The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Beekeeping Q&A Episode 303 LIVE-Stream Friday, April 26 of 2025

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

This is the audio track from the YouTube video:  https://youtube.com/live/kqMT9iPK0YU?feature=share

Oh, it's time to go live. So, 4 o'clock sharp. Glad that everyone's here. I'm going to do my normal blurb here real quick. So hello and welcome. Happy Friday. Today is Friday, April the 25th of 2025. This is Backyard Bekeeping Question and Answer Episode Number 303. This is the live edition, live chat. So by the way, as people show up in the comments section there, if you have a question for me, please type it in all caps. It's not. I considered shouting today. And who am I? Frederick Dunn. And this is the way to be. So I'm really glad that you're here. I know that to kick it off, everyone wants to know what's going on outside. By the way, we are worried about people in New Jersey right now who have fires going on.

I hope they get some rains soon. We have a lot of good stuff going on. Too many questions this week, so I had to filter some down. And if you have questions, as always in the comment area, please type it in all caps. If it's for me, you're more than welcome to answer one another's questions or talk amongst yourselves. It's not rude.

We can't hear you. So if you want to know what we're going to talk about today and you're watching this at a later time, please go down to the video description and you will see topics that were key points covered today. And I'll be including those that were submitted over the past week as well as whatever happens live today. So if you have something on your mind, type it in all caps and we'll jump from. right on that. I know you want to know what's going on outside, weather-wise, because it's weird

around here. Yesterday, best day so far this year. High 70s, almost 80 degrees. What's it doing today? I'm glad you asked. 59 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 15 Celsius. 99% relative humidity. That's right. It's raining. It's been raining. It's going to rain. It's going to continue to rain. We have rain on top of rain with rain on top. Rain underneath. The pond is flooding. Everything's wet. The chickens are wet, but they're still running around outside because 59 degrees Fahrenheit is not bad. 1.6 milan hour winds. It also shuts down, but that's 2.5 kilometers per hour, so not windy. Good news. And like a genius, above average individual, I had the grandsons out there throwing seeds everywhere, and they were planting white clover, sweet clover, they call it, and bags of it. like their hands were all black and their faces were black because they touched their faces.

And guess what? It's all germinating. It's working great. And it jumped the gun on the buckwheat. And we just threw that around too on little bald patches and stuff. It's coming up too. So that's good news. I think I'm happy with everything that's going on around here.

And I should touch on what's flowering right now, pear trees. Pear trees here almost never produced pears. The reason is they flower like they're doing right now. We were out walking around and the kids could hear the bees on the tree before you saw them. So they're loaded with bees. But what usually happens is, you know, they get frosted. So as soon as the bees do all they're pollinating and they get their nectar and all of that, next thing that happens is it freezes on them and we don't get pears.

Crab apples, those are all crab trees, they're flowering. Everything is looking interesting. if we can just keep from freezing again, I'll be super happy. So dandelion is just starting. We're not threatened yet by swarms, but it could happen at any minute. So be ready, pun intended. Be ready for those bees. So we have a question already from a meal,

and it says, what is the best way to introduce a mated queen from a resource hive into a queenless colony? Don't make me talk about the gear I talk about all the time, which one of the best ways to introduce a mated queen into a queenless colony to make sure that if there are, for example, laying workers, if it's been going on for a long time, we need to protect the queen when we introduce her. How could you do that? You could use a queen introduction cage. There are full frame size and medium frame size cages that you can use to put them in. And it's the queen with brood, but no worker bees on. on the frame at all, just the queen and capped worker brood would be fantastic because as they emerged, they attended the queen. The queen can be fed through the cages. And that's if you don't want to take the 100% risk that I personally like to take. And that is that I take the queen.

You know, if she's in a cage or if I'm just carrying her in a little bottle or something, I go over there and open her up at the edge of the hive I want to install her in. I look at their behavior. If they zip up there and they start feeding her right away and they're desperate to have her out of that, I do something called a direct release. So it's a gamble if you don't want to do the direct release and you think she's an amazing queen and you're sure she's made it, then queen introduction cage. It's different from queen isolation because workers can't go through it.

They can't get a hold of her, bite her and tear her apart, kill her and things like that. So that's what I highly recommend. Next question comes from Sally Offer. Hi, Fred. While I'm marketing my queen, the ink still made a mess. What? Oh, marking my queen.

Okay, the queen still, we're marking queens. The ink still made a mess, and I pre-dabbed it first, but it still messed up and got on her wing and her head and a little bit. Will she die or get rejected?

I'm sad. Okay, don't be sad. As long as you keep it apart, and that dries. Now, you have paint on her wings. She doesn't care about that. She's not going to fly too much. Also, the important thing is to make sure that your paint is dry before you introduce her.

But for those thinking about marking their queens, and I recommend that you do, have a little blotter nearby, even a piece of cardboard or something. We want it so that we can give a light touch and just put that little perfect bead right on the thorax. And if it gets on other parts of her, as long as it's dry, I've not seen them reject the queen. There's another test for that And why I think they're not going to be upset with the queen Because she has a little extra pain on her Is my grandson the supervisor who might creep in here later? I hope not, but it's possible

He marks drones the drones still get he gets paint all over them Because he's practicing And the drones are still attended to by the nurse bees They still get fed, they still get cared for and they still fly off and they're marked in all these weird ways But if you're teaching children or if you're teaching a class about drift and what drone activity is like, mark them with different colored paint. We don't have to follow the five color rule. And see how many different hives they show up at and how quickly they do it. It is amazing how much they spread around.

So don't worry much, Queen. If you didn't get it on her antenna, that's critical. Her mouth, that's critical. Tongue, that's critical. Spiricals along the sides of her abdomen and sides of her thorax would be critical not to paint. But on the wing, on top of the head, stuff like that, it shows that you don't have very steady hands so that you may have not done the best job, but she'll definitely stand out and probably be okay. Let's see what else do we have here, Michelle Armstrong.

In a dead out, have you seen what looks like yellow frass? I'm hoping it is pollen bits or hive-alive-lawed-fondin-bits. Any thoughts? yellow frass, light amber frass, cinnamon-colored frass. For those of you don't know what we're talking about, frass rhymes with the part of the Barodistrictor mite that it comes out of. So it's the waste of the brodistrictor mite. And it's kind of the only thing that shows up in brood cells. That's where you see it the most.

If it's other stuff, it would be in the areas where the bees feed, like uncapping, you know, they're stored honey and things like that. We see bits and pieces there sometimes. and the bees cleaned that up really well. If you've got these little tiny natural sugar-looking crystal pieces, you might have a Varroa problem. It might be a big deal. And don't get me started on Varroa problems this year

because I have a Varroa issue that's pretty unbelievable. And I already have the video sequences, and I'm going to be posting it not today, but you have to spread it out maybe Saturday or Sunday. But I've seen Verotistractor mites in a way that I've never seen them before. A little bit alarming. I will try not to put scary music on it, but I'm tempted to because varroa mites are something else.

Here is from Bruin Fool. Oh, Bruin Fool. I recognize this name because I think I have a question from this person. What if any considerations should it take when collecting propolis using, yeah, this is a trap that was submitted. That's why I recognize it. Okay. Collecting probolus using a trap.

Time of year, race of B, strength of the colony, zone 9B, third year beekeeper. Okay, so I can speak about my part of the country, which is in the northeastern United States, the state of Pennsylvania, and the northwestern part of that state, which is the most weather dynamic part. This time of year, when the plants are just budding, is the top time of year for your bees to be collecting all of that bee glue. We call it, propolis is medicinal, and some people actually trap it.

So there are traps that Dr. Marla Spivak at the Spivak Lab, University of Minnesota. They tested a lot of that. And so why do people trap propolis? Well, one, to get the bees to encourage to build propolis on the walls of the hive, but now we have the propola hive and people are scuffing up the interior of the wood or leaving it rough cut to encourage propolis, but some people want to harvest it. So there are propolis traps, and it's not like a pollen trap where the bees go through it and it scrapes it off their legs because propolis is gooey.

And so they actually attach it to rough surfaces and the pollen traps are plastic. They're thin. They're very close together. They look a little like a queenie saluter, but they're much too tight for that. And then you take those out once they're propilized up, put that in the freezer, take it out of the freezer and flex it back and forth and the propolis comes off of it. So the time of year, spring when the trees are budding. Whenever plants that are resinous, right? So pine trees and things like that.

Coniferous trees are kind of top of the chart. They are protecting their buds with probolis. And the bees can get it. So whenever things are growing, some parts of the country, this happens a lot. Their trees grow all year long. New buds happen all year long. And even, I don't know if you've ever ran your hand along a staghorn sumact plant. The branches, the tricombs on that are just coated.

