Q&A with Bob Binnie & Ian Steppler

foreign Reynolds welcome to tonight's live chat I don't have what might look like The Brady Bunch but I got the beekeeping Bunch with me today and we have a lot to talk about it's a great time of the year to talk bees um it's awesome to see bees brooding up and pollen coming in and honey filling the supers in some parts of the country and the world so we're going to be asking some questions of each other I hope that you all are going to be bringing some of your questions and we can get those taken care of as well thanks for coming on guys absolutely happy to be here yeah so Bob you're a little south of me and for those of you who don't know um I'm in central uh middle North Tennessee area and Bob you're um Northeast Georgia correct that's right I am south of you but I'm also higher than you so time wise you know how the season progresses we may not be very far apart I don't know do you have private blooming in your area Bob we do but in yeah we do you know my region if you want to call of that it goes from north to south about 40 miles and also an elevation it changes from about 1400 feet up to maybe close to 2 400 feet so wow um we we probably have at least a two-week difference from our Southern locations to our Northern locations our Southern locations I'd say the privet is past peak in the northern locations is just coming in interesting um yeah we're we're similar to your Northern locations than um ours is just starting to hit Peak um here and then Ian you're up there and uh Miami Manitoba Miami the cold one yeah right above North Dakota uh straight pretty much straight North Grand Forks I'm 22 miles off the Border I was really shocked one time when I just decided to see how far of a drive it'd be from my house to yours and it actually was not as Extreme as I thought it was going to be you're not too far away um it's 15 hours or something like that yeah it's a good day's Drive I think yeah well you know back in my truck driving days what's 15 hours you know as long as they don't look in my log books we're fine um so uh got a lot of different questions some of them have been sent in beforehand and if you guys have any questions of each other or just have something that you'd like to discuss I would like to do that one of the points of conversation I hope that we'd be able to address in this Live Chat is clean quality Queen cell size various things like that there's been a lot of talk about that over the years I don't have all the answers so I'd like to ask you kind of your opinion on let's start with Queen cell size and kind of where is the the point of too small too runty and what's acceptable I'm gonna make a good Queen let's start with a hard one I gotta hand this over to Bob because he's a master people think I know a lot about Queens but not so much um really too bad Chris isn't here he could help us a lot um yeah yeah there is such a thing as too small but uh but you know I I saw some a year huge coin sales in one of your videos there came in and uh I think there is a point at which it doesn't matter if they get any bigger and those looked like they were probably at least two or beyond that point to me um yeah obviously you want them pretty nice but they don't have to be monsters I I don't know that you gain anything when they get that huge they don't look any bigger than some that are a little bit smaller than that um the one that Queens emerge out of there and I find that almost half of the royal jelly remains yeah after they've they've emerged so um maybe the reason the cell is so long is because they've placed so much royal jelly in there that they've they had to build off of it they've gone beyond the Jay-Z bz cup a little bit I don't know but um that's the thing is I don't know and so I just go for the biggest thing I possibly can create and that's yeah you know what kind of where I'm at we can't go wrong really can you um too you know I'm I'm pretty convinced that Italian bees make bigger queens and perhaps a little bigger cells I don't know what that means we like to thank the bigger Queens means higher quality larger ovaries or whatever but I'm pretty sure that Italian colonies will make bigger cells in a little larger Queens I think uh you know we've had some Queen cells that were about a quarter inch smaller than those jumbos that I showed and the Queens performed really good after that um how oh Ian's in the Stream with audio only maybe maybe he's got to uh oh there he is there he is so he's back in so uh I was visiting a commercial operation this year and I was really disappointed in the size of the queen cells uh a Jay-Z bz cup is you know I don't know about a quarter inch or so long and they were about a quarter inch off of that and I was not super impressed with those cells and lo and behold over the last couple weeks I've Heard lots of reports not just from individuals but some companies that have worked with them as well that they've had exceptionally bad issues with their packages in Queens this year and that's part of the reason I wanted to have this discussion is that's a big struggle for a lot of new beekeepers who really are just getting new they don't know how to make splits like you guys they don't have resources and assets um so you get two packages and one's bat out of the gate and you got a brand new Colony it's hard to know what to do and uh I think being informed maybe about the situation might be helpful if nothing else one thing I'm looking for when I'm making Queen cells like I'm going through the Builder pulling them out and I think more so than size I'm looking for consistency right across the board like if I'm looking at a frame of grafted cells and I see a big ones and smaller ones and you know blanks and just all the jelly you know halfway through and some filled right up and just that inconsistency I don't like to see that but what I would love to see is just a consistent row of Queens um Queen cells and then when I go through I take out anything that looks odd and and then take all the rest ahead so that's basically what I'm doing and like you're saying this the size I've seen some great big Queens coming out of little wee Nubs you'd wonder how she fits in there and I had a well-known Queen breeder out here you know multi-generational they should know what they're doing and she was saying you know the size of the cell doesn't tell you everything as long as it's fed and developed properly as long as it's not sick with virus or anything like that or any other use compounding issues but typically a bigger cell is going to be a better developed Queen because I have everything they need the environment's there for them uh you know the wax was there from The Young bees the building out all the uh the royal jelly everything like that so that's typically what we're looking for right now so I have a question for Ian if it's okay not every cell is accepted do you have any kind of clue at all what your acceptance rate other words how often or what percentage of the time do you think a colony actually does not accept the sale you give them yeah I hear that a lot and I'm going to bounce that back to you too Bob but when I'm putting my cells out into my nukes we're not putting any protectors around or anything they take them all and we go through like two days after just to make sure they all emerge and then we have some you know the queen doesn't flip or just for some reason that the queen never hatches out so we replace them but we never have the colonies themselves tear them down have I shouldn't say never you know never is never but uh what do you find in your uh operation Bob well it's pretty good I think of course we do use those cell protectors a lot if for no other reason we use cell protectors just because it makes it so easy to handle the cells um and uh sometimes we'll put sales in early you know after the nuke's been made for a day or two and I feel like it helps but I can't tell you for sure that it helps I mean who knows without checking them every few hours to see what they're up to you know here lately I've been kind of following uh what I learned from Camp Williams about putting in 48-hour cells and that's very interesting they actually will draw those darn things out pretty good and a hundred percent of them carry through and get the job done you just have to have a really good nuke in the first place you can't get a good sell out of a one or two frame nuke but if it's a three or a four frame nuke they do a nice job doing that yeah that's exactly the point right there oh he was saying something so good it just shut down all that Canadian reception um so this is the queen cell protector Bob was referring to right here yeah so Ian you were just fixing to say that's exactly or something like that and then yeah I bet you the kids are still on the internet here I'm trying to tell those darn kids uh so it wasn't that long ago Bob I was actually doing a live chat just myself um I believe it was it just me doing a question and answer one and my son accidentally yanked the plug on our Wi-Fi our modem and uh yeah I just took it out um but you know that's what kids do um so I think I'm back now right you're back now yeah sorry about that uh you're talking about those 48 days or ourselves and I tried doing that in my nukes one time too because who was it I think maybe I heard it from you Bob or somebody else you know video on it um for sure yeah it was it's an idea it was floating around there so I thought I'd try it and the problem I had was my nukes weren't consistent enough I had big ones and then the big ones did all right but then I had smaller nukes and then of course they didn't draw out the sales properly enough so I figured well you know I've spent all this time building the nukes why don't I build these cells and and ensure that they have all the conditions they need I know by setting up that Builder I build them all the way out I know they have everything they need right from the start right to the beginning or right from the start right to the end and then I can take them and put them into the nuke and then not worry about the conditions the nukes themselves because we go through making nutrients and we're pretty quick so some are big and some are small so we're you know some of those conditions might not be adequate to finish off that cell yeah I think it doesn't work but I just didn't have very much luck with it myself and I think that's the reason why yeah we we run into the same thing big nuke small nukes drifting whatever yeah yeah drifting week so I have a well we'll get to everyone's questions here soon everybody um thanks for being patient we're just gonna kind of hammer this out real quick on these Queen issues um so I had two yards I placed them ten uh it's the same location but a different sides of the property and it wasn't a lie it was 40 mating nukes I dropped one set of 20 another set of 20 and it was 10 days apart the mating nukes are typically made very similar they came from the same breeder Queen even came out of the same starter finisher and everything the only difference was the date that I dropped them I only got 40 percent exactly off of one of the rounds and then the later round I I got just only one miss and uh out of out of 20 and you know sometimes just things don't work out um that's the only thing I can figure because um I actually opened my queen cells up I'm very careful about it and um I'll I'll pop in there and I'll look and see how the Queens are developing to a degree not all of them but I'll give a few a check and make sure everything's where it should be and and Ian just left apparently I'm the the Prime Minister needed something they need to talk to Ian um probably going to talk to his kids about getting off the internet uh you know those I have a yard that does that came in uh I saw Seth is on here he knows which one I'm talking about we call it the scavarki yard that's the landowner and we we have three kind of little spaces in the on the same property and some of them are only 20 or 30 feet apart and one group will routinely get 60 percent or maybe 70 on a good day and then 20 or 30 feet away we'll have another small group maybe around a tree stump or a privet hedge or something that we get really good like 80 or 90 percent and they're just feet apart and it and it's consistent it's very interesting that is so weird and yeah these one of them is next to a fence line that's the one that performed really good it's actually the fence line I had the first bees that I ever purchased and on my dad's place and then we we got away from it because it's on a little bit of a hill and it's just too much work hauling honey and stuff up and down but then the other one I put down in a field of my dads but it's in the basically in the middle of a field and I wonder if the grass grew too quick um and and that could have affected because we just dropped the nukes right on the ground and it the grass was fairly low When we dropped them um but the other one we weed eat it and then dropped them and um and they definitely there was probably a three inch difference in the grass height to four inches I just wonder if that could have affected Queens returning back to the main nuke I have no clue but regardless um these are things that have been making beekeepers scratch their heads for a very long time and maybe it's why we're so addicted to it as we just can't start but try to figure all these things out though we never will so Seth is saying something well the ones I make take IDK what would that mean I don't know I don't know Barb are you gonna put up with employees talking to you like that put up with it all day long I don't know what's new I'm sure um you know I talked to Ian like that and I don't even work for him um so hey Dave Dwyer um just got his first nukes today's been following us for a long time and a long time friend thanks for coming on thanks for the donation Dave and I also want to say a big thank you to the other folks that have donated on here um I saw them earlier and they are there we go ECP thanks for coming on Chris again what are your gentleman's thoughts on marking a Virgin Queen or should we mark them once they come back mated what do you think guys well I don't like to touch virgins if I don't have to and it's just me probably it may not make any difference at all they may be fine but I tell my employees I say don't let's not mark them let's not mess with them until after they've made it it's just a theory I really don't know for sure if it makes a difference yeah I have a friend that marks virgins and they seem to come back made it properly but I'm scared to death to touch like Bob's saying like I don't want anything to do with him that's why I manage the sales because I feel there's a lot of things that go you talk to Curry Stevens though he'll tell you know relaxing there's not as much going on as you think but I I just like putting the the cells into the hive and then have the bees care if that version that comes out and feed them properly and provide all the conditions and Pat it on his head let us go and fly I just want to don't want anything to do with that process so I kind of shy right away from it but Corey's changing my mind in some of that and I'm I'm you know I'm willing to dabble into the you know the murky Waters of Virgin Queens so you mentioned something earlier about your mating nukes and going through first two things first of all you said that you dropped the cells um Without a Queen cell protector which I've done in in the past I've honestly like Bob said half the reason is just for handling because I like to place them in the Jay-Z Beezy little bars they just fit right in there and makes it easy to go in and out of the incubator and then the other thing you mentioned is that uh you would come back and see if they hatched or emerged from the self and want to be technical here apparently I say a lot of words incorrectly by the way so you'll have to forgive me for all my terrible slang um I I'm getting uh chastised on YouTube it seems like every other week now lar V there we go larvae uh all right larva larva larvae you know it's one of those it depends on who you are but I I really don't care as long as people understand but so you come back and check and I don't like the the mark versions um beforehand I don't I I prefer not to mess with virgins at all I'd love them to come out in that cell not come back um until they're mated and and then then I can mark them or something like that but but you say you're coming back and checking those cells a couple days possibly afterwards what's up with that two days yeah just cracked the lid it's very yeah but we don't intrude very much we just crack the lid to see if it's hatched out and if it has and everything's good leave them alone for about two weeks at least and if there's a problem then we just drop another one in there so basically if we have time I mean sometimes we're running and we just don't get around to them so then we just take that two percent loss on that I see so essentially what you're doing is you're if you were if you had one of these or if you just had the cop you just tilt that grab that look at it and see where the queen saw on her way out of there basically yeah we just pull it out and you should be able to see yeah all the way through it's pretty quick other though we don't like to disturb The Mating nukes once we put them in nice especially me because once I start getting in it was like uh dig a Little Deeper dig a little deeper and then you just it's like uh when you have little chicks and you have a bunch of chicks and a bunch of kids they're you know helping you care for the chicks you always have one or two that you always let the kids handle because they always over handle them and they die and that way the leaves all the rest of them right I'm kind of like that with bees you know you know I need that Hive to dig into all the time so I can just leave all the rest alone so that's what I that what I'm trying to say is with the mating nukes the less is best once you get that Queen emerged in there well interesting I've never heard of anybody doing a check back like that but yeah I something I found really interesting and it was Chris Warner I'm pretty sure I watched one of his videos and it was probably on Bob your channel I forgetting where I've seen this but he he actually before he puts him in he checks him he pulls him up apart and takes a look and puts them back together that's Chris Warner who does that right yeah he he does will they do that if they're suspicious of anything they only do it if they think you know if they candle them and it doesn't look right then they take him apart to look I saw that I was shocked I mean I'd never seen that before and he said well it's not a uh sterile environment you know what's the problem and I guess he's right yeah it was very interesting because I'd solve a lot of issues you can you can make a very accurate call yeah at that point at times I thought that was neat so I actually do that a lot these days um I didn't used to it's one of those things um Corey Stevens was the one that showed it to me and I was just like what hey we're supposed to be babying these things like you know they're they're fragile eggs and uh instead he's just like pop that sucker open yep that looks pretty good and pupil looks good and throw it together and and it'll be fine and so all of this queens that I got from Corey Stevens uh last year I I believe it was like 75 Queen cells I went up to Missouri flicked my incubator brought them back every single one of those had been opened by either him or or myself I got over 80 take out of those um in July and I thought that was pretty good given the location and then um I do that fairly frequently I don't typically do all of them I just don't have the time for it but if I have yeah any that sells just a little discolored at the tip I'm definitely opening that one and it's interesting where sometimes you'll see a monster selling like oh man that's got to be a great Queen in there and sure enough it's either come dislodged too far from the royal jelly at some point or something is going on and and that would have just been a waste of a mating nuke I'm gonna have a problem this year with my mating or my queen rearing like I've had a tough spring and I've had a lot of nozema and the nosemas flared up and that's one of the reasons why my colonies of kind of not collapsed but dwindled in a lot of ways and now I'm just kind of