The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - BeeKeeping Q&A Episode 301 still cold, raining, and challenging for the bees.

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/2kyaTsM32CE

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, April the 11th of 2025. This is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 301. I'm Frederick Dunn. This is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here. 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 list in order and there aren't very many of them. That's right. This is going to be a short Q&A because there's just not a lot going Let's just be honest, it's a little bit depressing outside. I can't remember a year when the weather milked out this long and kept our bees inside our hives because even this morning it was at what temperature?

That's right. 32 degrees. 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which is no great surprise, zero Celsius. Freezing temperature. 2.7 mile per hour winds, which is 4 kilometers per hour. 99% relative humidity, not a great surprise there. because it's raining. That's bad for your bees. This combination of cold weather followed by rain, this transition from snow to rain, really bad for the bees inside the hive,

because what have they been doing, brooding up, trying to keep everything warm while they're being deprived of their opportunity to go out and get resources. So anyway, it's bad. It's bad news all the way around. I'm at the point now where I'm not surprised if they die, I'm surprised if they live. We have lots of losses this year. It's not good. The bees have now been confined for roughly six months. That's a long time, no matter how healthy your colony of the bees are. Anyway, we're going to talk more about that in the fluff section at the end. One of the things I did, sure, take advantage of it. I did go out and, as I mentioned before, I did what's called frost seeding of my white clover.

which is fantastic for bees. Now we have many acres here so I can walk around and look for bald patches and things like that. And what I did was, while the ground was covered in frost and everything was frozen, knowing that there was rain coming and a warm-up, I broadcast the seed just on the surface,

just wherever there is dirt patch and just sprinkle them around. And if you've seen clover seeds, they're really tiny. And just let them go. It's the lazy person's way to casually garden. So what's going on now though? See it's been a couple of weeks already since I did that they're up Even with this terrible weather they're like half an inch tall and if it would stop raining I could get out there and get I don't want to crawl on the ground when it's wet. I just don't you probably like it I don't

Because I can give you close-ups and show you the success looks it's really good Pretty happy that I did that I'm also going to try to grow morning glories but I have to find a way to expose the soil there which is more to come. Anyway the weather is miserable and where is this misery existing in the northeastern part of the United States the state of Pennsylvania northwest corner of the state of Pennsylvania and I'm sure things are perfect where you live and I'm sure there will be comments telling me how wonderful it is in the sun right now like my wife who happens to be down in Florida who sends me pictures of the food she's eating and she was somewhere

where there's natural sponge like where they've been gathering sponges everywhere and i thought that sounded boring until i got to see the sponge the way it would grow naturally it's kind of conical shaped pretty cool stuff has everything to do with beekeeping i know and why wouldn't it what would you do with natural sponge you put it in your water system outside for the bees so they can get their footing and they can drink through the sponge that's what i'm hoping is going to happen curiosities, maybe they'll grow moss, maybe all kinds of cool stuff can happen with natural sponge. So, yeah, it's bad. It's all bad. In fact, the coming week, we don't even hit the 60s here. So we do have a warm-up. It'll get into the 50s. If you can get the 50s in sunshine, the bees are going to be desperately zinging out to find resources because there are resources.

They just can't get to them. So how do you submit your own topic or question? you go to the website the way to be dot org click on the page marked the way to be fill out the form and there you go it doesn't mean that you'll make it but if it's something that I feel would be of interest to others it hasn't been frequently covered you'll make it next week it'll be good and by the way some people have been getting the way to be mugs the 300th episode mugs which I think are great thank you for that response and I wanted to let you know They're only good for two weeks.

Not that they wear out. It's that in two weeks, they won't be available anymore. So see how I have this little pamphlet and I have a mug? Why would I show you those things? I'm going to give them away. When? Next Friday. The same day that it's the last day that you could be buying a mug that's marked for the 300th episode

because that'll be the 302nd episode. So I gave people two weeks to get them. So what you do, get that pamphlet and that mug if you live in the United States. I'm sorry I can't ship overseas. Huge hassle. All you do is go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark the way to be, and you submit instead of a question, you put 300 episode mug in the subject line

and you name one new thing that you learned from this channel in the entire time that you've been watching it. and all of you who do that we will have all of your entries put together you also need to have a mailing address on there too so that by the way nobody's going to get your mailing address the only way we're even going to use the mailing address is if you happen to be a winner the supervisor will pick the winner he'll have to pick it out of a can we've done a giveaway before long time ago so I'm sorry it's been that long so let's go over again what you're going to get you get this pamphlet it's the 300 edition. It says special edition. All it is is spiral notebook line paper for you to take your notes and let everybody know that you're a winner because you can't buy these. You have to get them only from the giveaway and you'll get the coffee cup too. And I'll sign the bottom of the coffee cup so that when you run it through the dishwasher or you scrub it up at the kitchen sink, the signature will go away and it'll be a normal coffee cup again, having the exact same value that it did when I wrote on it. or I may do a doodle, who knows. So you submit that next Friday will be the drawing at the same time that the door closes on being able to buy the 300th edition mug.

So I appreciate that for those of you who have been interested and it is a fun thing to do and I've been really inspired by the people that decided to get a mug. Thank you so much. So you may be wondering where do you get that mug anyway? Look down to the video description. There's a link. They're sold on T-Spring. T-Spring and there's a link on Facebook and so on.

It's just some way to commemorate it. So let's jump right into today's question. If you have a question right now that's just eating you up and you need an answer and you're watching this at some other time, go to the Facebook Fellowship, the Way to Be. If you just Google the Way to Be Fellowship, it'll come up for Facebook. You can join, no requirements, no entry fees, no payments, as with everything we do, all free.