It's a sticky resin, and I've not seen beads collecting that, but it doesn't mean they couldn't. And so time of year spring when things are growing. So, I hope then as, and that took care of one of the questions I was going to cover today. So please remember, if you have a question for me, put it in all caps. I'm looking at a question here. It looks like from Mike Pew. It says, do you rearrange your brood boxes in the spring? Still in 30s at night here.

and is it too early to take the candy boards off and give them sugar water? Okay, so this is regional. I'll bekeeping is regional, people will say, and that's true here. But I don't rotate boxes. And my rule for myself, and if you've got something that's been working and you've got a mentor that does something that absolutely works, don't mess with it. But you're kind of searching around and fiddling a little bit. I've been a little bit unhappy with the bees moving the speed at which the bees move down towards the bottom board in spring.

So my winter configuration is a deep brute bogs and then a medium super that has nothing but honey in it for the bees to get through winter. This year, even with this extended winter that we have, they have large amounts of honey left over. I want them to move down. So one of the ways that I get them to move down is they have no top venting. And so as things warm up, they move their brood naturally towards the single entrance that we have here. And that can take a lot of time. They can stall a little bit. So this year, and I recommend that you try it too, I'm just doing it for fun for the first time.

I am going to put Queen excluders in my hives. I was doing this yesterday because it was the only day, the first day that I could work the beehives. You find the queen because you have brood up in your upper box right underneath your inner cover. particularly if you're in an area and it sounds like you are where it's still cold, your brood will be up there, your queen will be up there. So we get a hold of the queen, so you have to find her. So bring your best queen finder, queen finder with you. And I lift up that top box, put the queen excluder under it,

collect the queen up there, put her under the queen excluder into the bottom box, and then any capped brood, and there will be a lot of it this time of year, at least where we are. As they emerge from their cells, they just go down, the workers go down through the queen excluder and join the queen down below. So I'm actually going to force my queen down below because it can take them too long, especially if the cold weather sticks around longer. And when should you do it?

For us, for me, anytime we're getting into the first week of May, it's go time. I was looking for queen cells yesterday. I didn't find any. That's good news, but it also shows that they're behind. Normally this time of year, we would be seeing queen cells. we'd start considering which colonies to split or a pull stock from. So the queen excluder, queen underneath, she'll be kind of by herself, but the brood does dip down in there a little bit.

And then we'll push them all down below. And then that second box becomes nothing but honey as they get out. And one of the concerns people have is, what about the drones? The drones can't get through the queen excluder. So if the drones can't get through the queen excluder, you can let them out when you do a follow-up inspection and make sure that you did, in fact, get the queen down below and she stayed there.

And we want to do follow-ups to make sure they're still doing good, but this can offset their urge to swarm. So it's kind of like a weird Demery method. Everybody talks about Demoree, but you just separate the queen, get her down there and get the brood spread out down into that bottom box. Keep the entrance small, by the way, and keep the venting low,

and you'll find out they migrate right down there. Pretty good. That's what I'm doing. And by the way, thanks for us. Wagner is in the house and he just gave me financial gains. I think that's nice. I'm going to jump up above that. Jose is here and has my bees swarmed a day before my queen came. And I still split them. Am I a fool? Okay. Well, I don't know how many bees are in that hive. Some bees deserve to be split. Some colonies do. They're overwhelming. They're wall to wall. So it's a matter of how populated they are, whether or not you want to do multiple splits. If there's swarming already and you have a queen coming in, you definitely need to get any queen cells out there that they currently have. And that's a detailed hunt. I highly recommend, by the way, when you're hunting queen cells, you also cut out all the drone cells you can find. Here's why.

Sometimes the drone cells can mask a queen cell down around the edges. So cut them out and remove them and take this opportunity, trust me, to cut open the drone cells and see if you have a road destructor mites in there and see what that looks like because that's what I was doing yesterday. I was not happy. Okay. And then once they're out of there, now your chances for them accepting the queen that you're bringing in are increased. There's no more competing pheromone from even virgin queens.

And I think you'll have better luck that way. The other thing is we don't want them to abscond or shove off. So you can actually put a temporary queen excluder on the front of your hive. So, so Ross says I have some great drawn-out. frames that I put in the freezer last August. I'm assuming I need to clean out the frames that are solid pollen. Any recommendations on the best way to do that? Okay, this question actually comes up a lot. What to do with the old pollen? The pollen, by the way, that's really sealed up and shiny looking. The bees have kind of encapsulated it because they seem to have no plan to use it. And why won't

they use it? Because there's lots of new pollen coming in and they like the fresh stuff. So you have to take it out and warm it up and rinse it with hot water. Sometimes you have to soak it. And keep in mind the way the cells are made, they're not really designed to receive water very well. So now you have to walk the tightrope of enough forced water to get it to rinse out the pollen that's in there. Because remember, we also have to defeat the wax covering that's kind of over it. And they've sealed it up kind of like they do, stored honey.

and so you might have to get in there and actually probe open each little cell to make sure that the water gets to the pollen and then you can rinse it out. And once you do that, I like to spray the whole thing down with a bleach and water solution and then dry it out. And we can dry it out with air. Tada. I had this out yesterday. I talked about this before. These are called wolf boxes. I don't know.

this looks Mamby-pambi, I know, I could blow out a whole bottom board of dead bees with this. Touch free. So the other thing that hit me was, if I have to rinse out cells on frames, not only do we blow out the cells because it's blowing dead bees out, that's in the upcoming video that has the varroa mites in it, by the way. And getting water out of the cells, once you've done a bleach and water washout, this will blow them out right away, where eye protection, phase shield, whatever, because you can spray yourself in the face, so I'm told. And so that's what I would do. And then dry it out really good, put it in.

Bees don't mind the smell of chlorination at all. In fact, they seem to show that they are attracted to that. It's weird. So that's a good way to treat and prepare your frames. And yeah, if you don't get it all out, once your colonies get to a certain size, they will start to clean it out, but it's kind of last on their list. So that would hopefully work. Next thing is from Gary Chapman.

Caught my own swarm about 50 yards from the bee yard. Can I move them directly to the bee yard and put branches in front to force orientation flights? Okay, so for Gary, keep in mind, I'm willy-nilly, Lucy Goosey when it comes to handling swarms in my own bee yard. I don't do the entrance modifications and stuff. I just put them right in hive. I took my cue from last year in particular when, the bees were hiving themselves in the unoccupied hives that I left in the bee yard as swarm traps. And we have a question that's coming up today, but I can address it now.

We had multiple swarms at the same time. So we were picking which swarm to deal with first. And the one that was toughest to get to, I just let them go. And then so I went and I had the bee vac and all that. We're getting the other ones off the tree, the easy pickings. And while we were doing that, while we were putting them in a Colorado bee vat, back box, they all took off. They all went airborne that were on the corner of a fence post where, you know, the fence all comes together, kind of forming a tea. And when they took off, I thought

we're just losing them. I was a little sad about that, but they only flew 25 yards and hive themselves into one of my hives right in the apiary. Now, they did that on their own. There is a huge amount of drift already going on in your apiary. So I don't do things to swap. out stuff like that. I don't change the configuration of the entrance, although if you've got Apamahe hives, you're hiving them, so changing the entrance, they've already left home. Let's keep that in mind. The foragers that are with that swarm that departed, that know their way out and back, left. They swarmed. They don't have any intention of going back to the hives that they just left. So if you collect them off that tree branch and you put them in another hive,

chances are they're going to stick around in that hive anyway. Now, it's when you're meddling with a hive and you're doing a split and you're, you've got one occupied here and you swap another one there and then you want them, if you've taken some of the foragers with you, to reorient to that hive, there may be some merit in, you know, altering the entrance and making them do a reorientation and stuff like that. I've actually had very good luck not doing that. So, and of course, just, you know, try what you can't. So what else?

Got my swarm, got that, we're done. Let's say beekeeper, okay. What else? I don't see questions. All right, I'm going to move on. So I think I did my first question. No, I did not. First question is from Harvey.

I was inspecting one of my colonies today on my rooftop apiary, New Jersey Shore. And I witnessed a swarm in one of the other colonies, two eight-frame double deeps with a medium super on top. And a cloud of bees ended up on one of the trees which aligned with the roof. There were two large basketball-sized swarms

at the top of a tree, which were about 30 feet high from the roof. Bye-bye beads, he says. So anyway, as I continue to inspect, both of the swarms returned to their original colony. They could not get back into their hive fast enough. I would like to know your thoughts on why they came back.

