 Good morning everybody and thanks for coming. Yes my name is Jeffrey Hamelman and I never used the word retire by the way because that's sort of a disease I think so I just left my baking job after 41 years but that's okay. So we're going to talk about bees for a couple of hours and there might be a problem and that is that I really don't know how to shut up when I'm talking about bees so we could be here another 24 hours after that so but a couple of things before we get started there's a handout back there of just some interesting fun facts about bees if you didn't get a copy you might want to grab it. I brought several books with me I probably won't stay too much longer after this is over so feel free while I'm talking if you want to browse through some books or anything like that and the best format I think to do our program this morning would be to just keep the floor open so if you have questions as we go along no need to wait until the end we'll just raise your hand and we'll talk about them as they come up so I live in Hartland down by White River and I've been keeping bees since 1982 maybe it would be equally accurate to say the bees have been keeping me since 1982 there seem to be two types of people in the world I know I'm painting a pretty broad brushstroke here but it seems like there are people who when they look inside of a beehive they are filled with this profound dread and they just want to get away as quickly as possible there are other people who look inside a beehive and they're filled with this often life changing profound fascination. Bees really are an extraordinary species of animals we'll be talking about starting with bees and the kind of equipment you need locations pests and diseases all that manner of thing plus whatever questions come up but we might also meander into some of the more fascinating things about bees as we keep talking so off we go how many people have bees great how many years if you're trying and failing yes it does how many years have you been trying three years three years okay it breaks my heart yeah I know the feeling well yeah yeah I'm sorry maybe I'll have a couple of tips that might help your success rate a little bit okay and how long have you been keeping bees 30 yeah how many colonies do you keep yeah yeah yeah and you have bees yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's more of a challenge than ever to keep bees as probably everybody knows I've never been a commercial beekeeper my love of it is such that the most I've ever had is 12 colonies because if it gets more than that it feels like work and it's not I'm not interested in it as a work sideline income kind of thing I'm interested in it even if there weren't honey at the end of a good season I would probably still keep bees simply for the fascination of keeping bees so how many people hope to keep bees that's beautiful to see okay yeah well it's a real different world now when I started in 1982 I never knew what my motive was it was as if just one morning I woke up and there was this realization that oh I have to keep bees I hadn't read books certainly there was no YouTube or videos or anything I was living on Chappaquiddick on Martha's Vineyard at the time and so there were no fellow beekeepers I could become a protege towards so I don't know what really prompted me but as soon as I did I had kind of fallen down that rabbit hole of fascination and I guess I never looked back over the years again I've never had more than 12 that's plenty for me right now I like to keep it at about eight I like to keep them all at my house you know you'll find if you start keeping bees that you're gonna get a lot of people that say oh why don't you keep a colony at my house over here because it's great for them and why don't you keep a colony over here and then before you know it you know you're logging 10,000 miles this summer just visiting bees on other people's property so I like to keep mine personally nice and close so that I can sit out there I've got a chair that I sit in I'll put it really accurately where it's located so if that's the first colony I get a chair I sit right here and now and again my wife has to come out and wake me up because I'm not joking I fall sound asleep so I came to Vermont full-time in 1983 and I think I joined the Vermont beekeepers association in 84 or 85 one thing I would encourage anyone who's really interested in bees is to join VBA it's a wonderful wonderful organization that's very dedicated to education it's a whopping $15 a year to be a member we have a winter meeting that always takes place in conjunction with the Vermont farm show which forever in a day was in Barry and then I don't know five or six years ago it got too big for Barry so now it's up in Essex that winter meeting has only opened to members of VBA and that'll be taking place a week from Tuesday if you're interested and it's always at the farm show on the Tuesday and then in the summer we have a meeting that ranges all over the state this summer it'll be in Swanton last summer it was where was it last summer I can't remember we had it in Heartland a few years ago where I live and I was secretary of VBA for about five years the bylaws say that officers are able to serve for three years so I kind of said after five years I don't want to go to jail so I'm going to stop being the secretary but I've been already warned that next Tuesday at the winter meeting I've been kind of conscripted to become the treasurer we'll see how that goes so anyway a great organization if you really seriously want to be involved in bees because you can learn so much from the real masters again I'm an amateur who's very very passionate about bees there are some real masters in Vermont whose knowledge is really extensive and it's available so you want to keep bees what do you need well you don't need a ton of land there are bees being kept on top of the Louvre in Paris there are bees being kept on rooftops in a lot of cities in the US London has bees Brooklyn probably has you know one colony of bees per hipster and there's a lot of hipsters in Brooklyn so there's a lot of bees in Brooklyn so you can keep bees in most locales in Vermont we're very very lucky because our climate tends to be favorable for beekeeping of course we all know you're all gardeners I'm a gardener too and we all know that the climate really is getting crazy so there are plenty of years where these days it only rains once in July it starts on the first and it ends on the 31st that kind of rain so we're seeing a lot of really wacko stuff of course but Vermont is very very favorable in that when the first pollen and nectar is available which where I live is usually the end of March or very beginning of April with the poplars followed by the soft maples and then there's willows and things like that but usually by the first of April or so if the weather is favorable the bees can get out and collect nectar and pollen and in a good year something is blooming right through the Asters in October and this is really great because the bees have a steady source of a very very very diet there are many parts of the country if you lived in say Virginia or the Southeast or many parts of California you'll get these early nectar flows they might be over by the beginning of May and then there is nothing until the autumn so typically beekeepers then have to be feeding their bees in summer which seems really bizarre for somebody who's used to keeping bees in Vermont so we are we are in a favorable state if you're in a very wooded area you probably won't get too much honey I lived for many years down outside Brattleboro I owned a bakery for a long time in Brattleboro and my bees were near a lot of woods and really the most I could really get was maybe 40 pounds of honey surplus honey from a colony and that would have been that would have felt like a pretty good year where I am now in Heartland it's much more mixed is more open land as well as a lot of forest and there's this is still mind-boggling to me there was one three or four years ago one of my colonies yielded over 200 pounds of honey and that's the stuff that I take that's not the stuff that they also keep for themselves to get through the year that was extra honey so that's pretty starting I consider again since I'm not expert commercial beekeeper if I get 75 pounds from a colony I feel like this is pretty great and I'm happy with anything because my goal is to have healthy bees and so actually twice in the last 36 years of beekeeping I did not take any honey and that was because I felt like you know it's been a rough summer for the bees and I'm gonna leave everything for them so that they can be strong alright so if you have the choice you'll want a location that is reasonably sunny this will help the bees get started in the mornings if you can do it you'll want your bees to be at the top of a rise as opposed to at the bottom moist air pools downhill and if your bees are kept in an area that's constantly moist it's it's not good for them they're not happy there for one thing so if you're near a brook or something that might not be a very favorable place to put the bees so if you can have a little elevation let the colder air and the moisture air drain down that will be great again if you have the choice face the colony to the south or southeast something like that that'll enable the early light to come in warm up the hive get the bees going so and if you don't have that any of those options or if you only have some of those options you can still keep bees right what do you need well then you need equipment clearly this isn't new equipment but this is I'll show you right from the bottom on up this is a bottom board which you'll need a lot of beekeepers these days use what's called the screened bottom board so this would actually be quarter-inch hardware cloth covering most of this surface here quarter-inch hardware cloth meaning it will keep a lot of critters from coming up through it and the principle behind the screened bottom board is that Varroa mites which are really the worst plague of bees for the last 25 30 years Varroa mites that are groomed by the bees and fall off will fall through the screen and won't be able to get back up so they'll die it's not any longer considered to be a particularly effective way to treat for Varroa because not that many fall through and die so there's other strategies that you have to employ and I want to use that term carefully but if you want to be one of these so I'm just gonna you know let the bees do their thing and I'm not gonna treat them or take care of them in any way they will die they absolutely will die unless you are one of probably 10 cutting-edge experts in the world who really successfully have been able to evolve their local bees so that they are completely resistant to these mites then your bees are gonna die end of story right there we'll talk more about that later so you start with the bottom board on top of that typically goes a deep hive body this is a deep hive body when you first get bees you'll need one of these but if you're going to get bees you'll want to get enough equipment at the outset so that you can have in a good year you might make some honey the first year so you'll want to have enough equipment so that you're not saying okay I needed to put on another one of these deep bodies a week ago and it hasn't come in the mail yet then you're behind and you always want to be one step ahead of the bees so you're gonna start with one hive body typically two deep hive bodies is considered the year-round house for the bees right this will hold 10 frames and we'll get into frames in a moment so if I got some bees and I started them out in one and