rebuilding from that and I track my diseases I track uh fungal infection and bacterial and mites and virus and I have my viral analysis back and I have a lot of black cell Queen virus residing within my my my bees so I'm not sure how that's going to affect and just like that like a fart in the wind he's gone I hope my mom's not watching this so I'm going to say a big thanks to IH xlh for your donation Ian we you're just getting to the crucial point and now we've just been on the edge of our seats talking about black cell Queen virus because my heavy nozema infection and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that because I'm looking at the level of block cell Queen virus residing within the bees and it's a severe infection so what I'm going to have to do if I'm going to rear Queens this year is when I build these Builders you'll first off build them on a clean comb of course but I'm going to have to treat them with female Magellan or something to try to manage the virus by managing the nozema but whether managing the nozema is going to clean up the virus in time to be able to get my queen cells going I'm not sure so I don't know what I'm going to do about it because I don't want to go through all the motions and all the effort and build these cells that are queens that are subpar because they're they're infected with a you know a virus that could compromise their health and I'm going to see that further down the line too as we go so you have to be using more of that Canadian rocket fuel looks like he froze up again he looks actually presidential I'm going to my back I'm going to slip on up to the house and get on to the other I'm going to kick the kids off the other one and get onto that feed and that maybe maybe it'll work there I'm on the farm feed right now sorry about that game no it's it's not a problem we're not going anywhere I actually got to get to some questions so we're going to hit those real quick all right Chris hit us with some questions all right hi from Northern Ireland my hive is a little bit of chalk brood will my bees sort this out JD's thanks for coming from all the way from Ireland JD Bob what's your thoughts on chalkboard well there have been times in the distant past when I had quite a bit of it and I it came to what I really figured out in my situation that as it came down to where I was buying my Queens from I could see it just very distinct in one group of queens that are coming out of a some I won't name names but a fell out of South Georgia they just came down with it right and left did the chalk brood come with the queens or was it just genetics that were more susceptible I'm not sure but the bees were running now I haven't seen it in a decade and a half and I didn't do anything to get rid of it I I'm being very vague I I apologize JD's bees but um I don't have another answer really really I don't think you're you're quite wrong either Bob um most of the guys that I know who fix chalk brood almost all of them did it through genetic means um and uh you would typically when you hear a chalk brood a lot of times you think of cool rainy weather poor conditions stressful conditions yeah Ireland Ireland so Ireland's probably more prone to those pressures than maybe some other places like New Mexico however a friend of mine who was in lives in Hawaii and runs quite a few beads was having some issues and in some of his yards the problem is on the big island it can be difficult to get diverse genetics because you can ship these out to the mainland but you're not supposed to ship them back over because they're trying to keep stuff off the island so there's sometimes genetic bottlenecks and so he actually brought in some drone semen from some more hygienic Queens because you can bring that in and had someone come and do a lot of AI stuff and that seemed to really really help and clear that out I'm just doing some genetic stuff and he was doing probiotics and doing all kinds of different things to try to clean it up just wasn't working um so I've read a little research that uh suggests that probiotics can be helpful well there's Corey uh hello everyone hello this is Corey Stevens so we got a another surprise guest we're gonna bring him on for just a little bit and I'm kind of waiting for Ian to get back Corey so we can kind of continue the queen discussion but meanwhile let's just knock out some questions Bob what do you think about thymol for chalk brood I know that that's been talked about in the past as being a help to flush some things out but I didn't I don't know if you've heard anything about that uh just just rumors I really don't know for sure you know I use a lot of time all I use apricard like you do at times is that why I haven't seen chalk root for so long maybe but uh I don't know for sure I really don't I think um it it may or may not help of course in Ireland they produced a high of a live product which has thymol is one of the main ingredients in there so I'm sorry we can't be more helpful JD but thanks for coming on thanks for your question and if you find a solution to your problem please share that with me we're always trying to learn something new um hey Bob so you're from Oregon right so we're at in Oregon Roseburg here 43 years Chris Wright I was south of Roseburg in a small town called Rogue River which is just south of Grants Pass kind of between Grants Pass and Medford that he'll know what that means Rogue Valley I've only been to Oregon once and I was there as a groomsman for a wedding and it was the coolest part of the entire thing was the church that they got married in there was a tree that had bees in it and I mean I I spent like two days just going logistically how can I make no no I gotta get up these all the way back to Tennessee and I'm flying on an airplane but it was a lot of fun and it was amazing how many hundreds of people went by those things and never even knew they were there but they were about 15 feet off the ground so Ian stapler's back oh he got the expert here now oh yeah now you can ask your queen questions so we're gonna try to bounce back and forth between some uh specific topics and then getting back to uh questions we got a lot on Queen rearing so let's focus on clean rearing questions for now Chris and then we will go into general questions later so Corey Stevens is with us he does AI work I'm with bees that are varroa resistant hygienic and all that kind of stuff new lines of vsh all that jazz trust me I know that sounds impressive but he's just an average guy um that's right he's he's from Missouri and but I did have a good results with your queens and I have a lot of people constantly asking me came and came and what about the Corey Stevens queens and you know but gradually I have to say yeah they're they're working out great um yeah that's that's they are the they are laying really good patterns they don't remind me of the vsh that we tried back in the day that just pulled everything um they they would just pull brood and pull brood and pull brute and just weren't super productive um the AI queen that you um did for me um that one has been just it's just been a constant struggle to keep them from swarming they just keep she just keeps laying so for an AI queen I'm actually surprised she's laying as hard as she is I try to keep her down to about three frames of brood um a lot of times you know I'll have two deeps just because I want to let them run for a while and not keep up with them and a lot of times they'll have two deeps with two or three honey supers on top you know so if they're done right they function just like a normal Queen but there can be a lot that can go wrong where they don't do that so well yeah I talked to a commercial guy that I know that runs fifteen thousand hives and he actually went away from buying Aid Queens because he's like I never could get one to last more than about a month and a half to two months and it just wasn't really worth the the dollars I was dropping per Queen well that's what he said so when I when this one's been doing this for me I'm like well either Corey did something really really good or that guy's just got a source that's really really bad or they could be used and some people call them sbis or single drone inseminations where they have a super narrow set of genetics which is good in some ways and really bad in others and it could be some of those that he's using because those things are terrible to keep alive they just they want to supersede them you know if you've got a season out of them you're you're lucky but you know and you can get multiple years out of her if you're lucky I mean stuff happens it's like production Queens you know I think what would you say Bob like 18 months I just count and Hope on a year and if they last to then I'm happy we had uh let's see we're out of AI Queens right at the moment um uh shaboos doing a few for me right now they should be here in a few weeks and right now we're actually grafting from some of our Queens just straight out of our outfit um but the last one lasted uh one year actually exactly one year all right oh sorry Bob go ahead I was gonna say in chibu is good at it there's nothing you know he's he knows what he's doing he's very precise yeah that video you did with him I really liked him and he had contacted me prior to that but I didn't know him from Adam and we had emailed back and forth Just because I'll you know talk with anybody about these and then that came out and that just made me get to know him even better we've since hung out in person multiple times but yeah that was a great video so the more you get to know him the more you'll appreciate him he's a really nice guy so uh we've got a lot of comments and questions get to around Queen rearing so here's one right here Gary bees why are some Queen cells colored suspiciously dark on the bottom and I'm just going to say that we were talking about this earlier um it's not necessary but if it's a suspicious one then as the Queens go through their metamorphosis they spin their cocoon and that's kind of like rebar for the structure of the cell and makes them a lot tougher and uh so if you wait till like day nine day you know definitely the longer the tougher I think they get and you can open them up and look down into them Corey you want to talk about that just a sec yeah that's I love the discussion you guys are having earlier I was I was felt like commenting more but I didn't but just you were talking about cell size and everything and it's completely variable and I really agree with what Ian said too but as far as the darkening of the cell you know some of them like Ian was talking about black queen cell virus if the larva just shrivels down or it's all nasty goo inside you know um the tips will be really dark so some of them could be dead but on the same side where I maybe Cayman was going as if they're really close to emerging you know how the bees will shave the wax off the end of them and those are darkened so I don't know what they're talking about specifically dark on the bottom but it could be they're dead or it could be they're about to emerge and the bees are just expose that cocoon that the rhubarb that Heyman was talking about one exception that I've seen is like if we have some really old Combs like and we don't have a lot of these but if you put your cells as they're developing in between two very dark Combs or if you have it in there somewhere in the hive and it's it's an old comb and you're getting them to clean it up sometimes they'll repurpose that wax and uh you'll end up with some darker Queen cells because of that so you typically I have very young combs in my starter finishers I'll end up with those nice whitish yellow looking cells but if I have some old Combs I mean they can look quite dark brown I didn't know that too you just taught me something there because I've wondered because if you pull if you have a bunch of cell Builders set up and you pull cells out of all of them they look different some draw them longer some the waxes white some of the wax is darker you know it's just it's all over the place it's almost like they're I think Bob touched on this they're genetics or he said the Italians will make bigger cells and stuff there's just some bees that are like their cell Builders are more cooperative and like the cell size and shape is variable too I think it's all it does have a genetic component but then again you know Cayman mentioned something I haven't even thought of of repurposing older brood wax so that's I'm going to pay attention to that now it's pretty interesting stuff so we got several questions for some individuals um here's a we'll get to that one in just a second here's one from James seidler Bob when is the flow over in South Georgia uh well South Georgia is a pretty big place in areas it's still going right now gallberry is blooming and uh once the gallberry is over it's kind of that's kind of the end of it some years that can go till you know the third week in May which we're just starting now I just talked to a couple big beekeepers down there in the last couple days and they're still making honey on gallberry and then and then of course after that you can get red bay and saw palmetto so that can stretch it out longer too saw palmetto is is probably the latest thing in south Georgia so Russell coopman has a question for Ian Ian could you use the packages for grafting and I've got a question that kind of goes a little bit further than that Ian um I saw you shaking those in those were oddly shaped um do you mind talking about that a little bit plus answering Russell's question yeah and I'm just going to use this to get back onto what I was talking about earlier about black cell Queen virus uh Corey I'm going to throw the ball into your court or even Bob 2 maybe it could fill or up to 400 people here so I'm running into an issue this year with nozema high nozema levels I'm my colonies have dwindled through the spring like it's been terrible it's a terrible spring they're rebounding now they're starting to grow I'm recovering but through my testing it's showing because I'm assuming because of the high nozema I have just extraordinary High black cell Queen virus residing within my analysis and I'm I'm just kind of putting the pieces together now thinking well with all this black cell Queen virus I'm probably going to see more incidents of black soil Queen virus showing up in my cells if I as I try to do some Queen rearing here with the bees that are infected with it so um before I get on to you know maybe using the bees from my packages because that's a really good idea it's going to make a very expensive Builder but what would I be able to do with my bees to be able to clean up the black cell Queen virus aside from just the you know putting in honeycomb to keep the wax clean the viruses and the bees is treating the builders with uh fumagillin to clean up the nozema is that going to be enough to be able to relieve that black cell Queen Virus issue is that just going to linger and cause me problems for the next you know I I do a little bit of reading of black so Queen virus and you can have outright death right off the start or you can have lingering health issues further down the line and it's that part that I'm scared of right dead right off the start at least I know you know they're out but if if it caught if compromises their health and their quality so I'm seeing this decreased in Vigor because of that further down the line I have I don't want anything to do with that so do you have any experience or any kind of feedback or thoughts in regards to Black cell Queen virus well I think a lot of it's nutritionally based which makes sense that you're seeing it because they're having nozema issues and no zema is going to affect their nutrition uptake because it's basically their guts are infected so I don't know about the Puma Jill if the fumigil effectively deals with it I think it would get rid of a lot of those problems as well as nutrition so whenever your flow really kicks in I think some of that stuff's going to go away you know and Bob or somebody that has a better experience maybe with thymol or fumigil maybe if you can expect that nozema to get cleaned up and your nutrition improves I think a lot of that's going to go away but and Bob could speak to more about that but I can just say even I'm not having nozema issues but you can tell from week to week like ours our spring here has been so unpredictable everyone was saying it was going early and so it starts to take off Queens look great take is great drops off for a week robbing take goes to crap you start having more calls more viral or bacterial issues because like Cayman says I open all of mine up like I'm do not take a conventional approach I want to see every single one of them before they leave and occasionally stuff happens you know but uh anyway so just nutritionally related from week to week you can see a difference in Queen cells and that's why Caymans look so nice and big is because he'll tell you probably there's a flow on he's feeding him really well and they're they're not hypnosing there were there was too many bees in there there there was Canadian Rocket Fuel plus a good pollen fuel flow um there was everything going right for those cells I mean so you can't ask for more than that um um and some people are like why'd you bother even feeding a pollen Patty well because things can go wrong uh and uh just throw it in there too well Ian somebody's asking about terramycin and it may not be a bad idea I don't know what you're yes what would that be exactly targeting then I understand the female Magellan because that antibiotic is targeting the nozema right and you're making a link between malnutrition and black cell Queen virus which is very interesting and that's assuming it is exactly like block cell Queen virus because occasionally there's bacterial issues too so the thing with with terramycin would be if it is truly Black Wind cell virus it may do nothing because you know antibiotics don't attack viruses do you have any comments on the fumigil or uh or fumadil and uh oh gosh uh terramycin uh not on FEMA jailen because I've never used a i i the last time I saw something that I thought might be a nozema problem I was living in Oregon almost 40 years ago since moving to Georgia I've you know I don't use a microscope like Ian does but I've just seen no reason to think that I had it at all so I've never bothered he's it's such a detriment there he his bees can't get out and defecate so here in Georgia you know it's just not a problem you too and or I mean uh came in you don't have that problem Corey might have a little bit of it I mean they still you know we'll hit Sub-Zero temperatures I'm talking Fahrenheit here sorry and but my friend does not convert celsius but I mean they can still get out in January so they're not six months confined or four months even I would like to talk about terramycin just a minute I'm I'm in in the middle of getting really educated on something that I think is brewing right now I've got a new friend actually I've known him for three or four years as a York I can't pronounce his last name or remember it properly he's in charge of the veterinary um uh thing over at the University of Georgia a very very smart man and we've been talking about terramycin and European Fabric and things like that a lot lately I am absolutely convinced that there's a storm brewing on the horizon that very few beekeepers know anything about he's finding bacteria that is resistant to everything literally bilosin lectomyosin terramycin and he's seeing samples that have so much bacteria in it off the charts stuff he's never seen before and I've talked to several beekeepers in Florida and Middle Georgia who are suddenly dealing with a lot of European foul breed and they're having to just pour the terramycin enter tylosin in or whatever A friend of mine in Florida is using lectimyosin now because terramycin doesn't work anymore I think I think we got a serious storm brewing and people have no idea it's coming and York believes the answer comes down to nutrition and probiotics and I listened to a lecture by a pretty smart lady in North Carolina last year and her research showed that probiotics seem to have very little of no effect her opinion was that it was a waste of money unless the bees are compromised somehow and of course compromise means you know pesticide exposure fungicide whatever and jorg and I have been talking about this idea that you know Beeswax is loaded