So there you go. Now I'm going to start right off with Peter from Perth, Western Australia. So a couple of years ago, I built a long Langstroth hive to your plants. Thank you very much. What I have found is that the queen plants, eggs throughout the frames mixed with pollen and honey, hence no pure honey frames to harvest. I don't use a queen excluder. Can you make a suggestion or technique to love? limit the queen to stay at the first eight frames. Okay, sure. And here's the thing, and I'm not telling you to use or not use queen excluders. You can. We described last week how you can make a queen excluder as part of your follower board. So you model it after the follower board so it fills the space and then you can, of course, constrain your queen to the first few frames,

whatever you decide. There are a lot of beekeepers even here in the northeastern United States, some that are commercial scale. Steve Rapasky comes to mind, they do single deep brood management. And so that's 10 deep lankstroth frames. So if we use that as a model, we would have 10 deep frames available for the queen, brood, and of course, brewed food, bee bread and all of that. And then you would have a queen excluder following that. But now let's say you don't want to use a queen excluder. And so here we get into another discussion. very polarizing among beekeepers, by the way, which is perfectly fine with me. There are a lot of discussions about even the vertical configurations as well as horizontal,

and how to keep your queen where you want her to be. So let's go back to see Rapasky. The commercial management of bees is very time constraining, right? So it's number crunching, its efficiency. You want to know what box your queen is. is in that's why use a queen excluder we want her right there and we want a 100% guarantee or maybe 99.9 because sometimes queens still get through the queen excluder we don't know how or why. So they want to make sure that it's nothing but honey up there because even if they can do brood at any time of year

my configuration deep brood box medium honey super for the bees beyond that for the people So when they cycle up and down into that upper food resource, which they use in the wintertime, which this year was not enough. It's right. We'll talk about that in the fluff section. But anyway, that medium soup or wall-to-wall honey and then the brood box, if they cycle back and forth, it really doesn't matter to us that some of that comb gets really dark. The more times it's been used for brood, the darker the beeswax gets.

So some people would like to keep the upper boxes with nothing but Honey in them and therefore not having brood in it means that it doesn't get dark and tough and difficult to work and stuff like that So looks better if it's been used only for honey So the only way to guarantee that is to use the queen excluder So now moving on let's go without the queen excluder I don't use top venting and I use a small entrance I base that upon what I have learned from those who do hundreds, if not thousands, of ripouts or removals of feral colonies of bees in structures. And they have found in hot weather, hot weather locations.

Now remember, I'm in the northeastern U.S. in the state of Pennsylvania. We don't get these super hot, super humid summers that they get, let's say, down in the south. So let's say Gulfport, Mississippi, where dirt rooster lives. Let's say down in Louisiana, where Jeff Horschoff lives, and they do these ripouts. And they find these spaces occupied by large colonies with a single entrance, often extremely small. So the reason I bring that up is high humidity, high heat. The bees are doing well down there, and what they find, here's what I want you to look at. Go to either of their channels, look at their videos.

when they do a rip-out, these are feral colonies, therefore there's no restriction on where the queen can go. What's the organization of the resources inside the cavity that they're occupying? It always has the brood near the entrance where the ventilation is. They have their resources well in the back,

often more distant from the entrance, so the honey doesn't get robbed, for example. And you'll find that it's a very consistent organization of resources. Now, why does that change in the Langstroth hives, or maybe even in this case, because Peter did not explain this in the question, is there venting in that long Langstroth hive?

Is there another entrance? Sometimes we have another entrance, depending on where you get your long Langstroth hive. These were built, I think, based on my plans. So we don't, initially I had vents on the bottom that we could control. and we had openings in the coverboards that you could put screens on and also have venting if you wanted to. I've since eliminated that because the bees indicated they didn't want it. How did they indicate that they don't want venting?

They seal it up with propolis. So I found that once we do away with secondary ventilation further through the cavity, whether it's vertical or horizontal, your bees are then likely to spread out and have brewed elsewhere. Often you'll find drones distant from where the worker brood is, which is kind of interesting too. So when you restrict it to a single entrance and not a huge single entrance, I mean, it makes sense. I get it. When you look at a beehive and you see that it's, you know, it looks like huge traffic congestion midday and there's a nectar flow on and you just think I'm just going to pull out that entrance reduced or I'm going to open it wide up and all these bees are going to go in there. And not only that, it provides more ventilation. sense that it would provide more ventilation and of course less traffic jamming

with the bees they're more efficient they go through instead of a two-lane highway we now have a six-lane highway so I keep it small and this keeps the brood down near the entrance and it's just a normal progression up through to honey I rarely have them go above the second box and but I also say that people that do that and do that at 100% risk that you might end up with what's described here, you can have brood further away from your entrance. So if you want to guarantee it, you have to go to putting in a queen excluter. In the event that this is happening, even though you don't have any secondary venting,

even though all of your joints are nice and tight. Because remember where your boxes come together, you have the potential there for wear and tear and air movement until the bees propolize it up. So closing up entrances, making sure of a single entrance, concentrates them. In these barrel-style hives, like the ivory beehive, which looks like a cylinder on its side, it has the option to have back venting and a front entrance, or closing the back and only having the front entrance. So I closed the back and I only have the front entrance. So what did they do?

Predictably, they started with brood, they went into a mix of brood and resources, and then nothing but honey stores all the way to the 15th frame all the way in the back. So by closing off venting, they do what they do naturally in cavities. So it's very interesting. And just like a yo-yo in spring, they're all up at the top, and they go back down. And if I could just get out in the hives and work the bees, where I fully intended to by this time of year, because let's face it, the clock is ticking. I don't like not knowing what's going on inside the hives. So, but I'm not going to, not going to go out there in 39 degrees with the wind blowing and the rain coming down and snow falling

and open up the hives and do inspections it's just not going to work out they are challenged but what we're going to be looking for this coming week if I can get some warm days and I think there should be a couple of them I'm looking to see if they're starting queen cells already but I think this year they're hurting I think they're far behind I think their numbers are going to be small I think we're going to open up a lot of hives and find out that they've dwindled to the point where they're in jeopardy. And the reason I say that is we can really count the days they've had where they could fly. And it's like three days in the past month. This is not enough for your bees to sustain themselves. I don't know what's going on where you are. But here, where I am in the state of