they're probably filling three four or five frames I'll give them 10 frames and when they get up to about seven or eight that they're occupying I'll put on the second story this is their year-round brood chamber so we'll call that either we'll call those two stories the brood chamber okay that's their year-round house you don't take honey from there you will be checking on your bees in the brood chambers but this is their year-round quarters on top of that goes an inner cover which is here it's got a as you see a vent hole there also most of them when you buy them they have a little notch here this is for ventilation in the winter it's actually an upper entrance some inner covers don't come with this so you would just saw it out so that you have that for the bees okay so these are pretty much components that every beehive is going to have bottom board start with one deep hive body brood chamber put on a second and then this is going to be filled with frames there are many many many ways to utilize frames in the old days when I started out you would have top bar sidebars bottom bar and you would buy pure beeswax foundation this thin sheet here is called a sheet of foundation it's embossed with a hexagon which is the shape that the bees utilize to draw out and use to store their brood or their honey or their pollen or whatever but this is called foundation in the old days the foundation you'd buy there was only one style and it would have these vertical wires five or six wires and then what you would have to do is put in cross wires back and forth three or four times get them nice and tight then you'd have to heat this little knurled roller and you'd roll it over the wires and that would melt the wax so that the wires would be embedded in the wax it was very time consuming I never bothered much because I like doing it it was a nice winter activity to get my frames ready but nowadays there's so many different options on what kind of frames you can buy you can still buy what I just described it's called crimp wired foundation I don't use that anymore not so much for the time I really don't want to be too much involved in getting bees wax from the commercial industry because the wax is not particularly clean anymore there's a lot of stuff that's showing up in wax chemical residues and things like that that I don't really want to see in my hive so I stop using the crimp wired foundation so this is called Dura guilt this is a sheet of plastic that has wax on both sides of it and there's you might be able to see this on each end you can see I don't know if it looks shiny or not but there's a metal strip here that that vertical strip that gives the frame some strength and then instead of all that tedious cross wiring you put in these things that are protruding here just above my finger those are called support pins they're basically stout bobby pins basically and you put them in from the side and so couple of those on each side plus that vertical metal bar and you've got enough strength right so what are the bees going to do when they have this well the next thing they're going to do is draw out the foundation this is called drawn comb you can see down here the residue of plastic that wasn't drawn out but all the rest of this has been drawn out so the bees I'll pass this around it's a beautiful sight the bees they use a hexagon it's the it's got two characteristics it's the strongest shape that's possible that enables the greatest amount of storage space so clearly a circle would be silly because you've got all that space between circles too much wasted space a square doesn't have enough strength so a hexagon is meant to be the strongest shape in nature the bees draw the comb out into a hexagon they'll use each of those cells to store water pollen nectar nectar that's been ripened into honey the queen will lay eggs in there the eggs will hatch into larva the larva will then pupate and will be covered with a coating of wax and just sort of hive residue it's not pure wax that covers the brood and then those will hatch and become young bees right so this is a multi-purpose shape that one you'll see if you notice that on the surface of it on the top bar it says 14 I tend to put the date on frames of what year I put it into the hive just so I have a sense of how old the frames are there's another drawn comb this one maybe even is more interesting because two characteristics here what do you see on this one that's different from that one it's much darker what does that signify I wonder because I've got something that way yeah yeah what it signifies is that it's much older right the bees have walked over this a lot more a lot more brood has been laid in there and that and so it darkens with age well actually yes and if you see here this is evidence of cross wires right so this started out as that frame that I mentioned that you have to go back and forth and back and forth what else do you see that's different you might not see it because this hasn't really gone around yet yeah look at that huh what's that all about nope nope but you see the size difference on the bottom rows can you see that larger cells yeah all right larger cells signify drones right so you have one queen in a hive you've got upwards of 50,000 workers in the middle of the summer that are females and then you've got drones the drones are the largest and so when you see these large cells you'll know that's where the drones were laid by the queen okay and curiously that frame doesn't have any drone cells at all which is very very rare right what the queen does is she dips her abdomen into the cell she'll walk around and she'll kind of inspect each cell with her antennae and then she'll choose a cell and dip her abdomen into it and then lay the appropriate eggs so it's pretty fascinating I'm probably jumping ahead a little bit but we might as well since we're talking about this so a queen is born in a hive and we can get into more details about how she's born how she's chosen how she's raised and all that but once the queen is born she's in this black box and she has to go on a mating flight she's not fertilized yet she needs to mate to get fertilized so after it usually takes I don't know maybe a week she's in the hive after hatching yes sure you can pass that too maybe somebody else wants to see it then she goes on a mating flight well where does she go well there's these things called drone congregating areas think of a singles bar in college right the drones that go to those drone congregating areas were not alive last year they might not have been alive last month but the drone congregating areas are the same year after year so somehow the drones and the queen know where these places are there I think they're supposed to be about 20 feet in the air and when the queen goes on mating flights she goes to a drone congregating area there's all these drones there they mate with her so she's taking on the sperm from a dozen or more drones the drones are in pure ecstasy until they realize oh shit now I'm dying because they they don't live after mating with the queen their genitals are ripped out so but they're they got a smile on their face and then the queen has a lifetime of sperm and it's in various drones which means what biodiversity they're from the region that's a good question and I don't know the answer yeah no wouldn't be that much but it's probably a few miles so if there are wild hives and trees which used to be quite common until the mites came along and pretty much wiped out everything but the drones from the wild hives the feral hives would come manage hives the drones go and they mate with the queen if they're lucky so now the queen has a lifetime of sperm from multiple sources so she's got a great deal of biodiversity question generally speaking you're buying mated queens yeah yeah it's almost never do you buy an unmated queen yeah question they would and I've got some frames that I can show you too and now when the queen is laying her eggs she dips her abdomen into the cell and as the egg is coming down through her body she chooses either to open her sperm a thinker which is this valve I guess that allows the egg to be fertilized or not so if she fertilizes the egg it'll be a worker if she doesn't fertilize the egg it'll be a drone so the queen makes those decisions it varies some often they'll be further towards the perimeter there is a real method to the way they organize the whole as you would expect with something that's been doing this for a lot of years so we'll come back to those things because I want to keep talking about frames so everybody has now had a chance to see just the foundation and then the drawn comb you can also buy 100% plastic foundation which personally I don't like a lot of bee communication takes place via the comb and I don't like the aesthetics of this personally and I don't know if the bees like it or not but these this is becoming much much much more common so this looks like a sheet of foundation but everything is plastic what you would do if you bought this stuff is you'd get some wax I keep my own my own wax and I use it in certain baking and I also use it to brush on if I have any frames that are plastic I'll brush it on and that makes it more attractive to the bees a very common thing now is to buy the wooden components the top bar bottom bar and sidebars so you're having a wooden frame and plastic foundation so that's common too so you can see there's all kinds of permutations on a theme ma'am yeah yeah I think those are meant to just be ease of passage for the bees I'm pretty sure that's why they put them there and another way you can buy your frames is plastic and drawn plastic comb that's also very common that way the bees don't have to draw it out which takes a lot of energy resources and time it's already done so a lot of commercial beekeepers like that I also don't like plastic because when it gets hot it sort of bends whereas wood stays rigid so and I don't like the aesthetics personally or plastic so alright so I played around and built a wooden frame put some vertical wires here can you see these and then I just took some foundation and I glued it along here I did this with about 20 frames a couple years ago and then I just put that into a hive and they'll do the rest right and eventually they would fill this whole thing but in nature this would be the natural shape that you would see for the hives right it's their shape now please put your nose on that and smell it and then pass that around because one of the most intoxicating aromas in the world is beeswax fresh beeswax it's it's really that's enough to say I want to be a beekeeper just smelling wax right it's amazing yeah so if you've heard of top bar hives anybody heard of top bar hives okay these are they were developed actually for Kenya they're called tip the formal name would be Kenyan top bar hives because they're very cheap to build and it was a way to try to get some livelihood to people in Kenya now they're becoming more common you'll see them often in the States if you look at bee catalogs you'll probably see top bar hive type stuff top bar hive basically looks like a coffin with often slightly sloped sides and all you do is you put a piece of wood across and then a little strip of foundation or even just melt some wax and put it across the top of that bar and put that in the hive and then the bees will make that shape there's no wires there's no wooden frames other than that top strip of wood some people like it because it's the most natural I don't use top bar hives because getting the honey out of it means you're going to destroy the the wax the frame and secondly because the principle the top bar hive is the hive itself might