The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Beekeeping Q&A Episode 307 May 23rd of 2025 swarms, splits and swapping veils.

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

This is the Audio Track from Today's YouTube:  https://youtu.be/FnQ3zyLoJlY

So hello and welcome, happy Friday. Today is Friday, May the 23rd of 2025, and this is Backyard Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 307. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. So I'm really glad that you're here today. It is fine to be inside, and that's because it's terrible outside. So if you want to know what we're going to talk about, I want to welcome you, first of all. If you want to know what we're going to talk about, please go down to the video description below. and you'll see all the topics in order and there will be some links leading you to additional information and of course websites and stuff like that all the topics that we're covering today we're submitted during the past week now what's going on outside i know you want to know well that's what i was about to say i'm glad to be inside because it's rainy and it's cold and it's not the way it should be this is memorial day weekend and things should be

awesome and they're just not in fact it's raining right now where is it raining well in the northeastern part of the united states northwestern part of the state of pennsylvania so now you want to know the specifics about the conditions outside 45.7 degrees Fahrenheit that's 7.6 Celsius just so you know 3.6 mile per hour constant winds with wind gusts to 5 and 6 miles per hour so that 3.6 is 5.7 kilometers per hour 97% relative humidity. No great surprise. It's raining. So it fluctuates around. This is just a bad time of year. Everyone's saying the same thing. When I say everyone, I mean those who are local to me are not happy. They can't get out and do the things they normally would. This would be a weekend of planting plants, putting seeds in the ground, mowing, tilling, things like that.

I did walk around, actually, in the rain days ago, and I just poke seeds into the ground where I know. I want them and I want to make sure they have a head start. But we need the combination of warmth with the rain. And I put some seeds in the ground, though, that were interesting. They were supposed to take weeks to germinate, and they take to soak them overnight and stuff like that. And I thought, why would I soak seeds overnight if they're going to get rained on constantly? Isn't that the same as soaking them? We'll just do that in the soil.

And guess what? The roots are already starting. So I think this is going to be a really good growing year. just waiting for that temperature to go up. So what do we see out there? In the opening sequences, what you observed were gold finches, which are really cool birds in my neck of the woods. We have lots of wild bird species here, lots of songbirds,

which I think is one of the reasons why we have so few pests for our beehives. So I'm talking about small high beetles. I don't have any, knock on wood. And of course the moths that fly around and deliver their eggs into your hives this time of year so that you can have wax moths to chew up your old comb and stuff like that we don't see many of those either my chickens will run 100 feet to catch a moth in the tall grass so the goldfinches were eating the seeds from what the dandelions so hopefully people were able to get away with no-mow may and i think it worked this year because the rain kept people off their mowers

so dandelions are done though it's amazing how quickly that goes by and we did get a nectar flow out of it so the hives are in pretty good shape considering how cold it is. Clover, it's not open yet. I don't know if it needs warmth or what's going on. There's lots of clover around. It's just not flowering. The pears and the apple trees are done.

Already. They're wrapped up. Holly is blooming right now, American holly bushes. So the beads are all over those. Even today, in the rain, even at these temperatures, by the way. Your honeybees will fly out and forage to known resources. So in other words, they're not going to waste certain. scouting around for something new this time of year when it's cold and wet and

rainy and things like that but they will go to known resources and what's that tell us it tells us that the colony they came from really needs the carbohydrates so anyway and privates I think are going to be looking good soon Memorial Day weekend so it's a three-day weekend this again would be the standard gardening weekend so I wish you all in the United States a happy Memorial Day weekend so you can remember those who have served and gone before us. The pollen count 3.5. That's really low. No great surprise because of the rain. What's the source of it? Tree pollen is number one. Mulberries. We have lots of mulberry trees

here and oak pollen all up. But there again, those who suffer from pollen will be just fine. And for those of you who have a question, I want to know how to submit it. Go to my website, the way to be.org. And there's a page, mark the way to be. And you can click on that. There's also a link to that page down in the video description and you fill out the form and you submit it. It can just be a topic. It doesn't have to be a question related to you. So the other thing is we have a pesky raccoon around here, little gymnastic type raccoon because it climbs up every tree. Why is it doing that? It's hunting birds. Our songbirds have nests now. They put eggs in their nests and then of course the eggs hatch and the raccoon tools around and snatches them all.

So that thing walked right past one of my video cameras and with this little feet turned upside down while it went down in the rain. Very persistent. They're also called wash bears in Germany. I think that's funny. One thing that's absent from the wildlife landscape this time of year, chipmunks. I haven't seen any this year. Usually you can hear them squeak and chatter and run around in the woods. I don't hear any.

Is that the same for you if you're in my neck of the woods? And so I don't know where they are. And before we get into today's questions, I want to wish you all specifically. A great weekend. And my wife had something special going on this weekend. Guess what? It's her birthday. So happy birthday to Annette.

She has been around longer on earth than I have. She's basically a cradle robber. I don't like to point that out, but it's true. Her birthday is Sunday. So we're going to have fun here. And what else is going on? You've got a question on your mind. and you need to talk to somebody right now.

You have a picture of something weird. You want to share it. Go to the Facebook group. The Way to Be Facebook group. So it's the way to be fellowship. Just Google it, the way to be fellowship. The other thing is, maybe you've got shorts to do. Maybe you just want to sit and you don't want to look at a screen.

You can also go to Podbean, or you can just Google search, The Way to Be podcast, and you'll find it. And then you'll just be able to listen. But today I have some things that you're going to want to see. You can't just hear them unless you ever. really good imagination. So I think that's it. We're going to jump straight into it. And the very first question today comes from Texas B-House, Texas B-H-A-U-S. And this is from Marion, Texas. Says I'm currently running Appomat Hives, love them, and the new vent covers.

I add some double bubble to my vents to keep the insulation R value high. I run one deep, and the rest of the boxes are mediums. Since that box, bottom deep is attached how can I rotate boxes or even try the Demery method you know everyone is talking not everyone but so many people are talking about the Demery method and for those you are sitting here to scratch your head what is the Demery method it's a way to help reduce warming and by the way the weather this year is doing a great job of that on its own because it's holding the colonies way back But it's a method of moving your frames of brood around and keeping the queen down below,

moving the frames up, or leaving congestion in the brood area, so then your bees are not simulated to swarm. The problem with this Apamah situation is, by the way, you can run deeps on Apamah, you don't have to go to mediums. But in this particular case, the Apamah hive, which is a very good weather-resistant, super-tuff, bear-resistant beehive. in other words barrack and knock it over clamber around with it and knock it into it they're super interesting so what do you do when you have mediums above you've got a queen excluder and then you've got just the deep down below

well one of the problems it's not a maybe it's not a huge problem but here where i am this late season cold has kept our brood areas high so i started something new and i'm not complete with that yet this year because i'm behind this is a one-man show you know people you know, pint can't hold a quart and stuff like that. And it's because my goal was to find each queen up in these upper boxes, install the queen excluder, and just have a single deep brood management box this year. And the reason is, particularly when it's cold like this,

we have a problem getting them moving down. So I'm just putting the queen excluder in. Find the queen, of course, which seems to be really hard for some people. you find the queen, put her below the queen excluded into the bottom box, and then you've basically separated the queen from most of the brood. And in my book, this is not strictly the Demerie method, of course. It's not the Demerie method at all, other than the fact that I move the queen to an area where she has now a lot of drawn comb left over from winter,