Pennsylvania, right now, it is not good for the bees. They are not able to take advantage of the nectar resources that are out there right now and the pollen resources that are out there. So the minute they do have an opportunity, it is a mad rush. So I hope that, so that's my technique, those are the two. And when you have upper entrances and things like that, which some people do, and I'm not against it, I just don't do it myself anymore. The vertical langstroth hive, when you do that, you will need to use a queen excluder, or you have the risk that your bees will start to spread,

brood throughout your colony throughout the hive space and that's why because now they have air movement everywhere question number two also comes from peter western australia okay so the end of our season here in perth unfortunately in my district it has been very poor in resources see that's what we had last year we had a dearth in a big dearth right at the end of the year my pond was the lowest it has ever been So when I ate, it was so much so that I barely had any honey, which I need to leave for the girls. What do I have? It says what I do have is a lot of pollen mixed with brood, minuscule honey. Very soon now, I will be reducing my hives down to just the brood box and storing my rotation super.

Should I just store the pollen frames or should I remove the frames, clean them out? If so, what would be a good way to clean out the pollen? Okay, so there's a lot of questions here. And sizing your colonies, keep in mind that they're going into winter down there while we are in spring and headed for summer. So getting ready for winter in Australia, and by the way, my second most popular viewing people come from Australia. So thank you for that.

What's going on is getting ready for winter, we do need to assess. every frame inside the hive and make sure they're going to have the resources that they need to get through winter. I don't like if, for example, they have frames of pollen down there, and they just don't have the nectar necessary to support the use of the pollen in the building of brood, because those are two things that they need together. I would definitely put that in the freezer. And the reason is that when the dearth continues or when they have an opportunity and there's a warm up, there just isn't pollen in the environment but you have it already stored as bee bred in your hive I would save that out and then condense together the honey supers the other thing I have concerns about and I don't know

what the climate is like there I don't know if it freezes for example there are parts of Australia that never freeze and like if you look at New South Wales where the flow hive people are they always seem to have also what they get a little rain one day and but they have a nectar flow year round on some level so when you have a real dear dearth, that's when the beekeeper needs to be prepared to provide some resources for the bees. And as I've mentioned before, sucrose first, proteins, second. Because if they don't have the energy that they need to do the work that needs to be done, it doesn't help them then to have protein around to make brood.

So freeze those and I would concentrate going into winter on making sure they have capped honey as a resource and size it right. See here two boxes for winter time and as I mentioned earlier For me that medium super was not enough They used it up they moved right up underneath it all the frames below are empty and then they brood it up and then what did it do? It dropped into the teens in Fahrenheit and froze the bees over the new brood because what are they doing? They're they're not brooding up enough to replace their numbers right now and some of the hive configurations that I have out there don't facilitate feeding.

They have no way to feed the bees. So even having left honey for the wintertime for them to get through, imagine being inside for six months and having to be locked into a food resource while we're brewed. You need a great number of bees, but also we're running out of our fat-bodied winter bees. They have reached the limits of their life. This is where now we're going to get the potential for your colony to dwindle down to nothing or just a tiny cluster that can't sustain itself. They can't forage anymore, they just don't have the numbers,

or the brood is dying, and they're wasting their time clearing out empty cells, and it's just a mess right now. It's really not good. All I'm doing these days is sitting around worrying about my bees. It's not fun. So, yeah, I would save the frames, freeze them. We freeze them to make sure that there are no eggs. I don't know what kind of pests you have down there,

but it doesn't hurt, and it does preserve pollen. It's one of the things that we do to make sure that it's kept as fresh as possible. And then what you do later is once they've consumed some of the honey next to the frames, then next to the brood area, we push the honey frames in close to the brood area and a pollen frame. So honey frame on one side up against the root, pollen frame on the other. It takes a full frame of pollen finished to complete a full frame of brood. So, and it's the most expensive resource in the hive too. So that's what, that's just what I recommend.

Other people may have other ideas, and those ideas are also welcome. Moving on to question number three, this comes from Shing Dai. Question, it says question 14. So I guess this was last week. If we leave empty hives in our apiary, which I recommend that you do, but I also recommend that you put robbing screens over the entrances. Why do I recommend leaving your empty hives in the apiary? One of the reasons, of course, is they take up a huge amount of space in storage.

Here's the other thing. I found that in storage, your hives get visited by pests. Pretty darn easy. Unless you open-air stack them and they have exposure to light. So there are lots of reasons and we want to make sure that we're storing empty cleaned out comb, not comb with resources in it, not comb with protein, you know, you can't have bee bread in it, none of that, or it will attract pests. So here's the thing. I do recommend that once you've cleaned them out and clean out your dead out, it's just as soon as you can. Get all the dead bees out. I know a lot of people will say, yeah, the bees will just clean it up. I'll just put a swarm in there and swarm, we'll clean them all up. Let's pave the way a little

bit for them, because installing a swarm against their will is one thing, and I'm not against that. It's called management. But I do like the volunteer occupancy. occupations of hives because that's just a feel-good thing. So if you can leave your deep brood box, so take it apart, get the supers off, clean out your dead bees, use that air blaster. That air blaster, by the way, I don't have it with me here, but it's a battery-powered, handheld air blaster, almost as strong as a low-pressure air hose. It blows the baby bees right out of the cells, blows the cappings off, blows bottom boards clear, it is a touchless way. to do it. So if I look it up, I'll find the link for that blaster. On full power, this is no kidding,

you can blow eggs out of an egg carton with it. It's just a little handheld battery air dust are designed for clearing out computers and stuff like that or blowing dust out of your radiator, I don't know, anywhere where you need portable air power. I was drying off eggs that I had had to wash before I put them in the shell, in the egg cartons. and it actually had it too high and it was lifting the eggs out of the egg carton. That's how strong it is. It is a pocket-sized tool that you can blow dead brood out. And the next bees that want to move in will appreciate it.

