MSU Extension Pollinators & Pollination

Ana Heck:

Welcome everyone to tonight's webinar. We're excited to be here with you. I'm Ana Heck and we're here with Dr. Zachary Huang, Dr. Meghan Milbrath and Dan Wyns. And we are here to talk about beekeeping here in Michigan seasonal management and answer your questions.

All right, so we all work with MSU Extension. MSU Extension is open to everyone. Today what we have planned is that I'll talk about some announcements and ways that you can communicate with us. Meghan's going to talk about late season nectar flows and fall feeding. Dan is going to talk about different kinds of feeders you can use. Zach is going to talk about feeding honeybees and a resource. We're going to all talk about Varroa mites and then we'll have lots of time to answer your questions.

So to get us started on some announcements, if you are watching this webinar live, you'll be able to find some links that we're sharing in the chat box of the Zoom application. If you're watching this as a recording on YouTube or on the MSU Extension website, you'll be able to find a list of links in the description box.

We have a YouTube channel, it's the Michigan State University Beekeeping YouTube channel. We've been posting all of the recordings from our webinars this year. So we have April, May, June, and July all posted on the YouTube channel. So the most recent webinar recording that we posted was the July Michigan Beekeeping Office Hours webinar, and we'll plan to post the recording from tonight on the YouTube channel as well.

We always like to encourage beekeepers to think about their local beekeeping clubs. The Michigan Beekeepers Association is our statewide organization and on their website they have a list of local Michigan bee clubs. These bee clubs oftentimes meet monthly and work really hard to try to support beekeepers, share information, especially around local resources and environments and how that affects beekeeping. So if you're not already part of a bee club, we highly encourage you to check one out.

And another thing to think about too is if you are someone who removes honey bee colonies from structures. So for example, if a honey bee colony establishes in the siding of someone's house or barn and you have the bee and construction skills to be able to remove those colonies, we're looking to help Michigan Beekeepers Association add to its list of people who do cutouts. So the Michigan Beekeepers Association maintains a list of people who do cut out removals. You don't need to be a member of MBA in order to be added to the list, but you do need to send an email to our MBA newsletter editor. And so there's information on MBA's website. There's also information on the screen about how you can email someone to be added to the list.

This is a time of year where we're getting lots and lots and lots of questions and concerns from the public around cutouts. We know some of them aren't always necessarily honeybees. Sometimes people confuse wasps and honeybees, but there are people who have honeybee colonies that are established that are looking to hire someone as a service to remove them. And one thing for you, if you do cut out removals and you're just getting too many calls about wasps, you can also direct people to use the Ask Extension form to confirm whether or not the insects or honeybees or wasps and then have them contact you back if they're confirmed to be honeybees.

All right, our website is pollinators.msu.edu and we have a list of upcoming events on the website, so you can find that on the events tab. There's also a QR code and a shortened URL link there. And I'm going to go through some of our upcoming events that we are excited about.

So we have two more of our office hour webinars scheduled. So one is just our general one for September, which will be September 18th at 7:00 PM. And then we also have a special one that we're doing with Dr. Meghan Milbrath and Dr. Peter Fowler on European Foulbrood and so that will be on Thursday, October 12th. And they are going to talk a little bit about their research and what they know about European Foulbrood. So that's a special one that we added recently.

And then we also are hosting the Michigan Beekeepers Association's fall conference pre-conference webinars. So we have two speakers lined up. One will be Cybil Preston, she works with the Maryland Department of Ag and she's going to talk about her inspection program. Some of you may have read articles about her. She has trained dogs to be able to smell American Foulbrood disease and she puts them in the little adorable bee suits and they go around and smell for American Foulbrood. So we're super excited to hear her webinar. That will be on Monday, October 2nd at 7:00 PM Eastern. It will not be recorded, so make sure that if you want to see this webinar that you join us live.

And then the other pre-conference webinar that we have is by Dr. Katie Lee from the University of Minnesota Bee Lab on Top Tips for Northern Beekeepers, and that will be held on Wednesday, October 11th at 7:00 PM Eastern. It will not be recorded. So again, please be sure to join us live. Dr. Katie Lee is also going to be the keynote speaker at our live conference, which will be held on October 21st, our fall Michigan Beekeepers Association conference. So you'll get to hear a taste of her presentations at our pre-conference webinar.

These webinars that we're doing are free, but we're asking people to consider becoming a member of Michigan Beekeepers Association and/or making a donation to the organization. We added these webinars to the same link that you're using for tonight's webinar for the Michigan Beekeeping Office Hours webinar series. So if you're already watching us live and you're signed up, then you'll be able to already have the link for these upcoming webinars. All right, and then our in-person meeting is on Saturday October 21st in Clare, Michigan and that's our fall conference with Dr. Katie Lee as a keynote presenter.

All right, so again, I just talked about a lot of events. They're all listed on the website. You can also get an email. It comes out about every other week with upcoming events. If you sign up for a news digest by going to pollinators.msu.edu and then clicking stay connected and signing up for the Pollinators and Pollination News Digest from Michigan State University Extension. All right.

Meghan Milbrath:

Ana, there is a question about the October 11th live webinar. If people are registered for this series, will they automatically get a link to that?

Ana Heck:

Yeah, so it'll be the same link that you're using for tonight's webinar. Great question. So we just added more webinars to the same series. So you're already registered, you should still get reminder emails the day before and an hour before the webinar as well.

Meghan Milbrath:

Thank you.

Ana Heck:

Yeah, thank you. All right, so if you're watching us live, we hope that you ask your beekeeping questions. You can do so by using the Q&A box with your Zoom control. So type in your question and we'll look forward to addressing it. If you have questions outside of this webinar, you can feel free to ask Extension form and you can find that at pollinators.msu.edu/questions. And with that, we're going to get started with late season nectar flows and fall feeding, and I'll turn it over to Meghan.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right, thanks Ana. So there are a couple of really busy times of year and this feels like it can be one of them. So you can go ahead. And the main message with this one is that somebody has to be feeding your bees at this time of year. And it's very, very important because, one, is we're about to go into a period where we don't have food anymore, and two, this is when your winter bees are getting formed. So this is a really important time that you absolutely don't want to be having nutritional stress.

And the reason that I worded it as either Mother Nature provides food or you do is because in a lot of the state we do have a secondary honey flow. I have a picture here of goldenrod. This is one of my favorite goldenrods. I believe this is Riddell's goldenrod. And then if you've got a lot of goldenrod and you have good weather and you have strong enough hives to go get them, you maybe are pulling in a lot of food. If you don't, you maybe will have to feed and it can be gallons.

So I've been keeping bees in Michigan for, I think, well, I've been here for over 10 years and about a third of the time where I am in Jackson County, I feel like I get a pretty strong goldenrod flow and I can actually make honey. I've drawn wax this time of year when it's been really strong. About a third of the time I've had a trickle. So they're technically getting fed, but they're not putting on a ton of weight. And a third of the time I've gotten nothing.

Where I am, it almost is reliably the peak goldenrod flow in the first week of September and it looks like we're on track for that. But it does differ, especially with whether or not it rains this week will make a big difference, which where I am, it's not scheduled to. Or things like if you have a really, really hot July, the plants can not put out a lot of nectar. So it's not just that you see the blooms but that you have the foraging weather and that the plants are not feeling stressed so they'll put it out. And the best way to know whether or not your bees are actually bringing it in is to pay attention to what you see blooming, but then also to check in your hives. And if you don't have a very strong flow coming in, this would be the time that you would start feeding. So we're finishing taking honey off this week at MSU. And then the next thought would be to start feeding if we have to.

And what you have to do is you have to account for the needs that the bees have at this time of year plus for them to bring storage. So we want to make sure that we're feeding a lot because if you watch, if you put your hives on a scale and maybe you put a gallon on them, you'll watch that scale. You'll see the number go up with the weight when you put the bucket on, and then they'll eat it back down. And maybe they're using so many resources because the colony is so big that they just ate that whole bucket so they didn't store any of it. And then you'll put another bucket on and you'll see the weight go up and it'll go down, but maybe just a little bit higher and it may be three or four or even five gallons before they've actually put enough honey away or enough syrup away to actually make it through.

So you do need to make sure, again, I have 70 pounds on this scale, which is kind of considered a recommendation, but that is really, really going to be dependent on the size of the colony and on how much food is already in the colony. So if you have a full deep box of capped honey, you maybe don't need to feed a ton. If your colony feels pretty light when you lift it up from the back, you may be needing to try to get a lot of food in there.

Go to the next one. So this is where we are a lot at this time of year where we've got lots of capped brood and we want to actually take that frame and make it look like the next frame where we have it backfilled. So we don't want to fill... The bees are going to naturally shut down brood production at this time of year as you know they form that last generation of bees, and we do want that brood nest to backfill. So May and June, backfilling is just the worst. That's what leads to swarming that makes the colony feel super overcrowded. That's kind of the worst thing we can have. And then all of a sudden, October backfilling sounds fantastic because we want that colony to really have all of the space that we leave them in to be totally filled. Not totally filled, but pretty much totally filled with honey. So in the spring, backfilling bad, this time of year back filling is starting to be the thing we're actually aiming for.