with chemicals and our bees are compromised in a way that we don't understand and uh I think we got a toxic soup going on and anyway I hope to put a video out with York I want to go over to Athens Georgia and interview him on camera he's very smart see if I can get some I can't talk about it intelligently enough to explain all this stuff but he certainly can and I'm gonna try to get him to explain to us and you know put it out on YouTube make people understand a little more about this antibiotic situation it's dangerous in the long term it's not an answer his opinion and I agree with him is that we're headed for troubled waters well the reason I didn't use it is because I you know most people put it in syrup or in a uh candy and the thing is is it's mobile and a lot of my stuff I split to the Four Winds after I raise Queens out of it and so I don't know where it goes you know I can't keep track of it and that bothered me so I I never never messed with it but I can remember the last time I've used the stuff myself we just have a surveillance program and we try to call her columns but I have it's been a a long time since I I've used it well you know I try to keep my Nest or sorry Bob I stepped on you no it's okay uh you go first I get a lot I've been like I put this like on YouTube I show everything I do and people ask why I do that but um so I'm bringing these packages in to replace some of my dead stock and like why are you buying packages why aren't you buying nukes you know nukes nukes nukes and well my answer to those people is something that they don't like to hear and that's I'm having a hard enough time keeping my own comb clean and managing the issues with it I don't want to bring somebody else's issues into my operation also and have to then mix that into the whole bunch so I'm bringing in bees which I feel I can manage those types of issues better because it's just bees right they come in half starved for one thing so everything's purged you're jumping into my box which I'm not doing a good enough job cleaning my comb anyways but at least I know what's going on in that call me dump them in that box and have them again going again just trying to I believe there's a lot of issues with trading of comb yeah Mother Nature doesn't do it mother nature destroys it with the wax moth right and they just cast off the bees so that's one of the reasons why I brought in the packages for that and I don't know so that was just a passing comment on what you guys are saying there a little and say I was guilty as anybody of you know when I went to work for that commercial beekeeper in Oregon in 81 every commercial beekeeper in the west gave two treatments of terramycin in the spring and two in the fall that's what I was taught and it worked honestly if you didn't do it you'd come down with American fowl Brew pretty easily in those days don't I haven't seen it in decades but back then I saw plenty of it and if you didn't use terramycin you would come down with it from being exposed to other beekeepers and you know it was wasn't that many years ago you know when I stopped doing that so I was just as guilty as anybody of using too many antibiotics so in my Builder what would we be using that in my builders for to relieve the black cell Queen virus I'm not seeing what the connection is on that one there was another breeder that told me that same thing you know because I I open up everything so I see every call and that's why I open everything up now and like I I like to use cells occasionally too like Cayman I just don't trust them we've had a bunch a couple hundred Queens hatch out today Jamie is behind me here cleaning up the mess but we had several that look like Cayman cells well-fed large and dead they didn't they weren't as good as fans mine were mine were viable yeah yeah that's why I look in them and that's out of hundreds or so you know we've been grafted we've grafted about a little lower 400 last week so we're going through a lot but you will find some and I like Ian's answer earlier about consistency too because if I see one that's abnormally long you know a lot of people are like ooh and gravitate towards it often times it's dead it's like a slip larvae or is there something wrong with them so exceptionally overly large cells are a big red flag to me just as much as the the tiny ones that threw a bunch of little tiny ones and I don't know what was wrong with her same thing terramycin may have taken care of that because it wasn't black queen cell virus and I think it was bacterial or it comes down to nutrition and and Bob echoed that too you know with his friend from from Athens Georgia there at the nutrition's there and you've got the flow that's why I pay attention too to when the flow's on if it stops I just quit because once that nutrition drops off your quality is not as good your Queens aren't as good and your take won't be as good either so we got a question here from Loma Vista B company on my last round of Queens I had one hatch a day early the version stung some of the cells and not some of the others by the time I got to it my question is will a virgin Sting the most viable Queens first you know I don't I don't know but uh you know the other the most viable queens that are fixing to emerge if they are old enough to be piping and be making a sound through the cell that could encourage that virgin to go hunt them down just because of the sound that they're making but I don't know if anyone has a an answer to that one or not I definitely I don't they were trash talking that's what got him killed just wait till I come out of this cell I take a lot of pleasure in killing versions Rogue virgins that destroy my Builders it's like I found you [Laughter] was it Monday or it was Monday I was going through them I'm like man this take was terrible first frame I pulled out to look for emergency cells there's a big yellow dot Queen on it and the only thing that I can figure is I had somebody send me F1 daughters that did really well out of one of my breeders and I had nukes about 20 yards away because like if I Mark a queen I clip her too and this one it wasn't the same yellow as mine I think it was Ryan's Ryan if you're listening I think you're playing cost me hundreds and probably a couple thousand she somehow got from that nuke into one of my big queenless cell builders so I wanna it's a lot of weird stuff like that that happens in the bee yard I'm just weird stuff um there's times the year where I know that I'm not raised in any Queens um like in that yard where I'll be raising Queen cells in the the starter finisher but I won't have any mating nukes there shouldn't be any virgins that I've created flying around but yet I'll have a rogue virgin just fly into my starter finisher and just take over and uh we know that Africanized bees will do that um with even a little pocket swarm you'll just go into a colony supersede the queen and before too long you have African isbs thank goodness uh we don't have any of that excitement up here in in Tennessee I have friends that deal with that in the South and uh well I'm glad it's their problem and not mine so I want to say a big thank you to Yasmin thank you so much for coming on and it was a good senior in January and thanks for supporting us the last few years I want to say big thanks to Matt Kirkland out of Texas he says got all the Heavy Hitters on tonight well we just brought Corey in so now we got a pinch hitter too um and uh sorry I just got to I just can't help it Mickey's bees thank you you so much he's got a question for Corey Corey I checked 18 of my mated virgins found two colonies that had zero mites and 300 open cells would you consider that a four on the harbow score none have been treated since I purchased they were made at 11 months ago yeah I would say so because I mean even if you if you score it basically if you look at Harbo score chart it's zero and 200 views so yeah that's definitely would be a four especially that's the thing is as long as it's got a might load or had my load exposure that should be an accurate score you know I trust John who's got a got a PhD and a lot of experience I don't have you know I just go with what he says but you're going with what Harbo says that would definitely be a four so why don't we go around with this question right here this one's from honey and the coop sorry Chris Medeiros um he's and I want to say a big thanks to Chris he's the guy doing all the stuff behind the scenes he makes a lot of this stuff happen and and does a ton of work for Hive life so we'll Chris a lot but uh anyways I go off script a lot and Chris puts up with me um so what's the best way guys to introduce mated Queens I have 10 coming from Nature's Image farm and there's a lot of different ways to go about that so Bob why don't you go first and then we'll work our way around well I I'm guessing Corey's going to say the same thing and push in cage is probably the best way to get a very valuable Queen introduced and then also the concept that young bees accept uh new Queens much more readily than old bees so if there's some way you can lose your old bees that's helpful too nectar flow helps we're feeding in such a way that you're creating you know you're emulating a nectar flow but you got to be so careful not to cause robbing because that's the exact opposite those three three things can almost guarantee acceptance you know a little bit of a nectar flow push in KH and young bees and you're just almost guaranteed to get it done pushing cage meaning we make our own out of eighth inch hardware cloth you can purchase them in the catalogs but I've honestly never seen one that's as good as a simple homemade model out of eighth inch hardware cloth and Corey I'm sure you must use a lot of push in gauges I do yeah and the same thing with you is I had some that were really I thought they were cool designed but they just had four little pegs you gotta shove it we use plastic Foundation I have to shove it all the way down and even then sometimes all under them but it seems like after they've tunneled under they accept her like I don't know something about her walking around on that comb I mean I don't like those cages at all well if you're if you don't like those cages because it is a little bit more work but we do make our own out of 1 8 hardware cloth too just like Bob said I like I like the the cage concept I don't like the ones that you purchase like if you make the eighth inch hardware cloth um they work great um but the ones that I've purchased um always seem to get I get tunneling under them or I will get um they'll break on me they're just it seems like the plastic is pretty easy to for me to snap you know it's it's probably Laurel she you know she's just you know so rough on everything well if you don't use a cushion cage you know if I'm just using a standard I'm like a Benton three hole or even the jay-z-vz if I get one I'll just make a split and put a mated Queen in it and just some people candy release them then but I kind of like to know for sure so I'll leave it capped you know three or four days then I'll go back and maybe Queens are easier because they have that Pro pheromone profile that suppresses everyone's elbows and suppresses their urge to make Queen cells that's where cells and virgins are difficult at times because they don't have that suppression effect but even with a mated Queen sometimes you know if you just candy release them um they'll murder them but it seems like well I have one instance one of my friends he was at high of life he made if you met him or not canon they run a couple thousand colonies and he manually releases them too just to make sure nobody's kicking her butt so whenever he turns them lose sorry that that goes right into something that Ian talked about I'm sorry to cut you off there Corey but so manually releasing I know that one time Ian was comment on base horse this is this goes back um about you manually releasing them because queens were so expensive it was worth it to take the time to uh release them by hand are you do you still do that um boy yeah the bees they humble me all the time I have no idea what's going on most of the time so it's just ridiculous if someone everybody asks me all the time this a question like this and I don't know how to answer because uh it just doesn't work whichever way you do it well it does work and it doesn't work all at the same time and you're left there scratching your head what the heck's going on one of the biggest problems I have or to get back to what you're saying came and yeah that's what I do um I uh put the cages in and either I come back in two and a half days and pop the cork meet the candy or I I release them in about four days and it seems to work very well but that's not the problem I have the problem I typically have is emergency cells being built within the nuke that we're building regardless when like you can understand the emergency cells be built if you leave that nuke for you know a while while being queenless so of course they're going to start making them so then you got to take care of them whether you make them up and you put a queen in there right away they shouldn't be making the emergency cells am I just you know not knowing what's going on or do you guys go through and Hunt these emergency cells as you're trying to introduce or what's going on that that's where I was going with that one story is he put it in there went back to turn it loose they were trying to kill her they made cells he held it again they made a couple crappier ones still wanted to kill her now nobody's going to go through this much work unless she really want to save a queen the third time he went back they had nothing to make a coincide out of and he manually released them and they're like oh we're to this time so it changed but those cells that's where I learned the hard way with breeders and with virgins that's how I figured out the Virgin intro thing is I was trying to explain it to Bob I think he thought I was a nutcase at Missouri State I I hold them until like seven days from when a split is but I leave her in there and if you take all those Queen cells out this is with a virgin you could do it with a mated Queen but I don't think you'd want to hold her that long unless they are making sales you would have to hold it seven days six at the earliest cut all the cells and then their their attitude towards her should change but that's where I figured out the Virgin intro thing because a lot of times I just want to reject the heck out of them because they make cells just like some of the mated planes you were talking about well they would still feed her most the time but if I would wait seven days and cut all those and then candy release them even you don't even have to manually release them the take would go so much higher but that's their only option they have nothing to make a queen sell out of but that's a most people don't wait seven days and come back you know so anyway yeah that's a lot yeah listening to you talk about that and we've talked a few times about it too and you're almost starting to convince me to maybe do something like that but it's a lot of work too right and you're going through like right now we're re-cleaning some colonies and I'm just pinching off the old one putting the new one in there and gonna come back and just pop it open hopefully everything works but there's inevitably there's going to be emergency cells and some of those coming around so that's kind of why I shifted off not why that's not the reason why but one of those many reasons why I quit using uh mated Queens coming in because I was spending a lot of money and I wasn't I felt like I was seeing a lot of compromise or casualties there so then I started making my own cells and and virgin themselves all problems right you put a version cell in there and she's she'll kill all those emergency cells and it's everything's just seemed to work a lot better when I was when I shifted into uh dropping Queen cells in instead of mated Queens how much do you think it because it seems like we're nothing spot on do you think yeah that might be it too and that's another reason too maybe there is a bad batch of queens that comes through that gets damaged in shipping there's a lot of problems that happen between The Beekeeper who do and they do absolutely spectacular work and they can talk circles around what we're talking about here just just such high quality but what they're doing and what I'm getting isn't the same thing so something in between is happening I think and you get good ones coming through and you get bad ones that come through and I think it's a transport yeah so yeah I think I think uh the best Queen is the one that never sees a cage um that's that's just my opinion on that I mean if if you're going for like over a thousand Queen average or 100 Queen average you know you can get some really good Queens in cages but the problem of it is I don't know what they're in Canada I'm sure they're not cheap uh but if you order a hundred Queens and you lose 10 of them due to random things maybe they decide to raise a virgin or whatever may be shipping was rough on a couple of them and you know you pay 40 Canadian dollars or whatever it is 30 Canadian dollars whatever and uh for that Queen you lose 10 of them that hurts but if you lose 10 Queen cells that you made yourself well that doesn't hurt quite so much and uh that's just it Bob what do you do when you make your nukes you're for sale you put a mated Queen in there are you following through in five days to disturb that Nest to cut down those emergencies or do you even have trouble with that uh no we don't do anything uh one thing we might do or some of the time is we'll put a piece of masking tape over the candy and then punch a very very small hole in the masking tape like something like the end of a frame nail or something and that'll buy you another day maybe you know I had never gone back to see just how long it takes them to chew through the masking tape but it's obvious that it takes them a while because in in a compromised situation we always have better luck when we do that buys you a little more time and uh you oddly enough you need to use the cheapest masking tape you can find the good stuff the blue painters tape they don't chew through it they don't go through it and the reason you have to poke a hole in it is so the bees realize their sugar candy on the other side because if you cover it with just masking tape without a hole sometimes they don't chew through it at all you come back two weeks later and it's still covered with masking tape and I found over the years that that can help quite a bit actually that masking tape trip you know it's nice to know that other people are struggling with different issues um throughout the year I know because uh Queens is one of those things that constantly makes me scratch my head and also getting splits to work out and I look at it as a kind of a certain degree at percentage games so getting to some of the questions Cameron Martin want to say big thanks I'll get to the Wildwoods next um Cameron Martin thank you so much for your donation again actually it's the other one in my experience that packages will draw come Lots faster than nukes if you can get a clean package with a really good Queen they perform really well I think the in the Georgia and some of the packages that I've seen in the past um the bees typically are really clean it's the the queen says you're rolling the dice on did you get a good one or not there's a lot of Queen issues with packages that I've heard in this region this year I'm Cameron Martin's uh other question was I raised my first queens and was one was off one day and they started to hatch in my incubator what do you do if that happens I had four of them die after putting them in Queen cages so um that actually happened to me this year um I actually messaged Corey I was like I've got some virgins um running around in my incubator what do I do with these things so why don't you go first Corey and then the other guys can chime in if they want to well you got to think about it in nature whenever they hatch you know there's immediately somebody to feed them or they could walk over and eat so that's the main thing is if you're gonna have them unattended do you want to have either a piece of candy in there or some honey or honey is those track all over the place so just a drop of honey would be it basically they need something to eat whenever they come out and you know within within 48 hours if you put them if you get them out and you get them in a candy Cape successfully if you don't add attendance even a virgin within 48 hours in an incubator it's like they just lose hope and die they're made to be in that social environment so that'd be the first thing I would say is make sure you get them on some good candy immediately and have access to it and then within 48 Hours either put them in a colony use them or add attendance it's probably the way Ian's they're feeling right now is he's kicked them off of social media um I hear a lot of fighting in the kitchen right now would you guys have something to add to that question on uh having Queens uh hop out uh of a queen cell I I don't like flowing with virgins when I can help it do you guys have anything to add to that one I just never had any luck yeah I'm a student of Quarry here so maybe my uh my whole thought process will change is maybe I get more familiar with maybe managing that way but I just stay right away with it I like to handle cells I'm I'm the same way um however I did have those virgins emerge out it ended up being 20 of them out of the the sales that I had in the incubator and you know what I had really good takes out of them I got them in within 24 hours I dropped them into nukes that were about three frames strong of bees and they only had young bees they were moved to a different location didn't really have a lot of foragers and uh of course but it's it's May I mean there's honey flow like crazy I'm there you accidentally drop a frame and just nectar falls out all over the place right now so it's a lot easier to do a lot of things right now but they accepted the Queen's uh just fine in those situations Chris why don't you give me another queen rearing question and folks we will get to General B questions before too long that was kind of the main topic of discussion then we'll get this just a general b questions before too long it came into Bob and Ian and uh I probably this one's before Corey came on what queen wearing method do each of you prefer for raising Queens I'm using a starter uh Slash finisher right now so I think there's a couple different methods represented in this chat Bob why don't you go first well I guess what I do would be termed as a starter slash finisher where we use the same colony of course I learned that from Chris Warner where we take a queen Right double deep that's real strong and you know shake most of the bees in one box and I should isolate the queen above a double screen board and turn the bottom into a starter for two days and then we'll come back uh two days after putting the graphs and then reverse it and make it a queen right finisher so it goes from a queenless starter with the queen up above to a queen right finisher and they do great and I I there's pros and cons to every single method and it really comes down to one thing if you've got a bunch of young queenless bees they'll raise cells for you no matter what you do well um that that summed up a lot of it right there um I I use a just starter finisher um it's it's just a powerful single deep brood box um it usually I'll put three frames of capped brood in there I'll start it up I'll come back two days later and I will cut any cell that they have created but I typically don't have a lot of opportunities for them to raise cells anyways and I'll have two frames at least of good bee bread or more I'll be feeding them there'll be if there's 10 frames of in that 10 frame box and there will be then I will have probably the equivalent of about 14 frames of nurse bees in that box so it's just this massive Colony kind of like what Bob said tons of young bees swarm like conditions and and that works really good for me I learned that method from Michael Palmer and it works well I've seen Bob's method in action at Chris Warner's place and I've seen Bob videos that obviously works very good and a friend of mine in Hawaii produces over ten thousand Queens a year using a different method um that's slightly different and uh this this year just real quick uh I I found a colony that was wanting to swarm on me I went in there and I pulled the queen out and I went ahead and made a small split I took all of the the larvae and eggs out that I could and I turned that into a queen rearing Hive because they wanted to make cells and they actually did phenomenal on on making cells for me because they were so powerful and they had the desire to build cells because they were in the Swarm mode and um I got that from GM Doolittle who you know kind of taught us all about grafting Queens back in the day Ian what kind of system do you use yeah I keep it really simple and then make it really complicated all at the same time I just have like a queenless Builder and I do everything in that queenless Builder I find the magic number of bees is 10 pounds of nurse bees in there that I just they fill it right up and I rotate my graph through every four days and it's a lot of bees but I need a lot of Queens uh churning out in a small amount of time so I just get this queenless Builder going in and then I just rotate the graph through there every four days just to keep her going so that's what I do yeah but uh of course Ian's got some really good videos on that Bob's got videos on his system um Corey have you got any videos on your system um I've got one where I just kind of described how I find cell Builders you mentioned earlier finding one that was swarming and using it that's that's what I do is I just go through my big double dupes and usually crack up crack the top box and look look for Queen cells as soon as they start making Queen cells I just remove the queen out of it you know maybe do a nuke if I want to if I want to keep her and then take any of the queen cells out and then I'll do three rounds into that so like the first week they'll make some emergency cells sometimes but usually I get a good tick out of it a second week I go back take the cells out and just graph in the third week I just switch graphs out and then I'll re-queen them so basically I'm just jumping around to where all my colonies are wanting to swarm those are cell Builders but it's similar to what you all are saying just large a queenless starter finishers is basically what I'm using yeah BH is important what you just described I used to do something like that and I found after three rounds that they weren't doing so great unless you were constantly putting in young bees or hatching brood maybe that's what caiman's doing I saw I I saw that you mentioned you got five rounds in a row I was wondering if you were adding bees Cayman or brood or something to keep me yeah yeah we will add good frames of caft brewed periodically it's those nice brick frames that we'll find on a on a colony like yeah they probably pulled back a little bit so we'll swipe that calf bread from them and we'll plug those in periodically and we'll also after usually by the third week they're in a different location um two 14 days to 20 days they'll stay in the same location by the third week we will move them to a different location then we'll put a small nuke with a good Queen there and they'll get all the forager bees and some so they get a big boot boost but we're also getting rid of some of those old bees move them to a new spot so we can kind of see what do how many young bees do we have that way and you know it's not the probably the best way to do it but uh I've gotten several hundreds of Queen cells that I've been very happy of uh with um I just sometimes I wish that they'd go and and get mated and come back a little bit more effectively that 40 percent take kind of hurt my my ego there um on that one group so there was a question down here I used to purchase Queens from Ferguson apiary in Canada they say the US will not allow them to ship to the states anymore anyone have any idea why so Ian do you want to talk about this tedious topic it's biosecurity yeah I don't want to get too much into this it leads to another conversation but but yeah I don't know nothing makes any sense to me sure well um you know you're a farmer have you been able to um uh if you got your or maybe I'm putting it in the spot in front of everybody yeah that's okay are you uh have you got your Africanized uh testing back yet no no I have not but what you have to do is you have to have DNA samples from your breeders that say there's no Africanized so I don't know where Ferguson's at maybe they're in a compromise Zone where there's no they're they're in Ontario yeah and he can't ship down to the States we can't shoot into the states yeah and from that I'm just trying to deviate off that question because I don't want to get into exactly that but yeah um have you been able or repeat what you said have you been able to pass that test I haven't passed it yet but I don't have any reservations about passing it we just have to get you know it's going to Purdue University we reached out to Crispin and them in the lab and uh they told us here's what you do send them in you know in alcohol yeah we have to do it in the same season so what Jeremy's saying and then you've also got to be in a Blue Zone like have you seen those Maps someone may have posted on your chat even where it shows you're not in an Africanized Zone you're right on the edge of that though right we're north of it a little bit we're in a blue area so we should be good there but it's a little bit further south you know I don't know if it was Southwestern Arkansas or where it was at that they had some confirmed but um I've just we've been so busy here lately and what I've pre-sold I was sold out on so I was hoping to have extra capacity but you know like I mentioned to you in our chat I'm mainly looking at next year or two whenever I don't have a day job as well I want to have all that tidied up so yeah so here's a question down here from Pat Gucci I'm setting up a five frame starter finisher tomorrow afternoon how long would you wait to introduce a graph so five frame starter is a video that we have um on our YouTube channel a couple videos and it's similar to the process that I use for the 10 frame Hive which is what we use for our making nukes and increased colonies and and really the only difference is it's half the size so it's it's not as productive but it definitely works if you're a small sideline or hobby beekeeper and you're wanting to get more control on either genetics or just have what I feel like is a better Queen because I think you can raise really good Queens in your own backyard um is use a five frame nuke and you don't have to have any brood in it it can be um one frame will be the graft frame and then you'll have two frames of bee bread I like to to have a comb if possible where they can take any incoming honey or sugar syrup and then you can have a frame that's Foundation to where if they want to draw a comb they're going to draw it on that Foundation instead of drawing Combs where your queen cells are that's called webbing and that's a real big pain in the rear end when all your queen cells are combed up and webbed together so what I would do Pat is I like to the first day that I make these starters up I will leave one frame of young larvae in and so I don't graph the same day I used to do that but my first round was never Stellar it seemed like and so I would leave a frame of larvae in that five frame nuke setup or a 10 frame queenless starter finisher and then I would come back 24 to 48 hours later pull that frame and then put my graphs in because within 24 to 48 hours they're going to take the larvae on that frame and start making royal jelly and making emergency Queens so they're already in that mindset and just I seem to get better takes with that anyone have anything to add to that well most colonies wait at least eight hours to start emergency cells and they can take as long as 24. we always make our cell Builders up one day and craft into them the next day so that fits along your your reasoning of 24 hours and that works pretty good that's that's a good point to me I wasn't sure if there was any research behind that or not I just noticed that my second takes were always superior and I'd heard to talking to beekeepers that knew more than I did that a lot of times um you put it in immediately that the takes aren't quite as good so I'm just like you know what wait a day let them kind of figure things out and then give it to them let's get to a few more Queen questions this is an important one I wanted to address does the size of the queen matter are large Queens better than average sized Queens so take that one and run with it I love the great big ass queens because they don't get through the excluder those little skinny they they always cause troubles Carrie she just hates him she she'll she'll pinch off those skinny ones just because it causes grief a practical reason discrimination against his skinny Queens um but uh that is that is an interesting point there always is and in the operation a couple queens that are slender enough to get through that excluder and uh I'll go and look at four or five mediums and like oh man I've got a lot of honey I'm fixing to pull off of this one you need to pull two or three of them and there's brood in them and a dog on it that Queen slipped to the excluder and sometimes you'll have a queen down below the excluder and you'll have a daughter or a different version that's moved her way up but uh getting kind of back to the quality though um typically it's perceived a bigger Queens are better I think probably with Queen cells there's a little bit of play there but uh I do like those big queens that like to lay I think Bob mentioned earlier didn't you about the over they have them having bigger ovaries and being able to lay more I mean it seems to me like if they're physically physiologically bigger that they would have bigger ovaries and it seems like it goes just way harder maybe it's my imagination no thank you I think you're right just just casual observation no real research on my part over the years it seems like a reasonably good-sized Queen does better than the skinny ones like Ian was mentioning you do see puny skinny Queens doing a good job sometimes but I think the overall average if there was some way to measure it I I think the bigger Queens average the better I think Randy Oliver did a trial on that and he determined that is the better size queens where the most prosperous yeah I would go with that yeah well and especially I think in areas where you have a very long brooding season where your bees could be brooding 11 even 12 months out of the year I think you would be more critical maybe than anywhere to have queens that have larger spiromaticas and ovaries because now we have the possibility of being able to have more which means they can lay longer probably but uh we marked over 170 Queens this year and we were you know we sold some nukes and had a a bunch of folks wanting marked queens and I've never agreed to marking this many queens before and I never will again that was the gift they were good sized nukes too I mean so finding those Queens in like a four and a half to five frames of bees was a we totally were able to do it but gosh um however there was um but after you grabbed them so many times by the thorax so that's the way I grabbed mine to mark them I'll just grab them by the wings with my right hand and then I will take my left hand and get around the thorax in the market with my right hand that's how I do it and but after doing that so many times it was interesting after a while you could fill a diameter difference between some of those queens and that thorax areas and you know I I think there I don't know what the difference was but the naked eye tests and also being able to fill it I felt like some of those queens were a good 15 to 20 percent bigger you know on the thorax diameter is just a significant field difference but anywho um moving on go ahead I can't help myself okay I just can't help myself do bigger people do a better job than small people folks that's all the time we have for today and chat that's right right um I apologize and then I say it so there you go that's uh that was a classic Bob the only thing that I regret is that it was not me saying it but uh uh yeah the devil made me do it well I'll be the first one to admit that um when it comes to a lot of things being bigger is better there are some things like when you're working underneath a truck on doing mechanical work being shorter is kind of nice sometimes and especially when you're flying on an airplane I'd rather be Cayman Randall's uh Cayman Reynolds than uh you know Ian stapler on that airplane it sucks to be me on the airplane I don't know how anyone bigger than me has to fool with that it must really suck well in your defense I wouldn't say that to anybody else because I know you take it just fine I kind of have it coming um yeah you do you pick on chain or you pick on Ian so much you do have it coming I didn't know but uh he's he's an easy target for a lot of reasons and it's too expensive to come down here and beat me up so I'm pretty safe okay so this goes all day long in my B crew I really try to stay out of The Fray because I don't want to be on the receiving end of this stuff John and Seth and those guys it's endless and uh but every and then they'll tell you every once in a while just out of the blue I just got to put my two cents in my mouth well it's it's really I know they do in other parts of the world um but in the South it seems like there's quite a bit of the Trash Talk verbal Warfare however you want to choler it and it's a sign of affection it really is so that means I really like Ian that's uh man that's really that's embarrassing to say that is that another one of those bad jokes yes that's a bad joke um all right moving on to something serious so Lucas guile says I've read multiple conflicting views on this what's the general consensus on making Autumn Olive honey I'm in PA and the bloom is over around me but next year would it be worth chasing so I don't think they've got that up in Canada we've got it here in some places um Bob I'm pretty sure you have it around you a little bit a little bit not a lot it's a good flow for me where we have a lot of it some areas in my County are very sparse or have none on the Autumn Olive bushes it's kind of got a habitat a a growth that's similar to privet in my opinion similar height it grows in similar places and it's similar similarly invasive but in a good year I'll get a super off of that stuff in my good yards well for sure money isn't it I bought some out of uh came out of Michigan uh and I said it was pretty much pure and I thought it was pretty tasty actually I liked it I I if I could get Autumn Olive all throughout this County and twice as much I would do it in a heartbeat I'm sure the extension agents would kill me if they found out I was trying to help that produce um it's so good for the pollinators though I mean you look at everybody's happy there's bumblebees all over it so I mean maybe it does spread a bit much but you know invasive has such a negative connotation that it's the bees would disagree with you I would have to say but that marks the swarming season well they're invasive too Corey that's true actually that's incorrect I'm very dilute native oh I was talking about the bees but yeah you're definitely an invasive too so Paul Martin thanks so much for um Coming on and supporting us again Paul hope you guys are having a good bee season if you could only get one book on Queen ring what one should I buy wow what a great question um okay guys favorite Queen writing book you mentioned it earlier GMD a little that's a great one to start with old classic Bob you're next clean rainbow I'm gonna probably show my ignorance here I haven't read all the queen rearing books in fact I've only read a few um and what's that what was your favorite I think this is going to sound crazy I guess it's because I knew him Steve Tabor breeding Super Bees I love that book that is a good one yeah from a braiding perspective too not just yeah he was he was sharp Steve was a sharp guy he was very smart very colorful uh hard to be around sometimes because he had no filter I mean just he didn't sell to anybody just no problem I got along with him really well though so he was very smart and I really liked that book and he put a nice little uh note in it for me when he gave it to me and so awesome maybe that's maybe I'm prejudiced I don't know but I think that's a cool book