It's less work for them to do. And I have seen bees, scouts, reject hives as soon as they detected dead bees in it. So if you can pave the way and make it smell just like brood comb and everything else, think of it as a previous owner of an apartment, either less, left their garbage everywhere. Who wants to move into that? Or they did a good cleaning on their way out and left it move in ready. You know, broom ready, whatever you call it. That's what we want to do with our beehives because the swarms can move in. And so that's why I was suggesting that. So the concern here is they're in yellow jacket territory. And if we leave a previously occupied box, would not yellow jackets move into it.

With all the frames in it, they tend not to. And how do I know this? Because I have encouraged not yellow jackets, but wasps, to move into empty hive equipment. There's a video. If you want to look at my YouTube channel, which is Frederick Dunn, and you go to the little search bar up on the top right,

just look at wasps versus wasps. And what I did is I picked the favorable wass, and I set up boxes for them. standard solid bottom board, deep brood box, empty, no frames, nothing else. Of course, they built their paper nest underneath the inner cover, and my purpose was to use these wastes that don't tolerate yellow jackets as a repellent, a natural repellent against the yellow jackets. So you could look at that video and see that then if you have frames,

they're less likely to move in, the wasps are, which is interesting to me. Because let's think about the wasp paper nest. looks like a little umbrella. They start, the queens start this time of year, and they start to build it out. If there were frames in this hive, then there's no room for them to do that. They tend to not like that.

They have to create galleries of cells that they're going to have their brood in, and they need space to do it. So it's not a big concern that yellow jackets will move in. Although it wouldn't hurt to do inspections. I'm a huge fan of getting your morning coffee tea or whatever you drink, wandering around at sunrise and seeing what the landing boards are like what's visiting because your cold weather flyers, your early morning flyers are your wasps.

So you can find out what's going on. But my goal is to have boxes that are ready for a, a voluntary swarm to move into, which last year was a banner year for that. Or having a box is just ready so that when you've registered with B swarmed.org, which we did that interview with Mateo last week, when you register there and you go and get your swarm and you've collected it and you've brought it back in your car now you have to hive it up isn't it a pain to have to go into the shed and pull out a bunch of gear and put together a bottom board and an entrance reducer and a deep box and everything else how awesome would it be if it's already just sitting out in your B yard so that's what works for me and you can just hive those things up and by the way for those who are interested he was doing a fundraiser go fund me whatever, more than 250% of the goal was met. So fantastic for Mateo.

Somebody who does a great service to us as beekeepers, and the public in general now have a source, B-swarmed.org, where they can report swarms as they find them. And then beekeepers can go and get them, and we limit the amount of time that they're on trees and stuff. Their opportunity to survive in the wild is greatly reduced. Even where I am, the habitat for the bees in trees, has been profoundly reduced. Why is that? Because they came through and logged all the woods around here.

And they took down trees. There were 10 inches in diameter or larger. So basically every bee tree. And still going on, a mile to the south of me, to the north of me, a mile to the north. They actually set up a mill in the woods and they've been milling those big trees and logs there all winter long. which is really interesting, but you talk about habitat disappearing for cavity nesters and even honey trees, bee trees, and things like that, it's going down. So it's going to be more and more important for us to have bee boxes for them to get into because the habitat, the wild and feral colonies that need places to live will now be looking at our apiaries, hopefully, for places to be.

And so that's it. Long answer for that question, but woven a lot of extra stuff there. Question number four, last question of the day. This comes from Mike from Waukesha, Wisconsin. Question is on bee venom viability. My brother's a little sensitive to bee stings, and when cleaning out a dead out, he wondered if he could get stung.

I suggested that if you picked up a recently deceased bee and squeezed her, you might. But I'm thinking after a short time, they would no longer pack a punch, Any readings on that subject? As always, Mike. Okay, so here's the thing. Yeah, we play with dead bees all the time.

And also, this is one of the things that you can get in a dispute over, or let's call it a heated discussion. When people say, dead bees still sting. They don't, actually. And the discussions, it's one of these areas where people have made up their minds because they were stung by a dead bee. Now, I will say this, because a lot of new beekeepers will often open

beehive and they think they're all dead. They're sure they're dead in fact and this is why I always say if you think they're dead scoop them onto a plate bring them in the kitchen and put them on your kitchen table because there'll be a small cluster they don't look like they're moving they look for evidence of life right so they look for respiration now you can't take a mirror and hold it under the nose of a dying bee and see if it's still breathing because they don't respirate that way they don't breathe through their mouth they breathe through their spiracles. So then the thinking is if we don't see the abdomen expanding and contracting must be dead. Actually, no, they could be in a chill torpor, which happens a lot this time of year

or the warmups and the cool downs. This is a devastating rise and fall of temperatures this time of year. That's why it's so hard on the bees. But anyway, you often find out that they're still alive. So what happens is some people get a handful of dead bees and as they start to warm up on your hand, the stinger comes out like it's in slow motion and they low-key sting you. I say that because bees, when they're agitated, can deliver more venom or drive their stinger deeper or be more aggressive in the way they defend themselves. So now let's say they're dead. First, let's talk about the apparatus. You know, bees are, you get this argument too. well if bees are so evolved how come they die when they sting and a wasp can sting you over and over and over

well the wasps that's singing you over and over if it dies it can't sting you anymore either um but the honeybee even after you kill it detaches the stinger which has an autonomous system on it and by that i mean it runs on its own so it has little muscles that contract on their own and they have a venom-sacked and they have a little alarm pheromone gland in there and they have a three-part stinger so they have the stylus which is a rigid portion really super sharp and then they have stylets and uh those things slide and they dig into you and they uh lancets I'm sorry they're not stylets they're lansets so think of lances like the old medieval times so while these things are sliding on the stylet or the stylus the fixed

stinger part, venom is being contracted by the muscles and traveling down, right? And it's not a closed system. So it's not like a hypodermic needle. It doesn't travel and close and then just deliver at the bottom of the stinger. It kind of leaks out all the way and they're driving themselves deeper and deeper in. Now the reason I bring this up is there been studies done on it. So they contract for about 30 seconds. So it delivers its full venom load in 30 seconds. Now even when they're just in an alarmed or aroused defensive state, they are releasing some of their alarm pheromone. And they are priming themselves with a little bit of venom. And so when the venom is in the stinger and then you come along later and you're picking up