where she can start to lay in the nurse bees, will eventually join her down there. and those frames of brood and the comb that's capped above the queen excluder as the emmerish I'll just come down and go through the queen excluder and then they will back fill the upper bogs with honey so we accelerate that movement now what's cool about that and it's not the dimmery method it's just the method I'm using and I think it will work try it see what goes on because by moving the queen down and the colonies that I've done that with by the way are doing really well so the worker bees went right with her the nurse bees came right along and you've got enough foragers and other workers that can still sustain the brood so this isn't a time to for example split them all up

and you know checkerboard those frames and things so when you move your queen down below this is this doesn't mean rearrange the frames leave them all up there as they are in the order that they were in and now we've just put the queen down below and there is basically a little dip of brood already in to the bottom box, but it wasn't enough for all of them to go down the way I like them to do in spring. So by putting the queen below the queen excluder, now she starts to brood up down below and they back fill with honey up above. So that's working for me. So what do you so that's why I recommend that the Hapamay company has their own queen excluders, their plastic queen excluders they fit perfectly. You also might want to look into because

part of this comment is that this bottom box is attached to the bottom board, which is made by Apameh. So I also got a set of Endora hives from Nature's Image Farm from Greg Burns, and they're coded, they're long-lasting, but they're partnered up with Appame also. So they've got the Appamee Featers and the top, and then they've also got the Appamea bottom board. So you can have woodenware that's compatible with those, because in some parts, of the nation and the world probably where your hives are close to the ground your bottom boards tend to rot there's a lot of humidity and things like that so this eliminates the rot potential and adds utility and by the way that bottom board from appamay is configured differently than the ones that

actually come from apame hives it has a flip-up landing board it's a swarm collection system because it also has holes in the bottom of it so you can screw it up through the bottom and attach it to a a wooden hive box and now you've got something that's transportable flip it up nothing gets out it has a little twist style i need to do a video coming up of that because i use that hive for training to show some new advantages to beehives configurations and things like that so it has a lot of utility i don't get anything from you know nature's image farm for mentioning them they're just one of the ones that i know of that are selling that combination and you get the benefit of Propolis. So actually the hive bodies that are in Dura hives, they are partnered with Premier,

which makes propola. And so what's that? Well, it's a rough surface on the interior of the wood that gets your bees to produce more propolis, and that's working, because I've had those out in my apiary since last year. So more propolis or propolis, it really doesn't matter how you say that. We have a healthier hive environment. So it's really interesting. So that's the memory thing if you've got mismatch boxes this is just my recommendation of one way to resolve that is to install your queen exleater hunt up your queen get her below it and then get them to move down and as far as i'm personally concerned i think that pretty much satisfies the congestion issue while they're all piled up above because their tendency is to continue to move up particularly

when it's cold so we're going to move on now to question number two from dennis from Crystal Falls, Michigan. Okay, so anyway, it could be Minnesota. What's MI? I think that might be actually Minnesota. I don't know. Anyway moving on. When I split my double deeps, I put the queen in the bottom box and I put with four frames of brood, then an excluder. So this is kind of what I described, only now we're talking about a split by putting one above and one below. And the rest of the brood in the second box above the excluder, I wait if few hours, I take the box off, then I remove the excluder, and I put a double screen board

on top of the bottom box, and then I install the queen in the top box. Okay, so this might be complex for some people to follow. So what we're doing here is we have a double deep hive, deep and deep, eight over eight, ten over ten, it really doesn't matter. So what's being described here by Dennis is we took the queen out of the top box, put her in the bottom box, put a queen excluder in, and the purpose of this is to divide the brood and to install a new queen. Okay, so now we'll have two colonies together. So after a while, Dennis takes off the top box,

removes the queen excluder that was in there to keep the queen down below. So this allowed the bees to move freely through it. All the workers can go through the queen excluder. And then install a new queen up above the queen excluder but now it's a double screen board okay so it says install the queen in the top box why will they accept the queen if there is the fair amount smell of the queen below so first I want to describe the equipment so the first thing we did this is a queen excluder and I want to mention this today because historically I've not been a fan of queen excluders and so I'm

finding more uses for them now, but particularly with a cold weather spring, I'm using them a lot for a lot of different things. This is my favorite queen excluder. There's a lot of different ones out there, a lot of different plastic ones out there. I've done testing and backyard science in the past with queen excluders to see what the bees would pass through the easiest. And in some cases, some of the plastic queen excluders, the workers that were out foraging couldn't get through them at all. or it was so much effort that they just gave up and didn't try. These are my favorite ones. They're wooden frames around them. They come in eight or ten frame sizes.

I wish they would sell a nucleus size. The Keepers Hive people have a nucleus-sized queen excluder. You might have to make it yourself if you're doing nukes. But anyway, so what's described today as the queen excluder was put in, and I show you this one. This one's sold at Better B. I don't get anything for mentioning that. So if you go there and ask for one and mention my name,

you'll pay the same as everyone else. And this has a space above and below it, so the bees can still go over the tops of the frames. It's one of the things I like about it. The other thing is it's metal. It doesn't sag. And this is made by the same people that are making those queen isolation cages

and queen introduction cages. Because if you look at the banding on that, there is no bottom side where it sticks down farther. even on both sides. So these are my favorites. So this is what Dennis did to put its queen down below but then a few hours later took this off and what was put in its place. Let's look at that. Double screen board so it looks about the same thickness right only now we've got these two screens. It looks like number eight screen is in there. Now it goes right up through the center. So the new colony in this case is going to be up above this

and the question is, why do they allow it? So it's also got these little twists. So if you're looking to build your own, these look like they would be easy to make. Here's a twist. And by the way, you have the option to make an entrance on any side above or below. So either the colony below could have this as an upper entrance.

So the colony above could have this as a bottom entrance. And this is treated with eco wood. So why the double screen? Well, first of all, it's a double screen, so now it's not a queen excluder either. It's number eight cloth. Nothing gets through it. No worker, no drone, no queen can go through that. But here's what's the most important and why they don't have a war going, because now there's a queen up above.

The queen mandibular pheromone is spread through physical contact. Now, it's true that they can smell it. In other words, the queen mandibular pherom can be emitted into the air, but it isn't passed from b-to-be without direct physical contact. contact and you can't get it from the queen herself without direct physical contact from the queen's retinue. So then what happens is the bees that are in the bottom box are in direct contact with their laying queen and they're continuing to spread her pheromone around. But then when you have the double screen board or the Snellgrove board, which some call it, you put it up above and then now we've got a queen up there and they start to spread her pheromone through mandibular contact

right so her mandibular glands so queen mandibular pheromone is spread physically the other thing is we want our entrances now to be probably out the back or another space this isn't something by the way that i personally practice and that's because you can still expand you know your colony the bottom box as they start filling up you can super it and then you just move your double screenboard up again historically the weaker or smaller colony is one that sits on top and uh with their own entrance and then people decide on their own whether or not they need to vent that or don't need to vent that and what kind of insulated and recover they have and of course on a cold day like today don't those bees down below benefit from the warmth that's being generated from up above also

but that's why they make it the top box they accept the queen the pheromone smell is again from direct contact ultimately so that's interesting and I hope we get a report on how well that goes question number three comes from Steve and Patterson, New York, says they set up five brand new Langstroth Hives on Saturday. They only have brand new wax-coated foundations, and I installed a queen and three-pound packages of bees in each one. So now we have five colonies, three-pound packages in each one, and then, of course, the queen comes in a cage. Upon returning with a handful, upon returning the next day, one of the colonies decided to cite, to move next door to another hive.

