in queen cups

that later you put and put them in finishing colonies and they finish the queens, but I just take these out by themselves. I cut this little wooden plug here and to fit into the bottom, which normally this would be on your queen cell, your egg cell, right? And I put this on here and I glue it in place and then I carry this on my belt and I leave it in the open position. Because if I see the queen while I'm doing an inspection in the hive,

I collect her and I can just scoot her right into this cage and I can close the lid and then I can put her in my pocket or something like that. So now here's the thing. She's out of the way. She's safe. And now I don't have to worry about smashing her, rolling her, things like that while I'm doing inspections. The next queen controlling cage are these plastic ones that you often see. It already has a little hole here that you can roll up, you know, bits of grass and stuff in there temporarily.

This is what you would put a candy plug in if you were using it to introduce a new queen. so if you're producing queens and she needs to go in there and you have a little cap here that you can push the queen through even though this is plugged with sugar and then you close the cap the other option is the whole thing just pops over sideways and now you have access to the whole thing so you can put your queen in there close her up put the cap on and your finger over the hole which i think might be described here the fingers over the hole we're going to release the queen open that put it down and she should go textbook right onto the frame that you want her to go onto so that's that one the other thing is queen cages that they come in candy plug on one end and the bees are supposed to chew their way through the candy plug and at the other end there should be a cork

that you can remove right away for what's called a direct release and this is what or a similar style wooden cage that was put in inside the queen isolation cage between the frame of the cage and then jammed it up made it difficult to deal with later we want things to happen easier later and then the last one i'm going to talk about is the one-handed queen catcher so this one it's one-handed you're supposed to and i don't use it the way it's designed but you're supposed to put it here's a queen on a frame tooling around you put this over the top she's in there and then you slide the yellow piece and it closes it up and now your queen is in there and of course you have a plan

here that has a soft pad on it you can push up to the top and then now you line your queen up here and your markers so I've done videos showing how to mark your queen this year you're using a green marking pen for your queens so I carry this also in a special pouch on my tool belt if I see an unmarked queen and a hive that I want to have a marked queen in then I actually pick her up with my fingers I pick her up by the thorax and the wings and I put her in here and I start to close it off and then I release her and a nice fat laying queen when you drop her in here she'll be right along the sidewall there's really very little risk of her coming up to the top and that's why I don't like using it against a frame to grab the queen because when you slide this shut you can actually pinch her legs or injure her I don't like any of that so I put her in here by hand and then I close it up for safekeeping marking and then I leave her in here while the paint dries now on to the problem with the queen isolation or queen introduction cage it makes no difference and

Harvey is not the only one who has done terrible things with his queen recently so the rest of you know who you are a frame goes in here so we're gonna get a frame in this case I'm just gonna get a medium frame and these are Langstroth sized frames So your frame goes on here. Now we have to get her queen in here. There is space on both sides here. So you can move it to one side or the other. I like to center it up. But if we're trying to get the queen in there, now some people panic

and they, I want you to see, I'm sorry if I'm laughing. It's not funny to smash your queen. Don't get excited. But if you look across the end here, the lid of this thing is going to go, going to go right on here. There's no space above that frame. So two people wrote to me and said they grabbed the lid really quick. They slapped it on there as soon as they released her in there and then they were looking around and they're going where do the where's the queen.

It's going on with this. I sleep and then so they they get impatient. They open this up and they see their little pancake queen up there. 100% your fault. So now that I made you feel bad, what I want you to do is when you're putting her on here, slide this on. Sorry for that noise. It's like fingers on a chalkboard. Slide this on and then make sure that you're not smashing the queen. Now what if we wanted to take our time? We want to see the queen down on the frame before we put the lid on at all. This leaves me to my best piece of gear ever. If you're going to handle a queen, if you're going to get workers out of a queen cage that she was shipped with, some people