And then you also want to make sure that it takes a lot of time to dry and ripen honey. You can click ahead. Especially when it is starting to get cold. So the bees have to go into that bucket or into that feeder and pull it down one tiny sip at a time, and even if you're mixing it up two to one, that process takes a really long time. So even though it feels especially next week, it's going to get hot and it's going to feel like we're very far away from winter, if you were to wait until the temperature cools, you're just not going to have that many working hours for the bees. So it will take them a long time to go up to get the food to bring it back down, to dry it down if they need to store it. So it is something that you do want to start pretty early so that by the time the bees are consistently in a cluster that they have everything stored.

So start early, feed often and early. And I mentioned that it is going to be a lot, so you can see this is at Auburn, how they mix it up with a canoe paddle, which I thought was clever. At this time of year, the recommendation is to do two to one, so that's sugar to water and the sugar and the water is close enough mass wise that you can use volume so you don't have to try to weigh it out. When you do two to one sugar, you do generally have to heat it on a stove or something like that unless you have a really, really hot water tank. With one to one, you can get away with it out of hot water out of the tap but with two to one, you do want it to go into a solution. So you generally want to heat it on the stove.

I always get the question about what type of sugar. So as long as it is pure refined sucrose, that is ideal, which that means the white sugar. When you have pure white sugar, it's so refined that there aren't other products in it, which we kind of think of as negative because that's empty calories, but that's what the bees need. They absolutely need empty calories because unlike us, they're going to have to go all winter without pooping and they basically can't have a lot of extra ash content in there. So they have to be able to digest food really, really cleanly. They absolutely need to have empty calories in there.

When you start getting into things like brown sugar or sugar in the raw, it's going to be calories plus things that bees can't digest that's not going to be positive for them. In terms of whether or not you use beet sugar or cane sugar, by the time it goes through the refining process, the bees cannot tell a difference. It'll be effectively pure sucrose. So from a bees perspective, if it's organic, that won't matter because chemically it will look exactly the same. So whether or not you choose beet or cane really depends on do you want to support Michigan beet growers or do you want to have the organic label or something personal for yourself. But from a bee perspective, they don't care. As long as it's sucrose, glucose or fructose. But mostly we just have access to sucrose.

Ana Heck:

Thanks, Meghan. Dan's going to talk about different feeders for feeding syrup.

Dan Wyns:

Yeah, so Meghan kind of covered the why and I'll just kind of touch on the how, which is kind of the devices that you can use. So if you make the decision that your bees need to get some weight on, you're going to feed them syrup. There's kind of three primary types of feeders. There's a few others that are less commonly used, but these that I'll touch on are the three most common ones.

So the first is called gravity feeders, bucket feeders, cans. It's all kind of the same thing. It's basically a volume, it's a canister of syrup inverted on top of the hive. And either that can be if you have a migratory type cover, a lot of times beekeepers have a hole drilled through that with a itch and a half or two inch. You can put a plug in for when you don't have the feeder jug or feeder bucket on. So you can feed through the lid like this metal, you can see that's a through the lid feeder. But if you have a telescoping lid, then typically you put that feed bucket on top of the inner cover and then a lot of times you'll put an empty box, like an empty shell, just a deep with no frames in it and then you can put the lid on it. So it kind of gives you that weather protection and keeps it from getting knocked off. Probably deters the raccoons and things a little bit that sometimes like to come along and do those things.

But the basic principle, again, gravity feeder, it's works on a similar principle to, I remember growing up had a hamster and it had the little thing jug of water with the little nipple on the bottom and if it's working well, it's not just all going to pour out. What you do as a beekeeper when you have this full, you invert it, you'll get a few drips out then a vacuum should form and so it won't drip out under its own pressure, but it'll, like Meghan was saying, the bees kind of take this one little sip at a time so they'll be able to drink from it without it pouring down on top of them.

So just a couple things to pay attention to. The plastic buckets either typically come with the bottom left here, kind of some pinholes in the lid or some of them have a fine mesh screen like that. So again, that's the surface that the bees from up underneath are going to be sipping that syrup through and you do want to just pay attention a little bit. These can get clogged either if when you're making your syrup you don't get a hundred percent dissolved in the syrup, so you'll have some sugar grains that essentially just kind of fall to the bottom as you invert it and plug that. Or sometimes bees being bees, they decide they want to propolize things. So with this mesh screen they've started to propolize that.

So one other thing to consider with these feeders, especially if you're feeding through the lid, they're kind of outside the hive. If you don't have a real good seal on that bucket and it leaks, you certainly can start robbing. If there's syrup kind of seeping or weeping out of that, that's something you definitely want to avoid.

But one really nice thing about the bucket feeders is, like you saw a few slides back, Meghan had a picture of a bee truck all filled with dozens and dozens of syrup buckets. And a nice thing is you can do all that at home. You could do that in your garage or your barn or wherever you do your bee stuff. And so you can kind of go out and basically all you have to do is if you know which hides you want to feed or you can kind of heft them, you can invert a syrup bucket on that hive without opening it and disturbing it. So that's really nice and you're not pouring syrup. Your chances to spill syrup in the yard and things like that are kind of minimized. So that's a really nice aspect of the gravity feeders.

They do come in a variety of sizes. If you want, I've seen as small as a 20 ounce soda bottle or a quart mason jar, but typically when we're thinking about fall feeding, we really want to put on weight. So kind of for fall, generally the minimum size is a gallon and I've seen feeding with these plastic buckets up to a three gallon size used and that's kind of a function of efficiency of how far away are your bees if they're in your backyard and you can refill it every day or two no problem, a gallon's fine. If they're a long drive away and you can get a couple gallons in a feeder bucket at a time, that's going to probably save you some travel time. So these are gravity feeders.

The next type of feeder that's pretty common is I call them frame feeders. I've heard them called division board feeders, but they sit in your hive just parallel to the frames. Actually they replace, depending on the thickness of them, one or two frames, they come in a variety of volumes. The deeps, for deep box frames, I think they come in one, one and a half and maybe a two gallon that's a big wide might replace three frames. And they do also make them for medium boxes as well. So the volume's going to be a little smaller there. But as a beekeeper, if you want to use this, we use these in our colonies and they just live in the colony year round. So I fill them if I need to feed in the spring or feed in the fall, I know I've got that receptacle and it just becomes part of the hive. And so that's easy, it's not carting stuff back and forth.

Bee yard, you do lose a little bit of comb area. So if you're running a single or something like that, that would be a consideration that you might not want to give up that comb space. But basically this is just an open trough that you can pour syrup into. On the left there, that's a nuke box and you see the feeder on the right side of that leftmost photo. That's just an open receptacle. It is bowed in a little bit. That's kind of one of the downsides of these frame feeders is they can tend to warp and twist like that with that one being kind of pinched in. It's losing some of its volume. Another thing is bee strong colonies, we'll go in there and build comb and fill it with drone comb and honeycomb and all sorts of stuff. Which depending on how tight you like to keep your hives and whether or not you're trying to find a queen and don't want her to have hiding places like that, it's one of those, it doesn't really matter. It can be kind of a nuisance sometimes.

But one thing that in recent years has come along that's kind of improved on that is this middle photo. You see the frame feeders on the left side there and you just see the two holes in it. And what that is it's called a cap and ladder system. And so on the photo on the right there kind of shows what's actually underneath that cap. And so you've got your a wooden top across that it's still your same plastic frame shape receptacle that holds a gallon or a gallon and a half. It's got wood across the top, so that keeps it from pinching in or twisting or bowing, cupping. And then it's got these sleeves down inside of it that are these kind of plastic mesh tubes. That opening's, I don't know, probably an inch and a half or something at the top. So it's a pretty good, you can feed into that with a funnel or whatever your feeding system is. You can get your syrup in there.

But it gives the bees access to all that syrup but really minimizes the potential for drowning. If they fall in, they get stuck in the syrup, they actually have something with those plastic, that's what you're going to call the ladder. They can climb onto that plastic mesh and crawl out. Versus the frame feeder on that left photo where it's just an open receptacle. One of the issues you can have is bees falling in and drowning. One thing you can do with those open frame feeders like that to mitigate that is throw some handful of straw or sticks bracken fern's really good because it doesn't break down and get slimy. But throw something in there that gives the bees something to stand on. It's kind of same idea as if you put out a bee watering station, throw some corks in it or whatever it is, but give them some surface area so if they do fall in, they can kind of drag themselves out and dry off. So those are frame feeders, pretty good. Bees take it pretty fast. We like using them.

The third kind of primary type of feeder is a top feeder, and what those are is actually, so it's the same dimensions as hive bodies and they come in, if you're in 8-frame equipment or 10-frame equipment, you can buy these in either size. And so it's an actually not the exact depth, I think it's about a shallow, probably shallow. It's about five inches or something like that, five and a half.

And they have these plastic tubs on either side. Some are front and back, some are side by side like this one you see here. And it's just these big plastic receptacles that you can pour a bunch of syrup into. Another recent improvement that I've seen in these originally, the first ones of these I saw just had the two receptacles. The bees could come up through the middle. A recent improvement is down though the photo on the right where pouring syrup, and you can see this gray stripe down the middle, that's this hardware cloth that the bees can come up from inside the hive and get at that syrup, but they don't have open access to the point where they can fall in and drown. So that's a really nice feature that I like.

I know these are things that they don't live on the hive year round. If I'm going to go feed a yard. And I like to use these a lot either if I've got singles where I don't want to give up a frame of drawn comb to a frame feeder or in yards that are a long ways away. Because a nice part of these feeders... The ones that we have and they're pretty standard hold, it's probably four, four and a half gallons. So you can give a lot of syrup to a colony quickly if you have something you really need to get a lot of weight on and don't have the time to make repeated trips, that's a really nice feature.

One thing I will say, just from using these, your hives need to be fairly level. If they're sitting at an angle, they're going to drain one side of it and the other side you're going to end up with syrup down at the end because they can only access it in the middle. So having it level on a left to right, that helps them get all of that syrup out. And then when you put your inner cover or whatever you've got for a cover on this, you want to make sure that that's bee tight so you're not getting robbers coming in over the top.

This kind of, it becomes, even though the bees have limited access through that middle, it is part of the hive. And if you put your lid back on as you would normally closing up a hive and make sure that there's no access through the top. So I guess if you had a notch to inner cover, you would want to flip that notch up so you've got a tight seal across the top so bees can't get in through the top of that top feeder in a robbing scenario.

So those are the three main types, kind of pros and cons of each, but they're all kind of situational what works for you. But those are some of the options. Again, if you need to feed, this is kind of some of the how you can do it.

Ana Heck:

Thanks Dan. All right, and next up we have Zach. So Zach has a resource on feeding honeybees and he'll mention what's in that document and anything else that we missed here.

Zachary Huang:

Yeah, so a couple years ago I wrote as an extension pamphlet to feed bees. So it's pretty much what Meghan and Dan has covered. Different types of feeders, what concentrations with sugar to feed bees depending on the seasons. The reason you want to do 50/50 in the spring is to simulate the honey flow and get the queen laying eggs quickly. And in the fall you want to do two to one is because you want to minimize the effort.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:28:04]

Zachary Huang:

You want to minimize the effort of bees trying to make that into honey within a short period of time because winter is closing in. But if you're feeding them right now, they probably still has a month. So most people probably don't feed them now. They probably check their hives and realizing they're short of food, I would say around mid-October. So then they only have like two or three weeks left. So if you feed them now, I feel you probably could get away with 50/50, which is much easier to make. The bees can drink it much easier if it's a frame feeder. With a gravity feeder, probably doesn't make a big difference. But a top feeder, a frame feeder, if it's too thick, bees, usually because of viscosity, it's much harder to suck a 66% sugar syrup compared to 50% sugar syrup. Just watch bees with sucking honey. They already have trouble to do that. It's viscous.

It also mentions feeding the water. That's during the summer of course, and whether to put some salt into the water to keep your bees so they don't move away to a swimming pool next door, because they have some chlorine in it and these taste a little bit different. Bees don't just clean water. If you use bottled water, that's too clean for them because they want to have some minerals and some sodium in them, that's why they want to go to that stale pool somewhere on the creek that's further than your artificial feeder. So adding some salt probably would help you keeping the bees loyal to that same feeder.

Another point is, you have to start early, otherwise bees will form a habit by going two miles away to forge on a creek for water and you're giving them water next door right in front of the hive, but it's a bit too late. So you have to start early, probably sometime in May and not in July because they already have the sight to go already, so propolis you cannot really feed them. But some people brush those studies [inaudible] if you paint the inside hives with propolis, that will help your bees fighting disease better or creating artificially, uneven surfaces inside the hive, so the bees will forage for propolis trying to make it smooth.

And that has been shown in the studies. I'm not sure actually any beekeepers are practicing that or not because it's quite involved and you usually have a lot of propolis anyway. I guess it's stuff I really hate, I work with bees sticky on my hands, on my fingers. I try to use my cell phone to take a photo. The cell phone becomes sticky and it's very hard to wash them off. Of course, half of my pants have propolis stains and you can't really wash them off.

Ana Heck:

Thanks Zach. Great. So Meghan just put the link to that document, that resource that Zach wrote in the chat. And then I also saw that she added the links for Dan's blog posts. So Dan wrote blog posts on the different types of feeders. So you have questions about feeding honeybees, there's a lot of resources for you there.

All right, we're going to move on to varroa mites and this is really a group conversation, but we've been talking about varroa every month so far on our webinars. Hopefully, there's already things that you've been doing to monitor and manage varroa mites in your colonies, but this is another time of year where we're really thinking a lot about varroa mites in terms of management and what management options are available to us. So again, we have resources online on managing varroa. Megan has a document on making a plan for the varroa mite that has different treatment options explained and listed there.

Another really helpful guide is the tools for varroa management guide from the Honeybee Health Coalition that goes through your different treatment options. But I would say some things to consider this time of year, one, is whether or not you have honey supers on or not. And so if you've already pulled your honey supers off and you've extracted all the honey that you planned for human consumption, you'll have more treatment options available to you. So that includes some of the time oil based treatments like Apiguard or Api Life Var, you can use those when you don't have honey supers on. You're still going to want to pay attention to the temperatures and the forecast and the colony size and strength and if there's any limitations around that as well. So I'll just let people chime in here in terms of what are you seeing in terms of mites or what kind of management are you considering this time based on your situations? Start with Meghan.

Meghan Milbrath:

It's like, "Oh that's us." Well, so one of the things that I've been doing all summer is doing a miticide research trial and we don't have the data yet to share, but I've learned a ton even just carrying out the trial. So what we do is, we do sticky boards. So we look at mite fall and we collect that every single week. And this is on about 40 hives, and we look at how many mites fall off of the bees every week with different treatments on the colonies. And then we're also doing the alcohol washes at the same time. And one of the things that have been the most eye-opening for me is, even when we're seeing fairly low or medium levels in the alcohol washes, we're literally counting thousands of mites and sometimes over a thousand mites per week that are falling off of individual hives.

So I think that was something that was really interesting for me to see with my own eyes. And also, these are colonies that look perfectly healthy. So no signs of Parasitic Mite Syndrome or we're not seeing mites crawling, we're not seeing deformed wings, these are in colonies that functionally look healthy, but because we're doing all of this trapping, so even when you see 2% or 3% mites, you have to think about how big the colony is at this time of year, and if you've got 50,000 bees, that 2% can still represent thousands of parasites crawling all over your precious bees. So we've been going out and doing formic acid at this time of year just because we are half on with honey supers and half off and that's considered our cleaned up method at the end of this trial.

Ana Heck:

Great, thanks. Anyone else have anything to talk about in terms of varroa? You mentioned some monitoring options for people are still the alcohol wash or the powdered sugar roll test. It is helpful to know where your mite levels are, especially if you've been managing all season to kind of know post-treatment where your levels are. Or if you're about to do a treatment to make a plan to do a varroa mite test afterwards. And we have some videos on how to do that on the keep bees alive part of the website.

All right, well we can answer more questions about varroa mites as you put them into the Q&A box. There is a program evaluation survey that should open up once we close the webinar and it'll also go out in the follow-up email that'll go out tomorrow. We're thankful that we have some funding that supports our projects and work. And next we're going to turn it over to you all. So if you have questions, please put them in the A&A box and I see that lots of people have already been doing that, so we have lots of questions to start with.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right. And we'll try to just get to them as they come in. So the very first one, Jason asks, "With the change in the weather, is it a good time to prepare my bees for winter or should I give them more time?" And I'm very excited to speak about this one first and then other people can chip in. So in my opinion, what we have just talked about with the two things being controlling varroa and feeding, that is winter preparation. So all I do with my colonies is I make sure they're very well-fed and I make sure they're very healthy, which in this context really translates into not being overrun with parasites. If I'm managing varroa and I'm feeding them, that is winter prep.

Everything else like wrapping, closing the entrance, putting a spacer, dancing around it and praying to the winter gods, those are things you can do. But none of those things will have a direct relationship to high numbers of winter survival. So in my mind, this is what we do for winterizing. I know people do additional things, but those are not really the things that lead to big differences in survival. So if Ana or Dan, if you want to add to that. Oh sorry, I do add mouse guards, so that's the only thing and I wait until the drones get kicked out, but that is the other thing that I do.

Dan Wyns:

We're of same mindset here. I kind of think thinking about wintering starts in the end of spring and that's because my control is not just the tick that box once or twice a year, it's a whole comprehensive, what's going on, what are we doing? But if you're keeping your parasite load down and then the real over the next month-ish is kind of the window for fall feeding, getting things up to weight. But we don't do a ton as far as the wrapping or things like that. We have some wraps, some of the Bee Cozy, some cardboard sleeves. We use them because we have them, but we've got more hives than we have wraps and I can't say I've noticed a difference in those that have gone wrapped versus unwrapped the last handful of years. We do put a reducer in and a mouse guard on, but that's probably at some point mid-to late October, something like that. So that's kind of where we're at with things.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right, there's a couple on robbing, and Ana very smartly already gave me a robbing resource to post. So Dan, if you want to keep this going, do you have to feed all hives at one time to prevent robbing?

Dan Wyns:

In my experience, no. The main things to prevent robbing when you are feeding is avoiding spills and whether you're syrup from a bucket into a frame feeder or you're using your gravity feeder or something like that, not slopping it around, but no, we do a lot of spot feeding. Some yards we have have really good fall flows or just because of how they've been managed through the year. We get out there when we start feeding and it's like, "Oh this one is already, this one's got plenty, it doesn't need anything." And others might get fed maybe three, four times over a course of a couple weeks. So very much case by case, hive by hive basis for that I will say, doesn't as much apply to feeding one versus feed them all, but if you're concerned about something and robbing, it can be feeding and using an entrance reducer to these other things we talked about I think sounds like maybe a resource in the chat about robbing and mitigating robbing. But you can spot feed the ones that need it and the ones that don't, they don't. That's fine.

Zachary Huang:

I honestly use a front entrance feeder and some people, some hobbyists have a contraption sitting on the entrance with a glass jar and that's really inviting for robbing. They always find robbing. They use that kind of feeder, so I recommend that type that uses a mason jar and people think it's cheaper to do, but it's a pain because you have to refill it every two or three days. And if there's a sun hitting it, it's going to come up faster because it expands the sugar syrup so it drains too fast. Or sometimes the thing, I'm not sure if they came was the lids with holes, sometimes beekeeper have to nail the nails themselves, nail too many and too large holes. They [inaudible] just come out in two hours and big mess and all the yellow jackets would come not only the robber bees but wasps also because they're getting attracted to sugar this time of year in both places.

Meghan Milbrath:

That's a good point. It's definitely not just the honeybees that are robbing. Ana, can you freeze frames of your partially capped and partially uncapped honey for next year? This is a good question because I feel like everybody either has been in this situation or will be in this situation where you have partially capped and partially uncapped frames.

Ana Heck:

I don't see a problem with that if you have the freezer space to do it. One thing that I've done sometimes if I don't have the freezer space and especially early on is, if I have an inner cover, I'll put the partly filled supers above the inner cover and then sometimes the bees kind of move the uncapped nectar down as they would've from a feeder. So that's one way of dealing with some of the uncapped stuff. They don't always move it down. It works some of the time, but I'd say especially now when it's earlier on in the season and we're still getting warm weather, if you put uncapped honey up there that is maybe pretty wet and not ready to extract, they might move some of it down.

Meghan Milbrath:

And then Dan, do you want to talk about what we did today or what you did with uncapped?

Dan Wyns:

Yeah, so we pulled honey off campus bees today, and on one hand it's great to have late summer nectar on the other, it puts you in this position of there's never really a period where there has been a long enough dearth at the end of the season where everything you pull is going to be capped and dried and ready to go. So we took it all off because we're getting into fall management in the bees in the field and it's in the hot room. So basically heat and a dehumidifier and airflow is your friend, if you've got frames of uncapped honey. We have some that we know are too wet and we're going to try to dry that down and we will certainly pull a couple percent of moisture out of that just by essentially moving warm air across that honey. Honey, in a humid environment or uncapped honey will suck in moisture, and in a dry arid environment, it will give off moisture and dry out. So we're creating that warm dry environment to bring that moisture down.

Meghan Milbrath:

Excellent. And then there's a couple questions about moving frames around. So there's a general one and a specific one. So I'll do the specific one first. Ana, if you maybe want to address this. "So it's a colony that's in three deeps and the top box is only partially drawn. So I was going to consolidate it into two deeps for winter, but I found one frame of brood in the top box and was uncertain about moving it. Is it okay to move it down to consolidate or should I wait until those bees hatch before I move it?"

Ana Heck:

Sure. So I'd say the main principle that you should be following right now is to keep the brood nest together. So if you just have one frame in that top box and you want to put it down below, keeping it in that brood nest, that should be fine.

Meghan Milbrath:

And then there's kind of the opposite question is, "Should you put any honey frames into the brood box?" Do you want to address that one too?

Ana Heck:

Sure. So again, we're really trying to think about how our bees naturally organize their resources and their hives. So we want to keep the brood nest together and those frames of brood kind of touching each other. But if you have extra honey frames, and maybe for example if you have foundations still, you can remove those foundations, put honey in there. We're trying to keep honey along the sides of the brood nest and then above the brood nest as well.

Meghan Milbrath:

At MSU and in my own hives we try pretty hard to keep honey frames for humans separate from bee frames. If they're the same size, you could take a honey frame out of a super and move it down below if you're using all mediums, but you would want to be careful not to move stuff around in the spring. There's three really fast questions about feeding that I'm going to do high speed that are just confirmation. So one was just confirming that it is two sugar to one water. So when Zachary and I were talking about fall feeding, it is the higher concentration of sugar, so it's correct, it's two sugars to one water compared to one to one that you would do in the spring. The second question is, "Is it granulated sugar or powdered sugar or confectionary of sugar?" It's just straight granulated sugar, so just white sugar that you use for baking. And then someone asked about if you should add salt, and usually in this context, it's just sugar and water. Again, you want a very, very clean feed for them.

Ana Heck:

And I wondered if the salt question was in response to what Zach was talking about earlier about adding salt to a water source.

Meghan Milbrath:

Oh yeah, that makes way more sense so they can taste it. Yeah.

Zachary Huang:

That's in my pamphlet. But to repeat it here, a recent study has shown that if giving bees all kinds of different salt concentrations, bees preferred 0.2 to 0.3% sugar so they collect. So one teaspoon per gallon is about 0.11 percent, so you need to put about two teaspoons in one gallon of water if you use one gallon. So that same ratio, or you can weigh them if you're a chemist.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right. That makes much more sense. I was on the sugar roll. So Dan, going back to the drying off of the honey, our dear friend Laurie asks, "What temperature and what humidity are you using to dry the uncapped honey?"

Dan Wyns:

So we, about 95-ish, and again that's more or less hive temperature. We don't really want to go beyond what the bees take it to themselves, and then the drier, the better. We just have a space that we can close off that's relatively airtight and set a dehumidifier to run continuously. So I don't know, it probably gets down in the... Actually I shouldn't even guess at what the percentage. We just let it dehumidify run constantly and empty it out when it gets full. And it's surprising how the volume of water that it will pull out for even after we've dried the ambient air in that room. So then you know it's just coming from the nectar that is drying off. So the drier, the better, and I'd say somewhere in the low mid-90s if you can do it.

Zachary Huang:

I thought you had a tube that drains out so you don't have to dump the water every day.

Dan Wyns:

If you can have a continually draining to somewhere away. We have it draining to a floor drain.

Meghan Milbrath:

Perhaps if you have a building with beautiful floor drains, exactly. And there is a question too about the relative humidity, but I think it is we have a box fan and a dehumidifier that you get at whatever store.

Dan Wyns:

That's not anything specialized, it's just I've got them running, the same as I've got running in the basement. Just the...

Meghan Milbrath:

Going back to the early questions. So there's some questions about queens. "Is it common for hives to be going through supersedure at this time of year? I have a couple hives with capped brewed and no fresh eggs and two to three hatched queen cells." If someone else wants this one, I would say that it's not as common as it is right after swarming. That's when you see the most of them. But bees can supersede all of the time, especially if you are not careful about replacing your queens and putting in young queens.

So Mike follows up with, "How do you know if you have a weak queen this time of year?" And I don't really like the term weak queen because basically, she's either laying and she has the sperm to do so or she's not. Usually, when people are evaluating queens and saying that she's strong or weak, it's usually a colony issue where they have poor nutrition or a disease. What you can see in the colony though, and what can happen at this time of year is that she runs out of sperm. And that one, I was looking for a picture really quickly and I don't know if one of you have it accessible, but what it looks like is, on a frame where you should see workers and it should be nice flat capped worker cells, you'll see flat capped worker cells and then boom, a drone, and then boom, another drone and boom, another drone.

So it's almost like little popups throughout the thing and basically she's holding that egg back in her valve fold intending to fertilize it and there's just no sperm that comes out. And so she is laying in a worker sized cell and you'll see a drone. So you can absolutely have queens run out of sperm at this time of year, especially if they're older queens and went through a big spring buildup as well and that's how you'd see it. I don't know if anyone else wants to add to that.

All right, so there's a couple questions about feeding winter patties, which we are going to talk about next month. But I don't know, Zachary, if you want to talk about using... So there's "When do you recommend feeding winter patties, fondant, sugar cakes, candy boards?" Or if you want to touch on that briefly.

Zachary Huang:

Winter patties, I'm not sure what that mean. Is that sugar?

Meghan Milbrath:

Actually, Dadant now sells or some of the other companies sell, they look like product... But I think it's basically a fondant that has a much smaller amount of pollen but it looks kind of like a pollen patty.

Zachary Huang:

But it's more sugar as...

Meghan Milbrath:

Yeah, it's more sugar. Exactly.

Zachary Huang:

Yeah, that's a mixed message. I think Gard Otis, my PhD advisor from Canada did a study trying to feed pollen in the fall to see if that make them longer lived bees and maybe help through the wintering process, but it doesn't seem to help strangely. I think because this relates to another question, when do winter bees, [inaudible] bees start? [inaudible] start. So most studies actually now called that it's a lack of brood [inaudible]. So it's basically the last batch of brood that emerges and when they emerge out there's no larva to raise. So those bees will survive through the winter.

So if you feed too much pollen then you can prolong a brood [inaudible] in the fall and that actually contradicts your purpose because the longer the brood ruin, then later the winter bee will become [inaudible]. So if I give them a lot of problem right now, so normally I think Michigan bees stopped brooding around mid-December, so that's that last I'm talking about queen stops totally, but even the months before that, that's not enough brew to cause those bees to not become winter bees.

So I would say bees re-emerge in middle November would be long-lived bees, even the queens are not stopping until mid-December and then they start again middle of February-ish for two months break period. But if you feed them too late, then you're going to prolong that [inaudible] by the queen. Instead of this small brood inside their cluster, you get this big one that's going to make the bees summer bees because it's too much brood family. So that's why their study give a mixed message that feeding bees late in the fall doesn't really help your bees live longer. But it's a lab study because it's counting how long the bees are living. So it's not very direct linked to winter survival per se. But of course, you can postulate, like the bees are not long-living and of course, [inaudible] might not be long living either. So that's a missing link. It's a lab study and observation hive. So I would say a good fall feeding probably should be actually earlier, sometime during that dearth period, sometime in-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:56:04]

Zachary Huang:

... during that dearth period, sometime in August or September, give some pollen because there's a lack of flowers that give you a boost or brood. And those bees hopefully will raise the next batch of winter bees. So it's sort of convoluted, it's not direct. The pollen is not going to make the winter bees, but you use pollen to raise the nurse bees, which then raise the winter bees. So you have to be doing it two or three months out. I had one beekeeper saying that's how he does it. He read my theoretical papers, the regulation of division of labor in the colonies and he says, "Oh that's great. That's why I feed the bees very early in August when there's dearth in Michigan and have the colonies build up during that dearth period.

Ana Heck:

I'll just add too, because you were talking a lot about pollen, but one thing that we're thinking about in terms of just getting sugar and weight into the hive, ideally we really want do as much feeding of... So A, hopefully your bees have lots of nectar from the environment. B, if they don't or if you're not sure, we want to do a lot of feeding with syrup in the fall because the bees are able to move that syrup, store it in the combs and then access it through the winter. Things like fondant and winter patties and mountain camp with the dry sugar are kind of like emergency feeding. So it can be harder for bees to access winter feed when they're clustered in the hives and the temperatures are really cold. So ideally we want to do feeding now so that we're not having to do emergency winter feeding, or if we are doing it, we're doing it just as a backup.

Zachary Huang:

Yeah, the sugar balls are usually emergency feedings that we do in, most people do it in February. When you see the cluster, it's near the top and realize an experienced beekeeper can tell how high the cluster is inside that two or three super stack. So the closer near the top, then the less food they have. So if it's in February, then you can see them under the inner cover, that's bad news. So then that's when you give them fondant or the sugar boards and the more popular method is having a box with a newspaper and have dry sugar that are on top. What is it? Tap.

Meghan Milbrath:

But just to reiterate what Ana said is those dry ones are the ones, that's what you do, if you can't get the liquid feed in right now. So we'll cover it a lot more next month, but hopefully every... And life does happen and sometimes you can't get them fed up or something happens. But at this time of year I would focus on the liquid feed and then if that doesn't happen, well, then we go on to the other ones. So I'm going to switch gears back to varroa stuff. Ana someone just ask if you could please explain the alcohol wash?

Ana Heck:

Sure. So there's lots of different ways to do it and different videos and resources of people showing you how to do it. One way that we've been doing at MSU, and if you come to the fall conference, we'll give you a jar that has a screen on it. So it's just like a mason jar, a regular jar. But what we do is we collect a sample of about 300 bees, so that's about a half cup or 100 milliliters of bees into a scoop. We put them into a jar with isopropyl alcohol. We shake that jar with a closed lid for a minute and then we pour the alcohol and the mites through the screen into a bucket so the bees can't pass through the screen and they stay in the jar. The alcohol and the mites go into the bucket. We sometimes do another rinse or two with isopropyl alcohol. But really it's just a way to dislodge the mites and count how many mites we have from a sample. But really probably the best way to see this are to watch some videos and we can put the link in our chat about how to find our grower resources.

Meghan Milbrath:

And then there's, on that same note, there's questions about using the CO2 method or powdered sugar or alcohol or Dawn dish detergent. Do you want to speak to your experience with any of the other methods? And Dan too?

Ana Heck:

Sure. We've done the powdered sugar roll past and normally we say that's pretty good for getting a good estimate of the number of mites in your sample. If we're doing something that we want to be pretty precise, we use isopropyl alcohol and we also count the number of bees in our sample. Meghan should talk about dish soap because that's been pretty cool to see. Do you want to talk about your method that we just learned?

Meghan Milbrath:

Yeah, and this is dish soap. I feel strongly about dish soap after the bees are dead is what I like. I don't like using dish soap as a way to kill the bees. So Dan and I are actually on a committee for the AVMA, the American Veterinary Medical Association, that looks into animal welfare and this is the first time that honeybees are brought in. And one of the things we talk about is ways that the bees do die in this process and you want them to die very quickly. In my experience when we've tried things like lower percentage of alcohol like the windshield wiper cleaner or with the dish detergent, it doesn't kill them as quickly, but the method that I like is we get the bees, we actually freeze them on dry ice in the field or you can take them and put them in your freezer at home and then they die very quickly.

And then what I do is use a kitchen stand mixer and I just put dish soap and water in, turn on the mixer, the kind that you're going to use to make cookies and then you just run it while you go do other things and then that knocks all of the mite off. It does not grind up the bees. I'll post a video at some point, I've taken videos of it. But that's nice for us because we go out in the field, we collect from 40 different hives, we put them in the freezer and then on a nice day we just sit and go through with the dish soap. Randy Oliver's been doing some things looking at Dawn Professional versus Dawn Ultra and that seems to work a little better, but I don't feel very strongly about that. In my experience

I've used CO2 to knock out bees. I haven't used it to kill them just because it's physically so difficult in the field unless you have the setup for it. And then for the powdered sugar, I do still teach that to the veterinarians. Someone mentioned the comparison that Randy and I did showing them to be equivalent. And that's true, we've definitely done hives where you do both a powdered sugar and an alcohol wash in the same hive and gotten basically the same results many, many times. The reason that I teach the alcohol wash is that it's much faster and less... it's easier, you're going to screw up less. It's harder and you can have more options to screw up with the powdered sugar roll. So there's more ways to do it wrong with that. But they're both fine if you do them right. Dan, have you had any experience with the CO2 method?

Dan Wyns:

I tried it once with the little [inaudible] in it.

Meghan Milbrath:

The bite [inaudible] thing? Yeah.

Dan Wyns:

It was like you got two samples out of one canister, so it was pretty expensive. And then ended up getting, I think because it was chilled, ended up getting a lot of condensation on the jar, so the mites stuck to the wall instead of falling down. So it wasn't my favorite, but I don't have extensive experience with it.

Meghan Milbrath:

Nancy asks, "If the Honey Bee Health Coalition recommends limiting to only one oxalic acid treatment for winter bees. What are the research findings behind this limitation?" Ana or Dan, do you have any insight into this?

Ana Heck:

I'll let you take it, Meghan.

Meghan Milbrath:

Thanks. So honestly, I don't know about the research. I'm going to give you my best guess though is that if you look at the EPA label, they recommend just one treatment and then they say it should not be used, and I could put that in the chat too, that it should not be used when there's brood on because that would require many, many treatments. So my thought is not so much that it is a research-based thing, but kind of coming out of this spirit of not treating more than you need to and per what they think that as long as there's no brood, you don't necessarily need to treat multiple times in succession because in theory all of the mites are available. That's my thought. That's based on just my thoughts, just for clarification.

I do have to say that there isn't a boatload of research behind the oxalic acid label and I am on a committee that is looking at redoing some of the label language and that's one of the things that we're discussing and there is going to be a big review coming out of that as well, but there's definitely a lot more research that needs to be done. I think on OA related to brood in particular, there's also people looking into different dosages and things like that. But that's a good question.

Zachary Huang:

One possibility is maybe they are, even though some people say you can't have resistance using formic acid or oxalic acid, but one prudent way is to treat it only once to reduce the chance of resistance development. Because we don't really know the mechanism, how the mites are killed by either formic or oxalic, but what you don't know doesn't mean and it's safe, they won't ever develop resistance, that's not true. It could be multiple ways the mites are killed, but then they're still starting the resistance. But anytime you're trying to kill something, unless it's extreme like using fire, maybe it's less likely to have resistance. But if you're using the high temperature, for example, to kill the mites, eventually mite could become resistant, more tolerant of heat, for example, unless using fire to kill them. So that's a traditional thought from a scientific point of view because anytime you're trying to kill something, there will be ways that could develop mechanisms to reduce the kill, in other words become resistant.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right. Oh, this is a good question. "Is it okay to feed sugar syrup when treating for varroa with formic acid?" Ana, are you comfortable with that one?

Ana Heck:

I'll double check, but I believe the label says no.

Meghan Milbrath:

Yes. This one though, I think, so the label officially says no, but this is another thing of trying to understand why the labels say no. One of the nice thing about the company that produces formic acid is that they are very open to phone calls. They have a scientist on staff that answers research questions and you can ask them about the strength of the reasoning behind this being on the label. So a lot of things that go into labels are not necessarily... There's this fine balance between getting things to the market and making sure people are safe and also making sure there's enough information to be usable.

I would never, ever, ever, ever question anything regarding human health. If it tells you to wear a respirator or put certain gloves on, make sure you do that. But there's other things that you can call them and ask them why in particular that's on the label. And if this wasn't recorded and posted on the internet, I'd probably be more liberal with how I talk about that too. But yes, according to the formic acid label, you're not supposed to, but you can ask them about that.

So here's one, Dan, if you want to do. It says, "I have junk honey, and junk is in quotes, from old combs that have been melted down. Can I feed this to colonies? Is there a way to sanitize this honey so viruses are not transmitted?"

Dan Wyns:

As far as sanitizing, maybe. I don't know. I'd just get rid of it to be honest. I mean, I don't know. Sometimes junk is just junk. General best practices recommendation is not to feed honey back to bees because of not just viruses, but other potential disease transmission, certainly from outside your operation, but I think that potential exists even inside your operation. So my preference would be not to feed that back to bees.

Meghan Milbrath:

And I can't think of a way you could sanitize it without damaging it just because if you tried to use heat or something like that, you're probably going to create hydroxymethylfurfurals which are going to be bad. You wouldn't be able to kill a virus without changing the composition of the sugars. So I think if you see it as junk, call it as junk.

"Does moving a colony in September present any specific risk to bees compared to moving them in the spring?" We're discussing moving hives right now, so if you guys want to talk about the decisions behind that?

Ana Heck:

I mean, the nice thing about moving them in the spring is they're often lighter. And also if you don't know what your colony survival is going to be, it's a lot easier to move boxes that don't have bees in them than boxes that do have bees in them. Other than that, I don't think it really matters that much. I wouldn't move bees if they're clustered and it's really, really cold and you're worried about jostling them and then them not being able to re-cluster. But if you have warm fall temperatures and you're doing it when temperatures are cool enough that they're not flying or at night, that would be fine.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right, so there is a question on fall feeding and Fumagillin. "So in the old days we used to do fall feeding and add Fumagillin. Not so much anymore. What are your thoughts on it?" I have thoughts, but if other people have thoughts too? So Fumagillin's the antibiotic that's used to treat nosema disease, it is still effective against nosema apis and nosema ceranae, so it's a microsporidial disease that comes into colonies and especially is dangerous when they're clustered. The issue with Fumagillin and Fumidil-B, which that's a name for it, is one is that there have been production issues, so it's not always available. The other is that it is toxic to humans. So you're obviously doing this after you take honey off, but you want to make sure that you're the kind of person that's very careful about keeping their honey separate for humans as it is from the stuff from bees.

The other thing though that is kind of why it's fallen out of favor or isn't standard practice is even though it shows that it reduces an active infection, it's only effective while it's actually in the colony and the microsporidia are in this vegetative or reproduction phase. So if you don't have an active infection in the fall and they eat the Fumagillin and then the dose of the Fumagillin goes down, it's no longer protected, it doesn't kill the spores that are in the colony. So then if an infection comes back, it can actually be worse after the feeding. This is especially true for nosema ceranae. So in the old days, the old days, before 2006, we used to only have nosema apis, or that's what we thought we had, which is one species of it that really was only a problem in the fall and the spring when the bees are clustered. And then in the now we see nosema ceranae all summer long. So that's when you can get that hyper proliferation where the bees leave cluster.

The other hard thing about nosema is that it's very, very hard to tell whether or not you have a problem. So you could sample your bees, you could go in there, you could find... you sample 100 bees and you have 10 million spores, but you don't know if that's in one bee or if that's across 10 bees or 100 bees, and you can have a colony that's going to have millions of spores, that's totally fine without treatment. And you could have a colony with millions of spores that could have treatment. So it is pretty hard. Zachary has studied a ton of nosema. I don't know if you want to talk about Fumidil or Fumagillin at all?

Zachary Huang:

Yeah, what Meghan said is correct, there's a study by another [inaudible] showing that the lower concentration of Fumagillin actually stimulates nosema spore production. So initially it suppresses it at the recommended dose, but then the drug is going to wear off and degrade and then during that degradation, just near the tail, there's a little bit of Fumagillin, probably 1/10th of the recommended dose that the nosema actually bounce back worse than the control, then you don't have to drop. So that's a very bad thing to have, especially if you feed them now, then it wears off right in the winter bee stage, it's probably bad. Yeah, and another issue is whether nosema will eventually become resistant if we treat with that same drug. So far we're lucky, has been used since sixties.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right. So Dan, someone's calling you out on your past practices of using foam installation boards under the top cover. But if someone went that route, should they remove the inner cover and the gravity feeder?

Dan Wyns:

Yeah, and I may have been speaking about foam installation boards. I'm wondering maybe if I was speaking about moisture boards, which is also a lightweight, foamy consistency that I have used. But yes, whatever you're doing in those, adding things for the winter, the wraps, the covers, the quilt boards, insulation on top, those are after the feeding period is done. We're kind of in the feeding window now if you want to feed these, but yeah, you're not going to leave... Basically if you're using a gravity feeder on top, that's for a fall and/or spring feeding window. And then all your configuration of your hive is for the winter. Whatever you're going to add to it is not going to include that gravity feeder on top.

Meghan Milbrath:

And then, okay, there's more varroa questions. "For the first time in four years, my varroa count is low for August. Woo-hoo. The sample I took of the three hives is zero, zero and one. But given that there is a lot of capped brood, should I treat with Formic Pro anyway? Honey supers are still on for expected fall flow. It sounds like Meghan is encouraging this given the large mic drop that she had." I'm just going to take this because it says Meghan's encouraging this. I don't think it's necessarily bad to, if you're seeing mites at this time of year, and I don't know if it's 0% or 1%, but just for me, everything changed in my survival rates when I took varroa control as one of the most critical things. And for me, coming from the side of a very strong animal welfare side, the parasite management for me is paramount.

That being said, you don't want to be on the side of just over treating and all of the treatments, including formic, have negative effects. Plus we are about to go into a week of really, really high temperatures that we have to work around too in some parts of the state. So I would say that it makes more sense depending on what your season long management strategy has been. If you're fully brooded up and you've got three boxes of brood, I still would still consider that... I wouldn't say that it's a job done. I would say that if you're at 001, that's more of a sign that you've been doing a good job, but there is still a lot of season left.

The other thing is Ana actually has really nice data for this from some colonies in Minnesota where this is the time of year that you also get a lot of mite migration into your colonies from other colonies as they start to collapse. So you'll start to hear people collecting swarms again. And there's drifting and we've talked about robbing. And at this time of year you can have a lot of mites come into the colonies. And so it is something that it's good to be where you're at now, but there's still a lot of season left. I don't know, Ana, if you want to speak to that?

Ana Heck:

Yeah, I mean even here in Michigan too, we did some projects where we were just monitoring the same colonies once per month and it is sometimes common that we'll see really low levels or zero mites in our samples in August and September, and then crazy high levels in October. So just because we're not finding them in our samples doesn't mean there's not a lot of mite still in those hives.

Meghan Milbrath:

Oh, and I'm going to put the label in. There are two questions about the double-stranded RNA for varroa control. And I'll put a link. Zachary's worked on some, you were doing some RNA on varroa control, right, with Alex?

Zachary Huang:

Yeah.

Meghan Milbrath:

So I'll put the one published study that I know about in the chat, but I don't know if you want to speak to that or what you were getting?

Zachary Huang:

Yeah, sure. From reading the news, it seems maybe it's the same original technology by the Israeli scientists Beeologics, which was then purchased by Monsanto, and Monsanto become purchased by Bayer. Now this Green Light or something is buying it from Bayer. So it's convoluted. And I thought it was dead somewhere because I have Beeologics, that was 15 years ago and I never heard any news about it. I talked to, is it Jerry?

Meghan Milbrath:

Jerry?

Zachary Huang:

Jerry, yeah, Jerry Harris. I talked to him about what happened and it seems to say that it was dead because government doesn't want to approve anything using transgenic stuff, using RNA, which you may be afraid of escaping to other organisms, stuff like that, even though it's against overall, which is very unlikely. It's possible they could migrate to honey bees and then a far stretched theory would be then honey bees, the double-strained RNA goes into the honey, we eat it, and then messes up our system. So that was one worry, but the company is saying they're hoping the product will be there next year. So we'll see. I thought it's a lot of hoops to jump by EPA and FDA because it could be considered as transgenic and it could be mobile because double-strained RNA could be transferred between different organisms.

So that's my concern. Even though I did a study in my lab trying to find genes I could lock down to kill the mites, and we found a few genes that make the mites having nice babies and a few genes that actually kill them. So this is after the Israeli study, which get a whole bunch of genes together and just looking at the mite drop, not an actual mechanism of if the mites are dead or something, but they just look at it, just count the mites and the sample size is quite small. The control would have four mites per currently drop and treated might have on the wall. So it's not a huge difference, but it's significant. So the data was like that. It's not a lab study. My study was a lab, we actually counted mite babies after injecting the mites with different gene, different double-strained RNA, again, targeting different genes and time babies. So it's a little bit more specific, more accurate. [inaudible]

Meghan Milbrath:

Yeah, I mean... Oh, sorry. It is really interesting route for people to look at, and I'm personally happy that we're looking at all sorts of solutions, but it's a long ways from showing that something works in the lab to getting things approved, and approved in a way that is making sure that we have stuff that's safe for bees and safe for humans.

Okay, so the reason it's a hot topic is because there was a talk last night-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:24:04]

Meghan Milbrath:

Hot topic is because there was a talk last night by the South Western Ohio Beekeepers, that checks out. All right, we're getting down... I'm happy that these are really good questions.

Okay. So the other day we started Varroa treatment on 20 hives, the next day they had 10 of them robbing each other. It was terrible. Reduced entrances to help them protect the hives, closed the top entrances. Reopened two days later, but left the entrance reducers, and they're worried. They're all active, but there's a lot of dead on the ground and worried about the [inaudible]. This just says "Any thoughts?"

I would just like to offer condolences. That sounds very traumatic. It is late in the season, but it's also early enough that you can see what happens. Thankfully the robbers are generally the oldest bees, so those are going to be those summer bees that are going to die off anyway and even though it can look very traumatic, hopefully you were able to stop it and see. But you should have a couple of weeks depending where you are, I guess in the state or the country to figure that out. I don't know if Dan, you want to add to that or-

Dan Wyns:

Just one thing that's challenging there is if you've just put formic on, which you don't want to confine the entrance of the hive when you put formic on. But what do you want to do when you have robbing? You want to confine the entrance of the hive to minimize the defendable area or space. One thing you could, hindsight learning experience and all that, but hardware cloth or something like that, that allows you to basically close an entrance to robbers and bee access but not impede the ventilation. But I get these things happen all of a sudden and you do the best you can, but if you're just thinking through future options. Yeah, that's tough when you get two things kind of counter to each other as far as what would fix them or how...

Meghan Milbrath:

And not saying that this is what you did, but one of the things that is on the label of your formic and that we have to educate a lot is you want to make sure when you're putting the formic on that that's all you're doing. So you're not doing a big inspection or you're not taking honey off at the same time. Sometimes it's nice to go out with two people because if you can just open the two boxes like a clamshell, quick throw them on and close it really fast, that can also reduce the chances that you would induce robbing while you're doing a treatment. All right, so Ana, the golden rod is just coming out now and the bees are all over it, and I can smell it in my hives. Shouldn't I wait for golden rod to start drying off before my last honey harvest?

Ana Heck:

I'd say this is a lot of personal preference. Dan and I have some yards that are not that far from each other. We've learned from the past few years, we have a yard, it's just in a field of golden rod, there's so much golden rod, but for some reason, I don't know if it's the type of golden rod or what's going on, but the bees never seem to make very much in the late summer or fall in that yard. So we've already pulled all our honey supers from that yard and we're feeding as needed. Whereas in other yards that are not too far away, we know that our bees historically can do really well on golden rod and so we're leaving those honey supers on and we're going to see if we do get a nice fall flow there and we're waiting. So it depends a lot on where you are in the state and what nectar sources you have. It also kind depends on your personal management strategies. And another thing we're also thinking about is how much weight we had in those brood boxes. So we want to make sure that if those brood boxes are feeling pretty light, that we pull honey sooner rather than later so we have more time for feeding syrup.

Meghan Milbrath:

Yeah. There are some people that totally wait until golden rod's in and then they feed. Someone told me once they're like, that's not golden rod honey, that's fool's golden rod honey if you try to take it. But I also know that there's a lot of people that would rather wait and take it, so it's just would you rather feed or use that as your last food. Still on robbing and feeding, I put extracted frames on a hive that set off a robbing scene, which is scary. I used water and wet towels to slow it down. How safe is it to return extracted frames to a needy hive without starting robbing? Ana, do you want to keep going on that?

Ana Heck:

So the colonies that are vulnerable to robbing are normally going to be the ones that are weak or small in population or sick or not queenright, or hives that are open for a long time or not even that long, but if you have a hive open and then robber bees in the area find that exposed honey. But if you want to add extractive supers back on top of a hive, I would make sure that the box, like wipe down the sides of the box so that they're not sticky with honey and just be really quick about it and put them on strong colonies with better queenright. I'm assuming they're thinking just above an inner cover to get the supers dried out.

Meghan Milbrath:

I think that's it, yeah, of having them above an inner cover and not just putting them outside. And then still kind of on the same thought but it's worded differently so I think it's worth it. Can I feed at the same time the bees are bringing in fall nectar? Will that throw off my golden rod honey?

Ana Heck:

Yeah, sure. So if you are planning on extracting it for humans, you don't want to feed syrup at the same time, otherwise you're just going to have honey that is adulterated with sugar syrup in it. But if you've already pulled all the honey that you planned to extract for humans, you can definitely feed syrup while your bees are also collecting nectar from golden rod if all that nectar and syrup is just going into the brood nest area.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right, so there's one hive that has two deep boxes and both are 70 to 80 percent full. Can we put on another box or is it too late? Ana, you can keep going, you're on a roll at these.

Ana Heck:

I would say it is basically too late. At this point, if you give your bees foundation, it's unlikely that they're going to draw out very much and they're either going to be very slow or not draw it out at all. If you have something like foundation... So the boxes that are 70 to 80 percent full, if you have drawn cone, you could replace those empty foundation frames and just make sure that the boxes are full. But I would not expect a colony to fill up a new box this time of year.

Meghan Milbrath:

And I think for me this time of year and that question in specific is the reason why I think beekeeping takes so much experience. That is one of the things that you just have to watch at this time of year to know putting boxes on. All right, we're past 8:30, but there's still some nice questions on there. I see some people have dropped off, but I'm fine that we just keep going until they're done.

Ana Heck:

Sure.

Meghan Milbrath:

So someone pointed out that there is a study that exists that shows a 22% increase in winter survival for wrapped hives in Illinois. I'm aware of this because every single time I say that you don't have to wrap, someone brings this up. Yes, in one. So in this study it's a small study, they compared two locations and the unwrapped colonies, they were having, I think it was above 20%, I think it was like 27% losses. So if I had 27% losses, I would probably be looking at other strategies.

But at our bees at MSU this last year, we lost one hive per yard basically, we had very good survival. My colonies the last few years, I'm not anywhere near losing 27%. There is also a study from 1968 in Wisconsin where they overwintered colonies just in screens and not even in boxes at all, let alone wintered ones. Which is again, not a recommendation, but it is something that in my experience, I try to figure out what is the absolute minimum that I can spend on them that doesn't result in something lowered to their health, but I'm not against wrapping them per se.

What I've found is that people lose really high numbers of bees to varroa mites and not having enough food, and the first thing they do is wrap their colony and then they put a quilt box and they do an entrance reducer and that kind of stuff. So I'm not saying that it can't help, but if you're in that rate where you're losing 30 to 50 to 100 percent of your colonies, I would look at the animal before I look at the hive. But I love it when people respond with studies, that's my favorite conversation. When do you start combining to take your losses of weak colonies? Dan, do you want to talk about if you've done that?

Dan Wyns:

Yeah, if all I did was look after my own bees all the time, probably would've done that a couple of weeks ago, but reality is it's probably going to happen this coming week. Yeah, I think it's getting a little later than I would like, but again, we're early September, the bees still have a good amount of time to kind of naturally contract, fill out their brood boxes, again whether that's nectar coming in or I'm going to give them the feed. But yeah, this next lap around is going to be queenright checks and everything. Basically I've been just adding supers and pulling supers the last couple months, there's not been a lot of real work down in the brood nest. Now that we're getting to supers off or the last supers on is the time where it's like, all right, we need to get stuff, who's who, if I need to do any combines. I made some small splits in July that are kind of my replacement stock, so if I have some queen issues, I've got colonies I can newspaper combine. So yeah, I think we're in that window. I would say ideally that happens in August, but reality it's going to happen 1st of September this year, so be it.

Meghan Milbrath:

This darn job's get in the way of our beekeeping, I tell you what. Yeah, I feel the same. I usually try to have them all combined by the time golden rod starts, but that's basically now-ish, but it's still fine. All right, so should I remove all the honey or all the supers and take all of the honey from them or will the bees go up for honey if I leave a super on over winter. Ana, I feel like you're killing it on these hive arrangement ones.

Ana Heck:

Great. Yeah, so a great question. I would say it kind of depends on your hive configuration, but for example, one thing that's really common here in Michigan is you have two deep boxes or the equivalent in mediums and those are the boxes that you leave year round and they have brood in the spring, summer, fall, and then lots of honey for winter. And then you remove all of your honey supers for human consumption and you just kind of keep those boxes separate. There are beekeepers for some reason or another, if you think that your bees just don't have enough honey at all, you could leave an extra super of honey on the bees for winter. They will use that honey. But we just like to then mark those boxes so we know that now we're considering that super to be a brood box and not a honey super intended for humans.

Meghan Milbrath:

Is honey bee healthy/beneficial as a food supplement? Dan or Zachary, do you have experience with that?

Ana Heck:

I don't.

Meghan Milbrath:

Okay, so I have used it as not a food supplement that is super beneficial, I've used it as an attractant. So if you want to put it in the feed, so in that you add it to the sugar water, and you add just a tiny amount and it attracts the bees to the sugar water, so it can allow them to take it in more quickly. I mean, I think it's just because they find it. It also has the benefit of keeping the sugar water from clouding and having some bacterial and yeast growth. But that's as far as I would make the claims is about it being beneficial. With all of those supplements, they are not regulated in the claims that they make, and so I would not say that it does anything besides attracting the bees to the sugar water. But that being said, I do often use it, but just for that purpose alone, just to kind of increase the speed that they take it down.

Any special needs for overwintering a nuke? I can talk to that. I have lots of nukes that I overwinter. Some years I have had much better success than large colonies or equal success, some years I have lost more of the nukes. And when that's the case, it's generally a starvation issue and it's generally because I'm not in there as quick and that's because they're just smaller so they have less food in there. So I would say the one thing is you just have to watch them more closely for the amount of food, but I make them up in all sorts of different sizes of equipment and I haven't found a strong argument for something being much, much better than anything else.

And I do have a document somewhere, I can see if I can put it in the chat if I stop talking, about comparing the different styles. But I originally got a STAIR Grant for the purpose of looking to see if I could find a nice system for overwintering nukes, and basically I found 15 systems that all worked perfectly fine. So I ended up kind of not having a great thing because it was so easy for me to at least get a bunch of extra small hives through the winter without an enormous amount of work that it just always felt useful to just try some. And a lot of times, the trying them worked pretty well.

Someone stated they had Formic Pro triggered supersedures. That's something we do hear a lot. I personally have not had that much supersedure using Formic Pro, both at MSU and at my own yards. But I don't know if Dan or Ana or Zachary, if you want to talk about supersedures past Formic Pro or what your experience has been.

Dan Wyns:

We've had some, but not to the point where Formic Pro is still not our primary mite treatment. It's a small percentage, we drop a few occasionally, but queens fizzle out occasionally just on their own. So yeah, I'm aware of it, I know beekeepers are concerned about it. I do hear a fair amount of it, and say we've experienced it but not to the point I'd consider a huge problem. But we also watch the temperature pretty closely when we're putting it on. I think if you're up near the top end of that temperature range or if you're up into the pushing 85, I think that's probably can be where you'd be potentially more problematic. So we shoot for high 70s, but 80, 82, maybe, particularly the first three days, that's ideally what we're looking for when we use Formic Pro.

And we put it on almost always as two pads at once. I see there's the question about that coming too. The two pads, 14 day treatment, rather than one pad and then coming back 10 days later for another pad. Couple thoughts just because that follow-up question. One, I never know what that weather is going to be 10 days from now and so if I put one on, I've basically committed to putting another on in 10 days when I have no control over what that temperature's going to be or what is going to happen in my life and am I going to be available to go do it and all that. So I think the idea is with the two pads at once, you're getting enough of a dose that you are in theory killing mites underneath the capping versus the putting one on, you're just killing mites on adult bees and then 10 days later you're kind of halfway through the brood cycle so as there's been a hatch out of new mites, you're killing more mites on adult bees. That's kind of the idea if I understand it correctly. But my experience has been almost exclusively with the two pads at once.

Zachary Huang:

Is it too late now to use Formic Pro? If I use it tomorrow, is it too late?

Meghan Milbrath:

We were discussing that because I think for us the heat change is on-

Dan Wyns:

Saturday?

Meghan Milbrath:

Sunday?

Dan Wyns:

Or Sunday it's getting warmer.

Meghan Milbrath:

So it says you don't want it within the first week, but there is... So when we worked with that group at the MSU researchers in Midland that are doing the polymer, actually, they took the formic and looked at how quickly the formic leaves the pad and most of it leaves the pad in the first couple days, so there is a pretty strong curve. So I would definitely be concerned about the first three or four days for sure. And it also depends too on how long it's above 85 degrees. If it dips above 85, but then it's much cooler the whole rest of the day, that's different than those times in August where it's hot all day, hot all night, and it's constantly giving off the formic.

Ana, how do you combine a weak hive with a strong hive? If they've got three hives next to each other, one of them seems weak, it's just much lighter, capped brood is sparse.

Ana Heck:

Great. So one of my favorite waves to combine hives, especially this time of year is just using a sheet of newspaper. So normally I find the colony that's strongest and that's being right and I put a single sheet of newspaper over it and then I add the queen-less or weaker hives on top of it. I'll sometimes just rip the newspaper a little bit to help the bees get started, but the idea is that the bees will clean out the newspaper, but while it gives them some time to get used to each other's scent to reduce the amount of fighting. If you know which queen you want to come out, sometimes it's better to pinch. You can pinch the queen or remove the queen from the weaker colonies, or you can just hope that that's... If there's a big difference in colony size, I'd kind of expect that the colony with the stronger queen is the one that makes it, but really the newspaper combination is one of my favorite ways to combine colonies this time of year.

Zachary Huang:

But you have to kill the smaller colony's queen, right?

Ana Heck:

I normally do, I normally remove the smaller one, but I know there's beekeepers who don't, they let the bees work it out and sometimes that works out too.

Meghan Milbrath:

All right. There's a question about if you left your honey supers on, does that risk condensation on the frames and then the water would drip onto the brood. So that having the honey supers on won't increase condensation in the colony, but the issue is really having the bees move up into the honey supers and then now they become brood frames for the whole rest of your life. And there's a question about what's bad about using brood frames for honey, and really what you want is to make sure you're keeping them separate for a couple reasons. And the big one is just for feeding. If you're feeding them sugar water at any point, you want to make sure that you're not selling humans very expensive sugar water, or if you're using a medication or things like that. It's also just nice to keep track to make sure that you are leaving a sufficient amount for the hives.

All right. Thanks Matt, who missed his dog being the star, so he'll have to watch the recording to see her big moment, who gave me the links to put in the chat. We've got one last question about invert sugar to feed. So when I was talking about sucrose being sugar, the sucrose sugar is the basic one that you get from the store. Sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose, which are the simple sugars. Sucrose is a disaccharide, so you can invert it by breaking the disaccharide down into the simple sugars. So it tastes much sweeter and then it's technically easier to digest because there's nothing to break down.

So one of the things is nectar has a combination of sucrose, glucose, and fructose in it. So bees are 100% able to digest sucrose and in fact their hypopharyngeal glands produces an enzyme called invertase, which the purpose of is to break down sucrose. So there's nothing wrong about feeding them sucrose. When you do cook two to one syrup, you break down some of the sugars, so you will have a combination of the glucose and fructose in there. There are a lot of people that talk about doing it on purpose and trying to break it down so it's easier to digest. In my opinion, it's not worth the effort. And again, you can start making other things when you start messing with sugars.

When I lived in Sweden and you actually could purchase feeds that were a combination of sucrose, fructose, and glucose. Of course, it was easy and efficient because it's Scandinavia, it was also incredibly expensive too. So there are options that you can do things like that, but I've never noticed it being worth the extra effort. All right, I don't know if anyone else has ever dealt with that before.

Zachary Huang:

When I first read the question, I thought it was referring to inverted corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, which some people refer to as inverted syrup. So if that's the question and the answer is no, it's bad for you. I had a high school student doing studies in my lab, trying to compare white sugar, honey, and corn syrup. So one thing that's clear is the syrup is the worst. One thing that's confusing is that white sugar is better than honey. We're still trying to figure out why that's the case. And so that's the second study.

One earlier published study by a USDA lab in the seventies said the same thing, that bees lived longer... In a cage studies, bees lived longer if they're fed with white sugar. Evolutionary, it doesn't make much sense because you would think the bees should have found out after a few millions of years should have figured out which one's best for them. Now we're saying, hey, white sugar is better. So it's probably just because it's a lab study and might be something with it that made the honey not as good. For example, we have to dilute the honey.

So one thing that occurred to me one day suddenly was, oh, what happens if they're used to honey, us making honey into a honey [inaudible] killing my bees. So I added some yeast inhibitor that didn't help. So there goes my pet theory. So now, you guys need to give me more ideas how to explain white sugar is better than honey, which can't be true. I don't trust myself. I trust the bees more, but I have to explain the data.

Meghan Milbrath:

I trust the these more, but we still have to explain ourselves as scientists. That's such a true statement. So we made it through all the questions. I'm so pleased to see how many people either forgot to turn off their webinars or stuck with us for the questions. I'm wishing everybody a super, super happy and heavy golden rod flow. May the asters be blooming long into August or October. So all right, thanks everyone. Have a great couple weeks till we see you next.

Ana Heck:

Thanks everyone. Bye.

Zachary Huang:

Bye.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:49:57]