Remaining was only a queen in her cage with a handful of nurse bees not knowing what to do. I moved in a few frames of bees from the other hives and closed the entrance for the night. I plan on obstructing the entrance with branches and when I open the hive today, will this work? What should I have done? Thanks. Okay, so here's the thing. Let's lay this out. We have five hives. five packages that came. So now we've installed packages and queens in cages in each of these five hives. This is the way I'm reading it.

Okay. And then you come back a day later and now we have the queen in one hive and she's by herself with a handful of bees that are still attending to her. She's still in her cage and the rest of the bees have moved over to another hive who probably, by the way, released their queen and they're in direct contact with her. and she's already starting production in that hive, even though only a few days have occurred. So what would you do about this?

Let's picture it. A row of hives, all the same. The only difference is one of them is underpopulated. So let's say the populated hive is right here, and then that this one with just the queen cage, first of all, we want to get that queen ready to come out. So we want to make sure that the candy plug in there is accessible to the bees and everything else.

What would you do? Here's what I would do personally. We're artificially populating that and it may not fix it because once you make a package of bees like that, when they're shipped that way, most of those bees are forager age. They're reverting back to other duties, but most of them are not, they don't give up their prime nurse bees, for example, when they're throwing together packages. So we get some mixed workers and stuff, but primarily they're foragers so they can come out and fly, as is already noticed here, that they went to another hive. So we take the hive that is shown the greatest interest in. We're going to do a switcher-roo on them. Take that hive, and we're going to put it where the weak colony is,

where the queen is being ignored. We take the queen that's being ignored, and we put her in the position where the one had filled up, because the foragers have very good memories. Once they've decided that this is where they live, they're going to continue to go back to it. So now we're going to fortify the weaker colony. And the other one that they chose the queen,

we're going to let them kind of filter down a little bit. they have more than they deserve in the first place because they have a lot of traders in there. So that's just what I would do that evens it out. I don't, I've never had to modify an entrance or do anything special. And at what time of day would you do this? Wait until sunset. So when they've all moved in and they're all closed up, that's when then I would swap them around. And of course you're going out at night. You're going to want to wear a full B suit because you know what they do at night, they come out and they can't see you so they climb on everything. They go to the ground and they climb up your legs, up your pant legs, and just be ready for that.

Red filter lights if you can. And that's what I recommend. And I hope Steve does it and tries it out and gives us great feedback and tells us how awesome it worked. What are your ideas about how that you go? Question number four comes from Lynn. From Omami, Ontario. Amemi? Omimi.

anyway. I'm just getting into selling nukes and queens on a very small scale. So Lynn has 10 years of experience with bees. I have a question around swarming. In my part of Ontario, the weather has been totally unpredictable. Join the club. It's really bad everywhere. If any hives were going to swarm, they'd be getting ready now. So my question is, if a hive is getting ready and they cap a queen's which is usually the go sign but the weather turns rainy or cold what do they do they tear down the queen cells they normally cap or do they go anyways what should i expect and what will they do okay so here's the thing because i've actually stopped swarms before by creating a weather event for them the thing here is that the weather events are real that it's naturally occurring

so what do the bees do in swarm conditions weather-wise but everything else is weather-wise they can't fly out to a bivouac location and start searching for the new location. Well I can tell you just based on one of our club members here, she's got a swarm of bees that flew out in bad weather and they're 30 feet high in a tree right now in this bad weather. So they could still go no matter what, so that's one scenario. I've also noticed because again I hate to bring up observation hives all the time, but we have had it where they've laid up all the cells. Production is good.

We have a bunch of capped brood. We have a very good population. And then we can see a string of queen cells. So two or three queen cells on the edge of the brood frames. So now we get a front row seat to seeing the queen cells come out, to see them battle it out. The new one is supposed to, the first one out is supposed to go around, two holes in the side of the other cells and kill them.

and the fact that they're visible to us means that we should be able to witness that. The other thing is, of course, the resident queen is supposed to leave, so we're going to lose her. Now, if you could find that queen, you can control it by collecting that queen and putting her in a nucleus hive. But now, what do they do on their own? So this has happened, and one of the things is that the food and resources stopped coming through the entrance. So they might have some brood, they might have some bee bread, right? They might have some honey and capped honey and some nectar open still in the hive and we've got foragers coming in, but they're not bringing in anything now because of the weather conditions. They can end up consuming their resources so fast that they instinctively will know that they cannot care for new brood.

So this doesn't necessarily stop a swarm, but it makes them back off on reproduction. So what has happened in one case, right, and this is one case in all my time of beekeeping, we saw them chew out all the queen cells and eliminate all the eggs and some of the open brood to the point where there were thousands of them and then within a day they were gone. And it's not that they're moving them around, they're consuming them because there's a sudden loss of protein coming in. So the pollen count, even though it's really high on these trees right now, is not accessible. The pollen is not accessible to the bees because it's raining and they don't collect pollen in the rain. So they could kill them.

Me personally, what I would do, they could still swarm, and then you've got this sad swarm out in the rain. It's not a very good move on their part, but remember that the queen has to go, because she faces combat with a brand new queen otherwise. And it doesn't always end up being a conflict between the existing queen and a newly emerged queen, which you would think the new emerged queen would be the underdog because they're pretty soft-bodied. They're not mature. They're not sexually mature. They're not ready to fly. They can't do a lot of things. And you would think the existing queen could win in a queen-to-queen sting off.

And they sting each other under the wings in the thorax. It's pretty interesting. But what happens, though, is the bees end up. Let's say the weather's so bad, they can't fly, they can't go anywhere. The bees end up selecting a queen. So I've watched them mob an existing queen, chew her feet, chew her wings, because the new one's coming out, and ultimately kill the queen, and you'll find her later on the bottom of the hive.

So that's actually good news for the beekeeper, who's trying to keep numbers up, and the decision was made by the bees, not the beekeeper. because another option that some beekeepers do is to eliminate the existing queen knowing that new queens are coming and you save 50 to 70% of the population of the hive from departing. So there are a lot of things to consider here, you know, how well was that queen doing, how old is the queen, the existing one, and do you want to get in there and try to salvage her? And it sounds like the weather conditions are so bad that you are not doing your hive any favors by digging into it under those circumstances, But if you can find the queen, another safety move is to establish a nuke during this bad weather,

which means you're going to have to fortify it. And by fortify, I mean a frame of honey, a frame of some pollen and some resources for pea bread, maybe move some brood with her. And that eliminates some of the swarm stimulus too, but they're still going to go because they have capped queen cells. And then you've got a new colony setup that you're going to have to feed and tend to unless the weather breaks and provides them again open access to the environment. We need a couple of frames of brood for them to sustain themselves long enough. But the good news is when you do that, when you pull frames of brood with the queen

and you create a division that way, then she's not without workers and there are newly emerging workers all the time. So it's very different from just pulling a queen and then giving them a bunch of eggs or something and hoping that they'll carry on because there's a lot of demand when you have open brood as far as feeding goes on the part of the nurse bees. So cap brood is your best thing to transfer with your queen. So I hope we find out what's going on, but again it's just my opinion on that. It's anybody's guess what they do and they do surprise us frequently. Question number five comes from Bill, Big Sandy, Tennessee.

No big surprise. There's a lot of swarms and splits and questions like that because this is the time of year for it. Since I have freda been beekeeping for two winters, three springs now. My apiary has grown from nine hives this spring to now 22 hives. And they won't stop swarming. It says just the day I had a swarm from a hive that we caught as a swarm April 16th. Less than five weeks ago. And this time the swarm settled on an oak branch about 30 feet up.