breeding Super Bees by Steve Tabor I like well I haven't read everything of his but uh Larry Connor he has some good insight and I just like to see his perspective on things and that's what history oh yeah Essentials well you know a lot of people don't know just how much experience Larry Connor has I mean he's been at this a long time he was part of the uh he was one of the last people that was involved with the Star Line yeah midnight uh program which most new beekeepers don't know what that is but that was quite something oh yeah yeah so so Ian you like this book right here um yeah it is a good book um honestly he's got other ones out too I forget where I see some of his he talks about drones a lot also uh maybe his presentations I'm thinking of uh he probably mentions the books in his presentations he's got a lot of information he's got Queen uh sex Essentials too or Dr or or B6 essential yeah I've seen this one but yeah and um and that one is is a lot more advanced this this one's really good don't get me wrong there's some commercial aspects in here to a degree um this is a really good B book um if you're wanting to raise a handful of Queen cells and and we really need to be getting some Kickback from Rick Ross from this promotion I'm just teasing we're just trying to be helpful here but this this is a good book and this is the one that Corey was referring to Scientific Queen rearing by GM Doolittle it's a reprint but um I really like it it's it's a lot of its story as well kind of how he you know he really needed to figure out a way to get uniform and better Queens back then they didn't have the pests that we do now um but they did not have um I think a lot of people think they had better bees back then but actually they struggle with very unthrifty bees back then very aggressive bees and they were trying to get some uniformity and bees that were less swarmy and less runny and and just didn't have the quite the behavior a beekeeper would like to enjoy and so he wanted to be able to get his best queens and and make and make a lot of them in mass and they didn't have a method so this kind of goes through this whole process of creating his own Queen cells from wax and and it's a fun book but it's written in kind of Old English and and if you like to read this is a fantastic read I think but has anybody read the Roger Morris's book he was at Cornell University that was such a good book like it's it's vaguely in my memory I haven't read that one I read the one by um was it Jay Smith um on Queen rearing but not the Roger Morris the Roger Morse design a mead I've seen that one I've never tried to make any of it but um that was a that was a good question I like books though I'm a big book nerd um Gus Mitchell I haven't talked to him in a couple weeks but he's got a bigger butt collection than I do and I've got a pretty decent beekeeping book collection so um you know some of these questions are going way back and don't overuse antibiotics um we have um you know talked a lot on on various things and so a lot of you guys have questions that date back 45 minutes ago I'm going to go ahead and Chomp down um just Big Nerd is more accurate Chris Medeiros he's heard um so uh we're gonna we're gonna jump on down more to the bottom any of you guys who we missed your questions earlier um resubmit them please and we will try to get to as many as we can let's let's just focus on General B questions now um one last thing um Corey I told you I'd keep you on here about 20 30 minutes and we've gone past that and and you've been awesome to be with but we're gonna try to tighten this up just a little bit more but I do appreciate you coming on last second um real quick um you know Bruce uh bees he got some virgin Queens from you um I've got Queen cells from me you're still selling bees right now so someone's looking for some Queens how would they get a hold of you and do all that I'm just checking out my website stevensbeeco.com um last year and what we've always done is just pre-sold Queens like I know I'll produce this amount and then I just work through my orders so we're still working through that this year we've still got some but next year I think I'm just gonna Post Live ready to ship inventory so I may do that differently so there there's his website right there and and thanks so much Corey for bringing a ton of insight to us on uh all things Queen rearing and vsh and we've had you on here before and at the conference and I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear the hillbilly vsh breeder thanks so Corey Corey before you go I'm gonna see you in Louisiana in a couple of months I want to have dinner with you that sounds great yeah thanks for having me on yeah thanks for coming we'll see you a little bit all right see ya all right so getting to uh these uh General beekeeping questions we're specific ones for Bob or Ian and whole actually came in if you don't mind I'm just going to hijack this just for a second yeah I just want to talk to Bob just for a minute um you have experience with building or putting together packages I've seen some a video or two of you of you building package bees and that um this spring have encountered a little bit of losses and I've been buying packages in but there isn't a lot of like they run a supply so I'm I know a guy out in BC 20 hours away and he has a few extra colonies I said well how about you if I bring the boxes over will you shake the pack of the bees in there to make a packages and they'll drive back with them and make up some nukes back home here do you have made it queens and all that he's oh yeah that's pretty good but he has no experience at all whatsoever of doing this I have no experience at all whatsoever doing this so I just thought I'd ask you a few questions in regards to uh kind of proceeding with this whole process and that with your um the hives that you are going to take the bees from do you have any initial prep work that you do to those colonies before you shake those bees out or do you just walk cold to a yard pick the colonies and shake them well the only prep two two preps that we might do one is we might give them a light feeding which you know that's kind of a no-brainer for anything you're going to do we might put an excluder in four or five days ahead of time so we can find the queen a lot easier and so not a lot of prep um one thing that I really learned uh that's I think is really important that is mostly overlooked Honestly by most package shakers and that is to shake the packages when the bees are flying so that you're getting mostly younger bees I was looking at your package I've you know watched your video I don't comment on your videos a lot that doesn't mean I'm not watching um I watch a lot of them and I would love just judging silently I don't know what to say you Ian always comes back with these Smart Sharp little comments you know LOL uh but uh you need to shake the bees in the daytime when they're flying and that's where a lot of these uh shakers go wrong they'll shape them in Georgia they like to shake them super early so they get them ready before it gets too hot or something and they get out there at first light and they're shaking packages before the bees are even flying well and they get more older bees and I was wondering these packages you were getting from uh you know overseas you know those maybe there was too many older bees and they weren't making the trip too good and younger bees might have done better I was just wondering I know you don't know the answer to that but you can get your friend to shake when the bees are flying now that would be quite helpful and then some shakers shake out of the supers and that's a mistake because you'd be surprised how many older bees are actually in a super you wouldn't think so but if you want to prove it to yourself just blow bees out of your super and see how many find their way back home it's a pretty large number so shaking out of the supers is a mistake too you want to shake right out of the center of the brood Nest preferably when the bees are flying yeah he has his Colony set up in doubles and I think he's going to do what you mentioned there like it's going to be a double brood chamber and he's going to hunt the queen down make sure she's below the excluder and then take everything up on top what how much well now let's back up a moment what you're best off to do is find the queen and isolator and Shake right out of the center of the brood Nest that's where your best package will come from right off right off the open brood so from both boxes what both boxes but get as much as you can you know the older bees can revert back and feed brood if they have to so if you can I just I just had the best luck if I could shake shake the center of the brood Nest heavily you know write the open brood right where those young bees are get as much as that as much of that as he will allow you to get you know have better packages so are you putting the queen underneath the excluder in the second then you're shaking the top just the center and the top the way I used to do it is we would find the queen and put her on whatever frames we wanted like we wanted to leave six frames of these or four frames of bees we would put them in the bottom box and not necessarily brewed and leave her in that bottom box all the rest of the frames are stacked outside and we would shake them all and we always tried to make sure there was a lot of open brood in those frames we were shaking not just the honey frames in the upper box that makes sense I think it would it makes a big difference from what I've observed I I've never shook packages myself but I have like my own packages but I've helped people and I've gone to a couple operations and filmed a little bit of it I've still got to release that video and uh then I also have taken packages back and used them and you can tell when packages were shook before the beads got out of the hives in the morning so one of these operations they were shaking bees at like 7 30 8 o'clock in the morning and the CL it was early and it was cool and there was not a Harley a b out of the hive right well I'm convinced that some of that is done on purpose they will tell you that they don't want to they want to do it before it gets hot or they want the packages to be ready to ship by noon but I know a couple guys down there and they know what they're doing but it's they they know exactly what they're doing they're getting rid of their older bees and forgive me that's I don't mean to be sound judgmental I know most package shakers are very honest people and trying to do the very best job they can but just like any in Industry any group of people you'll have a few that are trying to not do the right thing they're trying to do what's best for them so when you're looking at a yard that you're going to be taking the bees from what do you what would you say on average you would build a yield per Colony strong Colony it's like a booming Colony how much do you kind of estimate one of those colonies to build a yield for bees well the first round we would get a three pound package and then maybe the next round two and then the last I would go three rounds where I'm at in south Georgia they can get four sometimes five three then two and then maybe one and a half or one it slowly gets less and less but it's pretty interesting on the second round you can come back two weeks later and it looks like you didn't Shake anything in some cases but you should be able to shake three pounds out of a good double deep and leave a lot of bees behind yeah yeah so then when you shake them into the package I have these I'm going to be using these Italian packages that I got that's all those those were pretty interesting tubes no the tubes they come from New Zealand oh yeah now those black plastic things those are different yeah kind of like a clam shell I could split them open document there and the feed can up on top he had a gel it must have been a gelatin I I don't like that no my personal preference I I had some of them I used gel and I don't think the bees did as well with it so what would you use as a feed within your packages well heavy syrup heavy syrup and it's uh and what does that look like exactly um well if you were using high fructose corn so for example which is 77 solids you just put five gallons or 10 gallons of water in a 55 gallon drum I'll be real honest uh I buy my syrup when I was doing it I was buying my syrup from Rossman Apiaries because they've got the canning machine and it was just easier for me just to buy pallets of cans already already done and then we put our holes in the cans and the holes have to be very very small the what I came across is that the hole for feeder feeding can should be the same diameter as a and you would you've been around long enough to remember what this means uh reinforcement wire for a comb the spool is a wire that you buy for wiring wax Foundation oh yeah very fine tinned wire that's the perfect size hole that you want to do and we got kind of a punch that was set up uh perfectly for that and we were actually using I still have a bunch of them I was you I was buying the needles for the old Victoria phonographs from like 1920 those needles are very very hard and very tough and you can set them in a punch tool to where you just you get the hole just poking just right you can do thousands of holes with one of those old phonograph needles oh yeah so that package I have it has just that plastic container with the gel so I won't be able to uh do what you're talking about there because I just don't I'm not saying you have to do the syrup I mean the general works I just I did I didn't wasn't too fond of it I'm wondering if it would be much of an issue anyway because we're a straight shot 20 hours away so they're going to be in the boxes then back home within the next day anyways so it that probably won't be a big issue then right well no no you mean using the gel yeah yeah just to give them something to feed on I guess yeah that's not a big issue that's much different than coming across from Italy or something New Zealand or something yeah you're right it would be probably a non-issue for that situation there there has been issues with gel in the in the past so man like I know had a big problem with that um with shipping and heat now Canada typically doesn't get as hot as it does in in parts of the U.S but it can't get hot up there sometimes yeah well we're shipping we're doing this and beginning of June so right shortly so it's it does start getting warm now yeah we do see some heat I see I see well um I don't know I mean I've never used the gel before um but are you like driving and picking these up I missed part of the conversations yeah I'm heading out there as the SUV that's the other thing I was going to ask just a little bit of feedback as as we talk to ourselves here in front of everybody but um so I'm driving out there in the SUV with my wife on a bit of road trip and then I'm gonna bring 100 packages is what we're gonna do so like we're going out there see a buddy anyways and stop to see family on the way out there but um uh in my Yukon I'm going to stack him into my Yukon with the window down a little bit in the back hatch that'll provide the air through through that cabin do you see that as being adequate amount of airflow to keep those uh packages cool enough or do you think that's it is there a back window yeah I was thinking of rolling down the window just a little bit shielding them from the Sun of course but when coming in and then out the back that should provide enough airflow I believe so people used to pick them up for me in SUVs like that and it really came down to the temperature outside it's not going to be 90 degrees up there or something like that and you know my advice to people is just put on your sweatshirt and keep it cold heat is Worse Enemy than cold when it comes to packages in my view if it gets 85 or 90 degrees they need a lot of hair and yeah yeah do you think the air conditioning would keep up to 100 pages in no because you don't have the air flow right yeah that horse trailer you were pulling looked pretty good to me that was a horse trailers work great you know yeah yeah my brother won't let me use it so take signs on a pickup truck work pretty good too yeah forgiveness is easier to ask for than permission sometimes take your packages though we're just kind of dabbling with this kind of idea it's kind of kind of a hair burned idea I had to just a little while and I figured oh might as well go out there get some bees to fill some more boxes here so he's got a few extra colonies and we're going to shake up 100 packages and throw them in the back of the issue the SUV would be a lot better drive a lot more comfortable what about your half ton pickup with some stake sides that would work nicely Edward how much is too much airflow for the packages oh you know picture your it's really you know I always am using human beings as an example as what is comparable for a bee what would you be comfortable in that's what you're looking for right yeah Ian complains about the wind up in Canada all the times winter scenes you're going through it's so brutal up there we see the harshness of everything here in Manitoba it gets so cold and windy and so much snow and it just drags on forever and then it changes until like today was a beautiful day and you're like oh this is a nice country then it'll get so hot and humid right and and the bugs come out so it's miserable all the time that's why I complain all the time cold in Alaska but when it would get like 60 below Fahrenheit up there the wind wasn't blowing so you know you guys got to deal with that darn wind yeah the winds occurs for us yeah yeah well I saw that in North Dakota I spent some time in North Dakota when we were running late getting out of there with the bees and oh the wind was miserable loading trucks in the wind I hated it I really did no it drags you down and recently definitely does so just to get uh I'll give the show back to you in just a second Caitlin I just want to have a problem review just one thing so the setup on these colonies I'm going to have them feed them probably gorge on syrup so they have full stomachs that'd be the best thing for them and he's going to prep his colonies but he's going to find the queen put her down below the excluder so the day of the shake what do you guys do do you find that Queen set her aside and then take the bees or did you just take everything over the excluder yeah we're finding the queen at the moment we're going to shake the colony for him you could if he could do it you could if he could just put her that's kind of problematic put isolator in some sort of cage for a day until you get there I don't like that either honestly that's not good for them no but if he's isolating here below the excluder and you're getting all the bees above the excluder unless there's a bunch of brood up there that's not the bees you want no so the best would be to hunt down that Queen I'm a good Queen finder too I'm going to be there helping them so to hunt down the queen set aside I'm pretty sure I've seen you set aside the frames you want to keep with the queen and then you harvested the rest of them is what you're doing right yeah I just like to get the queen back in the box as soon as possible so she doesn't wander off yeah a lot of guys put the queen on a frame and lean it against the box I I really don't like doing that I want her in the Box yeah you've lost a few Queens like that before Bob haven't you lost them yeah like you know she was here 10 seconds ago where'd she goes I I had to happen uh this this week in a nuke and typically with my um my production colonies I'll clear some space and then show if I find her she'll go on the edge you know somewhere inside the box but with the nuke sometimes I'll I'm bad about if I've got something to do real quick I'll just lean her over there and but it only takes a few seconds and then all of a sudden she's in four inch grass and yeah yeah sometimes that's all there is to it and there's nothing worse than losing a awesome Queen um so I'm only going to be uh or sorry I stepped on you some people just use those little plastic things you know I don't know what to call them they shape like that and hold the queen and just leave the queen in there while they're doing their shaking work and they know really where she is yeah yeah that's what are you saying Ian or I was just going to ask what the last thing I was going