a bunch of dead bees and if their abdomens are contracted and the stinger is sticking out, you can poke yourself with a stinger and there's residual venom on it. And it's no longer actively expressing venom from those venom glands. What it's doing is it's just already coated on the stinger and when you stick yourself, you can get a little reaction from that and it's very tiny. You can have dried venom and get a reaction when you stick yourself with it because you're going to poke it into your skin. So, but dead bees, none of that apparatus is still functioning. It can no longer drive itself into your skin. It can no longer actively deliver more venom because after that 30 seconds it's kind of done anyway and so dead

bees truly dead bees do not sting and you can poke the stinger and stuff to get that stinger into your skin you have to find soft skin for it to do it if you're talking about scoop and dead bees then why contact them get that air blaster that I mentioned earlier and don't touch the dead bees at all just blow them out of there if I had the potential to suffer anaphylactic shock from bee venom. I don't think I'd be sticking my hands in a pile of bees in the first place. Just fail safe. Why not? But yeah, so dead bees truly don't sting, but we can force the venom, the dried venom on a dead bee still residual on the stinger, into our skin. And you can still get a reaction. So this leads us to the fluff section for today.

I know that's a little early, but we're in a tough situation here and have concerns, particularly about the smaller colonies. The colonies that are making it are remarkable and amazing. And, you know, we can't assign. This is a problem with beekeeping, by the way, the challenge and the attraction to beekeeping all at once. They don't seem to follow a lot of rhyme or reason regarding which colony dies, which colony lives. why they're full of surprises all the time insulation more insulation more life not

true they just not true for me here so I have uninsulated I have a premier box which is a propola hive a single deep that I just threw together last minute end of the year writing them off no feeder shim on top just toss those bees in a box and put them out there because it's better than what just you know letting them die late season swarm and they're live they made it and then you panic because now you're not configured to feed them I could put a fondant patty on there so I put a B-smart design's insulated inner cover on it I didn't have time to seal up a medium box over the top the way I'd like to because I like to take those covers and put expansion foam around that edge where it meets the

box and the insulated inner cover because they don't like airflow up there through a fondant pack on there those bees are alive that makes no sense to me me. I don't know how they made it through everything terrible. Now I have a heavily insulated lice and hive. Super strong, lots of resources, vibrant bees, great activity all the way into mid-January. They're totally dead. The puzzle remains. So, you know, you get on a checklist of what could have been wrong with my bees. Well, it all comes down to looking at the condition of your bees, and it's what I described earlier. Why are some bees able to, you know, manage a brood pattern, keep the brood alive, and then on a warmer day or in an

insulated hive like the licean, heavily insulated hive, it's polystyrene. This should have had the surplus workers to get to the resources and then, you know, kind of like a shuttle run, get those back through trophylaxis to all the bees that need it the most, and those will be the nurse bees in the center of the cluster and then off they go, but know they all clustered up, they bury themselves in the cells, and then there's a couple of inches of empty cells around them and then capped honey. They didn't do it. They're also not soaking wet or anything either.

These are puzzles because it's hard to find consistency. And well, that absolutely worked. Oh, no way, that doesn't work. Let's not do that anymore. We can't do it based on a one-off, make alterations. And I have too many different configurations in my backyard apiary. So the ability to feed top of the chart for me, I need to be able to get resources on there. The lice and hive has a reservoir style feeder on top, but it also has a center hole in it.

So it's a reservoir style that's for liquid feed, and we don't want to do that in the wintertime. So it has a punchout hole in the center, which I did not use. So I have to be fair to license and say I didn't put a fondant pack on that hive because they had so much stored honey in there well above the colony that was occupying it. And so they have and still have capped honey in there. So it looked like they had what they needed to get through winter. So no fondant. So this is the importance of keeping records.

And we shouldn't really take action based on one year's result. because a lot of different things can go on. And so we talk about losses. So what, well, let me just retry this a little bit just to drive it home. What am I changing? I'm going to make sure that every colony that I have, my lay-in size, I can't feed them. Just can't. One made it, one did not.

So there again, one made it, one didn't. They're insulated the same. They're configured. Identically, they both had honey resources inside, and no means to feed them. Because the way their frames are designed, they come together. And if you follow Dr. Lear Shurashkin's guidance,

you're not supposed to have feed in those hives. So, you know, one made it, one didn't. So what's the reason this one did and this one didn't? I don't know. But at least now I can do a split and reoccupy both hives again and we're back in beesness. So the thing is,

Project Apis M. Everyone had the reports in. You've probably seen it. Some people do the thumbnails, the influencers, YouTubers, 1.6 million bees are dead. And that's what Apis M reported. 1.6 million colonies are dead. And Blake Shook has been, man, he covered the ground. He's been on CBS, NBC, ABC. They did specials on the losses of bees. So he's kind of becoming the face of the commercial beekeeping industry, and giving that he is so successful with his own colonies and those under his management. We're talking thousands of hives. 1.6 million losses, and he's in a strong position, of course, to continue, but there are large commercial beekeepers that are completely out of business. And then so back yard beekeepers take some comfort in

that their numbers don't match that. So I did a survey three weeks ago, and, uh, Project APSM also does survey among backyard beekeepers. They had about 360 respondents. I had 530 respondents, not saying that it's more popular, but what I like about you is the listener and viewer on my channel is you're very engaged. And so when I post these very simple surveys

and things like that, the responses have been really good and helpful if you want to feel good. Because here's what I said. I said, if you've suffered dead colonies during the winter and spring of 2025, how do you plan to replace your losses? And this is very basic, and I appreciate your responses. Okay, so 55% are going to make splits. Swarm collections to restore will be 15% buying packages or nucleus colonies, 25% and quitting.