I think it has something to do with Queens, maybe virgin. Okay, so here's the thing. Sometimes that does happen, and I've often found that it's when the queen acts like she's coming out. If you see a swarm about to happen, you'll see them coming out, and they zigzag and they stay facing the hive, and they all fly out like they're going to go and bibwax somewhere on a branch, and then they come back and look again, and it seems like they're going in and coming out like someone that's impatient. The queen can go out sometimes and then change your mind and go right back in. it's unlikely this time of year that something flies through and nabs your queen because that's the other end of it we can control a swarm and send them right back to the hive they came out of if we remove the queen, catch her, and take her someplace else, then they go back.

But if the queen just changes her mind and goes back in, maybe she's too heavy, maybe she can't fly yet, maybe she landed in the grass somewhere. They will just all go back into the hive, but that's a colony that needs to be looked at and you need to consider making that split happen. and controlling that queen so that you can reduce your losses when it comes to the bees there. So that's why I think they came back. So that's it. Let's look down here. We have beekeeping. Anybody having Hornet issues yet.

I have seen several European ones swarm season until about three weeks here in Scotland. Okay. So the European Hornet, Vespa Crowbro. is a pretty cool Hornet. And I spent a lot of time last spring at this time of year, watching a queen build her nest. And that's right. I let her stick around.

And I put a bunch of different cameras on her. And I did time lapse sequences and wanted to see what she was doing. So the queens are all emerging and coming out and starting their own paper nests. The yellow jacket wastes are the same. When you see those this time of year, those are queens. And they're each building their own cellulose nest. That's why you see them on unfinished wood and sheds and stuff, chewing away, getting the cellulose they need. So anyway, I spent a lot of time and effort tracking this European Hornet.

And wouldn't you know it one day she just flew off and never came back. So something got her. It was a sad moment. But I don't have any problems with them. They're doing other things that seem really good because part of what I wanted to see, I wanted to see what she was bringing back to feed the baby bees. And when they make a protein pellet, they chew it up so much, you really can't determine that. So you have to actually see them nabbing things.

But same thing with Yellowjack. And I have a lot to share about that, but I have a video that's about behavior, the Vespa Day, and what they recognize, right along with Honeybee knowing your face, they know your face too. And it's, could be creepy, could be cool. It's up to you to figure that out. But I actually got really familiar with the Hornets and Wasst that I was studying last year, and they tolerated me just a few inches from their nest, where they were doing all their work.

So I just don't worry about them, but yeah, we see them. I'm seeing them. Anyway, so Hornet issues. I don't know if that's a Hornet issue, but you definitely don't want those to build up where there's a lot of foot traffic, a lot of people are going to be around and stuff like that. Uh, but, but John McGuinness. Hi, Fred.

Do you have experience with the comfort, aka dumpster hives? I've never heard of them. Comfort, aka dumpster hives. I don't, so don't know about them. Don't have experience. James Breran, how do you introduce a swarm into a week long, a week long Langstroth colony to boost them? Okay, so I did a lot of this last year.

Swarms have queens and collecting the swarm and using them to fortify another colony. We need to decide which queen you're going to get rid of. So we need to pull the queen out of the colony that you want to reinforce. But if you're doing it because they're queenless and they're unsettled, I have found that they accept the swarm install pretty easily. And I do it without dumping them inside the hive. the butterfly net full of the bees that I've collected off a branch somewhere right on the landing board that I want to fortify. I did find that if I keep them in the garage overnight, in other words,

the day that you collect the swarm, don't try it the same day, try to get them to stay in the box that you have them in overnight and then do the shift where you're, you know, combining them with another colony that needs help. We started to do that with late season swarms because I decided, why am I making new colonies? It probably won't make it. Whenever other colonies, it could definitely benefit from the personnel boost, so to speak.

So if they have troubles going in, it's a good time to also mask their pheromones a little bit. So I have used a little bit of swarm commander, which acts like Nazanoff, and spritz the tiniest bit in the colony. I'm hoping that they go into, and they join up. They actually, it's fun.

They do it. and I had very good success with that. And I don't know why I didn't think of it years before. I've been doing this for a while. So moving on, do to do. Love the podcast. This is from Joshua Van Vleet. Regular listener, first time catching it live.

Thanks for all the good intel. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for being here. And for those of you are joining us late. If you're typing in all caps, it's a question for me. So John McGinnis says, the comfort hive is made with four pieces of two by six and 13 by five inch four screws, hole for a cork, nothing cheaper or easier to build. I want to try them for queen mating.

So, and I was just talking at the VA this morning with a carpenter, cabinet maker, retired kind of guy who wants to do long langstroth hives. If you've got skills, you can do woodwork, experiment with different. Once you understand the biology, your honeybees and what they need, to get themselves through different seasons and different cycles of brood development and reproduction is kind of sky's a limit in what you could build when you don't have to move it and if you're not worried about compatibility,

I do recommend that people kind of build out from the Langstroth-sized frames and then go from there with your hive configurations. But yeah, I had not heard of that, but sky's a limit when it comes to building things. Somebody else says, comfort hives are neat and so are wari hives too so the wari hives you see in europe a lot so i'm going to jump ahead here to diane which is question number two says i mixed up some one to one plus spirulina

earlier in the season to feed Ziploc baggies no one was interested so it's just been sitting around in the barn is this month old syrup safe to feed in hive to a newly created split so what i want to what i want to about that is when we're mixing up sugar syrups and things like that, and this sounds like it's just sugar and water with spirulina. Spirulina is algae that has proven to be a benefit to your bees. So there's no preservative in there. And so these high water content, one to one is high water, which means it doesn't inhibit mold growth very well. So if it's going to sit around for a while, the chances are that it does get a little moldy, it does go a little off. My thing is, why not just mix it up fresh, I wouldn't try to store that. Now, if we were doing it again later,

but then you might be messing with the spirulina. That's why it has to be fresh. If you put in things like Honeybee Healthy or if you put in hive alive or something like that, now we've meddled with the benefit of the spirulina. So that would have to be fresh as it is. But if you want extended shelf life, mixing the additives to your sugar syrup accomplishes that. So I've had, even now, of course, you can take a gallon of sugar syrup and put a teaspoon of bleach in it, and that extends it quite a long time. And guess what else? The bees are showing a preference for it. There was a very interesting study that was done about that, and they brewed it up stronger with a teaspoon of bleach in sugar syrup. So that extends and, of course, defeats the growth of mold inside that. So

Why not keep it fresh? If you can afford it, keep it fresh. So what I do here? Ziplock baggies. So I just talked about that. And that satisfies that question. So let's see what else we have here. Long strength troughs of the newspaper can't be a sandwich between boxes.

She is Barron, Cage, Warm Queen. Okay. Talking amongst yourselves, I'm guessing. Okay, so question number three comes from Derek. and D. McKay, 753 is a YouTube channel name. A friend of mine owns an old farm, and there is an abandoned apiary, equipment in a wood lot. The equipment is junked, and there was nothing in it for the past few years.

Apparently, a swarm moved in sometime last year, and it's doing quite well. They offered the bees to me, and I wanted a little guidance. They're currently located under a mile from my apiary and could be a swarm for mine, suggestions for success. So, and there, this is happening in my area, my neck of the woods. Some old-time beekeepers have suffered continual losses, profound losses. I'm talking, you know, 90 out of 100. And they're getting out of the business. So there's a lot of bee equipment there. Sometimes people end up unable to take care of their bees anymore, and they have a decent size apiary, and they just want people to just come and get them.

often these have been in use for a really long time and the boxes are in just repair they could be coming apart things like that and so um i recommend uh not bringing any of the the honey and stuff of a hive like that i know they worked hard they're they're growing gangbusters i just pull the core frames out of something like that so that would be your brood and the queen of course and then stock those up in your standard langstroth boxes one of the best transport systems that are out there. Those are the High Butler Tots. They're easy to work with. They have extra space underneath the frame. So if there are queen cells or if there's any kind of burcombe down there or drone cells that you don't want to disrupt or cut away to make them fit your standard laying box, you can transport them in that. And they have a vented top. So that's

pretty easy. You select the frames and unfortunately kind of leave the rest behind. So but I don't see anything wrong with doing that and I take the brood leave the beeswax honeycomb stuff like that that's got any leftover resources I don't even try to take it I also personally don't like to take old equipment some of the older beekeepers have used a lot of synthetic pesticides in their hives and things and that can be very well concentrated in the beeswax so that's just about it so was that my question for here okay let's Let's see, neat, this worry hives too. Bo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo.

John McGinnis is the newspaper method necessary, and if so, under what circumstances giving people our swapping frames all the time? Okay, so we're John McGinnis. I did that years ago. I even have newsprint because I used to teach art and design. And we have a lot of newsprint laying around, so there's no ink on it at all.

And so when I'm combining hives, let's say I had a colony that was queenless, hopelessly queenless, potential laying workers. And then I had a Queen Wright colony, and I wanted to combine them. So I'd take the wheat colony. I put it on top of the strong colony.