to ask the transportation of these packages uh like currently driving 20 hours is going to be a straight shot so it's not a long time but um a b regulates its heat a lot better when they're properly hydrated and I guess that's where the syrup comes in so if I'm not going to be using the syrup and using this gel gelatin or whatever um I guess watering with the packages would be a good idea maybe yeah yeah we would always take a pump sprayer or a very fine Mist on a water hose and Mist the packages before we would load them on a truck if we could yeah interesting you're right it's a big deal they get dehydrated pretty easy especially if there's wind going through the load yeah so yeah oh sorry go ahead take a pump sprayer with you that works yeah and just give them a shot there maybe once or twice either and a lot of people will tell you to do that with light sugar syrup but I don't like that because it gets to be I don't want the bees to be sticky oh I I prefer just water yeah that's that's a good point um so when I got into beekeeping I started with packages and that was one of the info some of the information I got a hold of was you know if you can't can't get them in for a day or two just spray them in some sugar syrup but every over the years I've noticed um that that does not work well I seem to get a lot more mortality spraying them and getting the bees sticky and uh so these days um well I haven't gotten packages in a long time but um the water seems to work really good just like a fine Mist just you know and uh and so that's good I just wanted to tap into the expertise and the experience above there a little bit this year has been a real roller coaster for me there's nothing's typical and I hate these years boy I hate these years it's just so much work and stress but at the same time I love these years too because it it makes me think about things differently and you know I have this problem now I got to solve it and how am I going to solve it I have all these problems I I don't know how to manage so then I had to go out of my comfort zone to be able to manage these issues and this is this trip out there is just one of my hair burned ideas to help bring bees back to my apronus you know in your region so your experience is going to be way better than them packages coming from overseas that's for sure oh boy they go through a lot and those guys our importers do an absolutely terrific job yeah it's just a brutal trip you know yeah and they they lose all control as soon as those pallets of packages hit the airlines because then you rely on airline staff to follow Sops and that's part of the issue we're having it's just crates not loaded properly or the these uh pallets of bees sitting in the plane for too long or they take it out and sit on the tarmac in the Sun for you know for hours it's just not acceptable so there's there's all those circumstances they have to manage at the same time they seem to be able to do it so if I can't make it in a 20 hour shot then I guess I'm hopeless [Music] well you know uh your experiences last spring I'd like to say we're biblical so your hands to feel a little better than last year last year was a tough year yeah but my bees uh yeah they they were in tight shape last year and same exact the same as this spring and they bounced back and I'm kind of seeing that right now too where I was out in the that's why I was just about late for this chat because I was out and we're working the yard and I was like oh I gotta get back there the hives are just on the verge of exploding and I'm not gonna be able to keep up to them I'm pulling frames or brood and that bead of sweat's coming down my forehead because I know I'm just about to get so far behind We're not gonna be able to keep up to them so we're it's just there and two weeks ago I thought they're all gonna die so it's it's fun to watch things change throughout the season you know they're they're resilient Little Creatures it just amazes me beekeeping isn't a an emotional sport um that's for sure yeah it turns me into a manic depressive all the time it's like up and down and up and down it's just ridiculous the worst part is our wives have to deal with us um yeah but uh uh it's kind of the best and it's kind of the worst part about it too I said you know if I was telling a new guy that our preacher actually got into bees so um I was talking to him you know people Corner me and uh and he was asking some really good questions and I told him one of the things that you know has made me love her for 21 years is it's such a short window I mean in Canada in some ways it's way shorter of a window um you know so I've I've got about eight to ten weeks of Honey flow where I'm at in a good year I'll have 10 weeks and an average year maybe a little less in some years it's really a bad year I'll get around six weeks of weight gain I've only had that once but you know it's such a short window and it's it's kind of magical every time it happens then we hit that darn dearth period and our bees are robbing each other or trying to and and they're more aggressive and it's 98 degrees Fahrenheit and nobody's wanting to work bees that day but you just got to do it and uh you know but you just go through these things and uh that's what I was telling them like you get different seasons and that's what makes it special so let's get to some questions um everyone's been patiently waiting while we've been discussing things and for queens and all kinds of other stuff and I've learned a lot from this already but let's see if we can get to a couple individuals questions and I want to say thanks to Bruce bees for donating and he had a question for you Bob about Chris do you mind pulling that up for me I can't find it it's all over the place all right Bob how do you find all those Queens quickly when shaking packages well the if we have time to go four or five days ahead of time putting an excluder in the middle makes a huge difference because then at least we know what box she's in by where the eggs are so that that helps a lot when I was shaking a lot of packages we don't anymore we just I got out of that we always made a big effort to get a queen excluder in four or five days ahead of time so that was a big difference and then if you're shaking on a good day when they're flying that makes a difference you know when the bees are flying it's much easier to find a queen and we do Mark our Queens I mean if we keep Queen markers in our pocket if we see a queen we mark them on the spot and that makes a difference too and of course you're always going to have some queens that aren't marked super Siege or whatever but and uh back when I was doing a lot of package shaking for a while there we were selling 1500 packages a year so in my book that was a lot to a big package producer that's a drop in the bucket but for me that was a huge deal deal and I had a couple guys working for me that were really really good at finding queens and that was kind of my Ace in the Hole getting young guys like Seth to have a good set of eyes and yes that's pretty good at it and you nailed it he's young he's only 23 or 24 and uh I don't remember he's one of the other he's he's young and he really can see good and and John believe it or not is a pretty good Queen finder all my crew they're all good at finding Queens but a couple of the guys that I had like eight or ten years ago were just superb they were amazing at it and I'm not I used to be my best Queen finder but now that I'm you know I'm not going to be 70 in a few months my eyes aren't what they used to be and I don't I trust the younger guys honestly more than I do myself now so here's a question from Scott Reese what type of refractometer was the blue one that you showed the other day came in so honestly I I don't remember showing that but there's a lot of things that I do that I don't remember ask Laurel um or things that I said um this is it right here I just happen to have it on the desk maybe when I was doing a chat the other day I showed it as well so this is a misco and it's made in the USA they're they're not cheap but this is a really nice refractometer I've got some cheaper Chinese ones that you'll look through you know the classic refractometer but this unit right here it's very heavy plastic and stainless construction with a little glass eye there in the center and I actually have some of Bob Benny's a sourwood honey that was gifted to me a fellow went down there by the name of Don Bearden and he's been with us I think he was if I remember correctly he was in the 300 number subscriber accounts so he's very so we're just going to look how thick Bob's honey is right there though Bob's honey is always quite thick you dehydrate it down a pretty good bit and uh it takes a while to get it out of the container so this thing's nice right here just turn hit the Go Button turn it on close it and then now that it's in there I'm just going to hit go and 15.1 percent is what it's rating for that honey Bob 15.1 now it's possible it's been sitting on my shelf here for a year in a very dry room a little over a year so but it's this this is delicious sourd with honey I'm for sure but this this sucker right here is very nice I got it from Mann Lake I don't know if there's other places that you can purchase these but um it was worth it to me at the time to go ahead and just get a fast one like this and I really like it um it's it's better than the the other ones but those other ones will work just fine can you calibrate it somehow or is it just set for life um it does have a menu and all kinds of options Bob and there's an instruction manual that comes with it and these kind of devices I go hey Laurel and and then she she calibrates and all that kind of stuff so I'll leave it to smarter people to to engineer stuff there's a lot of uh fancy calibration fluids and all that Louie who works in my warehouse he's got it dialed in he knows how to calibrate with the extra virgin olive oil that that's works really good if you know what to do with it oh oh Laurel thought I was calling her I was um talking in like uh in a situation where I was having problems I would call for you proverbial um anyways she came in here it's like what do you need now she didn't say it like that she's like did you need something she's she's too sweet um get into some more questions Chris throw some up there with you um what is the best way to get a hive to accept a queen that just won't accept one cage straight release cells eggs this County kills or destroys every cell I think we've talked about that one a decent bit but I'm gonna talk about that for just a second longer is that um sometimes colonies just get so long in the tooth or old there's a bunch of old bees they're on the verge of being Lane worker and that's something as a new beekeeper was a very hard lesson for me to learn and one that took me a long time to accept that some counties just are not worth saving at some point and there it's too costly especially if you're buying Queens for like 30 or 40 dollars for a colony of bees that's all old bees there's hardly any brood even if you add a little bit of eggs to them to give them some brew they still won't accept a couple frames of brood with your queen introduced they're just old bees and these days I refuse to do that I won't try to fix a colony that's long in the tooth that's got a bunch of old bees especially if they've already killed one Queen and won't accept it like that I will just recombine them shake them out something else and I'll make splits with some young nurse bees and and good brood and a nice situation if I'm going to spend money on a queen I'm making darn sure she's going into a very safe environment you guys got something to add on to that yeah if I have Queen cells you know the Virgin Queen solves all issues so and they don't cost a lot where you put a mated coin in there and another one the third one Hurts the Most right because there's well well here it's a lot of money over 100 bucks already into it so don't throw good money after bad yeah and and like what you said um the only time I've ever been able to recover bees that were slightly going Lane worker is if I had some ripe Queen cells I could just throw in there A lot of times I'll take a a frame of Brew to kind of get the pheromones where there needs to be where it needs to be and um with the brood pheromones and throw that Queen cell and and like you said that virgin can fix that situation um but a good mated Queen man I hate to throw it in that a lot of times they die so Bob how do you get someone to let you put bees on their property for sourwood I live in Piedmont North Carolina and I want to take my bees over there for sourwood well I'll bet Ian could say more about this than I can not sour wood but how to find a good yard farmers are the best you know that's the first place if you if you can visit find a farm preferably older people they relate to bees better than younger people that's where I get my best uh results I don't like knocking on doors but I will do it if I have to um bribe them say there is honey involved you know that's how it always helps and but I have my best luck with Farms honestly all right so Chris why don't you just start loading us up with questions we're going to bust through some of these people have been waiting forever on here for their questions all right our frame slash foundations that get badly wax Moss worth cleaning up or is it better just to put New Foundation in that is an interesting question and I think depends on your circumstances um who wants to take that one like the question is if the wax moth takes it down to the plastic whether or not to put it back in again or you know is it worth basically the time to clean that frame up and re-wax the plastic Foundation or put a new uh wax foundation and this is a question that some people morally have an issue with wasting anything that has you still and and then there's also the production side of the business where like it's really not worth my time to do that so yeah consolidation is gonna sorry I stepped on you Foundation is getting expensive too though so it's starting to make sense is to recycle some of that back through we're actually doing some of that ourselves taken not the like we're not taking old garbage frames and then it's not with the wax Foundation it's with the plastic it's very easy scraper down or we put it in the military for a short amount of time so it's easier to peel the wax off and we just drop them back into live so that's what we're doing because the equipment costs a lot of money if that if the frame itself is you know it's if it's holding itself why not and the plastic as long as it's straight As long as the bees will take it again Giver yeah we have some foundations I've I've been doing a bunch of these we have you know foundations that go into hives um that sometimes don't get drawn properly occasionally and sometimes other things happen maybe it's wax Moss or whatever give me one second I'm actually going to color all this time hey Laura I'll have that frame for me would you meanwhile Let's uh Bobby you want to comment on that a little bit or are we good we were like I guess I'm still in a position where I'm looking at it from a money point of view I gotta pay somebody to do that work and if the frame isn't too bad and it's not too big of a mess we'll go ahead and fix it but if it's a bad mess we just throw it away a weak pressure washer will clean it off really good if you can hold it down somehow Kind of a Funny Story I had a friend who took a bunch of equipment through a car wash and cleaned all the old stuff off and he got a phone call about an hour later say we don't ever want to see you in our car [Laughter] yeah a weak pressure washer will take it off and you can scrape it I mean if there's a lot of ways of doing it but I don't want if it's an old ratty frame I don't want to invest anything in that I want a newer frame but if the frame's real good you know it's not too big a job we'll clean it up and re-wax it so here's a comb that I or a frame that I threw on last year and they I just don't think that there was a good coat on this one I got some that were single coat from a company I won't name and uh it was a little too thin but I was in a hurry and I in a good flow with a strong Hive it worked out likely this was in a situation where the flow had ended or they went queenless and a lot of times when you have a queenless hive they they draw stuff poorly not all always buy I find a lot of times when they're doing funky stuff there's some type of issue going on queenless strong dearth whatever whatever the reasoning for it was they just built like a patch up here and a little patch over here and this was all beared down in here and you can see where they they've taken a lot of this just down to the plastic and whenever we get in a dearth period where there's no nectar coming in the bees are stressed maybe they're trying to repurpose the wax or they're just bored out of their minds and they'll pick it off and back when I started beekeeping we used only solid wax Foundation no plastic and in those cases during a dearthbeast with just two holes through the entire thing and they would waste it and I I was talking about this with someone the other day and I was wondering why would the bees chew that wax off and could it be that there is some attrition with the wax so as the bees cap The Brood there is a mixture of wax and some propolis a tiny bit of propolis I believe in those cappings they put on the the cells could it be that if some of that's being chewed off and some of that's dropping down to the bottom board it never gets reused and could they be picking this off and put it in those places I I don't know um regardless in this case this is a good strong frame we're gonna put some beeswax on this and throw it back in um I just I've got a little roller here and this when I'm watching a little bit of TV or something like that I will roll a few hundred of these um or better yet make my kids do it they're starting to get old enough to do it um all right next question Chris all right Chris probably went to the bathroom Cayman have you found that your vsh Queens to be a little spicy um yeah they're a little they're spicier than my bees are for sure um I've had a lot meaner Queens than that however they are hotter than mine but I I'm while Corey's breeding for vsh and stuff like that I'm focused on um totally different traits I one of the things I'm looking for is gentle bees and not running all over the Combs efb and chalk brood resistance those things but um yeah his are a little bit hotter than mine um yeah I'll I'll give Corey a phone call and tell him to fix it immediately um now it it really mine were not that hot though but just a tad bit warmer than mine um let's see right here made could you use a queen pheromone strip temporarily in a starter while waiting on a new round of graphs thoughts I don't know I I'm sure it'll keep them from trying to raise emergency cells but is that really what you want to do you know I they have some on the Jay-Z Beezy cages that you get they have um a smell to them and they say that that's um like Queen smell or something like that they impregnate into the plastic if you guys ever opened up like a hundred pack of Jay-Z Beezy cages and smelled that strong smell from it um and uh yeah it's quite strong and um I had one guys like that's that's Queen pheromone they put in there like I wonder if I could just hang one of those in there if that would be enough itself I don't think it would be um but there's there's all kinds of beekeeping hacks like uh if you guys ever watched them I'm sure you have a few of Paul Kelly's uh University of guelpha videos um you know he's one of the speakers of the conference he's got the University of Guelph videos up there in Canada he's got one on those um little polystyrene mini nukes and he's got a video series on that and they use little pheromone strips when they um either mentions it or he uses them they staple them in there for when they make them up so the bees kind of you know glue into those little boxes until they the cells them you know get in there and emerge and all that um so so I don't know how to answer that person's question but it is a head scratcher so let's see we'll take us a few more questions we got some up top holy cow I just scrolled down have you ever found that when you roll extra wax onto your frames it widens the cells and you get more drones no um Ian um did you did you dip yours in to get wax on yours how do you get wax on yours if you would repurpose them yeah I bought a bunch of cheap Chinese foundation for a really good price they come unwaxed so what one thing we did was we would take the sheet and just dip it in and it worked really well you had to make sure that the foundation was warm if it was in the cold room and you dipped it in it just you know it'd flake off so that worked but it seemed to uh there seemed to be a lot of wax on there so I thought there's a bit of a waste so then I had the kids I had like five or six Expendable uh labor right yeah they're using the paint roller to do some of that so that kept him busy for a while they got tired of that and then I gave them a block just rub it on that that works as long as I just get a little bit of wax just on the top of the uh the cells just a little bit that's all the bees seem to need and then they built it but yeah it's a lot of work I think I'm gonna buy waxed Foundation next time because it's it's kind of a pain in the ass but this is a really good deal so it's what we got to do so that what you said it's it's cold so if it gets you know cold it flakes off and I'm like I've had some fairly cool foundation in winter time and I've had not had any issues but then I'm thinking oh yeah he's in Canada you're you're cold in my cold are quite different my cold winter days are like oh man we're the high today is 25 degrees Fahrenheit man it is a cold one you know and uh you're like oh my goodness what a warm winter day it's 28 degrees Fahrenheit so all right I I that makes sense um so wow yeah those Queens cages smell quite strong and and I have some commercial beekeepers who say they don't like the Jay-Z Beezy cages for the fact that they do have that strong smell and they think that could actually impact a queen acceptance I don't know if that's the case or not um I know a lot of people use them and really enjoy those Jay-Z Beezy cages I like how Slender the profile is of them myself versus a wooden cage maybe that's a let's get to this question right here real quick and then Bob I recently introduced successfully five of your made at Queens I got second hand and noticed buckfast written on the orange cage holder can you provide some background on that I would have no idea how the word buckfast got on there I don't think we would have put it there yeah I don't think that you never talked about Buck fast Queens in your operation is there even really hardly any Buck fast truly around anywhere not in this country yeah that's kind of what I was thinking interesting I wonder if someone was down I we usually don't use second hand orange Queen shippers so I don't remember doing it recently I guess it's possible uh but I I people that work for me would have no reason to write that on the on there so I I guess I don't have a good answer probably you know the whoever uh bought it from you guys wrote that on there um um but uh let's see here so that was the question I was going to ask you guys have introduced a lot of Queens over there there's a lot of different Queen cages out there there's a California style Queen cage kind of old classic wooden three whole uh drilled Queen Kate wooden Queen cage and then Jay-Z Beezy and there's a few other options you guys have any preferences on Queen cages just for practical use my favorite cage is the California wooden cage but you don't see them much little square cage there's no room for attendance in it but you know you don't want attendance in your cages if you can help it so why would it why would you pick that for your own personal use and for maybe shipping well because it's small and you can the batting cages I hate them because they're you gotta get them in between the Combs and you almost can't have 10 frames in there and do it without really mushing a comb and those little wooden California cages have a small footprint and you can get them in there very easily and also they don't have quite the issue if you look at the a Jay-Z Beezy cage the bees can actually grab the Queen's feet a lot easier than they can through one of those wooden cages that have that finer screen on there that's interesting I think you have less issues with the wooden cages in the screen and I like the small footprint of the small California wooden cages but you don't see them much I mean there's hardly anybody using them out this way right I think most people have gone to the Jay-Z bz system like I have just because there's so many compatible pieces the shipping containers everything yeah yeah interchangeable yeah but that's interesting about the California queen cage I've I've heard a lot of people who really like those um and I've read some books where people have brought those up as being their favorite so um that leads me into another question so Ian's talking packages and whatnot I have seen like when I first started I was and got all my packages they were all from Wilbanks out of Georgia and they always had a lot of attendance with the queen I mean we're not talking three or four usually there was five six or seven attendants in there with the queen which I always thought was pretty excessive um but they seem to do okay I was at some other places of this year and they had no attendance in the cage in a package and there's a lot of issues I but I didn't know there was other things going on as well and I kind of wonder what your thoughts on that are for packages Bob having just the queen in there or does she need attendance in that case since she's pretty foreign no she doesn't need attendance in that case in that case the reason for having six or seven attendants in a Benton cage that's the only one you'd want to put that many in would be uh if you know if she's shipping outside of a queen Bank shipping box and she if she's stuck in that cage for four or five or six days the extra attendance are helpful because they can begin to die off at some point true and one of the biggest concerns I would have is maybe the candies just a little tacky and the queen get a little gummed up and those bees can help keep her cleaned and groomed right yeah and but that seems like a lot and this is the first time I'd ever seen a package they did not have any attendance in it at all and I just but there were there was there were some poor issues and I just wondered if that associated with that or not but it doesn't sound like that's the case no not if not if the Queens are being taken care of properly before they were introduced into the package cage if they were I mean obviously if a queen's sitting around for a day that she needs attendance you know unless she's in a queen Bank of some sort whether it be a box or a colony or whatever I don't like to see it Queen sit alone for more than an hour without attendance or something and you know I'm not an expert on that I'm just some of what I'm saying is my theory not my necessarily my understanding but you can't have a queen sitting around for a day without attendance I don't think well I I don't think anyone's going to argue that you don't have more experience and knowledge about this than we do so or we'll take your word for it well I've seen a couple names pop up I'm wondering if that Steven's guy is that Stephen or Stephen Roberts or uh no no that's Steven's Biko that's Corey Stevens well that's the Corey oh yeah he's just like uh he's a he's pesky like that he just yeah yeah Stevens yeah I know another Steve and I was confused yeah Stevens because that's Corey Stevens and anyone that's interested in getting some virgins and all that kind of stuff um yeah they they've been very productive and and Bruce has had good results with the ozone so um there was a question for Ian up there well there's one question for you and weren't those that were in the tubes Ian just got the California cage was out of Cal I didn't see the the no they were little square cages the queen was by herself yeah very unique just for the package itself yeah so I've never seen him in a tube like that before that's probably not a U.S thing um maybe not in Canada too but uh is why would they be in a tube is they better on a plane or something like that or yeah they seem to ship very well like they stand them up right so you have the tube and you have a vent up top an event on on the bottom and they have um kind of like a mesh material down inside where the bees can hang on to and that's where the queen is stapled is it on that mesh inside and the bees hang on that mesh and then hang on the top and I guess the idea probably is heat rises so the the the uh all the heat will escape straight up through the vent and probably keeps them cool and the the pack them as just about one kilogram or a little bit more than that maybe and they stock them in a crate not sure how many they put into a crate but it's as much as they can fit in yeah like a four by four or four by five that's pretty wild yeah it works very well they seem to they come through just masterfully for me this last time that's cool I mean I uh obviously that those came from New Zealand right so in New Zealand yeah they do things quite a bit different come a long ways they have come a long ways Laurel uh uh and I would like to take a trip down there and see some beekeepers that's it's a very different place to keep bees we have several people that come on here from New Zealand from time to time and come and I'm sure they visit your channels as well um so do you think the bees got jet lag and did they have a problem with that they're pretty grouchy when we were hiving them I had to put my gloves on they're little but then we went around today had to pop the quarks because I don't like to release the queen when I'm shaking the packages in just you know there's too much going on she'll fly away maybe so we pop the Cork and just put a little bit of honey in there just to slow her down from releasing and they're nice and gentle and happy again because if we're feasting on the sugar pail all day so there was one that you just had up Chris about rooting for Ian and um that's that summed it up pretty nicely in your raw block style video has me on pins and needles so suspenseful my family is rooting for your success oh that's good to hear well I think there's a lot of people thousands of people that feel that way about it and uh it's quite the interesting little Adventure I'm doing on this YouTube channel I don't know it's kind of Taken its own path I'm just putting everything that I'm doing out well not everything we do a lot of things in this Farm I don't put on there it's just whenever I feel inspired about certain things about the bee farm itself I have my camera and I put it in there so it's it's a feedback mechanism more than anything else for me I read a lot of comments I get a lot of emails and just a continual discussion it's I think it's benefited the way well it's benefited I did it first off to help convey myself a lot better public speaking of that but it's it's helped me provide a feedback mechanism where I'm talking to myself and then others are joining in helping me with the conversation trying to figure these things out so I can't go to my old man he doesn't know anything about bees so like where do I get this stuff from right so we had a comment from Rylan uh opinion and I'd like to say thanks for his donation and apparently he's a fan of Bob so uh King Bob um apparently that's the thing now so um no King here no sir yeah but you know someone's gonna wear I'm not gonna say it I'm not going to say it um if you see it okay I'm gonna say it if there's a shirt at hype life that says King Bob on it it was not me that made it okay I'm not gonna do that to you Bob but somebody else will do it probably at this point um it'd have to have a picture of a minion on it you remember that movie King Bob in the minion movie I didn't know if he had seen that actually um I love the minions that's great yeah I have young kids younger kids at that time that's good stuff yeah that's awesome so what about the PO there was someone that asked you about um your copper smoker Ian where'd you get that from is that up there in Canada somewhere I don't know where it come from Brad Hogg gave it to me as a a gift um this is before I actually I think before it really started Brad and I we are good friends now we're on the association together and we're like four hours apart in that but he was following my uh written blog before I went on to YouTube on my web page and so he sent me this thing I was like where did this come from because there wasn't even a note on it so well this is really cool so I put it on the shelf and I took it to the schools is really it's a good looking smoker so I took it because those are my demonstrations and it looked really good and then I run over my smoker I didn't have one so I ended up starting to use this one and it's a good smoker yeah it is it's a it's beekeeper bling um is what it is and and that comment right there Chris you're you're supposed to do your job and filter out anything that's uh that makes fun of me and you didn't do your job Ian did you ever solve your problem of Tainted water on your your palsy yeah that's only a problem with the problem it's like son of a gun my bees are really poopy coming out of the shed and I had nozema issues and I was escalating because of the weather and then it would rain and I'm looking at the entire like if the bees fly out and they poop everywhere on the hive Lids on the ground you can see it on the ground it's just poop everywhere and on top of my pails so then when it rained you have these little poop puddles up on top and every time I pass by it's like darn it I bet you that's full of nozema too if it if these bees have the nozema infection and they're pooping and voiding that's good it's getting out but if they're pooping on top of my pail and then the water from the rain is making it into a little puddle which they didn't come and drink it then it might just be uh you know infecting my bees with nozema every time it rains so I went out there and I took a little dab in one of the Tails and put it into the scope I'm looking sure enough there's a ton of nozema that on the top of the Bales so I don't know what to do about it I tried cutting the rim like the pails of that little Rim around the top that holds the water so I I took a knife and I gouged it down but the pails are kind of you know um concave concaved in yeah so it held the puddle anyways so the other thing to think is just fill it in or the other thing is just to cycle the pails through the honey hose and wash them get all that poop off and move them back out that might be the most practical thing to do more work for the kids yeah you kind of left us all hanging on that video he's been watching too many videos from Hollywood look at that Cliffhanger the season Cliff yeah I'm playing YouTube I'm making money on that you know suspense make you come back for more but the thing is I haven't found a solution for it I don't know what to do but other than to cure the nozema and that's going to be a hard one or clean the pails because I can't modify the pail at all it won't work unless I fill it with silicone but that's too much money uh yeah Laurel has a lot of opinions you all uh it's it's too bad she's um she's super super smart and hard working um and she talks to me very freely let me tell you she's she's I'm old news um but whenever she gets to know somebody she talks quite a bit and um and it's a lot it's not like me where you have to sift through all the stupidity to get to some interesting stuff Laurel's always very interesting and very intelligent um so Kenneth bockham asked are you any of you guys looking to use the the amatras gel they're referring to the new stuff Vita Pharma is releasing um I haven't looked fully into it and honestly it's one of those things where you kind of got to try it you know there's a lot all the companies and I'm not trying to pick on them in particular but all the companies will say this product's going to get you this kill and this kill and probably in those trials they they did achieve that kill but the problem of it is over an average I don't always see the same things that they see and it could be that the trial was held in California and the humidities a third of what mine is here and that could affect the the treatment or whatever so I don't know a lot about it what are your guys's thoughts on you know maybe a a gel amatraz I like having another option we can't use it in Canada yet as far as I know because I don't think it's registered up here we usually lag behind you guys but if it does get registered up here I think there would be a place for a juice maybe it's more of a I don't know if you consider a flash treatment but it's like the app the app of our right now is an extended treatment you need like 52 days or even more if it's cold and this one is like within a two-week period I believe it is I'd have to double check on that I'm pretty sure you apply it once and then you're only supposed to do it two times if I remember the literature correctly and you would do two applications that are supposed to go for seven days but it's it's more of a flash treatment and they recommend it being used um it was really designed for commercial beekeepers in mind where you're making time splits where you're doing something that's going to make this more effective because you're you're using a biological um thing in with a treatment for those of you who don't understand what I'm meaning by that is basically it's hard to kill the mites if they are in The Brood and you get that capped brood and those mites are down in there reproducing but if you're making a split where there's very little capped brood or no capped brood and then you use any product really works pretty good when there's no capped brood in the colony or at least works a lot better so it'll be interesting and we actually will have them on in the near future live via the farmer is going to come on and talk about their product because right now there's a lot of speculation but their researchers know a lot more about this than we do so I'll be very interested to hear on what they think and how it should be used correctly so if you guys have any questions or things for that they will be on a live chat in the near future so there was a question up above and it was about frame feeders that and that's the thing there's a lot of different ways to keep bees Ian's got his system I know Ian probably doesn't feel this way about it but I look at as a very dialed in system you know sometimes your systems and circumstances that are out of your control don't always work the way you like to kind of like you know your pal feeding obviously it serves you really well over the years but now but the nozema it's a little bit of a pain in the rear end having to deal with that issue and someone brought up frame feeders up above but the system that you have really revolving primarily around a single brood chamber really doesn't seem to work too well I would think with the frame feeder or over winter with the frame feeder yeah we could go through and put the frame feeder in yeah we could do that I just I've never I do have a big stack of those things in the yard I've never really you know I found more use and just kind of flashing syrup to them on with pails or if we need to feed a lot to them at a time then we just give them a bigger pail or sometimes a good way with open feeding so that's just the way I've managed my bees there's a lot of beekeepers maybe that move their colonies around more maybe you would want to have an internal feeder because then it's always with them and then they can drop some syrup and Bob uses internal feeders maybe you could comment more about it well I I use them in double deeps but I really stay away from them in singles because I don't want to be limited down to eight frames yes honestly in a double deep you can look forward to lose two frames when I was traveling all the time the bees always had a feeder in them because no matter where they went there it was I could use it nowadays I don't worry too much about it you know they both have pros and cons the frame feeder is good for gaining weight fast and I prefer the bucket for kind of metering it out slower but my situation is so much different than yours we have a lot of then cayman's in the same position you know through the month of August into September we're just trying to keep the feet on them but if you I don't want it to be a flash flood a feed and then nothing for two