be this wide and it might have a divider board in there so when I start out I might put in five of those wooden strips and as the bees draw that out I'll move the divider board put in a few more as they build that out few more so basically the hive is going horizontally in our climate that's not favorable because by having it spread out there's not enough warmth for the bees so that's why we have exactly so it's much favorable thank you it's much better to have a vertical hive in our climate there by the way I should have said this is the outset if you go to a meeting of beekeepers and there's 10 beekeepers sitting around and you ask them a question expect the minimum of 20 answers so everything I'm saying there could be other beekeepers there will be other beekeepers who have a completely different opinion so it comes down to your style and just how you want to approach beekeeping basically okay so did I show everything oh no so we okay so we've put bees in here we filled it up enough so that we're going to put a second deep hive body on there they're filling that up enough now we might say okay they're getting strong now I'm going to put on medium or shallow hive bodies those will call supers honey supers right so the bees are living in these two boxes and now I can put another box that's maybe this high or this high that's a medium frame that's a shallow frame this the honey supers are where the surplus honey goes so the bees are going to keep on just filling it up all year long they're going to just go to the last minute it's like in our garden you know I'll say to my wife okay what do we have 75 jars of tomatoes can this year okay but there's still some out there let's keep going right we don't know what next year is going to be like you all know that feeling right it's the same thing with the bees they're going to store as much honey as they possibly can the stuff above their brood chamber the year-round house that's the stuff that you're going to take right that's where the supers go they're going to go above the brood chamber and if they fill it out you can take it and harvest it and if you're at all like me people are going to tell you oh my god I can't believe how delicious your honey is and you're going to feel this immense pride until you realize that all you did was steal it oh my honey is so good isn't it well actually I just stole it but it is good so so do you get the sense of the components of the hive now all right the inner cover is always going to go above the highest box you have on top of that goes the outer cover and that's it okay right you'll go into them to examine your hive yes that's right not typically I'm going to finish answering your question and I'll come back to yours because it's a slightly different topic so you have those two on top of each other and then the honey you take is from those shallower that's right you wouldn't take it from here unless you're really greedy I'm sorry no not the second one remember we're going to call these the brood chamber boxes and the brood I'm sure there's photos in some of those books over there okay typically the first inspection in the spring which is usually April or so let's say you've got these two they've been on all winter bees move up that's their natural thing so in the fall as they know it's getting colder the bees will force the queen down to the bottom rearrange their honey stores so they'll empty out cells and re-pack it in different cells so that they go into the winter with the bees in the lower part of the hive and then up here they'll have their stores as the winter goes on they gradually move up as they consume their stores in the spring almost always your bees will be in the top box so the first thing that happens when you do your winter your spring cleaning is you reverse the hive bodies means the bees are up here I'm going to put that one on the bottom the other one on top that way the bees still can move up right usually yeah yeah around that season yep so that would be your spring inspection reversing is recommended it's a good thing to do but those two will always be on the bottom even though you may be switching you know bottom on this year with bottom on with the top one next year yeah they could be in either position it's not really going to matter those two will always be on the bottom and yes exactly the inner cover is going to be just above the highest box that you have so when you start and you buy bees you'll have one box one inner cover one outer cover right that's right and then after the next box goes on it'll be here you might wind up in a good year with four medium or shallow supers of honey the inner cover will always be up here or wherever the appropriate places everything else comes off the top yep or the belly it goes in one of those places right right go ahead you don't put that box on the ground yeah yeah well that's really up to you you have to consider that the higher it is if you've got three supers you might need a step ladder so you want it off the ground some people just make a crude two by four frame my usually put two cinder blocks and then a piece of wood that's larger than this there's many many ways to do it but it's favorable to have it off the ground the ground is too moist your equipment will rot pretty quickly and it can be a big problem with skunks if it's right on the ground we'll talk about that when we get to pests right wouldn't you also suppose that if you went too high and you're potentially not in a very sheltered from northwest wind thing you're risking the cold from having them much higher you know excessively high except that it's summer when these are on so that wouldn't be too much of a concern okay okay so a couple more things one this is called 10 frame equipment this will hold 10 frames each box oh maybe 10 years ago because the average age of beekeepers was going up you started seeing 8 frame equipment so it's just a slightly smaller box means little easier to lift one of these full of honey is between 90 and 100 pounds which is another good reason why you don't want to be spending the summer moving these around it's really heavy a medium super full of honey will yield about 40 to 45 pounds of honey so that doesn't count the wax the box or the frame weight but a medium with nine frames in it is going to have about 40 to 45 pounds of honey and a shallow super is going to have about 30 pounds of honey so there's substantial weight so 8 frame a lot of people are gravitating towards 8 frame equipment just because it isn't so heavy and I know some wonderful people who have been absolutely dedicated to beekeeping for decades who stopped beekeeping has everybody seen this did everybody smell it okay if you didn't like the aroma your car is somewhere out there I know people that have gotten out of beekeeping just because it got too heavy and they are committed to the bees but they just can't do the work which is sad so 8 frame can be favorable in that regard another thing to point out is that it's becoming more common in Vermont and other cold states to have the brood chamber comprised not just of two deeps but two deeps in a medium or two deeps and a shallow you'll see that very very commonly the principle behind that is if the bees have that extra super either a medium or a shallow they have that much more stores to get through the winter right and beekeepers go back and forth on whether or not that's the best way to go or not question well you would there are visual clues without even pulling out frames because you can see the drawn comb just looking in there alternatively you could do the following this is like super jiffy and it's not really disruptive to the bees you could go like that and you can see how much is drawn out you can see some brood and then that would be a very non-invasive way to say yeah time for another one but ideally what you're going to do is be looking into the bees because you're going to want to see how the brood pattern is is the queen laying is she vigorous is it sloppy pattern how do they look right for that you'll need some tools and equipment it doesn't take too too too much you're going to need a hive tool that's about five or six bucks right there they come in many forms this is a pretty standard one that has been around forever in a day I always keep at least a couple because if you lose one you don't want to be out a hive tool so you better off buying a couple and I should probably paint both of these so that they have so that they're if I drop them in the grass I can see them I like to keep if I'm checking on all my hives I like to be able to write down what's going on just so when I get inside I can be writing I keep a little page for each hive that I have and I like to fill in how things are looking what else do you need this is a frame spacer so as we said this will hold 10 frames when it's all drawn out and full of bees getting a frame out can be tough it's easy to squish bees right there's not much space between the frames so a lot of beekeepers once they've drawn out all 10 they pull one out and they keep only nine in the box that way it's easier to pull frames out without crushing bees I personally prefer nine frames a lot of beekeepers say no tends the way you'll have more bees in each box I don't like to kill bees I know it's inevitable if you're going to be a beekeeper I feel like I kill fewer bees if I keep nine frames so this is simply so that I can then go in here and space the frames correctly because can everybody just see here the bees have what's called bee space it's roughly three eighths of an inch to the bees that means enough space to build our frames not excess but not too small if you had less than three eighths the bees might close the whole thing off if you have more than three eighths the bees are likely to build what's called Burke home so they'll say oh look at all this extra space we can get another frame in here well they don't have the wooden frame so they're just building it in between two frames and it's going to really muck up your whole hive because then if there's brood in there you're going to have to decide if you're going to kill all that brood to get your spacing back to normal so keeping your frame space properly is really important so it's a lot easier for me to just use this put it in there and then I know that's good so that's kind of down the pike yes yes you always start with ten because think of it like this if I only had nine in there there's a lot of space between that flat sheet and the next flat sheet so the bees are going to definitely build Burke home between them and it's going to screw everything up so you start with ten once all ten are like this then you decide if you want to go with nine or ten if you space it well they won't make build Burke home in a nine frame hive when you're starting them out initially where I have I've always noticed the center four or six frames are always built out sure the last two or four on the outside that's right that's right now does it pay I've kind of wondered about this too at some point take those that are built out of the war and swap places you can do that with the following caveat okay everybody understands what that question was the center frames are going to get okay let's look at this is sort of like looking at one frame is sort of like looking at an MRI it's just this little slice of a hole right and it can be misleading let's look at it in terms of a three-dimensional brood nest right so think of the shape of I don't know we'll say a football it's not really a football but if you put a football in this hive these outer frames are not part of where the brood is being laid the brood is where the football is right and out here there's no football so you can then when you're starting out and the bees are starting to build stuff out you can say oh well the brood is in here these four this frame has nectar and pollen which they keep near the brood because they got to feed the brood this frame has nectar and pollen but there's no brood in here so i'm going to take this frame and put it out there so i can put this frame in here and have them draw that frame out you can do that with the nectar and pollen you don't do it with the brood so if the brood is again if you had brood here you would not say i'm going to move this one out here so that i can put this one in here so they can draw that out don't mess the brood nest never mess up the brood nest okay they organize it in a certain way for a certain reason okay yes well the problem is when you've got six or seven drawn out you're going to put the second box on right and they're then going to move up and then they're going to tend to ignore the outer ones in the lower box so you want to be you want to be careful about just leaving it the other thing is if you leave it until they worked all of it out they might say wow we're pretty strong look at that we don't have any more space we filled this out we don't have any more space we're strong enough to swarm let's go and take our great gene pool and send half the bees into the woods so you want to that's why you want to have all your equipment before you start with bees so that you're not saying oh boy i wish i had another box because this is getting full and i don't have one yet you need that everything ready before the season starts um that would be a time you could do that if they've drawn out all 10 that would be a time you could bring one of them that would induce them to move up you could put that right in the middle up top yeah yeah okay how the heck do you get bees anyway there are a couple of ways one is package bees that's very very common there are millions and millions and millions of package bees that are sold in the united states every year and basically the way that works is you find a company that's selling packages there's a lot of them this is a very good company just over the border in new york state and grenitz new york so down near the baton kill better bee you can buy package bees from them this is one of the primary probably the better of the two main bee journals in america this is american bee journal and there'll be ads for 30 different companies selling package bees in here package bees are the following they tend to be raised in the south because they can get a big jump on the season and these companies raise millions and millions of bees and they raise queens and when it's time to make the packages you get this box that's about the size of a shoe box but two sides are screened two of the long sides are screened and the rest of it is wood thin wood and they put a funnel in the opening there's an opening this big in the top of the box they put a funnel in there and they shake in three pounds of bees then they take a queen which is not related it's not the mother of these bees the queen is god knows where from they raised it and she's mated and they put the queen in a little cage screened cage with half a dozen worker bees to be the attendants to feed her and groom her and give her water and then they put I should have brought a queen cage and then they put a little piece of its fondant so it looks like a marshmallow but it's a little thicker let's say they shove that in one of the little holes in the queen cage and then put a cork over that then they suspend that queen in the package she it's not just sitting there floating around while the package is shipped it's it's held in place yeah it's held in place and then they put in a can that holds about a pound of sugar syrup so the bees have something to drink on their trip north and then they ship the bees north they used to ship packages to zone five in vermont now they don't do that anymore so for many many years i would order four packages of bees and the post office would call me and say your bees are here can you come and get them because inevitably some of the bees wouldn't make it into the screened box so when you get your packages there's some bees that came all the way from georgia that are on the outside of that box which the post office isn't real happy about so nowadays you can't get them shipped to zone five so but there's a lot of companies that drive to georgia with the semi pick up 400 packages bring them back north and you just have to drive to pick them up at that destination so if you order packages from better be that catalog you're going to have to drive to grenad's new york to pick them up that kind of deal and then you would get the packages you'd install one package in each box um the queen is still in her cage the reason she's in the cage is because since she's not related to the bees genetically the bees would kill her she's a foreigner they would kill her immigration policy but there's you raised that i didn't say that okay we're not going there that's okay we're all fishing too so you're all right um so then what's the deal with that little marshmallow like stuff the fondant well when you then put the bees into the hive you've shaken the bees out they're in here now you take that queen in her cage you take the little cork that's covering the fondant and then you stick the queen in here so that the fondant is facing up the bees it'll take them two or three days to eat through the fondant during that time they will have gotten fully accustomed to the aroma of the queen so they'll accept her and even during the shipping time they're still right there i think during the shipping time they're just holding on for dear life so that's how you install a package and it's hard to visualize that whole process i'm sure so i'm sure i've not tried this but i'm sure if you went to youtube you could find multiple conflicting descriptions on how you install a package all right so that's a common way you buy a package three pounds of bees one queen not related the other thing you can do is buy a nucleus colony also rather indelicately called a nuke and a nuke means you're buying five frames that are all drawn out of bees and a queen they are related they're are all stages of bees in that little mini at your hive so nucleus basically meaning a little mini at your hive so you've got eggs larva pupa that are all genetically related you've got worker bees that are all genetically related you've got a queen that's genetically related right that's also a very common way to do it the best ones are the ones that are raised in my opinion on site so if you're buying a nuke from a guy that takes his bees to south carolina in the winter and makes up a bunch of nukes because the season is longer and then drives back to vermont and sells them to you it's not the end of the world but if you buy nukes from the few people in vermont who are raising them you're buying northern queens that have shown that they can live through the climate you're buying basically local bees right so you're going to have all kinds of opinions from people about do i want to buy packages do i want to buy nukes it can go either way they're each going to cost you roughly a hundred nukes going to go for 150 bucks these days for five frames of bees and a package is 125 or so so there's not really much of a difference between the two so that's more or less personal preference the better bee out of new york are they getting their bees from south they get them from the south yes they are more of a distributor yes yes yes they drive down and pick them up they drive down and pick them up and if you went vba vermont beekeepers association just two weeks ago posted online a list of vermont providers of nukes and packages so you can go to the website and check that out if you're interested in that it's it doesn't mean they're all raised in vermont right but that's you can get packages from this guy who drives down to georgia or florida and drives back up right this they're pretty much all over the state okay so where are we okay and interlude how about this okay how many people have a cat how many people have a dog okay we all know when the cat or the dog is hungry grouchy sleepy wants to go out isn't that incredible not really but in a way we speak english they don't speak english how come we know what they're telling us i don't know but we're able to communicate across species you should see the bees if you want to see cross species communication here's an example bees see ultraviolet light we don't the apple blossoms are out okay it's may and all the wild apples all the domestic apples they're all out when a bee has pollinated an apple blossom the blossom turns darker the tree is putting out a message to the bees saying hey i'm already pollinating no no no don't waste your time don't come here right what's the benefit the tree wants every apple blossom pollinated they don't want bees wasting time visiting ones that already got pollinated the bees want as much pollen as they can because that's what their brood needs right so the bees don't want to be going to waste time on blossoms so the blossom turns darker cross species communication anybody it's unbelievable when the bees visit a flower and drain the nectarine they leave a scent the scent tells their sisters hey it's gone don't waste your time the scent dissipates roughly at the same time that the nectarine is filled again right these are those i call them commonplace miracles of nature the things that surround us that we're barely aware of but that are happening in millions of different ways all the time and you know our vision is so kind of coarse that we don't see those things but this is you know if you want to talk about all right here's another thing we're going to stay on this interlude sorry so we are those warm-blooded creatures right insects are cold-blooded okay we know what that means that means if it's 50 degrees outside the bee is 50 degrees if it's 70 degrees outside the bee is 70 degrees they're cold-blooded oh yeah bees can increase their body temperature to over 100 degrees at will right so if you're a bee all right it's the end of january almost pretty soon very soon the queen is going to start laying eggs how i don't know they can't see that the sun's rising earlier they're in a black box but the queen knows there's some kind of hard wire and dna she knows that it's time to start laying eggs wherever there's eggs that little spot of brood nest is kept at 95 fahrenheit 24-7 right so we had 25 below in hartland a couple weeks ago i'm sure you had the same or colder here and it won't be unusual to get 10 15 20 below in february that used to be routine maybe it's not so routine anymore but definitely there's brood in february uh those that brood is kept at 95 fahrenheit how do the bees do that well pollen is protein the brood requires pollen adult bees don't require pollen they require carbohydrates which is honey so they consume the carbohydrates and convert it to heat that's how they warm the brood nest but they also are able to okay so what do we mean the brood nest okay so it's february and there's this much brood on this frame let's say some bees whose job description is that they are now warmer bees they will unhinge their flight muscles and lay down on top of the open cell of egg or larva and vibrate their body really really really rapidly to create heat other bees will plunge themselves into cells adjacent to the open brood and do the same they pulsate you could their abdomen is pulsating to create heat right so here's these insects that are supposedly cold-blooded who are doing that the other thing the bees do well where's that strip frame okay how do they do this anyway well bees go through a series of job descriptions from the time they're born right as soon as they hatch the first thing is okay clean your room already so the first thing they do is they they're cleaning their own room and then they go around and they're cleaning cells in readiness polishing the cells so that the queen can now have fresh cells to lay in that's their first job they stay very close to the center of the brood nest and gradually over the course of their life they are going a little bit further towards the perimeter and when they're roughly three weeks old in the summer spring and summer then they will become field bees and if they're lucky they'll live another three weeks and they'll be the ones that are gathering nectar and pollen and water right so they go through a series of job descriptions first they're cleaning up then they might be taking in nectar and pollen from the forager bees and depositing it in cells they're feeding bees gradually then they're getting closer to the entrance of the hive they might become guard bees who are keeping the hive safe by checking every bees aroma that's coming in and only allowing in bees from their hive with some exceptions but at one point when they're I don't know how old I don't think it's much more than a week they have glands on their belly on their abdomen from which they secrete wax and then they manipulate the wax in order to build comb well wax is either solid like this it can be semi-crystalline or it can be liquid well when they build these hexagons they need to have liquid wax so these cold-blooded insects are able to raise their body temperature over 100 degrees I think it might be 109 when they exude the wax plates from their abdomen they melt it and they start on each side of the comb of the frame building comb so there's bees here and there's bees here so it's sort of like the transcontinental railroad when they did that one and then they pounded in that stake somewhere in Utah when they made the railway go across the country in the 1800s the bees start here and here and somehow they wind up in the center and it all looks of one piece when they melt the wax by raising their body temperature the image that i read that really worked well was if you take two soap bubbles they're round that's their natural shape but if they come together they form a straight line well the bees utilize that characteristic of physics or whatever it is when they build their hexagons they take two adjacent wax and they put them together to form that straight line and eventually that's how they form their hexagon so that they that's how they build their comb so here again we have these cold-blooded insects who are able to raise their temperature at will depending upon what the task at hand is there was a question that I was ignoring did you have a question back no go ahead no that's the baby bees that's the adult bees it's yeah it's a hatched bee so queen lays an egg it looks like it's standing up in the bottom of the cell it looks like a very miniature grain of rice right five bucks really good if i want to see what's going on after three days the egg hatches and now it's a larva now it's laying down in the cell and it's shaped like the letter c and gradually gets bigger and bigger and bigger and after another few days or so the larva so the egg becomes the larva which then becomes a pupa so it spins a cocoon and that's when it's covered right okay and then that hatches and now that bee is a young adult and she'll clean the cells yeah yeah yeah yeah like dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of time a day okay so the bees um secret enzymes from there i think it's from their hypo pharyngeal glands um that's a lot of syllables i would expect you'd be a little more impressed um but it might not be the hypo pharyngeal the bees add enzymes to the honey and pollen to to make what's called bee bread which is the nourishment that they feed to the larva so all the larvae are fed this bee bread if the bees decide they need to make a new queen they'll take a cell and just give it more of the bee bread and that will then give it this supercharged nutrition so that they can make a queen so if the bees a worker takes 21 days from egg to hatching a drone the males take 24 days but a queen only takes 16 days that's because she's on this very accelerated diet question i will ask this spring probably yes well there's two ways the bees would create a new queen if okay so the queen is putting out pheromones that are saying to the colony i'm here i'm well smell me the queen is not feeding herself or grooming herself worker bees are doing that right and then they're passing her scent on to other bees so it's spread through the hive so the bees feel like okay all is good i can smell her it's all good if the colony gets too populace essentially that means the queen's pheromone is diluted they're not getting as much sense of it and so some bees basically just change their job description and instead of becoming forager bees going for nectar and pollen they become house hunting bees and they say now it's time to swarm we're so strong that we're going to divide our gene pool and spread it out somewhere and we're going to create our own declaration of independence right that's right so in that case the bees would take it's usually several eggs there could be 20 or more and they will make swarm cells they almost always are along the bottom of a frame near the brood in the brood chamber and you can tell a swarm cell because it's looks like a peanut it's that long unmistakable you know it early on it might be easy to confuse a drone cell which has a slight capping that's higher than the than the plane of the frame and you'll say oh that must be a swarm cell no soon enough when you see a real swarm cell they're big because it's got to hold the whole queen so you'll see all those swarm cells along the bottom the queen knows they're there but she also knows that before they hatch she is taken off with half the bees so if your swarm if your colony swarms you've just lost half your bees you've probably lost half or more of your honey crop too it's a wonderful thing for the bees because it spreads their genetic map right so it is a good thing for the bees that's swarming no beekeeper particularly likes it i'm trying to train myself to like it and sometimes i can fool myself into thinking that i like it but if i can capture a swarm that's a wonderful wonderful feeling so that's swarming the other time the bees are going to create queens is if they feel like their resident queen isn't pulling her weight right the golf course but the brood pattern is no good um she's not laying a lot of workers whatever if the bees feel like their existing queen is not up to the job they kill her but first they take eggs that she's laid feed them that special diet and they make different kind of cell it's called the supersedes your cell they're superseding the queen those cells always are in this part of the frame if you see cells down here those are swarm cells your colony is going to swarm once they're there it's very very very unlikely that you'll be able to change their mind they've already made up their mind basically the cells are evidence and there's nothing you can do about it supersedes your cell means we're getting this queen ain't working she's not doing a good job we're killing her and we're going to start with a new one whether or not the queen knows that those supersedes your cells are there i don't know the answer question it might happen but when it's time for the bees to swarm it is one of the most fascinating acts of have you ever seen a swarm it's extraordinary isn't it it looks like this immense amount of chaos this it's a cloud of bees yeah they always go i don't know three or four feet higher than my highest ladder that seems to be no seriously when you see a swarm of bees it's it's it'll strike fear in your heart but it's the safest thing of all because the bees are leaving with their queen they've chased her around on the comb for a few days before swarming because they wanted to lose weight so that she can fly then they give a message some bees start piping and kind of budding up against other bees saying come on start your engines we're getting ready and then those bees give the same message and then usually late morning early afternoon on a sunny day you'll see this cloud of bees that looks like chaos it looks like the end of the world and it looks like oh my god i'm going to be stung a thousand times it's one of the most peaceful times of all for the bees because they've engorged on honey so that when they get to their next home they have something to start making wax with and building a home and they're with their queen so they're very very docile actually and i had an extraordinary experience a few years ago i had a swarm down near my garden on this locus post that was holding um a wire around raspberry bushes and the swarm was low which was great so they usually they'll go to a resting place and then they actually have a town meeting to decide where their real next home is going to be some scouts are going out looking right scouts are going out looking coming back and then saying to their sisters yeah i didn't find such a great place somebody else is coming back and said you won't believe this place so depending on upon the alacrity of the returning house hunters they will attract others to go and verify that yeah that site looks pretty good they're going to take measurements of the opening they're going to take measurements of the volume inside they're going to take all kinds of measurements of the house then they'll come back and they'll say to their sisters this place is great check it out and finally the bees decide based on how many votes went for this site compared to this site compared to this site they'll decide where they're going to go but generally they first will congregate some place usually you can see it from the hive they left and often it's high but it it's not that uncommon for it to be on a fence or on a bush or something so i had a swarm that was around this post what did i do i went and i got a hive body with frames in it i put an old sheet on the ground right by the post i put the hive body close and then i took a bee brush and actually i held the the the the hive body under the frame and then i just started brushing the bees into the box well if you get the queen into the box all is good the rest of the bees will follow if you don't these bees are out and they're right back here so this was in a location where i really couldn't do that brushing so i put the hive next to it with a sheet and i just got down on my knees and i was really placid and i just started brushing my way through into the internal part of the swarm just kind of pushing bees out of the way i had on those i had on these gloves this is what a lot of beekeepers wear they're just sort of the thing you wash dishes with because the bees you can get stung but they're much more sensitive than these big clunky gloves that most beekeepers wear that infuriate the bees because you're always banging frames and all this stuff so anyway what all i'm in the middle of the swarm and i see the queen i reach in she's gone so okay i'll try it again i was feeling super peaceful so it was very out of characteristics so then i keep on brushing through brushing through brushing through about 15 minutes later i see the queen she's gone my wife starts coming down towards the garden and i'm brushing through again and when she gets close i say honey i think i'm gonna have to let nature take its course um this swarm is gone and at that moment i saw the queen for the third time i'll take a polygraph on this i promise this really happened i saw the queen i picked her up put her in the hive every bee turned around and marched right in it was unbelievable that's what i said that's what i said so it was so easy so not dramatic that landed in a lilac bush the only challenge was i was on a 10 foot step ladder on a slope like this yeah use milk crates under a couple of legs the step ladder to lose it yeah didn't have times i didn't know how long i'm gonna be there didn't suit up i went up there nothing but shorts i didn't know they were docile i'm a dead man right i go up there with a pair of lockers and hold on to the branch my teeth and cut the branch with the lockers and then grab that branch and come down the step ladder and then just shook it into the hive swarm box and i just shook it into the swarm box and but it was easy it was it wasn't any skill yeah like they picked a good place for me yes exactly i was lucky that's great right now not once not once and not the same thing they were actually some of them had covered my body and i'm starting to feel a little tense yeah but as soon as i decided either i'm dead or i'm not it was just right that's right they started after they were in the swarm box they started leaving not all at once but quite a few they're left alone i just did this little jump like this yeah last summer um there was a neighbor called and said that there was a swarm on a tree um and i assumed it was from me so my son was visiting with his two grandson so we went over to check it out and it wasn't that big but it was there i said well yeah i'll try to get it and so i went back and got just some stuff a little box to put him in and all this and my son was filming it on his phone and his two-year-old son was like you know right under the bees all around the bees and all this stuff and i got the swarm and there's a lot of bees in the air because i'm shaking it into the box and my grandson is just kind of you know like this and i was sure social services was going to find that because my son put it he uploaded it to wherever they do these things and the grandson didn't get stung no no he wasn't afraid he didn't know and he didn't know any better right so anyway um we should talk about pests i think that's an important topic go ahead please you sure uh splitting a hive it used to be that beekeepers would commonly split a hive in the spring when they're starting to build up really well break them in two that's going to a reduce the tendency of swarming b give you two hives instead of one you just saved a lot of money you might buy a queen and have that ready so you can install that queen and the split part that doesn't have a queen or you can let the bees raise their own queen as long as there's eggs in that split then they can turn the eggs into a queen if you do that it takes roughly 49 days so like seven weeks until you're going to see any bees hatching because the the bees have to turn that into a queen that's 16 days then the queen hangs out in the hive then she goes on our mating flight then she comes back and when she starts laying eggs it's 21 days until a worker hatches so if you let the bees raise a queen it's seven weeks which in our climate we don't have that many weeks so getting it another queen which you can buy queens in the mail from hawaii if you want having a queen on site is probably a good idea so a lot of beekeepers will split their hives in the spring other beekeepers say this is a really good hive i want this hive to make honey if i split it why would i split a good hive right it's still very common what's becoming very common is a technique that i think was popular in the 19th century and then basically vanished when they started raising packaged bees in the south and that is making baby nucleus colonies in june and getting them strong enough to over winter there are some very very good vermont beekeepers who do this with great success so instead of taking the good strong colonies that are going to make honey for you they take the mediocre colonies and they say okay i'm going to take two frames of brood out of this one one frame of honey out of it i'll take another two frames out of this one and then they'll start and it'll be a box this size but it'll have a divider board right down the center so you can fit four frames on each side right and then you start with a frame with brood in all phases two frames of brood one frame of honey and one frame of either foundation or drawn comb you do that on each side so now you have two four frame nukes you probably bought queens for them and it's becoming successful there are beekeepers in vermont who are getting hundreds of nucleus colonies through the winter in four frames which seems counterintuitive because what about needing all those bees to keep everything warm well it's working the bees seem to know how to adapt to the chamber size that they're in which is why i think a lot of beekeepers are going back to having two deeps for the year around home and not that medium on top because you have them a little more concise and they'll adapt to that size so increasing your colonies by making your own nukes in june very common one thing i didn't mention earlier so we're going to go all the way back to the first minute that we were here one thing that vermont beekeepers association does is it maintains two bee yards a north yard which is at the intervail in burlington and the south yard which is in a scutney in the southeast and there are six free workshops that are offered starting in april one per month through september that go through the whole cycle of the beekeepers year so it starts with spring cleaning spring evaluation reversal it goes through how to install packages how to install nukes it every aspect of beekeeping right through to harvesting honey treating for mites winterizing the bees so there's six of them if you go to the vba site the schedule will be there i teach the ones in a scutney with a good friend bill taft who between us we have like i don't know closing in on 80 years between us um and we don't always agree bill does it this way i do it that way but these classes can be wonderful way to learn about bees so you might want to check out the site on that and that one of the things we do is we make up nukes in june the four frame nukes so you're welcome just a quick question what days of the week saturday is one to three yeah i'm not sure of the north yard schedule but i think those are saturdays also yeah yes bees will make poison honey from rhododendrons and azaleas yes and i have a yard full so do i have to get a bucket loader and get rid of all of those or will they choose other things first or am i just gonna have a mix of i would probably if i answered now i don't think i would feel confident in my answer so i would look a little more deeply into that um there was something that we had on the vba site to kind of ask the experts kind of thing mike palmer is a great beekeeper in vermont and he would likely know what's the best thing to do but yeah azalea honey is poison um and rhododendron yeah or poison the humans yeah certainly poison the rest of the hive and you'll find out more i know it's a no-no for honey the thing to keep in mind is that most honey that we get in vermont is from a great great variety of sources so even if they were getting nectar from rhododendrons for two weeks probably the finished honey is going to be comprised of dozens if not hundreds of different floral sources so it might be fine but i would definitely look into that if you've got a lot of rhododendrons right yes uh well the queen starts laying and they start expanding oh yes yes so this comb here is that's i don't know i'd say probably at least 20 years old maybe more um so yeah they'll reutilize the comb year after year which is good because they don't have to put out the effort every year to be drawing all that comb they can make honey instead right any other questions yeah um because beekeeping is much more popular now than it's been certainly since i started keeping bees you want to order as soon as possible so if you're really sure you want to start this year i would order bees now either packages or um nucleus colonies so i would go online and well i'd go to the vba site and look for that list that we just uploaded which is where you can get bees in vermont and there were probably 20 different names on that list so there are options but if you're going to get bees this spring it's really important that you have the area where they're going to live ready the equipment is all built painted ready to go um you don't want to be catching up to the bees you want to be one step ahead and now we'll get into the past thing do you have a question sir about marrying a weak hive you're sure yeah which is um when i pulled this box out of my shed i noticed that there was some newspaper visible that was stuck to the bottom because if you have a weak hive and a mediocre hive you might say neither one is going to make honey but if i join them they might be strong enough to make honey so you simply take the weaker of the two you bring it over to the stronger let's say this is the stronger you take off the outer cover in the inner cover so you're left with nine or ten frames like that you put a sheet of newspaper over this you might make a couple slits in the newspaper but it's not critical then you take the other weak hive and you put it on top of the newspaper put on your inner and outer cover the bees chew through the newspaper but it takes long enough so that by the time they've done so they've become accustomed to each other's odors if you didn't use a newspaper you'd have a big fight on your hands but with the newspaper um they they accept each other then one queen kills the other oh no dead i tried getting on a stick try to put it back inside i put it on the perch yep was that a package the bees might not have accepted her yeah you know i tried for like a half hour wow i left to go get you sit on it and when i came back she was gone or i couldn't find her she might have gotten a brass but she wasn't inside what'd you do with the hive after that what did you do with the hive after that that's the weak one that i i mentioned i tried marrying it newspaper method yeah i used it with me it seemed to take but i i did get about 10 pounds of honey at the end of the season what time of year did you unite them the arson that you united um mid-june maybe a little later because i didn't realize i couldn't find her well do you know if there was any brood in the in the hive where the queen was out front really keen on yeah if they're if the queen were bad enough that they just um kicked her out and there wasn't brood then you were just adding bees which is not a bad thing to the other hive if you were adding brood then that would be even better for the other hive yeah uh what happens to okay you want more magic okay so the queen puts out all these pheromones and when she's strong one of the pheromones suppresses the worker bees ability to lay eggs if the queen dies and there's no eggs that the bees can now turn into a new queen to rescue the colony now there's no pheromone and some of the worker bees now develop the ability to lay eggs the problem is they never went to that singles bar right so they never got fertilized so all they can lay is drones unfertilized eggs now you've got what's called a drone laying colony or well but leave it at that and that colony's doomed because it can't lay workers you can tell when you have a drone laying colony or a laying worker colony sometimes queens don't mate well and they just lay drones too um so that can be another cause but if you have a laying worker colony you can tell because the workers abdomens aren't as long as the queens and so they can't get to the bottom of that cell so they'll have eggs that are sticking out halfway up the cell where they're deposited not as far as they can reach and they usually lay multiple eggs in a cell that plus they're cranky but they feel like they have a queen so you can't just take a new queen and put it in there because they're going to say wait we already got a queen and they're going to kill her so work laying workers it's not that common but it ain't fun yeah okay pasts go ahead oh yeah the bees love it don't they yeah yeah well they'll it's not bad for the hives it's very low sugar concentration right um sugar water is very commonly fed to bees for at various times a year for various reasons and so they're just saying cool there's they'll also they'll go into bird feeders and pick out little bits of duff from the sunflower seeds that they it's not pollen but they somehow they think maybe this is a good thing so neighbors will call and say hey i got bees all over my bird feeders no it shouldn't harm the hive no by me at all which was quite no it was like no sweating but that's okay but they they went in and out of the holes i stood there and i watched them like take a number they actually were waiting their turn yeah well amazing to see that that would also be an indication that you should have been feeding the bees right so if you have a mild day in march april and there's not much yet coming in there's a lot of brood that needs feeding the brood nest is expanding the population is expanding this is a really dangerous time of year because they can run out of food and starve so that's when you're going to give you know some beekeepers will say well i'm not going to give any sugar water to my bees well it's one thing to take every drop of honey out and now feed the bees sugar syrup to keep them alive it's another thing to say okay they're low on stores and either i feed them sugar water or i watch the bees die that's your call i feed bees when they need to be fed personally and if you were seeing that at your feeder that's when you should be feeding well it depends in the spring you'd feed one-to-one sugar syrup equal weights um and that will stimulate brood rearing right if you're feeding to bulk them up like it's like you know you lifted the back of your hive in september and it's like oh it's pretty light maybe i should feed them then you're going to feed two-to-one two parts sugar to one part water um and that they'll pack that into their cells and that will they can live on that and it's to see a colony of bees in the spring that's dead is really really really sad and it's not that uncommon New Hampshire lost 75 percent of their bees last winter it was a tough winter and in vermana wasn't much better it was very mild in february the bees got active march got really cold so at least a couple of my colonies the bees they cluster all winter right and they move up as a unit to access their stores of honey well when it got warm small little groups broke off to get to the honey and then it got cold they couldn't get back in and so when bees starve what happens is you'll see them all head first in the cells and they basically licked out the last bit of honey and then croaked and there was a lot of die off this spring because of that last spring so it's always good you know if it's a mild day in february i'm checking out my bees usually what i do it's my sort of ritual new year's day i go out to my hives put my ear on them wrap it i want to see what kind of response i'm getting am i getting a really strong response am i getting silence so i want to know just from the response roughly how popular this is the colony and i also want to know how high up are they in the column right if it looks like they're already at the top i might take one of the bricks on top of the hive and stand it up that's a note to myself this one needs to be checked as soon as possible then if there's a day in the 40s and sunny and not a lot of wind i can quickly take off the outer cover and if i see bees right up at the top it's like good they're not going back down there if there's any honey at all they're not going for it they need emergency feed or they're going to die so in februaries you're going to start looking on a mildish day in february to see what's going on and by all means feed them because yeah we do have an emotional attachment we don't want to see him dead you shouldn't give him liquid like honey syrup then no you feed sugar water in like ball jars i have gallon jars that i use but if there's too much moisture in the hive they can get dysentery so emergency feeding in february you're better off using something that's much thicker you can buy what's called winter patties you can make winter patties it's water sugar and some pollen substitute and that's that's a good choice because it's not really really liquid it's about that consistency yeah yeah uh you put it right above the bees so they can access it so you wouldn't switch the boxes no no no no um you're gonna have in the winter i wrap my hives and tar paper i put half inch hardware cloth across the front half inch is big enough for a bee to carry out a dead bee but a mouse can't get in right mice will go in there and really do a number on your comb they'll really screw up your frames so yeah or the bees might kill the mouse but you're still gonna lose a lot of a lot of frames you won't be able to use anymore so that's one of the pests is mice so you have a mouse guard and half inch hardware cloth is the easiest well now you've got zero degrees out and this is this amount of opening yeah the cold doesn't harm the bees moist your harms the bees so a method i learned from steve peris who's a great vermont beekeeper he was the apiary inspector for vermont up until a couple years ago when he retired and the method he uses and this is what i use all the time too um on the top box on the highest the higher box of two or three whatever you have you put a half a two inch piece of blue board insulation and the backside of the blue board if it's two inches you've notched out maybe an inch and you go in about maybe three inches so you've got this little channel here that goes right above the inner cover with that channel in the back okay and that way air goes through the hive the moist air is then funneled up through the inner cover hole and out that channel get rid of the moist air some beekeepers put an empty super on top of their brood chambers that's filled with wood chips or sawdust to gather the moisture i don't like doing that because i don't want the moisture in the hive i want to get it out of the hive but that was a very common method but i do steve peris's method and then the inner cover notch becomes the winter entrance so you got the blue board here with the outer cover on top of the blue board you've got the this here so that when the bottom when the opening is full of snow the bees still have access to get out that's the winter all right so we talked about something yeah that would be this expected it's going to be winter a lot of beekeepers also put a three-quarter inch hole on their brood chamber boxes not their honey supers i do that that's just another way for the bees to come in and out right but i also cover the highs with tar paper not covering down to the bottom here but right to here but not covering this and that just means that on the kind of shoulder days if it's sunny it'll be a little warmer in the hive they can move more easily to access their stores okay so it's 10 of 12 so i do want to talk about we mentioned mice skunks can do a number on your hive skunks can eat a pound of bees per night you'll know you have skunks if you see scratch marks on the hive what they do is they come out at night they scratch on the hive the guard bees go out to say what's going on here and the skunks grab and eat them right so some bees make some beekeepers keep their hives off the ground enough so the skunks have to stand up which exposes their belly which is very vulnerable and then they won't molest your hive other beekeepers use what's called a nail board and they just take a board a two by six or something and just pound 50 nails into it and leave that right in front of the hive right or if you have an electric fence what i do is i keep one low wire on the electric fence to keep the skunks out bees that are colonies that are molested by skunks become very very very cranky really hard to work because they're really mad and they'll let you know it so skunks can be a danger there will be a danger unless you're in downtown Montpelier or down here they do okay good so to start one colony of bees just the equipment i didn't even show you a smoker yet just the equipment and the bees and the gear you're talking i don't know three four three hundred bucks maybe something like that probably more than three hundred bucks but if you don't have a bear fence sooner or later the bears are going to get your bees and you know what a number they'll do so they don't care the bear the voltage in the fence isn't enough to bother them so what you do is you put up your bear fence which is going to cost you another 200 bucks make it big enough for expansion because you know beehives are like tractors the one you first bought ain't big enough it's the same it's the same with the bees you start with one colony and then you got a swarm oh my gosh now i have two and then it's like wow two is great i want four well make sure your bear fence is big enough to accommodate what you think you're going to get and then go buy some really bad bacon don't let your neighbors see but buy it and then you're going to wrap it around the wires of the bear fence you know you don't have to put a hundred of them but you'll put you know 10 or 15 pieces of bacon around there and then the bear is either going to put his nose or his tongue on the bacon that hurts if you didn't have that they'll walk right through a bear fence that with that fur that's not going to deter them electric fence yeah well i have one fence and so it's so far so good i mean i definitely have had bears on my property frequently this is how you work your bees you'll have a smoker have something to cover the hole when you're done and then when you smoke modestly not aggressively modestly then the bees tend to go down or they move away from where the smoke is so you can expose a frame and pick up that frame for inspection there's all kinds of fuel you can buy for your smoker personally i start with pine needles that'll start a good quick hot fire and then i i'll get it going well and then i put in sumac i'll bust this up into four or five pieces sumac will burn long and cool you can have a fire going for an hour if you're using sumac if you just use pine needles it goes out quickly and it's a hot flame so it can burn the bees wings right so it's a good way to start the fire you can buy all kinds of stuff some people use burlap that's okay too um last i checked the amount that i've spent on pine needles and sumac has been zero dollars and zero cents and i kind of like that very much so and they work very very well so that's it's up to you but i would recommend something like that simply for the the lack of expense one two three go ahead just add something to that when you get your smoker going smoke your hand you'll know whether you're going to hurt your head or not good point thank you yeah thank you oh there are a multitude of plants that bees like yeah they the list is so long and eventually if you keep bees your area you'll get to know the cycle of the seasons if you have a garden which i assume everybody here does you'll be astonished at how it is changed from the presence of the bees like our asparagus when it goes when we let the ferns grow up there will be hundreds and hundreds of bees in the asparagus flowers in like july august it's breathtaking right um you will be stung um it's probably a good thing it's probably good for your immune system no gosh no no no when you start out you're going to be stung a lot and in a sense it's a good thing because you're going to be too rough until you learn how to be gentle hopefully you'll be able to you know take some of the beekeeping classes that are free and watch somebody who's got experience how they do it but you're going to look into your bees more than you should when you're starting out but you have to do that so that you can learn a lot of the more subtle keys of how the colony's doing so expect that that's sort of a process and then as you get more experienced you know i i talk about sitting here falling asleep well i'm not exaggerating but what am i doing while i'm here i'm watching the bees and i'm listening you can tell a lot about the bees by what the sound is coming from the hive you'll know peaceful happy bees and you'll know agitated bees it's so clear once you learn it you'll know how the hive is doing by seeing oh look at all that pollen coming in oh this is buff colored so it must be this oh look at that it's bright yellow it must be that you'll know in your area the different plants that are blooming if you're focused on seeing what color pollen and matching that to the floral source and i'll look at my bees in april for a spring inspection i'll look at them again once or twice in may see if they're building up well see if the how the brood pattern is see if they're making any ideas about swarming may as a big swarm season for us but once i start putting supers on really an inspection for me is i might pull the inner cover off if i see white wax near the top bars well what does that mean well white wax is wax that the bees haven't walked all over so it's fresh wax so i'll say oh there's white wax on five of those frames good time for another super i don't have to pull frames and be looking way down here if if the hive is this big so i try to have a of hands-off attitude once i've confirmed that this colony looks like it's in pretty good shape and i don't think swarming is an issue but when you're starting out yeah you're going to be going in there every 10 days and just saying all right today i want to see if i can find eggs today i want to see the difference between cap drone brood and cap worker brood now i got to see if there's any supersede yourselves or swarm cells so expect to get stung and i don't know i think more depending on what energy i'm bringing to the hive is going to determine how that sting feels and i know that sounds kind of woody but if i'm feeling kind of mellow and just sort of in the groove for that particular moment a sting is like okay and if i'm feeling a little uptight then it's going to be so it's a measure of how tight your is how bad that sting is right one thing i wanted to mention that i don't know how many other people in the room might be allergic to sumac staghorns but i know it's not incredibly rare allergy for some people stag staghorn sumac yeah the sumac not poison sumac but staghorn sumac well they're different okay well that looked like a staghorn when you had there it is okay it's not that's not poison sumac you could take that staghorn and brush it on me and i might end up in the hospital no kidding uh and it's i i thought it was kind of odd because i played the voice 90s again wow and it didn't bother me and so i went to a dermatologist i mean rub this on me um and the dermatologist explained to me that you have certain wild cards for allergies to everybody's allergies and it's a matter of how much repeated exposure you have or don't have oh so it's a fair chance that i've had more than my share exposed to that yeah but the allergy to that if you have it yeah good to know i never knew that outrageous okay if you're lucky and you notice it first you wash it real well and go yeah cold um yeah uh what's that benadryl cream yeah then maybe you won't end up needing thank you medical attention thank you i would ask about viruses we hear a lot about that we have to talk about varroa mites these are those things that bees coexisted in kazakhstan and all these places in eastern russia for millennia and they had a peaceful coexistence they made it to north america in 87 i think it was and everything changed beekeeping was less a fair for a lot of years when i started out in 82 it was like yeah you have a colony of bees they're going to live for 10 years uh when the mites came first they were tracheal mites a couple years later varroa mites tracheal aren't much of an issue anymore but varroa mites are a death sentence if you have too many you will have varroa mites um maybe not your first year it's kind of like you might not see cucumber beetles your first year but you'll definitely get them by year two um the varroa mites more miracles in nature the varroa mites know the difference between drone brood and worker brood they know that the drone brood is capped for three days longer or they know something but the drone brood is three days longer as a pupa and the varroa prefer to go into the drone cells because they have more opportunity to mate so they go into the drone cell and they um basically perform incest with a sibling and then now you've got two of them and then they will rise exponentially right at the time when the bee population has tapered off and is starting to taper and they will kill your bees outright because they suck the hemoglyph I think is the word but they'll suck the juices out of out of the larva or the adult bee and their vectors for all kinds of viruses so if they don't kill the bees directly they're carrying viruses that will kill the bees so I got out of beekeeping for a few years because the first treatments for varroa were these super heavy organophosphate chemicals kumafos and fluvalinate and I just didn't want that in my soil I didn't want that in my equipment so I got out of it now there are a number of organic treatments even they're not USDA certified organic but they are based on time all and eucalyptus or they're based on hops or formic acid and there are treatments that are easy to apply and very effective and to me it's like a bear fence you don't have a bear fence your bees are going to get wiped out you don't treat for varroa sooner or later you're going to lose all your bees one of the challenges now is there's these things that are called varroa bombs and basically it's like oh I want to save the bees you can tell because I have this bag that says save the bees and I have a t-shirt that says I love bees so of course I just want to save the bees so I'm going to get a colony of bees and then it just sits there and it is not maintained it's not inspected and drones are accepted in any colony right workers and not the guard bees are checking the aroma of bees as they come in and out and they're not going to let foreign workers in but any drone can go anywhere any colony so your neighbor who loves the bees so much that they buy t-shirts they don't treat their bees that colony is full of varroa mites drones go into that colony come back and infect your colony so that's a real problem so if you do keep bees I urge you not to just say good I'm going to put them in in May and then I'll just come back in September and harvest the honey it doesn't work that way it's got to be an active engagement and you have to figure out your strategy for dealing with varroa mite you can start checking for them in May or June it's easy to check why you're checking your colony to see if you have mites see what the threshold is you know you should have no more than three mites per hundred bees I think that's now the recommended threshold three per hundred you can see them what you do is this is called a capping scratcher but it's a very very effective tool that what you do is pretend this is that frame that had the drone brood down here I don't want to be killing my workers but the drone now it's capped drone brood I'll go under it with this and then I'll pry it up and expose all the white larva and I'll see the mites they're going to be these little dark specs kind of a dark russet color and I'll see the mites that's the quickest way to do it right I can just take jiffy checks to check by you're going to kill that brood the bees will eat that larva so at least you're giving them some protein but that's a very important thing to do as the season progresses there's another slightly more elaborate method that's called the sugar roll where you take a half a cup of bees which is supposed to total I can't remember how many bees that totals and then you put it in a container a ball jar basically with a mesh lid and um confectioner sugar and shake it like crazy for about a minute and then leave it off to the side in the shade for a few minutes and the bees heat up and when they get above a certain temperature the drones fall off them and once you've done that then you you shake the mites fall off them you shake the mites into a white bucket so you can see them and count them and um then the other bees you can put them right back in the hive so you haven't killed them but you've freaked them out big time and then their sisters will clean off the sugar that's the sugar roll test pardon me you're not treating you're simply getting an assessment of the level of infestation oh I see what you mean you certainly could do that a lot of beekeepers do it I do that too other people would say well that's like just saying take some antibiotics in case right eventually it's not good so if you use a treatment that's 97 percent effective against mites that's like oh my god 97 percent that's incredible guess what three percent of the mites are resistant they're the ones that are gonna then become one step ahead of the treatments right I treat prophylactically I always treat my bees for mites every year oh yeah yeah right after harvest honey so you're not having this resistance probably not right and I think I would advise and other beekeepers who'd say no it's not good advice but I think I would advise everybody to treat prophylactically against verola yeah um I usually use something called mitaway quick strips which is based on formic acid sometimes though I like to rotate it with another treatment so I might use something that's called apple life var which is based on time and eucalyptus and the principle for all these treatments is you're going to put something in the hive that's strong enough to kill the mites but not so strong to kill the bees right and the rotation rotation is probably a good idea yeah take them out right if you're having to treat a couple times some of the treatments you need to give two applications but if you can do two applications and you still need to treat then you were not ahead of the curve yeah if you change your right that's what I tend to do yeah yeah you're less you're gonna be less likely exactly yeah probably you know I think a backyard beekeeper with a few hives is different from somebody with 400 hives right yeah so we are going to close up because it's time but so I guess I'd like to just urge people who really seriously want to keep bees to consider it to be an actively engaged hobby or pursuit and definitely to look into Vermont Beekeepers Association because it is by the way it started in 1886 and it's the oldest continually operating bee club in the country there were some that started earlier but then they had a hiatus for whatever reason so look into vba get that their fence think if you're like me