Then it spent the night in the tree and a morning full of storm, about 11.30, I parked the tractor under the swarm. Listen to this. I do not endorse Bill's movement here, by the way. I parked a tractor under the swarm with a pallet on the pallet forks. I set a 28-foot ladder on the pallet and leaned it against the tree. What could go wrong? He says. I use a brush to sweep about 10 pounds of bees into a pool net and then transfer the bees to a wading hive.

Thanks for the tip on the net. Question. I know I'm not that smart, but how do I remove the hood from my jacket? The hood has several cuts in the mesh, and I had five to six unhappy bees in my hood, which was not fun, 30 feet up a ladder. And I was pushed atop a pallet on your raised tractor forks.

I would rather buy a new hood than a whole new. jacket. That reminded me of an OSHA or a Darwin Awards film that we saw where somebody had a big forklift and they were lifting a smaller forklift with that. And then on top of that, they had something else and up they went to access something I. Please don't do what Bill has done. But the funny part is this whole story is just because of how to swap out your veil. And that's today's thumbnail. So this is great because I like that story. I want to talk to you about one of my favorite vented B-suit companies, which is Guardian Bee Apparel, right? This is a full-size vented B-suit. If you've been to the North American Honeybee Expo and year after year,

even at Hive Life before that, Guardian is always there and I like their stuff. Now they have a bunch of different veils. So how to swap it out. That's what we're talking about today. So this, by the way, is there, what's referred to as a fencing veil, because there's also another one that's called like the Buckfast Abbey veil. It's a fencing veil. And then you go down to what's called the professional or pro veil, and it's also a fencing veil, but it's like missing the front part. So it comes closer. Now this is an old veil. It's all marked up and stuff.

So I thought, and by the way, I didn't pull this off ahead of time. So if it goes bad, it just goes bad. But the cool thing was at the Expo this year, in Tennessee, by the way, tickets are for sale for this come in January. Guardian B Apparel had these Clearview veils out there, so I got two of them. And if you see this emblem anywhere, Guardian B Apparel, that's them. Now, they're supposed to be changeable. So we're going to test that today. And I got two.

This is the other one, which is like the Buckfast Abbey Vale. see how big around that is keeps it away from your face if you're dealing with really mean beads this is the one it will never get up to your face see the top on that it also puts you in the shade everywhere you can get away without wearing a ball cap although i do recommend wearing a ball cap under these when you put this one on wear a ball cap now the other thing is see this clear plate on here that is guaranteed to touch your nose so just a side note um you'll look kind of but put a piece of tape or a bandaid over the tip of your nose. Why? Because when your nose touches that, if you have oily skin as I do, you're going to have smudges all over that. So that's just a

tip for you, how to keep the clear view clear. We'll just take a good look at that. So look at this. The veils have a zipper here. And that was kind of the beginning of the Guardian Be Apparel story, is that you can zip this veil open and on a break just drink. from it, not from the veil, but drink through it, and then zip your face plate back up at any time so that you're not having to take the whole suit off or unzip your veil, you just unsip the front of it. So anyway, what we're going to talk about swapping it out. If you notice when the new veils come, they have this fabric strip on here. Okay, why would they have that? Well, it keeps the zipper together and the zippers have key components.

So this is the problem when people go to take a zipper off completely. If you get down here and I want to hold this up, if you see that, this end of the zipper has a little stop on it. And this is the part that stays connected to the new veil. So that's the connected side. Here's the zipper. They've got these big rings so that you can get all of it. This stays with the veil and this is the end that stays together.

So in other words, we're going to zip this all the way back in the other direction because you would never be able to pull that out. So we come down here to that stop. We go to the other end and get the other zipper because there's a zipper at each end. Just hope we don't blow 15 minutes on this on an already long video. But you get it to the end there and then here's what I think a lot of people do and why we need trouble, why we need trouble, why we have trouble here. They're trying to pull these two zippers off, but you don't. you pull the fabric out. Tada, came off. Look at that. So anyway, now you have this fabric strip that came with it. So that came with your new veil. So you could in theory stitch this onto something else and you've got the right number of teeth so you can match it up.

If everything failed, stitch this onto your old jacket or whatever. All right now let's go to the existing veil. Same thing. We're going to have to pull it off. So if you look at it, the beginning end up here does not have the stop zipper on it so we're going the other way all the way to where the stop is. Siv it all the way around the back do to do to do and you're right cheaper to replace the veil than the whole jacket. You get here to the end we get to the same two little long pieces and we pull the bottom out now that came out pretty easy and that's because it's an old existing veil but that's also our starting point so here's the part remember

that stops it. Got the little L on there. That's where we're at with our zippers. All right, so old veil chuck it. Let the grandkids wear it. Now we come to this one. Gotta put the new one on. This better work perfect.

We've got the two zippers together. Remember the top sides of stop and the long skinny part is where we're starting. Long skinny part. Gonna push that in there. Oh, it's going to work. work so we've got both zippers together hopefully that will start I knew I shouldn't have done this during my Q&A I should have made a separate video but

there look it started okay so now we're coming off of that take everything in get the zippers going zipping all the way around coming around to the front I'm describing this for the podcast listeners because they don't understand the extraordinary dexterity that's being shown here and that this is happening on camera without a mess up and then we tuck in the back zipper overlay this part and then look it's all together then you have the guardian bee apparel logo and now I've got a full B suit with a clean hood and it's all new and we swapped out the zipper for all of you.

All because Bill wanted to know after sharing his story about how he was trying to make the Darwin Awards, how to put that new veil on. So there you go. Guardian Be Apparel, by the way. If you want to go to them, make sure and tell them I sent you. And if you buy one of their suits,

you'll pay the same as everyone else. So thank you, Bill, for that question. and probably people may not have even known that you can swap out your veil. And I did it right here. One shot without embarrassment. Moving on to question number six, we have Anthony from Kingston, New Hampshire. My question is robber screen related. I found a few frames on a hive that had swarm cells on them.

Still there. I moved here to a nuke and took another frame of mixed, capped, brood and a band of honey and a big capped cell. I must have just caught it in time before they swarmed. On the three-frame lison, I have a little robbing. I have a little robbing scouts trying to figure a way in. The entrance had leaves in front of it to confuse any workers from the old hive, but later there was a couple of rumbles falling out so I put a robbing screen on. Sorry for the long lead-up. My concern is, will the Virgin Queen learn? that one hole entrance and be able to do a mating flight or should I remove the robbing screen

and in four or five days if the scout robbers aren't still at it. The nuke is 100 yards from the main apiary and it won't take long for them to find it again. Thanks. So it doesn't say let's see what kind of robbing screen it is but for those of you don't know these are robbing screens. Here's one from Cirrusel. Here's one of the probably the most popular ones from better bee. And when you put the robbing screen on, of course, we open one of these top entrances, and that's how your bees are coming out through the normal entrance going up and out the top. Okay. So the question is, if we had this on here, does that make it harder for the queen to create or create or complete her mating flight?

but here's what I would suggest because when we start a new colony a lot of people are this time of year we're hivings and things like that making splits saving queens making nucleus hives rather than the robbing screen because being scouted I don't see as a huge deal I think it's far more important to reduce the entrance down so keep your entrance where it is going to be and I would not put the robbing screen on this time of year but I would keep my entrances small so I'd have a three eight-eighths-of-an-inch high entrance even though see I'm thinking ahead if you left this on through right into winter it wouldn't be the end of the world so three-eighths of an inch high and just one and a half inches wide for a new colony a package or a newly started like if you're trying

to save a queen from a colony it's about to swarm and you're create a nucleus hive three-eighths inch high inch and a half wide totally defendable and I think that's much better in helping them out rather than putting a robbing screen on. And it sounds like you put a good distance on them. And I think it'll be okay. And I hope we get feedback about that. Next question is number seven coming from Derek. And Derek is in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

When we talk about bees as guards or scouts, what days of their lives does this refer to? I'm guessing it is an assignment during another specific phase of their short lives. This has ramifications as to swarming. For example, if foragers are the scout bees, then putting a swarm box where bees are looking to forage would be advantageous.