weeks we're better off keeping them kind of slightly fed over a long period of time you have you don't have the time for that you got to get food on you got to get it on right now so I see you're using those screens they they the bees can take a lot of feed through the screen and then buckets and I used to have two gallon buckets with screens and I you know I use those plugs now or we just put a few holes in them and make it last longer and that's really what works for me you know the the frame feeder then I think we're all looking for something better but like a frame feeder and it's has to use bucket feeders have uses but they're there's different pros and cons to those approaches I wish we could find something that had the best of buckets and the best of frame feeders and then we'd just be set um but that'll never happen I remember the the one time that I did use them I spent some money and I bought some and I was using them and I quit using them because of the condensation would accumulate in them that just because of the Colder Weather I guess I don't know but the condensation fill it up and just be a a feeder full of sludge it was gross I was dumping those things out and washing them up all the time and I said screw that because I needed that's when I was trying that's when I had doubles and that's when I was transitioning to singles so that just went aside because I needed all the space in the bottom anyways and the pails are just so so very easy yeah very easy so then that was overwintering you would get that water build up or that where that'd be through the season they just no through the winter yeah I'd leave them in there that way I wouldn't take them out and that's maybe my trouble but taking them in and out that's a lot of work so I just left it yes it is well that's something that we've been scratching our heads about because um I don't use an upper entrance in any of my colonies to let any humidity out or condensation out in the winter time and most of the time my feeders do just fine but I do end up with some of them that end up with uh two three sometimes even four inches of water down in the bottom of them and I know there's not a leak in the lid it's a good lid but they typically are the ones that have those foamy things on that you know you um and I just don't think any of it gets out of there and but the beast half the time are okay there's a little bit more it's a little more humid than I would like but again my Winters are nothing I mean this year we had about three legitimate weeks of winter and that was about it in my opinion it was a pretty mild winter overall we had one serious cold snap my bees did just fine and I say this around here a lot if you can't if if the winner kills your bees it's more than likely that you did something wrong in late summer and an early fall that's what beekeepers in the South need to really work worry about is keeping those mites low making sure that they have a good Queen in there and and plenty of food um but the frame feeders um they definitely aren't perfect and I do hate hauling them in and out um question that you guys might be able to answer better than anybody that I know is a single brood management a lot of people squat scratch their heads around scratch I can't say anything you know it's about time to go to bed um there's a lot of people that wonder about single brood management how to make it happen and we utilize it now and I know that you use that all the time e and I think Bob you've used that or do use that I don't know to what extent um but you'll kind of talk about that a little bit and I'll answer one more question in there to make it more confusing that I've typically had very good success this year I've had a little bit more issue with my single brood I cut them down to four frames of brood prior to the honey flow but I've still had a little bit more of a tendency towards swarming than I'd like to see but we've had really good pollen flows this year and I feel like that's clogged up The Brood Nest more than it has in the past previous years um so kind of you know your thoughts around single brood management and and then if you get a lot of Flux Of of pollen you know what do you do about it yeah I guess basically it all depends on what you want to do as a beekeeper what what are you trying to achieve it's just you know you're just not going to manage a single box because you know that's what Ian does here that's what Bob or Gaiman does is what is it that you want those bees to do and why are you managing them in a tighter space like that and I have a lot of reasons for that and that's why I've gravitated this way there's beekeepers up here that manage and doubles because that suits their style or it just you know maybe they can suits your style their bad habits and then they just seem to do better with doubles there's a lot of reasons for that too for me I'm looking at maximizing uh space for one thing I Endure winter um it's I find it's a lot more effective to manage mites because it's a a smaller area we're using less medicated strips and the mites can't seem to get away from from the medication especially with the vapor and you're putting the vapor in it's a smaller enclosed space that's a big thing another really important thing is is kind of twofold is I'm trying to keep the summer honey out of that brood nest for one so I can Harvest it and make money but the other is so I don't allow my hives to Winter on that summer honey and that generally is canola canola makes a terrible winter feed and when I find canola down in The Brood Nest especially I don't necessarily see problems with it on typical type years as the tough years like the the two that we've just gone through or the winter is a little bit more extended they just don't do very well on it and they suffer so I'd like to manage my nests or the bees take all that honey and move it up over the excluder so that I don't have to do that then I can backfill that nest with a premium winter feed which is sucrose and they do a lot better through the winter shed that way I also find it a lot easier to read The Nest you know you know what you have you have six frames you have eight frames you have two frames you're not trying to judge the size of that Nest between two boxes and trying to figure out you know the management of The Brood and all this kind of stuff it's just the Dynamics around managing the equipment in that single box is a lot easier for me anyways to be able to direct to other people as they're trying to help me do some of this work here so I'm very specific to the reason why I'm doing it in that single box and I guess maybe in some ways is a bit of a lie too because I'm not always managing in a single box there's beekeepers that try to manage in a single box and they're married to just managing in that box and you can't put that second on ever because then you're not managing single box management well they don't understand what exactly needs to go on because there's times in the year especially right now where they're about to explode you got to give them two boxes to allow that Queen to manage a bigger nest to avert swarming so then it gives you time to get around everything to be able to do your work right so it's a manipulation of that nest and the outcome that you want manipulation and I find it a lot easier to manage it within that single throughout the year so I'll pass it on to you Bob yeah you're you're in such a different position than I am um I'm kind of this may be the wrong word but I'm an opportunist beekeeper I'll do the best I can with what's sitting there at the moment and in my yards you might see double deeps and singles in the same yard and it's I know when the sarwood flow is going to come and I don't want to be building up a second box on sourwood in mid-summer and that's why you'll see a lot of singles in in my yards right now because if they were a late start or perhaps they swarm you know we'll shake them down into a single and that's how I'll make the most sourwood honey which is coming up you know a little over a month from now and I'm going a lot of I sell a lot of beehives too some years I sell a few hundred a few years ago I sold almost a thousand and I prefer to sell a single than I do a double deep because you make more profit that way you know the difference in value the difference in what you can sell a double deep for in a single is not worth the extra box you know how do I say this properly I'll just show up throw out some numbers if you can get say 250 for a single but you can only get 280 or 290 for a double well that second box full of whatever's in it is worth a lot more than forty dollars to me so I wanna get a lot of my colonies down to a single this year in order to sell them I'd like to sell 800 to a thousand colonies this fall for everybody that's listening if you need some bees in September get a hold of me colonies and then building back the following year and so uh but but I like I but I prefer to manage double deep colonies so if I know a colony is not going to be sold if I know that yard's going to stay put till the next year I'll prefer to run it as a double deep so it's just you know whatever's happening in the moment and if Seth Seth's probably long gone by now he's got a girlfriend he's probably not still on here but he always is telling me we'd never do the same thing twice place last year we did something completely different well I can get away with that but you Ian you can't do that your season is so tight so defined you don't have the Leisure of flexibility that we do in Georgia and I can play around and do whatever looks best in the moment in two weeks what I did now two or three weeks later may not be the most valuable thing to do for me you know depending on where when the honey flow is coming and you know what I'm going to do with that colony I I that's a vague answer I know but wow it's it's a real difference yeah I shudder when I think about doubles I just uh just sends a shiver down my spine I hate doubles I do everything one of the reasons I like doubles is because we do so much splitting if you have doubles you have so much more to work with and there's really you know I can't speak for you in Canada but in the southern Appalachian Mountains there is absolutely no doubt that if you over winter in a double deep with a good Colony you're gonna have more bees to work with in the spring than you will with a single yeah if you're making packages and making splits and doing all that you've got a lot more to work with if you've got a double deep so that's something to consider too Bob is there a day you can always be found at the store Saturdays mainly yeah exactly well and uh where where can I order Bob so you're gonna get a bunch of emails uh people wanting some singles from you so you might be able to sell as many as you want to Bob well hopefully I'm glad I was able to uh self-promote on this list [Laughter] make this conversation and take it one step further is I don't even like I I prefer managing singles but I also like to manage them even smaller than that into nukes like I've built these nukes and I manage them away to be able to maximize my honey crop on them by making them smaller right so I'm making these nukes and I'm forcing them up a lot quicker instead of building out and up and you know build them and they go straight up and make me that honey crop then the honey crop comes within three weeks four weeks and I need to get them into the those honey boxes right away so you know by manipulating the space for the colony it it goes back to exactly what are you trying to achieve so what I'm trying to achieve with some of those smaller spaces is just turn to maximize my honey crop a lot of ways keep that honey crop up top instead of down below right yeah that's a huge Focus for me I absolutely believe that if you manage singles properly you will make more honey but you also will feed more too you do put syrup into them yeah yeah yeah although I don't know you know well I'm not gonna say uh that's you know but I've managed doubles too and I my feed bill hasn't been a lot different from the doubles to the singles maybe they eat more maybe I'm just feeding him too much of that time I don't know but it's just smaller I always think the smaller units are more efficient but then you go through two Springs like I just did here and I wish I would have managed them in doubles because they would have been a little bit bigger they would add a little bit more resource on them they would have had more girth right and I would have just gone through Sprint just like that so there's trade-offs like Corey Stevens he's probably not here he always talks about trade-offs so that's one of the trade-offs is you know we managed a smaller unit more efficient not as much money put into blah blah blah but the trade-off is maybe they're a little bit smaller and maybe they can't withstand six and a half months of winter right so you know the guys we we're gonna go seven more minutes we're gonna make three hours um I do not plan on keeping you guys on this long I appreciate it's been I've learned a ton of stuff from this um and it's also made me think about some things a little bit differently as well props to Bob for being the consummate scholar and down to earth hey hey I don't know what that consummate word means but um it's got to be a good thing it sounded really good uh four beekeepers we don't we don't know those Ten Dollar Words um but yeah Bob is a pretty cool um you know uh Bob how old are you I'll be 70 in November your November baby too I was born in November were you born in November yeah November that's part of our problem you know we're Scorpios or you know yes so the wife's a Scorpio too so that's two Scorpios married I don't know I don't know anything about that but now I've got to find out um you know uh but yeah so but you don't act like you're 70 at all you told me the other day we were well the other day it was the last time we spoke at a place together and you're like hey man I'm kind of slowing down a little bit and I'm like Bob you're slowing Downs more than any guy my age is doing so I mean um it's you're still putting a lot of stuff out there and and you've taught yourself a lot of things too um and I'm not trying to pick on you at all I was actually quite the compliment where a lot of people in your age group refuse to embrace technology for what it is I think technology is a double-edged sword for sure but like this YouTube I think has been really helpful for the beekeeping Community you you creating a lot of really good content and providing a lot of good content to myself I've learned a ton from you I think Ian's probably learned a thing or two oh for sure and and being able to share so yeah we really appreciate you um taking the time to to learn all these things that really most people in in your generation don't take the time to learn all this newfangled stuff it has been newfangled stuff for me too trust me you I uh when I started making YouTube videos I well let's just say I've learned a lot too you know I've it's really stretched my brain cells out truly well you've called me a few times and and a lot of times I had to get Laurel to help you out but um when he first started the YouTube channel um but all the editing and stuff um you've done your videos are always really well put together and that's something I find really interesting is that a guy mentioned that earlier Ian's videos are um you know just like really raw you know kind of gripping videos I consider myself more in between where mine are semi-raw but um also more for hobbyists and sideliners and smaller guys like myself and I'll bring guys like you on to to provide Insight on your worlds and then Bob's got a totally different way of presenting and it's it's quite interesting the dynamic there and I I appreciate you guys very much I appreciate you coming to our our conference as well that was a lot of fun my only regret is um it was so short um maybe I shouldn't ask and maybe he doesn't have an answer is Ian going to be able to come to the next conference I have to be invited first I just assumed it was understood I'm going to shut up I'm done well you know Ian's one of those things I mean there's a lot of foods like this small doses you know um you know yeah it's best to probably stretch me out a little bit further that's right no we we had a great time um and it's not something that is not off the table at all honestly um that's part of my problem is since we're running hundreds of hives and and really it's my fault let's just be honest here Laurel tries to warn me before I jump off the cliff into doing too many bees um or trying to do too many YouTube videos or too many speaking engagements and and we're not as smart as you guys I'm not as smart as you guys yet where I haven't learned how to utilize um help through employees and other things like that but that is coming it's been quite a growing process to be able to get where we are and the conference takes a lot of time so I'm really behind on a lot of things I have people every day asking me if they can become a vendor I have folks asking me if they can plan their trip because they're wanting to come from Africa or another country and prep their visas and it's very humbling and an honor to be asked those things but to my shame I there's just not enough time in the day to be able to get it all done so Ian's definitely not off the uh the billing one of the things that we've we've often considered doing is even if the person wasn't going to speak just ha bringing them out anyways or maybe just have them give one presentation and then just be there for the camaraderie Hive life is about networking as much as anything and we really want people to come there and be able to learn to gain friends and to also go in the trade show and be able to see the product firsthand meet the people making the products be able to provide instant feedback like hey this is a product that I really like I don't think people understand how important that feedback is I got an email today I was kind of feeling a little down and this fella said the nukes that he bought from us we're just doing really good and how much he appreciated versus nukes that he had purchased in the past and and uh yeah that really mattered to me it I really appreciated that feedback and I had some people at Hive life who produce products and they're like man this has been great for us not so much for I mean we've made money but the most important thing that we've gained is Insight on what the people actually like and people are coming up to us and going hey could you do that and some of them you know this beekeeper that has three hives has given this company a whole brand new idea that was actually a good one and that's what high of life is really about is about the networking and uh putting that energy back into the bee industry um it's it should be exciting so um you know we've run into three hours I didn't mean for the last little bit of it to be dwelling on my conference or anything but um boy I appreciate you guys taking a lot of time out of your day and um thank you we got a lot of really nice comments um people thanking you for you guys coming on if there's anything that I can do for you guys you know how to get a hold of me and I won't charge you anything except if you know a few bad jokes along the way laughs like I've been watching in the conversation on the farm has been uh is working so they hadn't needed to call me out to the field so it worked out quite well Gary was out in the bee yard I think she just got back at eight so you know she got the work done anyway so it all worked out good bless her heart well um yeah if you guys need anything let me know um Bob Ian thank you guys so much anything that you got to say before we uh turn off the lights no just a pleasure chatting with you came in and Bob it's nice to see you again so yeah thanks for fielding my package questions that's kind of a it came and said you know I want to have you two on there I said well I'm going to hijack it because I have some questions I got to ask Bob that's really enjoyable yeah we went places I didn't expect uh have a great rest of uh your weekend we'll talk to you later everybody thanks for coming on and happy beekeeping we'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 92,524

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Id: yt1Ya9t-k-M

Length: 182min 4sec (10924 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023