And I put the newsprint, and some people say, sprits it with a little sugar water to get them started. You know, they go through that newsprint so fast, it almost didn't matter. And then, of course, they were tearing out the newsprint and hauling it out.

So I thought, why am I putting newsprint on here? So when we're doing these combinations of colonies, when we're putting boxes on boxes. There's so much going on or ready with the bees visiting one another that I've not seen an all-out war. So later I tried just doing it without the new sprint. And do I do things like spritz them with sugar syrup that might have honey be healthy in it and stuff like that, distraction, a little bit of happiness there,

get them sugar syrup as you combine the other colony. But they almost go to work so fast that they make me suspicious. Maybe, you know, people that are listening or watching now have had experiences where they totally went to war. I've not had that happen, and I don't use newsprint anymore to combine colonies. The intent is to slow their interaction with one another. You're supposed to cut little slits into it, and they smell each other a little bit. But the workers just all poured through those openings right away. They joined up with one another.

They're very quick to accept a queen-right colony when they are missing their queen. The other thing is it's amazing how fast they settle and they become non-defensive. So for me personally, I don't think it's necessary anymore. If you get a big melee going, the chances are you try to combine a colony that also has a queen in. So now we've got some rival colonies being forced together. So I think it's important to determine if the colony that you're trying to combine has a queen and you need to remove her so that's part of it let's see ed's bees bees don't mind bleach in the sugar water but what about hydrogen peroxide hydrogen peroxide i don't i've never mixed

that in there honey itself can produce hydrogen peroxide i don't know if you've ever seen that when condensation forms on honey on the surface you get a very fine white foam around the edge or even covering the whole top and that's hydrogen peroxide as far as trying to mix that with sugar syrup intentionally i don't have any testing information to share on that the bleach water the bleach sugar syrup has been tested has been vetted randy oliver did early reports on that too so uh i have no resources or i have no studies to cite regarding using hydrogen peroxide intentionally I would say since bleach is working and we know it works, maybe just stay without it's inexpensive.

So not the concentrated bleach, not the low splash bleach, not the bleach is designed for anything except disinfecting. That's all you want. So, this is from Kathy. Will you be using hive gates on some hives this season? Okay, will I? Yeah, I actually have a question about the hive gates in here, today because let's be honest i need to put myself on report with the hive gates some of you are

sitting there going what's a hive gate this is a hive gate this is how the hive gate is supposed to be used solid bottom board hive gate entrance going through that entrance which by the way it just happens to be that magical number of three eighths of an inch high which means mice and stuff can't get in it This gets shifted side to side underneath the cluster. And so here's why I've been doing it wrong. I put a slatted rack on here and it creates a two inch space. The designer of this, Kyle, who by the way, I saw in the comment section over there,

is the inventor of this. And so when I put that two inch spacer, the question that I have later was, should this be above the two inch spacer. Actually, you just shouldn't even have the slatted rack on here at all if you're going to use the hive gates. They work really, really well. When people have problems with, we mentioned wasps earlier,

the hive gate gives a long channel, raiders, robbers, things like that, don't get through that very well. We know that hornets and wasps can travel into your hives on these really cold mornings while you're being. are clustered and not active yet, which means you don't have an event system. You don't have guard bees on the landing board. And so the hive gate facilitates your bees' ability to defend themselves because guess where the wasp has to go all the way in and has to come out underneath the cluster,

which should be just above it, not two inches above it, which now gives the wasp a chance to come up and scoot around and go up the inner wall and then access their honey while they're still clustered against the cold. So used right, these are great. Better B also posted some articles about that, and they work good. So I've been using them wrong. So my apologies to Kyle that he was here. I don't know if he's still here.

So we've been using Hivegays. Yes, I did that. Bekeeping, Fred, any chance you could nudge Hive Butler to be sold in the UK. Okay, well, Hype Butler, by the way, I can make recommendations. If you've seen the Hyve Butler, it's a big tote. I would say that I'm not a business consultant for people. I know that there are products that people make that I like and when I like them, I talk about them. Hive Butler, for example, gives people a discount. Fred five, I think it is. I get nothing from that.

So it's just a courtesy that they give. You have to consider the size of the mold and everything else. I would think they would want to make a deal and have a satellite business in the UK doing the fabricating there, rather than trying to ship back and forth. These things are huge. So I would say if you know someone in the UK that has plastics manufacturing capability, that they would reach out then to Hive Butler. and make an offer. Again, I'm no dealmaker. I don't have influence like that.

But if I were in manufacturing and I wanted a product that was that big to be produced in other parts of the country where they would be popular, then I would definitely try to set up a satellite manufacturing system with somebody else. So, Keith Spelman,

I added casters to my nine-frame Hilco extractor and it works great to minimize out of balance issues. Great idea. Thanks. You're welcome. Yeah, because, and I talked to Hillco about that, the owner. I mean, I didn't talk to Hillcoe. I talked to the owner of Hillco years ago.

Because, by the way, you know, our big honey extractors are, they're already on, if you have to move them around at all, if you have limited space, like I do. Who doesn't have limited space, by the way? I see people bolt down their extractors, and I think that's a bad idea. So bear with me. We can cut down on the wear and tear. And so what Keith is talking about, I got these industrial rollers. I built a triangle-shaped brace platform that it sat on. And we put these rollers that can lock in place so they can freewheel.

And we all know that and the argument that I got from the owner of Filmco was they don't make them because when they manufacture, their extractors are perfectly balanced, right? But when we load them up with unbalanced frames, some frames are thick, some are thin, and we get this jigging around where if it's on wheels, as Keith describes, what it does is it just acts like a little spirograph. It just goes in circles, and that takes its inertia off the structure. It takes it off the wheels. and so if they're not stagnant and they're not held in place,

now that dynamic is just taken up. And so it works great. Here's the other benefit. It raised it off the ground more so we could put our honey buckets underneath. And so now there was plenty of distance there so that we could have filters in between the extractor, the valve, and the honey bucket down below. So it elevated it already.

And so it just works great. So I'm glad Keith brought that up. Put wheels on a platform. then put your honey extractor on the platform. And mine is just shaped like a big triangle, and then it has braces across, bolted. Keep in mind there's going to be a lot of seismic stresses on it. So, yeah, the casters, way to go.

All right, so the abandoned apiary of the wood and everything else. Here's something I want you to know because you're watching and you're here and you care and you want free bees. Be Swarmed. Please write this down. Beeswarned.org. B-E-E-E-S-W-A-R-M-E-D dot org.

Register there. It's free and puts you in touch with people that find swarms. This is a time of year where volunteer fire departments get calls and the police department gets calls. People call 911 and they see swarms on trees. So use your social media. influence to spread the word and give them a central place where they can report swarms.

Here's why. When you register, you get a notification on your phone and you have put in there based on your address how far you're willing to go to collect a swarm, three miles, five miles, maybe you're spoiled, you'll only go a mile. But if you're like me, you want free bees. Maybe you've got some mentees. You're a beekeeping mentor. You want to hook them up with some free bees and teach them how to collect a swarm in the process. You meet them on the spot. You only get the information about the location of the swarm when they send you a notification on your phone that says

there's a swarm three miles from you. Except, reject. In other words, I'm taking the swarm. Once you accept it, you say, I accept it. Now you get the contact information of the person that reported the swarm. You can find out more stuff about it. Get pictures of them. Make sure they're bees.

and then go get them. So last year I got 15 calls. I didn't respond to any of them because they had more bees than I needed, but a lot of people are low on bees this year and who doesn't want free bees. So vSwarm.org, please check that out. Also, while we're on the topic,

please make sure and assemble a swarm collection kit. We mentioned the High Butler Toad. That is my favorite thing to load all my load-and-go gear for swarm collection. That means, and by the way, I thought it was kind of hokey at first, but it actually works pretty good. They have a emergency veil.

I don't know if you've seen it. Better bee makes it. It comes in a little pouch. It's this big. And I used it at a bee breakfast that I was talking out at. And I said, oh, there's a swarm call. I have to go get it.

And I open this up and pull this hole, like it's a veil. And, of course, the upper body cover. arms and stuff. And so now I have to go get my swarm. And then it actually works, though. So it's more practical than I originally thought it would be. You can carry that in your glove compartment.

It can be in the back of your car. You never know when you're going to come across a random swarm. But Better Bee sells those. And they are, I don't even know what they're called. Maybe somebody here does. But it's like an emergency swarm veil jacket. And it's actually much better than I thought it would be. So anyway, throw that in your kit, have pruners so you can clip a branch if you need to.

Because here's the other thing with the high butler tote, I don't want to make this into one big advertisement for that. But it is easy to take the cover off. And we've seen those swarms that are bivouacked and they're just hanging on a light branch, usually a spruce branch or something. If you're careful, you clip it up here. You set the entire thing in the hive butler tote, put the lid on, and they have the vented lid option, and you make sure that that's clamped down,

put that in the back of your car, and go home. Five minutes. Very disappointing to people that are gathered thinking this is going to be some great sensational activity. But the other thing is, if you're a higher end, you're going to do this regularly, the everything BVAC, super portable. You can carry that on your back.

Battery powered charges up, runs all day, collect swarms in that. So if you want to use a BVAC, The other thing is, Carrie, when you're not using the beVAC and you're collecting it because you're going to drop it, you can kind of slow them down a little bit with cold sugar syrup. When it's colder, they need to warm up their flight muscles to fly away. So if they're a little bit colder and you can dampen them down. You can just use water. It doesn't have to be sugar syrup because they are thirsty, probably, if they've been there for a while.

But it also adds weight to them. So if you're shaking them off the branch and into a tote or a bucket or whatever you like, like to carry things in, it helps them do that. But if you're vacuuming them, of course, you won't be adding anything to the cluster. So you want to watch, if you have multiple clusters around, look at the ones that have waggle dances going.

They're the ones that are about to leave first. Get those and get the ones that are still tight and cold or sprit some with cold water and then go get the others and load them into separate boxes. So just be prepared. Be ready for that. So be keeping. debt outs over yet in your area in PA. Let me tell you what. The deadouts in our area are terrible.

We have this weekend tomorrow. Well, yeah, Saturday. We have a hive dive going on with the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association. And we are connected with Ernst Seeds there. And so there are 55 hives around Ernst Seeds. And they use these hives for the hive dive. As of this morning, three of those colonies are alive. Those are being maintained by our most experienced beekeeper. We don't know what's wrong with them. Things are not good, but then at the same time, we have people with 100% survival and there's, you know, these people, they come to your meetings and I had 100% out of 100, you know. But the sidelineers, not really, commercial. Project APSM lists a commercial beekeeper, as did the Be Informed Partnership,

those with over 500 hives. So overall, I think he's got 250, 300 hives. But to see that in an area like earned seeds, where normally the bees do extremely well to be down to three out of 55 is a major hit. In fact, it impacts our ability to teach about the bees because you can't do a hive dive, if a bunch of people show up and they need to look at that. So still developing. The other thing is, for me in my apiary, I have never seen, okay, never seen. Let's talk about it. The Varroa mites, but I have to say, when I say I've never seen it before like this,

it's because I never did what I'm doing now, which is, thanks to Zachary Llamas, I'm looking at the drones and the drone cells. So I looked at the colony that had a couple of drones on the landing board, And I said, oh, they might be making queen cells. I need to look at these. And when I found the drone cells, the drone comb still capped, I cut them out, which I've never done before. I collected those.

I put them in petri dishes. And I took them in so I could do really close micro macro video and photography on those. And the first drone that I uncapped just from a little corner of one frame, I uncapped one drone cell and five mites came out of it. Five. And here's the thing. Those are not the offspring and here's how I know. Because this is a pupating state drone in one of many cells.

And it's not even at the purple eye phase. It's not fully developed. So this means these are foundrous mites. that all piled in before it got capped and they're all trying to reproduce on a single drone. And that's because remember, these are the first drones of the year. Also remember that we're behind, that normally they would have been producing drones already. So I have an opportunity here, which is very important to share with people like you. If you are just now starting with the drones, where are your varroa mites now?

They are concentrating themselves in the drone. cells and this is your opportunity to remove them. And I don't want to do a spoiler alert, but it's very creepy how I noticed the Varro Destructor mites inside the cells. So I'm going to show some videos and stuff that are coming out in the next couple of days. I hope you'll watch. If you're not already a subscriber, please do. I don't want you to miss it because I did some research and found this has not been presented

before. So really exciting moment. really devastating when you realize how many mites are there on the drones. And keep in mind, based on Dr. Zachary Lomas's work, when they emerge, these mites go onto the drones. So the other thing that I'm going to learn from this is exactly how long when I have fat, healthy, varro distractor mites, and they are fat, they're very photogenic, covered in hair.

How long would they live without the host? I'm going to have that answer because I'm watching them every day. I checked on them before I came to do this Q&A today. I have drones. I have varroa mites scooting all over the drone comb, and I'm going to see how long they make it and what they look like when they stop moving around and stuff. But if you want to do integrated pest management,

regardless of your sensibilities about treating or not treating, this is the time to remove drone comb and freeze it or open it or do Mike counts on it because it was dramatic. Okay. Aaron Shelton says, What causes the different smells in hives? I'm new to bees, but kept reading about all the different smells

when opening the hive. Dead, sour, fermented, jimpsych, goldenrod. What causes that and why? Okay, the smells inside, now I'm, by the way, not what you would call a nose. I am no beehive, Somali, right? I can't go up there and go, oh, yeah, yeah. But you can definitely tell when there's bee bread.

So it's a fermentation process. So when they're collecting their pollen and they're mixing it with their own honey and they start to process that, they need to ferment it. And that's what's going on in the cells. And in our observation hive building in particular, because it's an enclosed space, you can smell the fermentation going on. Also, some people are opening their hives in spring. and it can smell sour.

And the thing is, some people misunderstand that once your honey is capped, so it's got capped wax on it, people think, ah, it's set, it's good, it can't take on any more moisture, it's never going to ferment, it's good forever, and 3,000 years from now,

people can eat this honey. The thing of it is, when that space is not managed or maintained by your honeybees, and if the space now if your honeybees dwindled through winter and you've got a whole bunch of extra frames of capped honey above them that they weren't attending to it can actually it's hygroscopic so it can actually absorb moisture because what's going to form on these cold nights and warm mornings

these hives and these leftover frames of capped honey get condensation on them you'll see the bloom which is when you kind of see a powdery surface look on your beeswaxe. It's called the bloom and it's like oxidizing beeswax. But you can also start to get mold because the moisture, the sugar, and all these things combined will ruin the honey. And if you smell sour honey, you can't feed it back to anything. So now it's time to wash it out. Things like that. So the different smells of the hive, there's venom in the hive.

We know that we can smell what smells like lemon grass. and that's because they've activated their nasanoff glands. And so when you're disrupting them, sometimes the abdomens go up and they start fanning and they're disrupted, they're bothered, you can actually start to smell that. So that's another smell that you can associate with the hive. And it's interesting once you smell that,

especially in managing swarms and things, and when you're installing them on a bunch of bees land on the landing board and they're signaling to the rest of the bees that this is the space to go into, you can smell it, and it's really interesting. another smell, which is part of their alarm pheromone, they have a gland that's actually attached when they stick their stinger into something

and it pulls out of the bee. There's a remaining alarm pheromone that's on there, and it looks fuzzy. It looks almost like a tiny, tiny caterpillar, and it's spreading this pheromone like an alarm, and that can start to smell like bananas. So that's fun too, so that's another scent. And then just the smell of the hive,

remember, what else is in there? Propolis. So springtime, when they're really propolizing the surfaces and all the interior parts of the hive, it has this medicinal smell. So it's fantastic. And that's healthy and wholesome. And people are even going the extra yard. I receive emails from people that are doing this. And they put a respirator on and it's connected to the hive and they're actually breathing hive air.

So there are so many compounds airborne inside a hive that depending on the season and the health and other parts of the hive because we know a hive can also stink. If there's dead bees in there, smells like a dead animal, that's a smell you don't want to see. There's a pungent smell that if there's too much mold and mildew inside the hive that's built up on the bottom, if the bees have been dwindling and don't keep care of it and they're using an upper entrance or something instead, and they're avoiding. all the dead at the bottom, then that starts to smell like a dead animal because that's exactly what it is. So there are lots of smells inside your hive. And the more you become familiar with that when you open a hive, the more you'll realize what's going on. This is a great smell. Look at honey production. We smell that everywhere. So does every other animal, including bears, which I hope stay away. So I'm looking for caps here. This is from Bees.

keeping wire basket swarm catch scoop would an expandable round all round oops it moved let's see the wire basket swarm catch scoop which I have here I have two of them looking forward to using those this year too would an expandable round all round mesh laundry tote work here's the thing about a laundry tote these wire baskets if only I had one around Look, I do. This thing is so lightweight. And someone else sent me an email. They hooked a paint roller holder holder, right, with the paint roller so they can have a threaded piece to stick it in here.

And they lash that to the top rim of this. For those of you don't know what you're looking at right now, this is your swarm catch basket. You put this on a long pole. And because the paint roller was on there, it would. swing like this and level up. Anyway, they bump it against the under part of the swarm, way up in a tree, falls in here, and the bees hold onto this basket. Now, we didn't come up with it. Other people did it. And the basket that's originally used is cylindrical. I like the square one because when I set this on the landing board of a hive, it'll match up with a landing board. I can leave it there, and the bees can walk in and install themselves perfectly in the hive, which they always do here. They never make a mistake. Everything happens flawlessly. in opposite land. But this is the basket. It works. There's a lot of ways to do it and get them up there. So I don't know if I answer the question. Oh, the toad, the laundry tote. I think it's heavier. I like the idea of the metal wire basket, smaller and everything else. Now, here's the other thing.

What to do with that? Once you get all the bees in it, rather than dump them. Let's see you have to transport them. So I had this other idea. Get a sheet. you know, the one off your bed. I don't know. You set the whole thing down on the sheet. You wrap the sheet up and you goose neck it. So you twist the top, curl it over, and you can zip tie that shut. Look it.

They can breathe through the sheet everywhere. They can't free fly in your vehicle. You pick it up by the gooseneck part so that you can't get stung through it. Set the whole thing in your vehicle. Turn your ventilation systems on full. Open your windows, whatever you do to make sure they don't overheat. And you bring them home. So it's going to worry. It's going to be perfect. I'm telling you guys, it's going to be great.

I've never used it. I just know it's going to be great. So what else we have going on here? I think that's no more caps. So I'm just guessing. No questions for me. Oh, here's one. How long are you going to leave your queen excluder on for? Okay, so the queen excluder, the whole purpose of that, and sorry I don't have, oh, oh, we're talking about, when I use it, it depends on how I'm using the queen excluder. But if I'm using the queen excluder to get my bees down into the bottom box, which I described earlier today, I don't know that I'll take it off at all. And we're going to see how well the bees

worked through the queen excluders because there are new queen excluders that are not as restrictive as they once were. But I'm going to leave it off until the queen is fully committed to bottom box and they start to back fill the honey up above then i can pull it off and i plan to put the queen excluder up on top of my feeder shim so that i don't have to go hunting for these things so i want to have equipment that isn't stored in the garage i want the stuff to be out stored away from the weather so i need to find ways to keep this stuff on each hive and then use them but i'd like to show you this queen excluder which sits right on the entrance you just hive to swarm they're in the box they all went in. They found their Nazoclop. They all went in. And you know the queen went in.

And then you set this right on the landing board. And I sometimes put a bar clamp on the front of this and the back of the hive and just hold it on there. And I want them to lay eggs in there. I want them to stick around. I do not like to think that I got an awesome swarm. And then I go back out in two days of the following day and the hive is completely empty. They found it unsuitable. for whatever reason. Maybe it didn't clean out the dead bees enough. Maybe there was just something that they found that was better. I want to keep them in there until the queen starts laying eggs.

Until they start, I start seeing pollen going through these bars. Then they're committed. Take it off. Put it away. And now I have my colony. Those work great. And Daydent sells them. You can also just probably do a Google search.

Better be does not sell them. They want you to pick up the whole bottom box. If you've installed a swarm and then you'll put a regular full-size queen excluter and then set your box on that. Now all the bees have to pass through it. But then you have to lift the box again later and be disruptive to the bees. So I like the entrance guards a little better. Glenn's natural honey ever notice diarrhea after feeding syrup with spirulina used in

FRW packages and a lot of dysentery. Could it be the brand I bought? Okay, so the spirulina, any solids, when you are feeding your bees solids, they need to be able to fly out and do cleansing flights. That's why it's not a good thing to feed that stuff in the wintertime when they can't do cleansing flights. I've not noticed that they have done a lot more defecation

all over things right on the hive. I had one hive in my apiary this year. It was just covered. The front was covered. This has nothing to do with nozima, by the way. It can be a source of spreading nozema, but it's not the cause of it. When they're full of solids,

even really dark honey, by the way, has a lot more particulates in it, builds up in the bee gut, and they have to, of course, get rid of it. Spirolina, Again, I should clarify those who are maybe looking it up or going to Google Scholar and finding out the benefits of Spirulina for the bees. They talk about sourcing it, but I go to just go to Amazon. There's a spirulina that is organic.

Had a packet of it here. It makes some use. But for people. So I buy the substance approved for people. It has a consistency of talcum powder. You mix it up with the sugar. and you have to mix it with sugar, otherwise it just gets clumpy and lumpy in your sugar syrup. And you feed at a time when you are not putting honey supers on.

So, and that's because you'll get green honey, blue green honey, in fact, because it'll have spirulina in it. Now, is that bad for you? No. Remember, it's food grade, so you could eat it if you like it. But if you're trying to keep your honey pure and just honey from the nectaries from the flowers in your area, then all feeding should stop in the hive that you're hoping to get honey supers from. But so spirulina is actually a good tell that some of the honey that you have is not from the environment, but rather from your feeder. So, John McGuinness, I notice a lot of bees drinking on the sand on my little lake beach.

My theory is that they are gathering spirulina and other algae. Would you agree? Okay, so it's not just they do prefer sand and they like algae. They like moss. And so you see the bees going to the water bees are going to the same spots over and over again. There's also a huge mineral load that comes from that. And once the bees get what they find, they stay with it. They what they like, they go back time and again.

Remember your watering bees are specialists. They're not foragers for nectar ever. They're just water bees. And so different times of year that also rises and falls. I don't even know if like we have a natural earth. pond here and the bees are on it they're right on the edges they're collecting the resources we can mark bees and see the same ones come back time and again right now of course it's raining water's everywhere but they still like to prefer nutrient dense water they show a preference for that

and even sometimes sea salts we did those tests too and if you go to my website you can look at the or my youtube channel and just type in sea salt tests we decided what salinity level they preferred and which types they preferred. And it's not consistent throughout the year. So at different times a year, for some reason, they like more minerals and stuff. But definitely they go for these algae areas. They just, it's, and who knows what they're getting from it? I'm not a lab scientist. I can't really evaluate their microbiome, but very consistent, very positive testing and results when your bees are consuming and ingesting spirulina. We have to be a little careful when we add it to sugar syrup and we make that the only option for the bees. That's why I think it's really good to give them

free choice on that sugar syrup with sugar syrup without see what they use. And last year in particular when I was doing Ziploc baggy tests to see if they could really hold up and at what fill level you would use and everything to prevent leaking inside your hive if they were up inside your feet. I wanted to know if they had a preference for spirulina and one-to-one sugar syrup or if they preferred sugar syrup without the spirulina. And near the end of the year, after you've harvested your honey, when we're preparing them for winter, they showed a preference for the sugar syrup that had spirulina in it. Now, two hides down, they would show a preference for just the sugar syrup.

So we can't assign the nutritional demand of each colony to all. colonies so I'm a huge fan of making sure they have choices so that we know that they're selecting that content so this is Dan Weaver this is Fred can you see the question from Yahweh Elohim okay I guess I have to go up is there a timestamp if anybody can tell me let's see do to do to do I want to go up but up Yahweh I'll have good afternoon I have a new swarm that was trapped out and now I have about three quarters of the bees in the hive but only a virgin queen. They're not foraging much, established, no comb, eggs, or brood.

So you've installed a new swarm in a hive. They're not doing a lot of foraging. And how do we know that it's a virgin queen? I don't know. You might have to wait it out. They don't invest in infrastructure in the hive. They don't bring a lot of resources is in unless your queen is mated or you've had your bees long enough that they activated their ovaries to get laying workers and they're producing drone brood. So hopefully she has a chance to mate. And the first question I always ask also in circumstances like this, how many drones you have flying around in the area?

Does she have an opportunity to meet? Is it, or you've got a lot of good flying days? Because a virgin queen can actually live in a hive for quite a long time and not, yet get mated and produce the eggs that you need. The environment needs to be providing the resources that they need for brood or the queen won't lay. So if you don't have the proteins coming in, the pollen coming in that they need, they will, again, not allow even their queen to lay eggs because I've got video sequences of a queen that's

trying to lay eggs, but the nurse beasts are not fortified enough in nutrition that they could support the open brood that's about to emerge from those eggs. hatch from those eggs, so they were consuming the eggs as she was producing them. So there are a lot of other things at play. So we need to know that they're bringing in from the environment. That's key to the proteins that they need and the energy resources, the nectar. And of course, they need access to water and everything else. So number one, water.

Number two, carbohydrates and sucrose that they later invert into what they use for their carbohydrates and the energy for everything that happens inside the hive, including wax production. And then the proteins that they need to produce brood. So this all takes time. And they have to, of course, you have to look at your frames and see, are they storing pollen? Do they have that adjacent to a brood area? Are they investing in infrastructure? Bees that do not have a laying queen, stop investing.

They don't make more comb, for example. They don't draw it out. They don't bring in pollen and start storing everything up. So there are a lot of keys to whether or not that queen has been mated and whether or not they're willing to invest in the colony. Because now what you're going to have, if she is in fact an unmated virgin queen, you're going to potentially lose a lot of your foragers to drift to colonies in your apiary that have queen right status. If I've learned anything over the past few years, it's that your foragers will on a whim fly through a pheromone stream. of a colony that is queen right and route themselves right to it and not even go back to a colony that either has a really young queen that is not yet in full production or maybe an aging queen

that's coming to the end of her time, they go ahead and route themselves right to a stronger queen fair amount. It's really interesting and that's why I did my queen on a stick evaluation to see if I could draw these bees out of the air and get them to join up with a queen that just smells right that's mated that is capable of surviving and for them to survive as a species. So they're drawn to these things, these pheromones for a reason. So there are a lot of different things at play that I would look at. Glenn's natural honey ever noticed diarrhea after feeding syrup? Oh, I already did that.

Okay. Good. Oh, here's Block Farm apiary. Fred and a long laying, if you don't want to extract, frames could a guy build a false bottom box for correct B space and medium frames for the honey yes you could so the long length troth let's say we were doing that and I'm not saying that we won't but you could definitely put a spacer inside that brings up so you can make your own insert so to speak and so for the

areas that you want to have your medium frames fill the space and then within three eighths of an inch of the bottom bar of your medium frames, that would be the space that you have there. And then you would just have the medium frames. And you can do it. You can there, you can build your hive that way. If I were going to do a hive that way, because remember I said, we need spaces to store our stuff. I would make the long Langstroth hive the same full depth. And I would have maybe an opening in the front that I could store stuff underneath because we're going to bump it up to accommodate just the medium frame. We want the top bars to all be the same heights, right?

And then you have a space above those and then cover boards. I think that's totally doable. And if you've got the skills to do it and you don't want to make it so that's the only thing you can do, just my opinion. I don't want to make a special purpose hive. So I'd rather see you build an insert that goes in there that's definitely going to get glued up. That you could remove if you wanted to restore it or make a storage area and use it for utility. I think, yeah, there's no reason you can't do that. be fun let's see do to do do to do to do drinking sand we did that I think we're

almost at the end of it this is supposed to be live from four to five if someone has a question for me right now please feel free to ask it I'm gonna jump I think to my fluff section I'm not gonna get to these questions because we're running long but if you've got a question, please type it in all caps. I'll be glad to get to that. And we'll go right on down the line. A lot of questions about Queens and stuff. I guess I just want to say right now,

the northeastern United States, please be on top of your colonies that are about to swarm. I do a lot of swarms and stuff. I like to see them. I like to manipulate the bees. See what they respond to. See what the pheromones are. and now I want to keep them around a little more because I'm under pressure.

I have a nine-year-old supervisor that has apparently he's got clients, he's got people that need honey. And so he wants me to do honey this year. And to do that, we can't let them swarm all the time. So what we're doing is we're going to go around. And as I mentioned before, we need to make sure that you don't lose your queens. that they don't take off. So when we find queen cells in production, we need to take the queens out.

Sad truth, they're getting rid of her anyway, and you can keep the bees. I do recommend you create an insurance policy. Remember, bees are about 75% successful in mating their queens. That means 25% of your colonies can end up queenless. Resource hives, nucleus hives, are very important, in my opinion,

for you to take your queen and one frame of brood. in a colony that's already building queen cells, put her in a nucleus hive, and keep her as an insurance policy, let them reproduce, let them get mated and get that queen back on track. You have a new queen there,

and then you can decide what to do with this older queen that you have. But always keep an insurance policy. The last thing we want is to be without a queen in a colony and no hope of making a new one. We can, of course, pull a frame of brood and eggs and stick that in the hive that's queenless and let them make a queen. But look how far down the line now they are before we start to see a new brood from a new queen that we start from scratch.

I do see some questions here. How high can a rooftop hive be? Someone asked me if 50 feet is okay. Oh, this is Jimmy's neighborhood bees. So this question was in my stack today. Hives can be any heights. In Brooklyn, New York, there are bee associations. that their entire apiary is on the rooftop.

R rooftops have to be carefully selected, and here's why. They get very hot midsummer. So screen shading, rooftop gardens and things like that are valuable. One of the probably most famous rooftop apiaries is in Paris, France, and is right near where the Notre Dame Cathedral burned. And I don't know if you recall that, but there were rooftop bees, right there. So the height is not a problem. Bees will forage people's backyards, their little growing plots. People have balconies and everything else. So actually city bees do remarkably well.

So I wouldn't go a whole hog. The other thing is you have to consider you're going to be carrying your stuff up and down, probably that utility staircase that takes you to the rooftop. So think about what kind of hives you're going to have up there. And if they can fit, how much lugging and lifting you're going to have to do but they definitely work and the height is not a problem because the one in paris is more than 50 feet easily so 50 foot you're talking to five-story in a rooftop which is actually pretty small pretty short but they definitely work um oh we are getting some last minute questions here live in western new york near you is it okay for me to make a walk away split right now okay so here's the thing walk away splits right now that's my favorite way

to make splits by the way do you have a lot of drones flying, if you do, go for it. If you don't, wait. Next week is my start for stuff like that. Because I've seen the drone cells, I've seen what's going on, they're in the area, and the chances of getting a really good mating are good. So walkaway split time is coming. I'd give it a week for me, but I'm probably colder than a lot of other parts of my area.

So drones are the key. When you see dandelions, fields of dandelions, do it. Do it because you're going to lose them otherwise. Do you know when a young queen lays multiple eggs in a cell? Do workers clear all eggs or all but one? Okay, so, and this is from Atlas. This happens a lot, and it's funny. New queens, the eggs are just coming out of them, like the Plato Fun Factory.

Some of them take a while to get that rained in. And the difference between that and a laying worker, for example, she is putting her eggs at the bottom of the cell. There's a whole pile of them. Now, we don't see doubles and triples of, you know, brood growing up in those cells. So the worker bees and nurse bees get in there and they eat them up. So it's called policing. They also eat eggs that they don't think are viable or maybe genetically not good enough to be raised in their brood area.

So they definitely eat them down to just one and they do leave one. Unless, of course, what I mentioned earlier on, if you've got nutritional deficiencies, in your hive, they will back off and they won't even take care of them. So then they do, they fortify their own protein by consuming the eggs, which is interesting to. But yeah, they'll eat all but the one. And eventually the queen gets herself under control. So that's good news. Can you give some? Oh, so here's James Carnahan. Question, can you give some feedback on the ivory beehive. I've just built mine up for the season purely as an observation hive. Okay, this is a tough one. The ivory beehive, for those of you who don't know, is an Israeli hive. It's built. The group

comes from a kibbutz in Israel. And it is fantastic for bees. It's like a barrel on its side. It's modified. It's shaped or designed after old unfired clay beehives that were used thousands of years ago. And as I said, it has 15 frames in it. So the bees use the space fantastic. It is an observation hive. It has 180 degree viewing window. I love showing it to people.

Now I have to say the part I don't like about it. From the beekeeper perspective, managing the hive, it is my least favorite hive to get into. And it's because the bees connect their honey, comb to that plexiglass full width so anytime you take them up all the frames come up all of them and it's it's like i said the bees do great the bees are fantastic i never fed it i never did anything with it i just let them fill and draw out every single round unique custom frame that's in there and i left them with a single entrance at one side you have the option to vent the back you have multiple entrances but i closed the back

and they did the perfect progression brood at the end near the entrance brood mixed with bee bread and then we transition to nothing but honey they drew out every single frame perfectly it is a wonderful example um it also because they build their comb right up against that translucent panel um you can see them filling it with honey and so but the management-wise, it's just a huge challenge. Everybody wants to see it. They want you to open it. And you just can't because you pull everything apart when you do that. Great for bees. That for the beekeeper. It handles winter weather really well. It sits on a porch and is insulated, as you know, if you're putting it together. But from a beekeeper perspective, great to look at bad to manage, hard to manage,

just a huge challenge. So this is B Amazing Hives. Fred, during this week's inspections, I found multiple charged cups. I did walkaway split since I couldn't find the queen. Is it okay to do this split without them being capped? Yes. I would do everything I could, though.

Charge cups, by the way, some people may be thinking, what the heck are we talking about? Well, there are queen cups that come off the frames of your brood frame. right, around the edges, and it looks like the cap of an acorn, and it's empty, usually. So we call it a queen cup. It becomes a queen's cell when the queen lays an egg in it.

If they're building those out, you're ahead of the game because you found it, you inspected it, and they are planning to replace their queen. That's when you go on this hunt to find that queen and get her out of there because she's going to leave with up to 70% of the population of those bees. So I very carefully go frame by frame, take your time. on a nice hot day, two o'clock in the afternoon, sun straight up above you. Pull them frame by frame, look at everything. Find that queen, get her out of there, pull a couple frames of brood with her.

And then I would act, this is personally, if I'm trying to keep this colony intact, then I go through and destroy every queen's cell or semblance of a queen cell that I can find, smash them all up, leave them without the queen for a while while you've got her in her nuke box. and then when we're sure that they're not capable of laying, so they can't make a new one, there's no eggs anymore, there's no new, very tiny, freshly hatched larvae in there, and then we make sure that they're past their chance of replacing the queen. So we also do another check again

and make sure that there are no queen cells that you miss. And once you're satisfied and sure, because they're also going to be upset, you're going to know that they don't have any sense of a secure, future because they're all going to be randomly moving around. They're going to be an active hive, an unsettled hive, and then you get to be their hero and bring back the queen that you remove and reinstall her. And there's a tiny brood break maybe, and you've had your chance to expand. And now you can keep them. So, or let them requeen and then have another colony started with their old

queen and let it all play out and don't smash any of their queen cells. And then, of course, they go on and you have two colonies now. So it's up to you. You got decisions to make. So this is from Flower Street, Farm Bees, Jen and Brian. Fred, how do you utilize your resource colonies in your apiary? Okay, my resource colonies has described. They're deep nuke boxes, five frames per box.

And I use them just as I just described. If I need an insurance policy, bees are doing something. I don't have confidence I can keep them under control or that they will successfully produce a new queen. I use them to house a frame of brood, a frame of, you know, honey in there. And then I fill the rest out with empty frames. And these single five-frame deeps grow fast. They got out of hand for me. So they actually, what they did is turn into hives on their own.

So now we have hives that are easy to manage. And I don't go higher than three. 15 deep frames. And you can use them to draw home and things like that also. So I treat them, I don't want to say badly, but because it's a resource hive, we're not depending on them for our primary hives. So we can be kind of will and nearly with them.

If you're going to teach people about bees, those are the hives we jump into because we don't want to disrupt our special hives, our happy hives. And that's how I use them. And then if I've lost a colony, I have taken all five frames out of it of brood and put that in another colony that hoped to fortify

and then left them again, which is a couple frames of brood and the queen and let them go ahead and continue on their happy way and they're remarkably resilient. So what does that tell us? This narrow, tall chimney of a colony, chimney of a hive actually works really well for the bees. We had a terrible winter this year, no secret.

and I had nucleus hives like that with no feeder shim on top. This is something I am changing in my apiary this year. Every single hive in my apiary will have the ability for me to feed. So there needs to be a feeder shim on top of every single hive just in the event that I decide I need to feed them. They're starving. If your bees starve out and die because of an extended winter, because you did not feed them.

It's a terrible feeling. So I was swapping and putting feeders on in the snow this year because they were up all the way. There was nothing but double bubble and a migratory cover up there. And they made it miraculously. That's an uninsulated hive. It did have an insulation cap over the top of it,

but no feeding resource opportunity. I couldn't put fondant in there. I couldn't do anything for them. and I just look at that hive in amazement. But that doesn't mean that we can just be hands off on all the bees. I was very off guard for the way the winter panned out this year. But that's what I use them for. I just draw if I have a colony or a hive that I want to build up,

it's not building as fast as I need it to. I'll go over there, take a frame of capped brood, stick it right in there, beef them up. One deep frame of capped brood, both sides. That's over 6,000 new workers in a hive. you can really kick it in that way so here is carmine oops okay so what else i might skip some i use it so that's i use those carmine fiola my queenless 10 frame double deep lang has 13 swarm and three supersedure cells why both types of cells are those things capped if those are

as far as the supersedeser cells and regular swarm cells, people are going, what's that? What's the difference? Well, if we had the frame, supers seizure cells tend to come off the center of the field somewhere. Long-term plan swarm cells are along the fringe. We can see which ones that your bees prefer. And here's something I want you to do. If you're thinking about smashing cells, get a really powerful penlight flashlight, shine it through the back of the queen's cell and look at the stage of development in these cells and see if they're

viable don't just go willy-nilly smashing everything up you can actually pass light through it and see if a queen is occupying it and how much of the space she's occupied it's really interesting as far as why they're doing those emergency out of the middle field cells as well as having the others i recommend inspecting those but if the bees die if the queens die inside those cells, they would be chewed apart by the bees and removed. So it's the only reason I bring up candling your queen cells with a flashlight is to make sure that they aren't in fact dead in there, which is why they're feeling desperate. The pheromone somehow has changed, and now they're trying to make emergencies.

But it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not something I would worry about, but if you're trying to narrow the field, I would get rid of the emergency skinny little cells and look at the ones that they've done the most work on. It's all modeled. Looks like the shell of a planter's peanut. I would leave at least two or three of those and smush up the others to prevent after swarming. Okay, this is from Hail Hives, Fred. I know you've never had to do this, wink, wink, but have you had success with the bees accepting and reusing badly damaged wax moth frames are better to just pitch and start new. Okay, so the wax moth, the wax worms in particular, messing up the frames and putting the webbing all over it, I would never put that into a hive and have them try to clean it up.

I would do my best to get that all off of there and get the webbing out. watching bees struggle with getting that fibrous material from wax moths wax worms off of that frame it takes so much effort they could be making honey for them and you instead of doing that so i recommend cleaning it up in fact a nice heavy waxed foundation in there would be just the thing i would pull it and not use it at all so do to do too do thanks for the piece back iber beehive i've modified mine with piano hinge on the side we'll see if we can put strips okay uh cecilia remind the shark vac make to blow bees off frames okay the shark vac is what i use is a handheld uh wireless vacuum that we suck these off of the frames if they're in the way

when you're trying to close things up and then you just pop it open and release them outside and this This is the wolf box. I mean, this is a wolf box. These things, this is the most powerful. My wife made the mistake of leaving me alone, and she went on vacation to Florida without me. And I was blowing chicken eggs to dry them off with this. It blew the eggs out of the garden.

That's how strong it is. Wolfbox. Highly recommend if you want to blow things around with it. Blow dead bees out, blow off frames. It might even, I haven't tried it because they don't have any of these wax moth damaged frames, but try to blow all the detritus and stuff out. It works really well. Three power levels on that.

Okay. I'm going to wrap this up, you guys. Sharkback is the little handheld one. I just want to make sure. Oh, yeah, smoker pellets. The smoker pellets are now for sale at the northwestern Pennsylvania Beaky Presumers. Association, you can Google it. They are switchgrass pellets.

If you want to light your smoker and have a dense, cool smoke, that burns the entire time you're in your apiary. I used it yesterday. They last a long time. And your purchase is a donation toward, it's a nonprofit organization so that we can teach people about beekeeping. I profit from it, not at all. Switch grass pellets, Northwestern, Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association.

We have a volunteer group of people that put these together. They are made for us by earned seeds, and it is the best smoker fuel I have ever used, and I wouldn't say that if it were not true. Cool smoke, dense smoke won't leave you without a smoker that's lit. Don't forget to use beesworm.org and tell other people about it so they can get free bees, and so that the bees don't spend a lot of time hanging, and we don't have multiple beekeepers going after the same swarm, disappointing each other.

winners from last week got the coffee cups and they got their books or notebooks those were delivered already so congratulations those it was really nice to have quinn here to do that announcement for us watch for the varroa video that i'm about to be put out if you want to be completely creeped out you need to see it i want you to understand what your bees are coping with with the varroa destructor mite. It is weird stuff. Don't forget if you get a chance, try to control your Veroa destructor mites, particularly this time of year. I know this is a little behind the power curve. Get those. Acorn is the company that I highly recommend for this. The green drone comb, heavy waxed. Use that because this isn't just for drones. Drone comb is green because we can use

it for an integrated pest management move. The other part of this is they also use it for honey. So they draw these drone size cells out. They use it for honey stores and other things too. So it's not wasted, but if you don't have them, you don't have a way to concentrate your drones. And then you have a viable area to really act on what's going on with those forod destructor mites. And again, splits coming up. Some people talking about walkaway splits. So the people that are in my area, northeastern United States state of Pennsylvania next week is looking promising for when we're going to start to manage hives, do splits

and combine and you'll know a little bit more. So that's it. I want to thank everybody for being here. I hope that your weekend ahead is going to be absolutely fantastic. I want to thank you for coming. If you enjoyed this and you like my channel at all, I invite you to subscribe, of course, so that you get notifications.

So thanks a lot for joining. It's been a great chat. He had some fantastic questions, and I really do appreciate it. Have a great weekend.