They lost so many. They're out of business. They're not doing it. And some of you who have lost everything have made your comments known underneath the videos, 5% of the respondents are completely out. So all the others are still in a position where they plan to continue with bees. The other thing is, overwhelmingly,

people had the exact same results as last year, as years before, as far as survivability goes, or better. A very small percentage lost more than normal or lost all of their bees. So it's very interesting, and I realize this is a very basic kind of service. because we don't even mention are these lengths or are these insulated are they not

insulated it's not it's simply back-yard beekeepers did they make it did they die what are you going to do about it are you going to quit are you going to continue and if you're going to continue how you're going to replace them so and this is the group that i like the most you know you're not named it's not like i'm calling you out but 55% of them are going to make splits restore my apiary for my own stock that is the number one thing i personally If we were in a club and I was able to influence you, I would suggest that if you have one colony of bees left, after this difficult winter, dearth period,

whatever you've been through that took out so many of your hives, if you can work from just one or two colonies and focus your energy on keeping those genetics and getting that going again in your own backyard, you're going to be, in my opinion, much better off. Not just that, it's literally the cheapest way to go. The second tier for that, swarm collection, I was kind of surprised only 15% of the people plan to collect swarms to replace their losses. 25% are buying packages or nucleus colonies. Because that becomes a big financial commitment, I noticed because I checked before he came on today.

Package prices are way up there. And I popped in on the Better Bee website to see, are they selling packages? and I expected exactly what I found and that said they were sold out. So these companies are in good positions that are selling packages and nukes. The other thing is, better be in New York, requires you to come and pick them up. They're not shipping anything. So I think that's wise from a package seller perspective because when you ship stuff, you don't know what the handling is going to be like. when once it leaves your breeding facility and I don't know if Better Bee is selling their own stock

or if they're partnered with California, you know, so we don't know if the big breeders out there are brokering through other things like Man Lake does that. I don't know if Better Bee has some of their own bees or not, they may. And so anyway, if I were selling nucleus bees, a nucleus of bees or packages, I personally wouldn't like to ship them. I realize that that would limit your range of clientele. But so much happens, and then you have to insure them. So in other words, if they arrive dead and there's two inches of dead bees in the package, you need to contact the people that sold you to the package,

you need to get a refund right away. If your queen died, you need to get a picture of your dead queen, blah, blah, blah. And so I think if you're going to sell packages or nukes, that having people come and get them or a representative of a B club or something like that comes and signs off on every package right there and that relieves you of your potential financial risk, right? Because you developed them, you set them up, you put them in nukes and you're selling them and sending them out there. Having people pick them up, sign off and say, beyond this, you're on your own. Now the thing that they should be warranting is the fertility of the queen

and things like that. So buying in a queen is a good idea because here's another thing, right? So let's say some people don't like the swarms because you don't know what the genetics are of that swarm. But here's what I know. If that swarm call comes in through besworm.org, which is on my phone, and if it happens here in the very first week of May, I know that those came from colonies that survived this dastardly winter series. I want those bees. Now let's say you don't want them. Let's say you're spoiled.

You can use the bees, but not the queen. You don't care about that queen. You don't care about the genetics. You care about the workforce and that's all you want. So collect the swarm anyway. Put them in something. Find the queen. Remove the queen. Feed them sugar syrup. Keep them alive. Keep them happy. Remember, you've taken them miles away from wherever they were. And if you need a colony that needs, if you have a colony, it needs a stronger workforce i know this because i've done it uh then after an overnight in the garage or the basement or wherever you put your swarms that you've collected then the following day at the appropriate time 10 a m to 2 p.m on a nice sunny clear day that's not

going to have rain snow and all the other terrible things open up that queenless group of bees right in your apiary right up against the colony that you want them to occupy and you'll be amazed at how quickly they go right in there It's also a great time to go ahead and put sugar syrup on that colony. They're weak anyway. You're not going to get a honey yield from them. So you can take them miles away, remove the queen, so now you control the genetics because now you're just reinforcing the workforce that you have with more foragers.

And remember that when it's a swarm that you collect, they're not all old bees. You got some young bees in there. They're the freeloaders that come along too, and you know what we're talking about, the drones. We don't need those. can actually block them out. But you can fortify a weak colony with them. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is don't turn down free honeybees. If it's a swarm, get them. Why buy the package? You could just buy a queen later and make your own package from swarms that you've removed the queen from. And then they follow any queen pheromone, the strongest queen pheromone.

This is another thing that happened last October for me. Late season swarms result in what? Virgin queens in the resident colonies, right? And then because I'm giving this a lot of thought because I'm losing sleep over some of these colonies. So what happens? The new queens have to finish maturing after they've, of course, beat each other up,

killed each other, whatever. Now there's a survivor in there that has to fly out and get mated and come back. We're in October. Now I had several swarms in October. So then they come back, assuming, you know, we have drones out there, and there generally were that time of year, because we have a late season, swarm season here, too. We also have a decent late nectar flow, but when the weather turns bad, everything turns against these colonies. So then what happened was we end up with a bunch of queenless, well, colonies that don't have mated queens.

So the pheromones of a colony that has a mated queen will overwhelm and out-compete. the pheromone of colonies that have unmated queens in them. What happens to the workforce that forages out of those colonies that are unmated? They go to the colonies that have mated queens. They smell better. Their chances of survival are better. They move right in with them. So you can end up with huge swarms.

And you can also end up with overloaded colonies of bees that just don't make sense because there's no way that these numbers came from the bruce. frames inside the colony. All of a sudden this thing is jam-packed wall-to-wall and they're bearding. They have left colonies, this is my speculation, so. They have left colonies that had unmaided queens or queens that didn't make it. By the way, 75% will make it, but that means 25% statistically don't end up getting mated and it doesn't matter what time of year. So then you're going to lose the workforce. And what's left? Nurse bees that are inside, they're just trying to hold it, and they're wondering why nobody's bringing groceries home.