Thanks for your help. Okay, so here's the thing. In the summertime, full flight, full bore, they're working their buns off. Flying is dying, is one of the sayings, and that's because that's how they wear themselves out. At what age are they fly? So this is very basic, and that's because you'll find that there are a lot of jobs in your hive,

in your hive community, that some bees never perform. There are also, depending on how you've put your colony together, some of these jobs are accelerated. So in other words, if you put a bunch of bees in from a swarm, then you may have accelerated positions, and others may even revert back to other jobs. but let's talk as if they had a normal flow of work if their normal life during high production is six weeks so that's from the time the egg is is you know from the time the adult B emerges from her cell they have six weeks of life expected so then two of those weeks of the six weeks two and a half so there's a blur there from the fourth into the fifth and six

week so that fourth week is transitional that's when we start to see them on the landing board they're doing guard duty they're doing undertaker duty so they have all these transitional jobs but not every bee goes through a guard day or guard duty cycle right so sometimes they accelerate straight to doing something like collecting water not all bees are water collectors and not all of these foragers go to a water station or a pond or something like that because once start collecting water it becomes a specialty. And so as they go through these cycles and jobs and foraging is the last thing. That's why we see bees on flowers that have tattered wings and

they're just really kind of spent. Sometimes they'll head out on a foraging run one day and just not come back. So six weeks, pretty standard. So two weeks of foraging. So the transition here that we're talking about is from guards or scouts, guarding and scouting, scouting is a foraging behavior. So that can actually happen in any of the final two weeks. The guard duty is transitional, so those are bees that are just getting old enough. So that's during that fourth week transitional. And some bees kind of try to make a career out of being a guard. They just have an attitude. Their mandibles are always open. They're ready to grapple. And they spend a lot of time in the position while others bypass it completely and go from

undertaking to foraging and scouting. So, but the thing about when you have a colony that's being set up and when they're coming to this point, you would be able to predict all of that if you, for example, establish a package of bees. Because we know that with the queen, with a package, we know all of these dates. So in other words, once the queen starts to lay eggs and once they have open larvae, and once they get to the pupa state, it's very easy to then forecast at what age if it were a normal colony with all of the normal reproduction going on the whole time, we would not see scouts, guards, and foragers until four weeks after they emerge from their cells.

But you see it much sooner than that. And so the thing is they get accelerated. They accelerate through these jobs because they need foragers quicker than they otherwise would. And once they're fully loaded and once they have all the jobs fulfilled in that colony, then it will go back to a pretty predictable time frame but when it's a new colony it's just being set up they force themselves to do jobs earlier than they otherwise would and that's because they lack the bee power necessary to exploit resources outside the hive so we would see foragers that are still pretty young

and when we collect something like a swarm I've seen very young bees in swarms bees that just barely started to fly and the reason I say that is because we look at the bees and we see how fuzzy they are. A newly emerged bee on a brute frame is very distinctive. They have so much extra hair. It looks like they just got up. They haven't combed it. They're not well groomed. And I've seen bees that look like that in swarms. So just because you collect a swarm doesn't mean you've got a bunch of foragers and scouts only. You've got a bunch of, you've got wax workers in there too, which is a job just prior to working the landing board undertaking and doing outside the hive jobs. So things are not linear all the time. But yes,

always have a scoutable area, a cavity for your bees to move into. I believe in doing that ahead of time because just a few scouts can start checking things out. And your swarm box, by the way, as I mentioned to a breakfast club this week, I don't use swarm traps at all anymore. none, zero. And that's because they have so much success just using a brood box, a normal size brood box that ultimately is going to have the bees residing in it. And I can get away with having that brood box in my apiary on the stand that it's going to be on and just hoping to attract bees. And if I collect the bees in a bivouac location, that's a perfect situation, then we just transfer them straight into the hive and there's no more shifting and moving around.

to go. So I don't put out the swarm traps anymore, but if you need them, use them. And I highly recommend you have frames in there because if you forget them and they start building comb and stuff inside your swarm trap, then you've got a mess on your hands. You have to transfer comb and everything else if you're not Johnny on the spot there. So question number eight is next from Mark Arlington, Texas. So I caught a small swarm. See we're talking swarms again. Just never gets old. I caught a small swarm, placed it in a 10-frame deep hive, and I put with it drawn frames after seven days I did an inspection. So new swarm collected, hived, seven days later, inspected. Didn't see any larvae or eggs, didn't see the queen. But the hive was packed with drones

two days later. Now that's key. Okay. It says, I thought I can give a frame with new larvae from another hive so they can make a queen but i was surprised to see i have some new larvae five days later when an inspection was done now i have capped brood i didn't see many drones and also didn't see the queen the cap brood wasn't much and also many frames have not been touched there is some nectar but also didn't see new eggs or the queen what should i do did i have a virgin queen when I got them and the queen was mated in the hive. Now that's key too. First, queens cannot mate in the hive.

But here's what I think happened. See if you agree. So the swarms collected off a tree and given the timeline that was provided here and the days that have passed and this is key to seeing a bunch of drones in the new hive. All right. We know those drones didn't come from that swarm. So what happened? drones rush a hive when you have a new mated queen returning from her mating flight.

So I think we had a queen that was unmated in the swarm, and once they were hived and getting set up, which is also why they didn't do a lot of investing in infrastructure, she flew out, got mated, and when you came back and saw that there were a bunch of drones in the hive, those drones followed that mated queen back because they're trying to mate with her on her way back. And then once she got in the hive, the drones dissipated. And that's why you didn't see a lot of drones later. And then she laid some eggs and she's on her way. So now the amount of reproduction going on in there with a mated queen is going to be based upon the amount of resources and nutrition that are available inside the hive. But they can't mate with the queen in the hive. So she had to fly out and get mated, come back.

I think you have a productive colony and I would weight them out. I would also boost their nutrition if where you are has a current lack of forage in the environment. So what would I boost them with? You might be wondering, I would put some pollen patties in there if you happen to have them left over. And which pollen patties would I use? The ones made by global patties, which are sold by hive alive, 15% pollen patties. Because they have different percentages of pollen. So if we're trying to build something like this, that saves them foraging for those resources

and keeps resources in the hive to continue reproduction in the event that we don't have the resources we need in the environment or we have bad weather, which is happening right here in the northeast, pollen patties will save colonies from consuming their own brood. That's what I think happened there. What do you think? Do you agree? I think we're on the money. I think that's what happened. Question number nine comes from Scott from Zug Switzerland. It says, I have the opportunity to receive some bee colonies from fellow beekeepers here in central Switzerland. I would like to start off with two hives just to get started and experience beekeeping in a practical way as I am doing my beekeeping course.