remove the workers that came with her because they can solicit a response from the resident colony that would be negative to the queen. I know this thing is like this thing looks big and obnoxious and it is a little bit. And I did a video about it, but we're going to cover this again just real quick today because given the number of people that are losing their queens killing their queens this is called a queen muff there's a bunch of different ones made a bunch of different ways and the intent of this is if I had a queen in this cage I want to get her out I want to mark her something like that I would keep her in here I would hold her inside and see now they can't get around this muff goes around your arms and now I can see through it so it's

black, there's no glare, and now I can open her up in here, I can get a hold of her with my fingers. So you would put your marking tools and things like that in on the bottom ahead of time. And then you've got your queen in there, and now we can just full around and mark the queen, turn her loose in there, collector, hold her, learn to hold the queen. This would be a great teaching tool also. But one of the reasons I chose this particular one and I bought it from BetterB is because it's large enough. it's got a Velcro opening that I can put a whole frame in here. So let's say I want to put a Queen B on my Queen isolation or Queen Introduction cage and I want no chance that I'm going to lose her. I would take the top off. I would put it on the bottom of my Queen muff, right? And then I take

the frame and everything else in here and I put it right next to it. There's lots of room in here. for both of those things okay now I have my queen in her cage the way she came just for visual sake let's see we'll put her in here now these edges are also velcroed so you want to make sure every edge is closed up so you'll crow velcro sealed up really good and then you're going to get your hands in here now we're going to get our queen in the cage and you can make sure that the goes down into this frame onto the frame inside the queen isolation cage and now we have all the time in the world to look and see exactly where she is now she's out of this cage so I drop that don't need it have the cover in hand I see that she's

not on the cover and I just carefully slide it over and now it's all closed up now I get my hands out pull the thing apart again and then I lift my whole thing out and I do not have a highway queen. For those you who have ever seen highway pizza or sail bunnies or whatever it is. Now she's in there and there was no risk of her taking off and I could have gone the extra yard and marked her with my green marker for this year and everything would have been great. So the queen muff.

That's what you want. If you have any doubt or if you're dealing with a really expensive queen and you don't want to fool around also once she's done in here and we're ready to reintroduce her this will take up two spaces in your box once we're all done and we know for sure oh she's laying and everything else look at that and she's on the frame and look at that and we can put her right into the hive and then we pull this out and then we put the other frame back in that we took out because there's too much space there right so now we have her all back and she's good to go and she's in the hive and we're all set in my opinion this is

much better than there are push-in cages that you stick right on here there's round ones there's square ones there's homemade ones and i don't even know i used to have several of them sitting around here anyway what i don't like about those is if we've got a brood frame that we're putting the queen on because we want her to start laying right away when you push in your cage you inevitably have to kill a bunch of your brood too so you have to stab through their cappings and things like that and then later on they also tend to put beeswax on your queen cage if it's the wire one the number eight wire screen or hardware cloth and when you put that on there later we have to pull the frame out we have to pull that off they're going to repair the damage and remove the dead pupin things like that that we've already damaged and you don't have to do that if all you've used is a queen introduction

or a queen isolation cage, you just pull the whole frame out. Plus, we could have let her go for a full week if we wanted to. Because if this is a deep Langstroth frame, we're going to have then up to 6,000 maybe more larvae in development. So that's pretty darn good. So I don't like the pushing cages. That's extra mus and fuss, plus you're damaging your comb when you do it. Not necessary.

Put it in a queen isolation. or queen introduction cage and the difference between the two the isolation cage worker bees can get through and they can all access her and take care of her if you have any doubt whatsoever about them accepting this new expensive queen that you're putting in you want to use the queen introduction cage and that's what this example was because these bars are too close together even workers can't get to her that's why the frame that we're putting in is a brood frame with capped brood and we don't want any beads on it. We're counting on these capped brood to come out and emerge from their cells as adults.

And then the queen, of course, has space to lay. And they can feed her through these bars. They can't hurt her. So that's the good news. That's my combination of different choices of queen cages, holders, isolation, and what I do. Now, that's not to say if somebody else does something different, that that's bad. It's just different. You know why beekeepers have so many different ways and there are so many different tools.

There are so many different ways to do things because they can all work. They just work in different ways for different people. And these are tools that I personally like to use and that's how I do it. So my grandson, favorite clip. For me, favorite marking tool. And of course my roller cage is in my queen muff right now. But you get the picture. So that should help.

Don't smash queens. Don't let them fly away with your hard-earned money. Go to Betterby, get a queen muff, tell them I sent you, and you'll be sure to pay the exact same as everyone else. So question number six comes from Jeff from Cincinnati, Ohio. So anyway, last fall I started using double bubble above the inner covers and feeders of all my hives, wooden, Langstroth, low hives, and Apame. I definitely saw the benefits of the insulation in winter and things changed in the early spring when ants started to explore and here's the thing in every hive across three apiaries.

10 hives total. Ants colonized the space between the sheets of double bubble and for smaller ants, three hives, the ants actually moved into the spaces within the double bubble itself. I ended up pulling all the double bubble to keep the high density ants out of my hives. I may use double bubble again in the winter but won't be keeping it in the hives the other three seasons. Have you seen anything like this in your hives? Thanks Jeff. So Jeff in Cincinnati. No, I haven't seen this in any of my hives. But there are ways around it. I would not personally get rid of my double bubble because there were some ants in it. And here's why strong colonies are not threatened at all by ants. And the ants, people that leave polystyrene or hive coesies and things like that on their hives. Also, they get later in the earth, they find ants move up between the hive itself and the coesies.

Any surface that protects ants from the elements, if we laid a board on the ground, chances are, ants are going to set up underneath of it and use that protection. They like beehives because they're kind of controlling the climate. It warms up. If they're on the inner cover, 9 times out of 10, here in this part of the country, and I'm sure down in Cincinnati also in Ohio, that we don't have like the ants that would really rip out a colony, like totally devastated attack it. And some of the southern states, they might have fire ants and all kinds of things going on down there that might be different. So I can speak to the species of ants that we have up here and that doesn't bother me. I've had ants at one time and I was alarmed by it and I made a

video about it. The bees were going up the sides of the hive and it looked like they were carrying bee eggs with them but then what I learned later is those weren't bee eggs. Those were just ants on the move and they carry their own eggs with them and they look surprisingly a lot like honeybee eggs. So here I thought the bees were just letting them go in, raid the hive, take the eggs with them, and they're leaving. Now we all know that ants like sweet things. So if ants can get into a colony that's in a state of decline. So if you have a honeybee colony that's too big for itself, that doesn't have enough bees to maintain all that interior surface area and they can't police it up very well, then ants could start to encroach even into the hive and start to get some of that

sweet honey, which is something they would definitely go after. But for most of the time, most situations, and in my hives, other than the one time that I video them doing that, I haven't had ants in any of my beehives. I also have not had them in between the sheets of double bubble. So I'm going to move on to that. One of the things that Jeff addresses here is that the ants were getting into the double bubble and in the bubble portion itself, really tiny ants. And you can stop that.

How would you stop it? You create little quilts from your double bubble and you seal up the edges so that they can't get in there. And what would you seal it with? Aluminum tape. And this aluminum tape is the same stuff that you see HVAC people using. So they use it on ductwork. You might even have it on your dryer vent coming off your gas dryer, for example.

So it's a luminesed tape, and you can use that. It's dirt cheap. Well, dirt cheap. It's $9.99 because I looked it up before today's Q&A. Two inch wide, 20 yards long is $9.99 on Amazon. I'll put a link for you or you can just Google it. The tape works really well and then you just seal up the seams of your double bubble and then you just created these little pads that have no open edges.

And also that can keep ants out. So the other thing I would be looking into, how are the ants getting into it to get into your double bubble? So me personally, I don't do top venting. I don't have upper entrances. So without top venting and upper entrances, it seems like I should be able to come up with a way to gasket that hive where the boxes sit on top of each other, where the inner cover and the outer cover meet, that I should be able to use even double bubble as my gasket

material for that. So there's no space for the ants to move in. So I would just close up those edges. And if you want to double up your double bubble and then seal that up with aluminum tape, they don't go through aluminum foil. So you can even try just aluminum foil and things like that. To me, personally, it would not be worth eliminating the insulation just because some ants got in between my sheets of double bubble. I would still keep the double bubble there and I would find ways to curb the ants. Some people put cinnamon powder up there and things like that. But I also think the illuminized tape is a great solution. And when people have polystyrene and I have this issue right now with a licein hive that they chewed the entrance a little bit and just around that.

and it's not the ants that are doing it it's bees that are chewing their own hive which is annoying to me but um so the polystyrene can also be protected when ants are chewing into the upper lightweight polystyrene lice and hives are very dense polystyrene so they're tougher so it's very surprised to see that damage done to it but if we have polystyrene inserts much like the bee smart designs insulated intercovers there have been several people that have reported bees can that polystyrene insulation, ants can chew that insulation and they actually make a nest in it. So if you just pull out some Reynolds aluminum wrap and make a barrier, then ants do not chew through aluminum foil. They can't, they don't. So you can stop it easily that way. So we've got a couple of options,

foil tape to make your little pillows out of that and seal the edges and you can use straight up aluminum foil just to block whatever point of entry they have and I hope that that will work. So we're going to move on to question number seven. But yeah, the insulation is way worth more than just having a few ants that happen to be annoying in the hive. Question number seven comes from Mark. I think that yeah, YouTube channel is Mark TechSai, so maybe Mark Tech Science. If you have a queenless colony and want to merge them into another colony, How would disrupting the destination strong colony a bit so they're fanning Nazanoff,

then taking the source wheat colony and putting them open under the entrance to the destination colony seems a little simpler than the whole newspaper thing. Okay, so we know that when we use Nazanoff and when I say we use it, I'm talking about synthetic Nazanoff, which is swarm commander this happens to be one of the little vials that you get swarm i like these vials because you snap this you put this on surfaces and it smells just like nassanoff now a lot of people will say just get lemongrass this is not just lemon grass even though that's the smell that you get from it this is very similar to the actual nazanov pheromone so to me rather than

than riling them up and trying to get them to fan Nazanov, which is what they do when they're trying to recover after a swarm, when there's a bunch of stuff going on that's if you've pulled a hive apart, you'll see a bunch of them putting their abdomens in the air to recover any bees that are flying around in the area. You can actually put Nazanov on there, but I don't think you have to. I'm going to give you an option for that. So instead of trying to disrupt the hive and we want to combine a queenless colony with a queen right colony, and so the queen right colony is the strong one, the established one and we're going to just take the other colony, the other hive, and we're going to combine the two. Now, one of the problems is I don't use all the same depth of boxes. So I start with

deep brood boxes, whether it's an eight frame or a ten frame, deep brood boxes, everything above that gets medium supers. Some people are all medium all the way. And so this comes into play when you want to change frames and things like that up or down. So one of the problems you would encounter is if you have a deep brood box over here and a colony that's dwindling and you've decided they're healthy, they just don't have a queen, I didn't catch it, I want to combine them with a stronger colony, especially this time of year, you'll end up with a much stronger fortified colony than another colony that you have to nurse along and try to build them back up. So you can take that whole deep brood box and you can put it right on top of the

that you hope to join them to. So this is the weaker dwindling colony being put on top of the established strong productive colony. Now the quick rather than go through the newspaper thing is the other comment here, which is something We used to use to combine colonies. I've done it. I've shown demonstrations about it And then someone asked me. He says, why do we put the newspaper in there? So well, because it slows them down and they you know, they get introduced and you make little slits in it and I had colonies with a newsprint on there combined within hours. Like they went right through the paper right away, which was really interesting. And now they, of course, tear out the paper bit by bit, they haul it out, and they fly it away. So all your housekeeping bees are tearing it up and getting rid of it.

And then I thought, why do I put the newsprint on there? That doesn't make... Let's find out if we just put a colony straight up on it. see what happens. If there's a lot of fighting, we will ultimately see a bunch of dead bees, or we'll see bees being pushed out the front, or we'll see them fighting like the old Western bar scenes where they kick open the swinging doors and they fall out onto the road and the boardwalk and everything else. And you'll see all these beat up, drunken, I mean, bees on the landing board at the end that shows there was a big skirmish inside. But they are queenless. And you can take them on there,

And so here's what I do now instead of the newsprint. I want to get them out of the weaker colony hive blocks because keep in mind, I want to get rid of the deep and I want them to have all their supers be mediums. So I put a skateboard on. This is a cirrocell escapeboard. This is designed to get your bees out of a super so that you can take the honey

and not have bees on the honey. These work extremely well. These also work extremely well for combining colonies of bees. So I'll take that deep box. I'll put it on here. This sits on. Here's the established colony. The bees ultimately go from the top box down through here.

There's no upper entrance, no preventing or anything else. So they have no other option to go any other place in the hive to get out. They have to go through all the areas of the hive. And by this time, they've been one over. They're all part of the family. and then the following day you pull that top box off the viz are out of it these are down below and now we're back to supering as usual and you don't have to deal with another deep like you would have a deep then a medium or two and then another deep on top of that because you did this combination and what I did is

I just left those other hives that I combined like that double deeps which I would like not to do in the future I want deeps and the mediums above that and I find that here in the northeastern United States that I can get them through winter fantastic with just a deep and a medium box full of honey. So that's a great way to combine them and then get them out of there. And now you can pull those frames and now you have another box that's ready for you to install a swarm in or something like that down the line if that happens. But it's a great way to combine colonies. No newsprint necessary because I've not seen the fighting. And I don't know why I didn't just test that myself because my motto is kind of to question everything.

challenge everything. It seemed to make sense that we put newsprint up there, but then I realized they just really blend right together. It's kind of like Braveheart. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, but they tried to bring in conscripts of a bunch of Irishmen that were going to fight for the British and stomp on the Scottish. And when they ran across the field like they were going to fight, and then when they all got together, they just shook hands and hugged and everything. They were friends. That's what happens. When you come. combine your colonies and that's what's going to happen here if you just use a bee escape instead of newsprint and now they're out of the box and you recover it and do your normal stuff with it.

So moving on to question number eight with Eric from Newdale, Idaho. I found out while doing a hive inspection on Memorial Day that one of my two hives was queenless. Is there a theme here? This is going on and on and on. It was doing well three weeks before that time, but then a string of cold weather prevented me from inspecting until Memorial Day I found no eggs, no larva, no cat brood, no queen cells of any kind on any frames. Still, lots of bees otherwise. My second hive was doing well, but I didn't want to disrupt their progress, so I decided to just order a new mated queen for the queenless hive. Unfortunately, the original company I ordered from, which I won't name, it says, never shipped the queen and didn't notify me. And by the time I realized that it was the Friday after Memorial Day, so I quickly ordered a new mated queen from a different company, which is now scheduled to arrive today, June the 5th.

My question is, I had the thought that when I installed the new queen into the hive, it would also be a good idea to perhaps feed them a batch of two to one sugar, syrup through a rapid round feeder on the top of the hive to give them a boost. The number of bees has surely decreased further over the last week, so I thought the sugar syrup may help them recover and perhaps have a more positive receptiveness to the new mated queen as she is introduced in her cage. Or do you think adding the syrup would detract them from her new presence in the hive? Thanks again. Okay, first of all, this time of year two to one syrup is a heavy syrup. I don't think it's worth it for you to do that investment. I think one to one sugar syrup and even lighter in some cases is doing really well. So if you're

trying to fortify them and make them, you know, they're in a recovery mode. You've had to introduce the new queens so providing them extra resources can give them a boost. This is an area where you want to check to see what the resources are in your environment. They may need nothing. So part of what I would base that on is are they storing nectar and resources are ready or are they declining even in that ability? Because here's what happens. In my experience, when I look at the bees and I'm looking at a colony that has stopped building wax, they've stopped investing in infrastructure, which means so they're without a queen. It's one of the indicators that lets me know they don't have a queen because they're not investing in where they live. They're planning to go.

They're in decline. So you can restimulate that with a light sugar syrup. So if you're trying to get them to draw a comb if there are areas that they still need to build out, you can do that. Now this is a judgment call. You might go to B-Scape.org, B-E-E-S-A-P-E-E-A-P-E-E-E-A-P-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-C-E. You can see if you have a DIRTH or if you have strong resources in your area,

strong nectar flows through different parts of the year, if you're actually in one of the areas where you're coming into a durth period, I would highly recommend that you put one-to-one sugar syrup on a colony that you're open to resuscitate a little bit by bringing in a new mated queen, and I don't know that it has a lot to do with their acceptance of her. Now, I would encourage you to use a queen introduction or isolation cage in this case. An introduction cage would be important because it protects that new queen that you just bought in, in the event that, because it's been three weeks, right, is there any chance you've got laying workers in there,

they may attack your new queen, and then they could kill her, and you wouldn't know it. So by having her in a queen introduction cage on a frame when you introduce her to the hive, then you'll know right away if she's being fed and cared for or if they're trying to attack her and if bad things are happening. Because another thing is happening during this period of introduction,

when she's in the cage, she's protected, but she's also starting to spread her pheromones. So she's kind of winning over the existing bees and possibly suppressing if you've got any laying workers. The good news is you're not seeing any eggs larvae or anything that would indicate that you've got laying workers that have started to produce those drone eggs, right? So it sounds like you're in good shape,

but there is some time to delay there. and this has already happened, I guess. So I would like to hear from Eric maybe and let us know because they're supposed to arrive today while we're talking right now. Good things are happening. So if they did accept her. And the other thing is,

it's one of the things that Honeybee Healthy has proven beneficial for and that's acceptance of introducing Queen. So you don't have a cage to put her in. So you can use a teaspoon. or two teaspoons of Honey Be Healthy in your one-to-one sugar syrup and spritz them with that because now it helps introduce the queen and they're all excited, they're all happy, and they're drinking sugar syrup, and they're cleaning each other up too.

They can't clean themselves up when they have that sugar syrup on them. So it's just another thing that has demonstrated to help with Queen introduction. So it's another thing that you might do. And I hope that Eric posts tomorrow or the next next day. next day and lets us know how things went because I think it's going to be good and it doesn't hurt to offer that sugar syrup although I can't think of any reason why that would help their acceptance of the queen. So for those of you who are wondering too if you have the queen in the cage and you're opening up a hive and you're thinking of introducing her, if you lay this on top of the frames and you see the

behavior of the bees that come out between those frames and these discover. that there's a queen here if they instantly go to sticking their tongues out and they're trying to feed this queen or they're putting their mouths up against the screen here and the queen's tongue is coming out to receive those resources they're trying to care for her now on the other side of that if you see them doubling over and trying to push their abdomens towards this opening or if you see them using their mandibles and biting at the screen and getting a little fever pitch a little anxious and agitated, they are trying to attack the queen. So these are very distinct differences. If they're trying to nourish and feed her, that's one thing. And also if it draws a crowd,

you know, that's not like a mass of bees on it, but if there's 10 or 11 bees all trying to feed her, things are looking really good for that queen. But if they're aggressive, biting, trying to sting through the cage, that is not a good sign and you need to protect that queen for a while from those bees. So that said, we are in the fluff section for today. So I want to thank you for sticking it out this long if you're watching to the very end. And because of our mild winters, we have wastes on the rise. And I've been watching a Hornet, a European Hornet, Vespa Krebbro, and making a long-term video about it, the time-lapse sequences, longest time lapse I've done for anything from the queen building out her nests and everything else. What does this have to do with

beekeeping? Nothing. But I was paying attention to what resources she's bringing to her larvae. And I wanted to get these super close videos of her feeding her larvae, which now she has seven hatched eggs, right? So these are larvae. They need meat. She has to go and get it and bring it back. So yesterday, she didn't come back at all. She flew out. She didn't come back. So this is this interesting to me because the European hornet, those things are big. Something ate her. Something killed my hornet and now she has orphaned baby hornets. Orphaned hornet larvae. And I know this makes you very sad to know that this Vespid will not be able to go out and hunt bugs and potentially even attack beehives later, which is the yellow jackets. There was a bald-faced

hornet around and was just flying around the nest. So I still have cameras on it because I want to see which insect is going to come back and if any predate upon the residual eggs and larvae because that's animal protein that some other hornets might need. So we're going to find out what's going on. There were some large dragonflies flying by. That could take out a bald-faced hornet. But maybe some birds. I don't know. It's gone on big mystery. But what that did is it concluded my documentary of the european hornets growth and development in the spring here and that was a queen of course and she was going to have workers and all these potential things that are never going to happen for her now because she's gone forever so sorry to start you on that sad note the honeybees are doing

fantastic for those of you hear they're wanting to feed the nukes and things that you've got or you've got small swarms and things that you want to give them a little boost one-to-one sugar syrup put it inside your hive and the preferred place to put feed inside your hive is on top of the inner cover this protects other bees from getting in and wanting to rob we're in a low robbing time frame here where i am however where you are if you're entering a dearth period feeding inside the hive it's a great way to make sure that you're targeting the feed to the hive that you're trying to resuscitate or get going and of course we would not putting sugar syrup on any colony that you plan to harvest honey from. So that's another thing to

pay attention to right now. You could be queenless. Don't rush on that. Keep good records. A lot of people don't realize that weeks go by before they even look into a hive. So they might find out that, wow, things have been in trouble for a long time. So by assessing the hive and looking at if there's residual larvae in there or if there are bees in the pupa state, you can get a sense that timeline of when the last time you had a laying queen in there was and then you start look at hive strength and things like that and you can go from there but feeding to get them back on their feet is important and making sure that you've got a queen right colony also if we get into July it's becomes a shady time where if you've lost a queen

you have a colony that's definitely dwindling time to think about combining colonies rather than resuscitating the colony or spending your hard and money to bring in a queen So try to let them make a new queen if they can do it. Also, for those of you have bottom boards that are removable trays, it's a good idea to remove those weekly. It's another thing that gets forgotten because it's closed up. It's under the hive. It's not wintertime.

So we tend to get, you know, very relaxed about how much moisture might be building up in there. But it's an opportunity to look and see what's falling through the screen. And this is only for those of you have the screen bottom boards with the removable tray. You can see what's in there. And if we don't clean it up, we don't have a timeline for how long it took to find five dead varroa in that tray and things like that. And so very interesting because over a period of three weeks in my observation hives again this year, two dead varroa. So false comfort because your varroa mites can build really fast right along with your brood. So anyway, clean and prep your honey harvesting extraction.

equipment and stuff like that because depending on where you are but i'm speaking of course the people in my immediate vicinity we are going to have a big nectar flow very soon so it's just coming on right now hide strength is good numbers are good foragers are everywhere i don't what they get from raspberries but the raspberries are going to be fantastic this year all the fruit bearing trees are going to do well we had a mild winter everything's great so um super Colonies, just be aware, stay out of them because they expand rapidly just as they do in spring. And they start to bring in resources. And before you know, you've got these honeybound colonies, and your favorite queen, your best colony,

decides to swarm at a time when bees do not swarm. Bees will swarm potentially anytime that colony is full of resources, that there's more resources outside, and that their populations are high. And if you're not doing an inspection, every second to third week, that's my preferred time frame. so try to get into or do a really good evaluation of each of your hives every second or third week. And you can, of course, split that up so that you're looking at one or two hives every week, depending on how many hives you have. And then, but not visiting the same hive weekly, that's too much, it's too much invasion.

You can actually cause your bees to abscond. So anyway, voles are everywhere, which means mice are everywhere. I've got night camera video of deer mice doing extraordinary things. If they weren't videoed, I wouldn't believe how quickly a deer mouse can move across a field, jump onto a smooth bark tree like a maple, and zip straight up it in a blink. It looks like a fast forward movie. And if it weren't for the night camera gear, you wouldn't see the little glowing eyes. It's like popcorn.

It's unbelievable. So one of the things that I'm doing this year is I'm just keeping the winter opening size. In other words, we're not reducing entrances, we're not enlarging entrances. We're keeping the entrance reducers at three eighths of an inch in height and of course, three or four inches in width. And even the largest colonies are equal in honey production to those in the past that have had wide open entrances. So it actually benefits them and you won't forget in the fall. So what we're doing is things now to configure your hives that hopefully you won't have to change. And then when fall comes, you'll be all set and no mice will get in there.

And usually it's the weaker colonies. And the reason I bring up voles is because I'm still mad at them because they attacked and chewed apart all of my hyssup that I grew. So I'm on the warpath with voles and there's just a big bunch of them this year. if you go through the field every 20 feet a vole takes off. Anyway, just throwing it out there, make sure they're not eating all your stuff. Another thing is there's an Indiegogo campaign that's launching to, not today, when's it launching?

June 11th. So this coming week, it's called the Keepers Hive. You can Google it, you can do a YouTube search, The Keepers Hive, and they're doing a fundraiser, which means they're probably offering deals, and that will be Tuesday, June the 11th. I'm going to put a link for you down there.

And I do have the one queen Keepers Hive here. And I know that David Burns did a video of his evaluation of the Keepers Hive. So you can also go to David Burns Bekeeping and look at his video on that to see what it's about. And of course the company themselves, the Keepers Hive, they have put out their videos to show step by step. If people are having trouble lifting bees, lifting colonies, lifting. hive boxes, all of these things, this is a solution to that. It's a way to pull the frames to the side if you haven't seen it yet. I interviewed the inventors and we talked about that. So I also have the interviews on my interview page, interviews with experts, and we talk about that. So I have the

single hive version and so on June 11th, I'm going to buy one too. And the one I'm going to get is the two queen keeper hive. So what that is is it's two, Langstroth, they're 10 frame sizes, but they're actually eight frames. And they have queen excluders above them, and they have a central column of your honey supers. So that would be for making comb honey or anything else that you want to do. But now we have double the brood, double the queen production. And so the queens would be providing their workers, which share a common honey super. And it will produce a lot of honey for you. They've done years of testing on it. It isn't something that just came out. So I recommend you look into it, but I'm just going to share with you.

I spoke with them at a couple of conferences, actually. The Pennsylvania State Conference was one of those. So June 11th, the Keepers Hive has their Indiegogo campaign, and there's a link down before, down below, and check it out. I'm going to buy the double clean hive system, which I'm sure you could cobble together something like that yourself. But there are advantages to having their particular hive. There's a reason why it is being sold as the keeper's hive. There are aspects built into it which make management very easy. So if you're going to, you have a nuke, for example, and you're about to open it up, you want to put it into a larger hive. This is a very interesting way to go ahead and expand it and there are translucent panels on the

sides on the bottom box that you can flip over the top and you can look through the panels to see the activity without disrupting your bees, without smoking them and doing all these things. So it has attributes to it that are very interesting and I'll be interested also in your thoughts about it. I only have one of those hives here. So when their campaign goes out on the 11th, I think their delivery times are later in July. So it looks like a pretty quick turnaround on that so you could still use them this year. And it's all standard Langstroth frames that they will take. So nothing unique about it. as far as framing goes and things like that. So I think it's interesting, and I'm just going to put the word out.

You can check it yourselves, and I want to thank you for spending your time with me here today. So I hope that you're not having the terrible weather we have, although I can't hate the rain because it's keeping everything growing, and all my fields of pollinator flowers and things like that are doing really well. I'm super excited about that. I'm still mad about my loss of blue giant, hiss up and I'm going to try not to hate those voles. So thanks a lot for watching. I hope you

have a fantastic beekeeping weekend ahead. If you still have questions, please put them down in the comment section below or go to the way to be.org and click on the page, The Way to be and let me know what's on your mind.