So, and then those are the ones that are going to be dead mid-December. So these are some of the things that I'm seeing in some of the colonies. So that's the tiny cluster, under manned, they're not fresh kill. They've been dead for a while. And the other thing is, if they're overrun with Feroa, then we also know that the brood is spread out, the workers are spread out all over the place. So there are indicators based on what you're looking,

at these tight clusters starved out full bodies in the cells abdomens contracted and a really good formation that's a starve out where if they're actually challenged by disease and everything else they tend to be spread out everywhere especially if there's no viable mated queen inside and now you might think wow end of the year though so if the queen didn't come back doesn't that mean that they produce laying workers and then don't the laying workers wouldn't we then see a whole bunch of drones in the worker cells produced by laying workers that are just trying to save their genetics and i say no and here's why uh they didn't have the resources even to produce brood so they couldn't do anything about their drones they couldn't make them because they didn't have uh be bread coming in

they didn't have the resources necessary and was the energy source that they need? They are starting to need more nectar that has stopped because the weather got bad too soon. So they consume resources right around them and then they dwindle. That's what I'm saying. Tell me what you think. So that's why we find these tight clusters and you find that over and over again this spring because what's happening right now? Freezing, sleeting, snowing yesterday. Bees can't fly. And then what's it going to do? It's going to rain. I mean, I don't want to be Eeyore or bad luck schleper.

rock or whatever try not to be negative it's not a happy year for those bees but that's what i think happens so the pheromone game they went out they move all into one big hive the other thing is when you get this huge swarm that's all together and i divide them up because they're too big for even a colorado b vac which is the size of a 10 frame deep we have several of those 10 frame deeps that are part of the colorado v vac system and then all you do is move the the motor onto the next one. So if you were going somewhere to get peas, you could collect several in a single trip. And so I like to take the grand monkeys out there, the grandkids out there, and tell me which of these boxes they think has the queen and which does not. So giant swarm,

maybe multiple queens. We don't know. So we go when we see the one is absolutely calm and they're clustered heavy in one corner and they're just quiet. And by the way, they should be in the dark. then we get over to the next one though and they're just humming away they're loud and they're kind of spread out everywhere and they're unsettled no queen it's really easy and now what we can do because it is too big that's too many bees we're talking easily 10 pounds worth of bees now what do we do with all of them you don't want to jam them all into one hive so we'll take the one that has the queen in it and we'll start a colony with that and then we'll take the other boxes that just have workers without a queen and what do we do? We haul them to an out yard somewhere else,

and we fortify the colonies that are there with those foraging numbers. So we split them up and let them go into whatever hive they want to. And they do, and it's amazing. I don't know why the guards don't guard them, why they let them in, because keep in mind, when they're swarming, what are they doing? They're loading up on resources, so they're not beggars. When they show up, they have provisions. They're ready to go to work.

They're ready to help out. So you can fortify colonies with these oversized swarms by just figuring out where your queen is, hiving them, and taking the rest and dividing them up as if they were packaged bees without queens. And all they'll do is follow the pheromones of settled, mated queens that are in production. So lots of things to do with swarms, don't ignore swarms. So another thing that last Friday I got some feedback from people. Somebody that let me know they unsubscribe because of my jump spider at the very end, which is, I think, think it's funny but I guess it's not I'm not scared of spiders so at the end of last

Friday's Q&A I thought it would be funny to have a jumping spider jump on the camera which they often do you get down there you're taking a video of them they pinwheel around they look right at you with those big eyes and they disappear and I tell people this when I'm giving presentations where do that spider go it's on you or it's on your camera either way it jumped on you I thought that would be funny not Anyway, I did a survey, of course. Spiders, it says, how's your tolerance? So when it comes to a presentation about honeybees, you,

and then these are the survey questions. 392 people responded to this, by the way. And I like this one. I never want to see an image of a spider. That's one category. 4% of the people. That's actually higher than the standard. Well, actually, it's right on the money.

392 because according to surveys that I researched 1% of the population can't tolerate even an image of a spider it's at the point where I could take a picture of a super cute bold jumping spider I can put it on social media on Facebook and see my friend's number go down so people don't want to see it to the point where they would unfriend you over it so never want to see an image of a spider that was interesting 4%. Here's the other low percentage. Only 2% said, I will leave any presentation if spiders are part of it. 2%. So two people out of 100. What else here? I have anxiety about spiders, but I want to know more. That's 7%. I like that attitude. I'm scared of spiders. Don't like them. They give me anxiety. They're kind of creepy, but I do want to know more.

knowledge is power and once you learn something about them, normally, it can alleviate some of your stress. Although I caution you, sometimes when you learn more about an organism, the more you know, it goes the other way. Your stress and anxiety can increase when you realize what that's about. But 7% want it to know more. 3% want a warning. If a spider image is included in a B-talk, they need to have a warning. So there's this phrase for films. It's called, Does the Dog Die? This doesn't have anything about dogs. Does the Dog Die means that you have to warn people

that something bad is going to happen in the movie or in the story. So if there's going to be a spider, then you have to tell people there has to be a disclaimer on it. There may be spiders in this. And I make jokes about, I have a daughter who is, spiderphobic. So arachnophobia times 10. She can't handle it. I used those fears or did against her when she was a teenager, but not in a humorous way. I just wanted her to clean her room and she wouldn't. Nobody beats a thinking person. And so when I saw the condition of her room,

because she's an artist, you know, art stuff everywhere, throws clothes on the floor, whatever, I thought, you know, wow, this is really cool that you're providing all of the spider habitat in your room. And she goes, what? She just stopped doing what she was doing. I said, yeah, because when you leave stuff around the floor, they move right in. This is like the choice room in the whole house. You are guaranteed spider habitation. She cleaned her floor, cleaned her room, and it never was messy again. There's power in that. But only if somebody's afraid. So the more fears you have, the more leverage other people have. See what I mean?

But that worked on her, and I felt pretty good about it. So here's my best answer. 83% said, I want to know about as many living things as possible, and that includes spiders. So those are my people. That's my core group. They want to learn about everything because some people even write me and say unsubscribing, I'm here for bees. Okay, well, your bees don't live in a sterile environment. You are going to be interacting with nature as a whole.