So one friend has two swarm colonies and another friend has a nuke that she has made. Is it better to take a swarm colony or a nuke? So nuke, by the way, if you're listening, is a nucleus, and nucleus means it's complete. So we have a queen and we have brood in production and you've got brood frames and you've got nurse bees and workers that are all from the queen that's in the nucleus hive. So that nucleus is much better in my opinion than the package or a swarm. So a swarm that you get has to start from scratch. So remember, we're more than 30 days out from seeing adult bees when you put them together. Where the nucleus hive is building now ready to go, not only that,

you already know the disposition, you know how they're going to be, you can see the brood pattern, you know what the queen is like. So the nucleus hives, for those of you, all other parts being equal, usually the distinction is collect a swarm, that's absolutely free. So if you get a nucleus hive, I don't know how much they are in Switzerland, but here that can cost you a premium. So you have a really good head start, you know, the history of the colony, the disposition of the bees, everything is good if you have a nucleus hive and quick buildup. So those are my thoughts because if you get a swarm, they go in and they go to work straight away. But as I mentioned, for the next 30 days, you have no adult bees replacing the bees.

have when you set up the colony so you have a game of attrition so you might like to know that anywhere from 500 to 600 foragers or bees per day are dying off just when we're having a production cycle right so when they're able to go out forage and do all these other things you're losing a lot of bees every single day and some people refer to that as a dwindling colony so we're kind of racing the clock a little bit when you've got a swarm that's why we want to time that right Last fall, I think a lot of people collected late season swarms, got them kicked off, and then what happened? Cold weather came early and stayed. And then we got a blizzard. And then now we have a rainy spring. So I think this is partly why we had so many here in the United States,

northeastern part of the United States. We had a lot of losses. Deep south, they had a lot of heavy rains and things like that, which were unusual. So I think this impacted a lot of bee management. But in the south, the swarming mostly happens, in spring. And in the north, northeast, we get two big swarm cycles, which one is now, and then the next happens in August and September. So whenever you have a swarm, you have work ahead and you need to like really look at the calendar and think about when are they going to start foraging 30 days out, then what's going to be available then and how quickly will they build up from then going on? Because that whole time, once that starts, now we're at fifth.

So 30 days out, you're at 1,500 to 2,000 new workers every single day if they've had the space for your queen to lay eggs. So you'd be good. Nuclice hive over the swarm if I was given the choice. And the swarm looked and the nucleus hive looked good. Question number 10 comes from David from Mead, Colorado. Ever experienced smoke making bees more aggressive instead of common, them down yes absolutely i was assisting an older friend with his double deep hives and i noticed that three of them seemed to have swarmed recently each time we used smoke the bees became more

aggressive flying up and head bonking us repeatedly normally i wear just a veil and no gloves but luckily i had just received a new jacket and gloves from apis tactical and was able to suit up given the situation, would it make sense to switch to sugar water instead of smoke? Any advice or insights would be appreciated. So yes, yes, yes. Here's the thing. There's often been a study on a lot of different things, and you'll hear a lot of discussion around smoke and smoker fuel.

And this was asked, I think last year at some time, so that's what caused me to do some research on smoker fuel and the reaction. So there is a defensive reaction from your bees, we know that when we use smoke and we've lit something and it's burning and we're puffing the smoke on the bees and we're trying to interrupt their ability to communicate with a pheromone known as the alarm pheromone. So when the bees get riled up, that's why I also say light smoke, just enough to get a reaction, light puffs. If it's really hot, because what do some beekeepers do? When the bees start getting a little bit angsty and they start getting jumpy and they start changing their attitude,

a little bit what do people do they create a lot of smoke and they start really puffing and they puff themselves they smoke themselves they smoke the bees they puff the bellows and then what can happen when they're really puffing the bellows they can actually shoot little sparks out but one of the studies that i read and i will put the link uh down in the video description i hope you follow up on it because one of the things in particular that were named in the study was burlap and i know that a lot of beekeepers i don't personally use burlap never have for smoker fuel but when they did that they said it was as if they did not use the smoke at all. In other words, the bees were just as defensive with burlap as if you had opened the hive without a smoker and just tried to do your

thing. Now it is something this year that I'm doing that's kind of fun and for my own entertainment and you don't want to do this when you have people coming if your abiary is in your backyard. But I'm trying to do careful bee intrusion. So careful. hive intrusion. And what do I mean by that? I want to treat it like I'm diffusing something. I want to render it inert. In other words, I don't want a response. I don't want a reaction at all. And I want to take the cover off and I want to work my way through a hive without exciting or causing the bees to be defensive. You can go a long way just by the way you manage your hives. No quick movements. No bumping, tapping, slamming, stomping.

No panics, no swats at the bees. Don't breathe on them. Don't yell at them. One of the things I noticed to when people are really scared, they not only have really jerky motions, but they talk a lot. And the bees don't like your breath in some cases. So now I'm not recommending that people are trying that because smoking and calming your bees is a great way to go.

We've tested a lot of things here. So Apisalus has the smokeless It's kind of a chemical smoker, so it's like an e-cigarette as a smoker, and you get a very mild response from your bees, and they back off. And the same thing, though, I tried to get someone who conducted a study to give me more information because they made a very offhand comment that said, smoking your hive can impact their behavior inside the hive for up to 24 hours.

And because it came from a very viable research lab, and advanced education institution, I thought, well, they'll be able to give me really good information regarding how they observed that and what were those indications and I got nothing, I got crickets. So when we talk about how your bees are reacting to something and how long the reaction carries out, then it's important to document everything. So research has been done on smoker fuels. And this is why we talk about smoker pellets and often people will say, well, I found pellets for pellet stoves that were dirt cheap, and I'm going to get those, I'm going to put those in my smoker, and those are going to be what I use to, they'll stay lit for a long time, and they'll keep my bees calm. Well, for me personally, that is not the right fuel to use, because smoker pellets are designed to do what?

To generate heat. They're not designed to generate smoke. That's not their goal. Their goal is generate heat, burn long, and produce heat so that you can. can use it to heat a home, right? So I say those are off the chart. And one of the things that came out through Ernst Seeds, I know some of you know what I'm going to talk about right now, but the switchgrass pellets from Ernst Seeds, which are only sold through the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association website, because it is part of their fundraising for a nonprofit organization that extends to educating the public about beekeeping and research yards and things like that. So those smoker pellets are things that I tested. Now part of it was that the smoker pellets, once they're lit, you really have to light them, by the way. So we use a propane burner to light them,

a burn somatic or whatever. But once they're lit, they stay lit for the whole day. And I know a lot of listeners and viewers right now have used them and the feedback is exactly that. Some people have had them burn for 24 hours when they sat their smoker down. But the good news about those is that there seems to be a lot of moisture in there too. There's a lot of creosote. So in other words, they kind of grunge up your smokers pretty fast. But that moisture contact and that density is also what generates this very low heat, high density smoke. And so what we observe is the light puffs of smoke get your bees to vac away right away.

which bees are we smoking in the first place? You always give light puffs on your landing board before you get into a hive because what's on the landing board? Your guard bees. Which bees are going to be releasing the alarm pheromone and getting more guard bees to back them up? The guard bees. So light puffs on those. Now when you open your hive and you're first removing your inner cover if you have one because migratory covers once you open it, you're in the hive. So crack it open a little bit, light puffs, and then back away. But as you pull off the top, if you have bees, then have the defensive posture. So I want you to think about what that looks like.

Bees come up, they just kind of look at you in their heads, or bob and they're looking around because they have ocelia, three simple eyes in between their compound eyes that they seem to look at you with. They pick up movement with those, which is why if you move fast, you get their attention. If their mandibles are open, and if they're already kind of flinching a little bit, and you see the forelimbs up, like they're ready to get a hold of something. Those are your guard bees and just light puffs of smoke directed at them. And then when they go on their happy way and they're not watching you, you're good.

Back off. Because as is described here by David, when you continue to puff smoke and you continue to, you create the fog of war and just keep going and going and going, now they're really frenzied because what's happening? As far as they know, their hides on fire. Now, a colony of bees cannot leave. with their queen and start a new colony somewhere what they do is the opposite because I also heard another presentation where someone said when they smell smoke they're preparing to leave

they're filling up with honey and they're going no they're not if they did that the colony would be doomed because the queen would die she couldn't fly with them so what they do instead is they seek deep shelter so as we continue to puff smoke as we progress down into the hive once you get into the nurse bees and once you get into the brood frames you shouldn't be using a lot of smoke because they're pretty defenseless anyway. Most nurse bees won't even sting you. Run your fingers through them. Move them out of the way with your index finger so you can see stuff.

You'll find out nurse bees are the most non-defensive bees that you can have in your colony. So then we wouldn't be heavy smoking brood areas, right? So it's only when you see the guard bees, the ones that are really paying attention to you. Give those a couple of light puffs. You see them over here lining up, looking at you like they're going to jump you. let them have it, right? Little light puffs of smoke. So what you use as fuel really does have an impact on how effective it is at disrupting that alarm pheromone. And also, you can antagonize and stress your bees with the wrong smoker fuel. And so look into that. I will put the link

to that study down if you want to read it. But I just remember it was a standout. They tested other things too but burlap was a no-go it was like really bad so and the good news was I had never recommended burlap I had never used it myself so that was actually good news for me but also switchgrass smoker pellets Northwest Pennsylvania beekeepers association if you get those you're supporting a non-profit and supporting education with honeybee studies I get absolutely nothing from that okay so that's it moving on last question question of the day question number 11 comes from Dustin okay I'm gonna have to say this

moccolumni moccolumni California okay so anyway Dustin McCleumney California says let's see it's had a swarm of bees that were on a fire drill and it says as you described it did go back to their original hives the next day it happened again to a different hive when they went back they clustered onto the front of two hives. I think some of the bees went into the other hive instead of their original and the next day I took apart the hive found the queen, smashed the swarm cells, and gave them some drawn comb and another honey super that I checkerboarded with the one under it. I would normally make a split but my yard is full and I want a large honey crop from this hive.

My question, do you think I've done enough to keep them from swarming again soon? Would it help to remove the queen for a day or keep her isolated in a clip for a couple of days? Okay. So I'm going to say the same thing that I've been consistently saying for a while now. And that is, I hope every backyard beekeeper has nucleus-sized hive boxes. and this is a classic example of when I would like to do that. When they do a fire drill, for those of you who don't know what that is, the bees are swarming.

It looks like they're on the go, and they often will stop on a tree branch or a lamp post or something nearby and start to collect, but then remarkably change our mind. Something happened, and they all go back to the same hive that they just left, and then people, you know, sigh of relief, whew, they didn't go. Well, what actually happened there is the queen didn't go. So, or the queen flew back to the hive because where the queen goes, they will go. Now, one of the things that's described here, I want you to pay close attention to

because this is something that a lot of backyard beekeepers are going to observe. And that is this idea that they did move out of the hive like they were going to split, like they were leaving, but they didn't all go back in. So I want you to look carefully at these clusters on the outside of hives and even under hives in some cases. Pay attention to them. If this is bearding, then the beard, as the nightfall comes and it gets a little cooler outside, bearding is so that they're out of the way so that your bees can dehydrate honey inside the hive. If it's actually a swarm in bivouac mode, in other words, they've departed, they made their decision, they're gone, they're just not going back in, they're just camping on the side of the hive, how to tell if that's a swarm or just bearding.

the give, the tell there is going to be waggle dances on the surface. So in other words, if they're scouting a new location, which they do, and they're in a bivouac position, a temporary location that they're going to ultimately leave from for their final destination, you'll see bees coming back and performing waggle dances. And when you see several bees doing that, they're on the go. They're ready to leave again. So I think your best bet, because it's very difficult, once the bees have decided, even if you smash a bunch of swarm cells and things like that.

So I'm going to give you two-fold here. If you think you've squashed all the queen cells and you don't want them replace because we want to keep all our bees, right? Now we're going to take the queen because we found her because she's out and we can put her in a nucleus hive in the same apiary. You don't even have to haul them away. They decided to leave and they have left. Not only that, they have a mated queen and her pheromones.

to bind them in their temporary location. So all you need is a skeleton crew of bees to take care of the queen in that nucleus hive, give her frames, drawn comb, resources. Now, in the hive that they left from, that's where you go back and you're smushing all the queen cells that you can. We want them to be without eggs.

We want them to be unable to produce a replacement queen. So let me add a layer to that. you should have in your freezer already because it's only like five or six dollars get queen mandibular pheromone temp queen lures right because it's situations like this where is it's what they're made for it makes your bees think the queen is still there even when you take her away why is that important because if we can put a temp queen or queen mandibular pheromone lure inside the hive near the brood area your bees will think that a queen is present and they won't go to the eggs that you have and when those eggs hatch they won't be trying to make emergency replacement queens

because remember you've also smashed all the queen cells that you could find and so it suppresses that hormone and makes them think that it enhances the queen mandibular pheromone but doesn't trigger your bees to produce a replacement queen thinking she's at Now once you're sure you have no eggs, you have no means for them, no open brood, no means for them to produce an emergency queen cell, then we can miraculously remove the QMP, which is that temporary queen noodle, put that back in your freezer, save it, bring back the frames that you put in your nucleus hive and restore the queen after they've had this brood break, by the way, and then we put them back and of course we brought back all her workers with her and don't worry about foragers that are out and about that would be coming back to the new kive

that you now took apart and restored to its original colony there are often people that are very concerned about homeless foragers that were out and about they came home their their colony was gone they don't know what to do where to go oh they do they end up going to any colony that they then decide to join up with. So they've got resources, they're foragers, they're active, they're capable, they bring their groceries to any colony. Now they could find their original colony and rejoin it if they care to, but they just follow pheromone streams that they fly through. You'll never find, never say never, but I've never seen a pile of dead bees where a colony used to be. In other words, because we moved them or we shipped them somewhere else,

or we divided them and created other colonies and left that space. So we have never seen a bunch of dead bees there that just showed up and held their ground and remained. The only insects that I know of that will do that are hornets and wasps. They will fly. If you remove their nests, they'll go back to the same spot, and they'll even try to build a new nest in the absence of a queen until they all just expire there. But honeybees find homes. so it actually works out really well.

And I hope I explained that well. So anyway, you're looking for, you can do it without the temp queen, but the temp queen is an additional insurance policy. So you're just making sure that they don't kick off and create another emergency queen cell, which would come off the face of your brood area. They're not like the swarm cells,

which are nice and big along the edges. So that was the last question for today. We're in the fluff section. Thank you for those of you who are. your questions in and I want to remind you again if you want to submit a question go to the way to be dot or click on the page mark questions the way to be there's a form you can be anonymous you can tell me who you are it's totally up to you okay so the flux section is um with this cold weather and everything actually made some very good decisions this year that i'm

happy about and it was because i could not pull all the winter leftover honey off the hives because of bad weather. Good news. I didn't pull all the leftover winter honey off of the hives because of the bad weather because now they need it. Now they're using it. So the colonies are really challenged.

We have very few days that are good for the bees to forage and get resources. The minute the weather breaks, they're out. Every colony sounds like it's warming because they're sending the foragers out. They have thousands of foragers available. And they're just bringing in pollen as fast as they can. I think the big day here in the Northeast in the state of Pennsylvania and adjacent areas,

western New York, eastern Ohio, I think Sunday you're going to see a lot of activity and potential for swarms. So you're going to want to pay attention to that. But leaving the honey on was a smooth move. Now let's say you didn't do it. What should you be putting on those hives? We're at a time when they can do cleansing flights. So a lot of people are jumping on syrup, putting syrup on their hive. If you've got leftover fondant packs from wintertime, it would be worth leaving those on right now.

I'm not a fan of sugar syrup, and here's why. When we put it on the hives, and we've got inverted jars out now. So we do this backyard testing all the time, ongoing, because I look for changes, different types of feeders, trying to overcome known problems. We look at how they dispense themselves. So when you've got feeders on top of your hive, so let's say you're going to do it. You're absolutely going to do that because so many people have said that's what you do. And let's be honest, most teachers in backyard beekeeping and when you take a B class and everything, even around here, the inverted jar feeders are the number one thing they tell them to put on. And I've always questioned that. And the reason is

you find colonies that end up with a wet bottom board when your inverted feeders are on. So I want to compromise on that a little bit. So what is a sugar syrup feeder? You have the inverted jar. It's got little pinholes in it. They're mason jars. And they sit on a screen on top of your inner cover. So they dispense themselves.

We've got 47 degrees right now. If it goes from 47 to 60, like it will on Sunday or Saturday, then if there's an air pocket in that jar that's inverted, because it's up above where the bees are generating their warmth, so it's cooler to match what is happening at night, and then when the sun warms it, that space might actually even get hotter than the inside of your hive. So what's it going to do?

It's going to liberate its sugar syrup into the hive. So here's my compromise. I really want you, if you're absolutely set, that you have to put sugar syrup in jars on your hive, hives, please have them in a back corner, have them back centered. Do not have them dead center over your cluster of bees over the brood. Sugar syrup can trickle down over the face of your brood into your open cells of brood, right, and can kill them. It takes so little effort to do that. and if you see moisture on the bottom board of your hive this is also why we always suggest

tilting towards the entrance ever so slightly because when that sugar syrup drips in and it's not if it will it's when it will because it will that when that goes inside the hive if it drips to the back then we have pooling sugar syrup in there so that's another trap for your bees and most people will say well they can just keep up with it they just clean up because I've had these discussions over and over. They'll just keep up. They'll just take it as it comes. But I've actually seen the sugar syrup collect on the bottom of hives and seen it around the joints, seeing how wet they are with sugar syrup. So if you have to do that, off center, in the back, tilt your hive forward so that if it trickles down when it warms up and pushes the syrup out,

your bees will be able to collect it in the back, but it won't be going over your main brood. bees and all of those that are well nourished already. So fondant packs on top, if you have to feed sugar syrup and stuff like that. The other thing is if you're trying to build up brood in colonies and you're doing other work, like you're trying to create nucleus colonies and things like that, your better nourishment for them is going to be pollen patties. And if you don't have them already, there are recipes that you can make your own but then you're lacking the plant protein to make them i did look at better bees list of uh ap 20 no it's mega bee that they have and they have a syrup suggested solution for that but you're going to have the same issue with that syrup when it drips down

so finding ways to feed your bees without the potential on an inverted jar to drip down into your hive i highly recommend finding another method to deliver it um open field Feeding is an option, but keep in mind that you may be feeding someone else's bees that is already supering up for honey collection. And if they're doing that, it's kind of not a neighborly thing to load them up with sugar syrup. And also you'd be feeding other people's bees. So let's say you are not supering your hives yet, and you probably aren't. That's why you have to feed your bees to kick them off anyway. And remember, this is only if you don't have.

saved frames of honey for those bees because that is best. And that's what I, thank goodness, have this year for my bees. So in that case, they're just closed up and they're sitting it out and they've got their honey that they can use. And in fact, I'm hoping they use up last winter's honey. I would rather have the bees utilize that now than for me you have to take it off and process it, which I don't want to. So anyway, I hope I covered the ground on that.

have your swarm collection gear ready same as always if you're trying to feed you can open feed protein to your bees so if we've got like right now I think we're headed for a protein dirt here and so if I wanted this would be the time to put out a pollen station to feed because now we're not tainting their honey production and things like that so if you wanted to put out something like AP 23 mega B or you know man lakes stuff then you could put that out and it would maybe get them passed get them over it so if you have that already it would be a good chance to use it up maybe if they come to it they want it if they don't they don't what's ultra B is for man lake sorry anyway so swarm collection gear have that ready

uh what else to lay down move oh yeah so my colonies are delayed and moving down so the only way I'm getting the colony down in the bottom box this time of year which normally they would be already but because this weird weather that we're having I have to physically get the queen under the queen excluder into the bottom box and kind of force them to move down so you don't have to do that but if you want to get them out so they can back fill the rest with nectar that's coming because the clover is going to be blooming that's going to kick off another new big nectar area So leave your insulation on always.

We have the B-smart designs insulated inner covers on most of our hives. On the long Langstroth hive, we've made kind of a quilt out of double bubble. I also created a gasket between when the top closes, it closes the entire frame where all the mating surfaces come together. There is double bubble in there, and so it seals completely. Leave your insulation on. Some people are asking, when should they remove their insuffles? insulation now that it's getting warmer. Well first of all, it's not getting much warmer. The second part is there is zero reason to remove the insulation on your hive and that's because

it works well for your bees in summer and winter. In summer it deflects heat from coming through the top. We've talked about this before. You get 135 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit on the top of your metal clad covers and that heat transmits right into your upper boxes which are what, your honey supers. So if you have double bubble inside or you've got rigid foam board insulation or you've got the B-smart inner cover, then you're insulating summer and winter benefits the bees. Because remember, they would have to kick in to cool the hive if it's too hot at the top. That burns a lot of calories, wears out your bees, and it's not something that they would face inside a natural cavity. So if you can, if it's at all possible, leave your

insulation on your hives, summer and winter. And then when bad weather comes, you're all set. You don't have to all of a sudden go oh no I don't have insulin so you're set you're covered and so I just leave it all the time clean and store your unsaved supers okay so here's the thing remember we said that you could put uh leftover supers from winter instead of storing them in your sheds and stuff you could leave them on your hives and then when the bees are ready to expand you just pull out your cloakboard or your spacer whatever you've put in there to keep the bees from moving up and now it's already there and they just move up and you didn't have to store them anywhere. So your super's now though with drawn comb have to be paid attention to here in the northeast because the weather's warming up.

With the warming weather means that our wax moths can start to lay their eggs because prior to this they've been frozen at night and so they're actually killing any eggs or larvae that were produced by the wax moths. So then now we have to think about moving those off into storage if your colonies are so behind that they're not ready to be supered. If they're ready to be supered, just open it up and use them. They're right there. They're ready to go. Story gear is one of the biggest challenges in backyard beekeeping

because it takes up so much space. So let's see what else. Clean out, unsafe, get all the stuff out, clean them, blah, blah, blah. And smoker pellets. Remember, I will give a link to that down below the smoker pellets if you want to get some and support a nonprofit that's about teaching about bees. So I want to thank you for being with me here today. Please feel free to comment, ask questions down below.

You can also submit your questions through the website, and I appreciate that you're here, and I hope that you got something out of today's Q&A. Thanks a lot for watching. Have a very nice Memorial Day weekend.