And the more you know about spiders, I mean, jumping spiders, you are going to see jumping spiders when you get into your beehive. You just are. So if you know a little bit about them and it takes away some of that fear, I think it's cool. I think it's fun. So I'm fortified to know that these are the results. These are really good. That's, you know, over 80% of the people want that. I think it's good.

I think you should be learners. I like sharing about things. And it's fun. And I apologize to those who are actually terrified. I know it's a real fear, arachnophobia. Not a joke. So what else do we have? scout the environment now and see what kind of things get some good binoculars and look at the tree tops and see if things are in bloom see if the bees are on them

that's coming around so and oh the drone comb I almost forgot here I am and this is a thumbnail for today these green drone comes which by the way a lot of people never use so it's color-coated for a reason so that you will know and it's marked on the back 2x means it's double wax wax dipped. This particular one comes from acorn I believe, yeah, acorn. So heavy wax drone comb. And some people say, why do I want to put a frame in that is just for drones in my beehive when I don't even want drones? Well, what I want to explain and share with you is when you put worker foundation inside your hive, they'll even turn some of that into drone comb. So the drone cells are larger than the worker cells.

And when they do it, it makes it all wonky looking because they forced it. They didn't really want to follow the pattern that was established and the parameters that were set forth for the bees. They need some drone comb. So what do they do? They tuck it up in between. So when you've got boxes up here and you've got the burr comb in between, most often those are cells that are large for dors.

drones and so they start tucking their drones everywhere they can find a space for them so this was interesting if you put a frame of drone comb in like your number one spot your number two spot something like that remember they start building drone when they've satisfied all their other requirements they have the food they need they have the resources they need they have brewed they have a workforce it's doing well now it's time to get some genetics out there And that's the good news because colonies that produce these drones, the queens that lay drone eggs and the colonies that have the resources to feed drones four times the resources necessary to raise a drone compared with a worker bee. So if you put the drone frame in there, you get a lot of advantages.

One, you just provided them with a space to satisfy their instinct to produce drones. So we satisfy that, which means, in theory, less drone cone. spread out around your hive. The other thing is, and my viewership is mixed. Some of you are treatment-free beekeepers. Some of you are managing your colonies, and some are treating for varro-destructor mites. So the treatment-free group,

and even those using soft organic acids like axelic acid, or if using formic acid, formic pro, things like that, we still want to get our mite numbers down as much as possible. So when you have this neurone, drone come and they cap it because they spend a lot of time developing it's also remember four times the resources to produce a drone and are they going to be here before they're even emerging from

their cap cells until their 24th day roughly so once you mark it the queen starts laying up your drone cells and once they get capped you don't have to wait for them by the way some people try to time it to where it's just before they would emerge and then you get busy or storms come in and then you forget to do that and what did you do all the drones emerged and all the reproduction for the Vero-destructor mites that's occurred in there is done it's happened so the goal is get them all capped because that's when the road instructor mites are in there and then take the whole frame and cycle it into the freezer unless what unless you have chickens if you have chickens

you do not need to cycle it into the freezer. Because the whole purpose behind cycling it into the freezer is to kill the Varroa mites that are in there. Foundress mite and any reproduction that's occurred. Any new females and the male that never leaves the cell. The male is in there only gets produced by the queen, the queen. The founder's mite produces the male first, and then that male mates with his sister mites.

So they only need one cell. to start off their numbers again. So you can do a lot in spring. This is why I'm mentioning this now, because if you do this and you can follow the schedule and you can keep up with them, then you can also reduce your Veroa destructor mite numbers. This is why you don't find very many mites in spring

if you're doing mite counts on your nurse bees in your brood frames where the worker cells are, because the bulk of those row destructor mites are now in your drone comb, in your drone cells, and what else are they on? They're not even on the nursebees. They have a preference for feeding upon two and three day old drones. So if you let your drones emerge in here, they can serve as magnets for the row destructor mites, and then what do they do? They've got them on their bodies. Then what do as they matured, they fly out? And Dr. Zachary Llamas observed that even though they're not mature enough to mate, which is another benchmark that people kind of look for and say, yeah, but the drone's

going to hang out so it's about nine days old or something. Well, yeah, but they're capable of zipping out and going to another hive when they're just three or four days old. Same time, they just happen to have mites on them. So you can prevent or greatly reduce some of your varroa destructor might drift on the bodies of drones because this drone, as it's aging and has mites on its body if it flies to another colony which is their instinct to do they're going to spread their genetics they're leapfrogging around the apiary and now they get a little older and what does a might do it looks for now the body of a nurse bee where are the drones being fed the drones are going in there and they're being fed by nurse bees because that's where the highest protein the richest nutrition is

coming from and their pushovers they will feed the drones and then what is the road destructor might do, jump ship, leaves the abdomen of the drone and gets onto the abdomen of the nurse bee and then cycles right into one of the cells because they're nurse bees, now they're in the nursery, and there you go, which you could have stopped if you took care of the drones and the road instructor mites that are reproducing in their cells and on their bodies later. That's why we did the green cell. But it was interesting to note that that can help alleviate your bees instinct to produce drone cells elsewhere throughout the hive and messing up some of your normal worker brood if they have a designated area to build drone comb

and then lay those eggs. So what do you think about that? I think it's good. So I want to thank you for watching and listening today and I hope that you found something useful. And if you did, please consider subscribing so that you won't miss anything else. A lot of people have asked questions about and we've talked about the survival of bees unattended where in bee trees so I'm going to the source we're going to talk about the studies that have been performed and evaluations and observations that have been made regarding feral colonies of bees in trees in the environment unmanaged by beekeepers it's going to be very interesting I won't say who my guest is but she's an absolute authority on the topic.

And I hope that you'll come back and watch for that. And you won't know. You won't get the alert unless you're a subscriber and unless you click on the bell part that says, notify me when a new video comes out. Thanks for watching. I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead.