May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Fox release If you have actually named your queen bees You might be a beekeeper If you cried when your favorite colony swarmed You might be a beekeeper Varroa mites were created in a lab in Wuhan, China. You might be a beekeeper. Man, I better look out there. That one might get me in trouble. If your beehives have more insulation than your house, you might be a beekeeper. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping
presented by our good friends at Man Lake. Our question of the day is this, how much can you know about the welfare of your bees without actually lifting the lid? Today our guest is Richard Wall and we'll be discussing answers to that question. But first, this just in from the UK. Headline Warning over surge in population of Asian hornets after unprecedented early sightings. In some areas, 11 times higher than the number of sightings
last year. In fact, they're saying the number of these hornets is going to be up over a thousand percent this year. Now, if you don't live in the UK, you might be saying, well, what does that have to do with me? But it has a lot to do with us because if you're a beekeeper here in North America or other parts of the world, you may be next. Now let's clarify something. These are not the Asian giant hornets, also known as murder hornets. These Asian hornets are mostly
known by the term yellow -legged hornets. They're not quite as big as the murder hornets, but they can be every bit as devastating. In fact, one of these hornets can kill up to 50 bees in a single day. Now these hornets have traveled from Asia to Europe, In fact, they've been found in about 15 different countries, and there is reason to be concerned about these. No matter what country
you're in, they may be coming. I know here in the United States, they've been spotted in Georgia, South Carolina, and some of the other southern states. The people down there are working to eradicate them. We wish them the best. We hope they'll throw every resource possible at this problem so that they don't spread everywhere else. In some countries, like Spain and Belgium, they have seen numbers increase from a handful of nests to over 10 ,000 nests in four years.
So these things can really spread like crazy. Research published in November of 2023 suggested in France, which is the worst hit country in Europe, that upwards of 29 % of the country's bee colonies are at risk of being wiped out every year by these Asian hornets. So let's keep a heads up. Let's be vigilant. But now let's turn to something positive and fun. We're going to
have a great talk with Richard. I'd like to welcome to the show today Richard Wall, coming to us all the way from the great state of Michigan. Good morning, Richard. How are you? I'm fine. How are you? I'm doing great. We have such a fun topic today. We're going to be talking about the article that just came out in Bee Culture magazine, the May edition 2025, that you wrote about everything that we can learn from observing a hive entrance. You called it observations at
the hive entrance. Before we jump into it, would you just give us a very brief idea of what your beekeeping background is like or anything else
you'd like to tell us to get to know you? Well, I got started with bees 16 years ago with no intent to do so a Swarm landed in a backyard pine tree I found a beekeeper and I was going to give him a give him the bees and at one point he said Or you can give this a try if you would like Those words changed my whole last 16 years of my life because I thought what the heck you know bees living in the wild Set up a hive in the back. Maybe get some honey in the fall. What
could be easier? I was totally naive when I got into it and That's how I got started Most of us were that naive it looks so simple And it is not there's so much to learn the topic that we have today is cool because you don't have to be an entomologist or a PhD or something to understand this. And for people that have been beekeeping for years and years, it may give you pause to think about some things and to spend a little bit more time just enjoying observing
the bees. And for people that are new to beekeeping, I think you're going to learn a lot here. So let's jump right into it. One thing that I love is your recommendation on having the hives close if if this is possible for you close to your house so that it's easy to go out and observe them regularly. Tell me a little bit about that. That's kind of how I got started because I had
no mentor. I didn't know clubs or classes or conferences even existed when I started, so I was just kind of do it on trial and error and a few things I could find in. the internet and beginner books. But I did spend a lot of time observing the bees coming and going. And then every time I would inspect, I'd always watch them for a little bit before I went into the
hive. And I feel I learned a lot by doing that, just seeing what they were, how their actions were out at the entrance, on the porch entrance. So we're going to delve into almost like a checklist of things here, about 10 things, but let's start with overall. What is the overall thing that we can learn just by observing bees? You know,
how they're coming in and out of the hive. When you observe, if you see pollen being brought in, that's an indication and you see a lot of activity, that's an indication that the hive is probably pretty strong. It's got a good queen.
Otherwise they're not going to be bringing in pollen unless they have brood to raise and brood to feed and so When you see pollen being brought in in the rear legs, that's the first indication that you get a pretty strong hive Shouldn't be the only indication shouldn't preclude inspections, but it's certainly a good indicator and None of what we're going to talk about today precludes inspections. We need to do those regularly correct But if we do them too often, we're actually not
we're doing a disservice to the bees. But you can look at your bees every day if you want to. The overall thing is some of that behavior. And I love seeing the pollen coming in. That's one of the most beautiful things there is. Would you mind touching on and I'll help fill in some blanks if you need it about that overall behavior? For example, sometimes. I can tell from a few feet away, these girls are just in kind of a bad mood today. A lot of that has to do with
the noise they're making. You can watch the front of the hive and if they're just coming and going and doing their thing, there's probably not much wrong in the hive. But you'll see a lot of fanning going on, and especially in the summer hot days. And what they're trying to do is ventilate the
hive. by ventilating, they're moving air through and they're taking care of the specific moisture and humidity level that they need, as well as the ventilation, reducing the nectar into the honey that they've stored in the comb to that 18 % that we're after before we can collect the honey. So they're very busy and there's a lot of bees usually just sitting on the porch fanning to take care of those actions. What does that
look like exactly? Well, the bees will be standing with all six feet on the porch and the bees, the wings will be moving to an almost imperceptible so fast that they're almost imperceptible. The bees might be facing inward or might be facing outward, depending on which way they're trying to get the airflow to go. And there'll be a good number of bees just sitting on the porch doing that fanning. Another action that the fanning serves is if they have their butts raised up
a bit. They have this what's called a Nazanov scent cell between the second and third abdominal break on their back, and they may just be putting a scent out to encourage other bees to come back to their hive. This is especially important if... you've moved a hive or you've caught a swarm or something like that, fanning with the butts raised indicates that they're trying to pass the queen's scent out to the other sisters that recognize it so they come back to the correct
hive. I don't remember if this was in the article or not, but to me it kind of goes with fanning, and that is bearding. Tell us a little bit about what you know about bearding. Bearding is an action that the bees take if the humidity and the temperature in the hive generally gets a bit too great. One of my first actions, the first summer I had bees in a single deep hive, somewhere in early August and July, I saw a heavy bearding
outside the hive. And being uninitiated at that point, I thought, well, there's probably not enough room. I'll give them a second deep. really what they needed was a better ventilation. In order to accomplish that, now I know that if I raise the top of the outer cover on the front edge and put a stick across there, it allows for more ventilation up through the inner cover and out, and it decreases the necessity of them
veering and moving so many bees outside. Because what you want is you want to have the bees working inside the hive as much as possible and not hanging around outside. It's just one of the things I learned in the process of my beekeeping, that if they have better ventilation, in addition to the fanning that they're doing, it will cut down on the bearding and you'll have more worker bees working rather than just hanging around outside. That makes sense. All right, let's talk
about guard bees. Guard bees is another element of the bees standing on the porch and they'll usually be one or two and you can actually, if you observe. the bees come in going, you'll see one or two that are normally facing away from the entrance, and those bees may come out and bump returning bees, or even if they perceive you as a threat, they may come up and bump your head or buzz around yourself, especially if you get a veil on, or even if you don't have a veil
on. And I've had bees bump my head, and they're the guard bees. They're usually standing with their front legs raised, their front of the body raised, and they're just checking the returning bees to see that they're the ones that really belong to the hive. And if they don't, they'll go out and attack them or fight with them not
to let them into the hive. And so that way they know that they're at the bees with the right pheromone or at the right hive, and they're allowed to enter, especially if they have a load of pollen or nectar with them. They just serve that purpose to keep other bees or robbers or a lot of times I see it with the yellow jackets in the fall. They'll attack a yellow jacket that's come because
it doesn't have the pheromone. It doesn't have the sense of those guard bees are facing outward in a different stance than your standard fanning bees. So let's remember guard bees. That's actually a good thing. Yes, they're taking a stance to try and preclude any invaders or any aggressors from coming in. And like if you had critters or skunks or something, they'd be the first ones to go out and sting. They're the first ones that
are going to come up and bump on your veil. If you're wearing a veil, if they feel it, feel that you as a beekeeper are being a little rough and you're a threat to the hive, they have a specific duty. and usually those are bees that have matured beyond the two or three week stage and have gotten to the point where they're taking on other duties other than just nurse bees or clean up bees inside the hive. I think this is a good time to throw out a little recommendation.
Not everybody can do this based on where their hives are sitting, but if you can, it just makes sense to work your hives from the back. True. sneak up on them from the back instead of straight from the front, which just alerts the guard bees. Hey, there's this gigantic creature coming towards me. If you work from the back and you very calmly and quietly take off the lid and start doing your business, it usually takes a lot longer
before they get alerted. And that's a nice thing because they don't just, you know, one or two come and give you a bump. If there's a problem, they alert everybody else. Correct. A little puffer to a smoke really decreases that alarm pheromone, and it also calms the bees. And lots of times, if the hive is just going about its business, if I open the hive and start pulling out frames and they continue to go about their
business, I don't even have to use smoke. because they've gotten to recognize me, I think, based on the years I've worked with the bees. They're much calmer if you're calm and not nervous and not threatening them and definitely one of you working from the back of the hive rather than the front. Because if you're standing in front, you become a perceived threat rather than quietly
working from the back of the hive. There is a behavior that is interesting that can happen in the middle of the winter on a warm day or very early spring. You're not going to probably see this happen in July. What are cleansing flights? OK, cleansing flights are when the bees need to go outside and defecate. In my instance here, we have some winters where it'll be below freezing during the day during the night for days on end.
And bees do not make a habit of relieving themselves within the hive if they can possibly avoid it. Some bees can go up to 60, 70, 80 days without relieving themselves if it's a very cold period of several months. And then you'll get one of those white winter snows. And usually we have a very warm, sunny day after the snow. And that's when, if it's above freezing and warm enough for the bees, they'll come out and you'll see all these yellow and brown spots on the snow.
And what they've done is they're coming out and defecating in the snow and relieving themselves because it hadn't been a chance to do that for maybe weeks on end when they were cooped up in the hive. So cleansing flights are very obvious
if you have white snow. In the winter probably not so obvious if you're in an area where you don't have snow on those warm days They'll come out and in mass Just one after the other after the other come and go come and go and relieving themselves because they haven't had a chance to do that cooped up in the hive for Weeks or maybe even a month on end and by the way, they're talented. They can do that mid -flight. Yes They don't have to stop. And anyway, we won't go into
all that detail. I had a couple of years ago, we had a very long, very cold winter here where I am. And most of my bees didn't make it. And there was five months straight where it was not warm enough for them to take a cleansing flight. And I wondered if that had something to do with them not making it through that winter. Do you
know anything about that? I'm going to say possibly yes and possibly no because I've had the good fortune of twice in the past six years going a perfect hundred percent through some pretty cold winters as was the case this past year. This year, this last fall, I went into the fall with 11 hives and I still have 11 hives that are very active. I'm getting ready to probably in another week do splits. And a lot of that,
I think, has to do with the insulation. A lot of it, I think, has to do with the winter feeding. But even more so, it's having the mites under control in late summer, early fall as your winter bees are being raised so that the mite population is not spreading viruses and disease within the hive. Let me just take a minute here to thank
our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. One of the things I love about Man Lake is their commitment to education because that commitment shows how much they want you to be successful at beekeeping. One great resource is their mobile app. You know, it's not just for shopping. It's packed full of all kinds of helpful information, including videos, articles, plus a plant identification feature designed to help beekeepers identify and plant bee healthy plants for their area.
It's free, so download the Man Lake app today. And speaking of shopping, don't forget your discount code MLBlove10. It's in the show notes. For $10 off your first $100 dollar purchase. Now back to the guest. The cold itself, bees have survived in the cold for for years in the woods and natural
environments. So if we provide a little bit of insulation, a little bit of winter feed as they require it and make sure the mites are under control, I think there's a good chance that most of people's hives, if they did those things, would survive. through even some very pretty cold winters because we have some pretty nasty winters here in Michigan too at times. Amen to all that and congratulations on having such good
success. You've figured some things out. All right bees have all kinds of duties during their lifetime in the hive. Undertaker bees you called them. What do they do and when is that in their life cycle? A bee's life cycle normally starts by emerging from the capped brood cell. And when the bee emerges, its normal first duties are as a clean up bee, it cleans up its cell and surrounding cells, as well as becoming a nurse bee and a caretaker of other bees that are just
emerging. Those bees need to be fed. They need to be bred. They need their area cleaned up. And that normally goes on for maybe a week or two to two weeks. At about the end of two weeks, when large group of bees emerge, that's when their wax glands develop. There's six to eight wax glands underneath their abdomen that develop and they can then go on and draw a new comb with
those new wax bits that they produce. And then somewhere in the, I think it's 18 to 20 day time frame, there'll be doing orientation flights and start to look at working outside the hive. This is the period when they've gotten into older duties such as undertaker bees and undertaker bees are the ones that are going to carry dead
bodies out of the hive. Bees basically wear themselves out after six to eight weeks in the summer, maybe even a little shorter because they're making so many foraging flights as they get further along in their life. The last few weeks of their life, that's not only what they're doing is coming and going, bringing nectar, bringing water, bringing resin and pollen back into the hive. And they work so hard, they literally wear themselves out until they don't have the energy and they
just die. Well, some of them end up dying in the hive. And so other bees have to be designated as undertaker bees in order to carry those dead bodies out of the hive. Because the winter bees last a lot longer, often four to six months because of the lesser activity, you'll see on warm days pretty large expansion of the undertaker bees
carrying out dead bodies. It's not unusual in warmer winter days to see an alarming number of dead bees just outside the hive entrance because the bees that are taking the undertaker duty are dragging all those dead bodies out. The more dead bodies they can gather the hive, the less moisture less potential for disease to be spread
inside the hive. So if you've got a good colony that's got good undertaker bees and a strong colony going into winter, you'll see that the bottom boards are almost clean when you inspect them at the first time in spring, because those bees have been cleaning out that bottom board and moving all the dead bees out. The other thing that's pretty obvious in the fall is you'll see
them dragging live drones out of the hive. And the drones are driven out of the hive in the fall because their only purpose in the whole structure is to mate with virgin queens. Well, going into winter, late fall and winter, there are no more virgin queens. The hive's not going to be producing new queens at that time. And so the drones, as the male bees' only purpose
is to mate, gets kicked out of the hive. And you'll see many of them kind of struggling as they're being dragged out of the hive in the fall. And that's another purpose of the undertaker bees is to eliminate as many drones as they can in the fall. They don't eliminate all of them, but they eliminate a pretty good percentage of them because all they're going to do is use up resources because there's no mating ritual that has to go on as you go into the fall and winter.
Oh, the life of a drone. I don't know what to say besides that. Anyway, this undertaker bee thing, it's kind of a good lesson, especially for new beekeepers, because sometimes you see a bunch of dead bees around the entrance of the hive and go, oh, no, oh, no. But once again, it's actually a good thing. It's good behavior on their part to be cleaning out the hive and keeping things as sanitary as they can. OK, one of the most beautiful things that I love to observe
is orientation flights. Now, if you're new to observing bees, it may look like mass chaos. Tell us about orientation flights and how can you tell the direction they're actually going on orientation flights? There's there's several different cases when you'll see a lot of activity out of the hive. One is swarming, and that's probably the most chaotic, which should get into at some other point. Orientation flights is a
little bit alarming because you see all. Bees are making a circular pattern, normally looking back at the front of the hive, maybe flying a little further away, making another circle, circular pattern and looking again. And in many cases, there'll be dozens, if not hundreds of bees doing this at the same time, because that queen that was laying eggs is probably laying 1500 to 2000
eggs. It can lay that much in a day. So she may have laid dozens or hundreds of eggs in the same time frame and all those bees have emerged close to the same time. So in a warm morning day, you may go out and look at your hive mid morning and there'll be all these this activity just outside the front of the hive. And what those bees are doing is they're getting their navigation skills down to figure out what the environment
looks like around their hive to get the. sense of the pheromone smell to come back to the hive and to just orientate themselves in relation to the sun and the other environment around them so that they know which hive to come back to. And this is somewhat amazing because in my case, like I said, I have 11 hives sitting in a row and you may see one hive doing this and no activity in the others. And then the day later you see a different hive do it with all this orientation
activity and none others. And they're just in that particular hive. getting oriented to the location of the hive, the color of the hive, the scent of the hive, so that when they go out in greater distance in relationship to the sun, they can find their way back to the hive that they came from. And Richard, have you ever thought about this? These bees have actually never been outside at all. In fact, inside the hive is quite
dark. Right. I mean, this is a big jump from living in this tiny little pretty dark quarters to all of a sudden. you're going to go out and fly and do your job. You need orientation of some sort. It'd be like a person living in a cave and one day coming out and seeing what the world looks like outside. But that's the nature of the insect is they have the means to do that. And they're smart enough to know that they need to maybe make several orientation flights. They
may go back in the hive and continue with. Queen helping duties or cleansing duties or something like that and come back out and do another orientation flight. They may do this three, four times before they actually go out and forage to a greater distance. But it's an important feature of the hive that they can orient to where the hive is located and know how to get back to the hive that they belong to. All right. One of the last things that we're going to talk about is robbing.
And if you haven't seen this behavior before, explain to us what it looks like. Robbing is one of the three things that you'll see that looks chaotic outside the hive. I mentioned swarming, which is a whole different issue. And then the orientation flights. Orientation flights are condensed usually within 5, 10, 15 feet of the hive as the orientation gets further and further out. Robbing is another condition where you'll see a lot of fights going on outside the hive,
but even more so. along any of the cracks of the hive or the joints between two different deeps or supers, the bees from a different hive will be looking for those cracks and crevices to find their way in to rob from the hive they're attacking. This happens in particular with the weak hive, sometimes with a new starter nuke hive that doesn't have the strength to defend itself and The robbing is a very chaotic fighting event often between bees, especially with a stronger
hive against a weaker hive. That's why it's well advised that if you're working with open hive to cover the part that you're now working with a sheet or just a part of the outer cover or something and only have a minimal amount open because bees can sense when honey is available
and a hive is open. And if it sits open too long, you might induce robbing, especially if you've got a hive that's not found any nectar in a while or there's a dearth going on and they want to get more honey for their own hive, it can increase the potential for a robbing event. The other thing to do is use an entrance reducer and reduce to the smallest size so the gargbees have smaller rate to reduce or you can throw a sheet over
the hive. and just close it up for a day and then come back and check it to make sure that you haven't lost that colony. Robbing can occur to the extent that one hive will totally eliminate the weaker hive if you're not careful and you have robbing going on. Another feature of robbing that causes robbing is outside feeding. A bucket of some type of feed that's set outside the hives is a real inducement for introducing robbing
among other bees. That's why I like to use enclosed containers or inside feeders or a super around a jar feeder that's sitting over the inner cover opening because then only the bees and no other yellow jackets and other critters can get to the honey and it precludes any potential for other bees to get into this robbing mode. Are there any other things that we could be looking for outside the hive that may be signs that there
is something wrong? You know, diseases or mites or queenless, anything else that we can observe that maybe should alert us that, hey, I need to dig into this hive today and figure out what's going on? Well, the advice that I've always I learned fairly early on was that if you have more than one hive, and you see one hive's activity considerably different than the others, it's
probably worth checking out. Outside observations on the porch should never take the place of whatever routine inspections, whatever your inspection
schedule is. If I do my spring inspections and I find that I've got a queen and I got a good egg and larva and brood pattern and she's doing well and I continue to see the bees on the outside bringing in pollen, I may not open and inspect every frame for a couple of months, maybe two months, maybe even a little more than that on end, unless I suspect that there's a problem. The reason you would suspect a problem is that you don't see the activity outside the hive.
You don't see the bees coming and going the way you would expect, and this comes with experience. I spend a lot of time in my first few years just watching the bees and getting a feel for what was going on inside the hive before I'd open it by watching what was going on outside the hive. And that helped me learn a lot about what
to expect when I did open a hive later on. But if there's a dirth and no nectar or there's a queen problem, problem with using, relying totally on outside inspections is the problem has probably existed for two to three weeks before you've caught it. And so inspections are not to be. replaced by observing outside. But watching what's going on outside, especially when you have two or three hives that you can compare, really should
alert you to the need for an inspection. If you see a drastic difference in activity from one hive to the other, especially a lack of activity, that's a key indicator that there may be something wrong within the hive. You mentioned swarming a minute ago, and I want to finish up with this one. What is swarming behavior going to look like from outside the hive? And if you observe it at that point, is there anything you can do
about it? Or is it too late? Yes and yes. Swarming activity, the first time I saw, I went out and was checking, going to check my hives and I observed bees just in mass, wave after wave, leaving a
hive. And I really Thought it was swarming, but I really didn't know the first time I saw it and so in an area maybe 50 60 feet wide 40 50 feet in front of the hive 2 to 3 feet to 12 feet was just total chaos with bees all over the place and this Exodus of the bees leaving the hive continued more and more bees in this chaotic huge area out in front the hive and then Suddenly the queen, which I learned later is going to
be one of the last to leave. She leaves and once she joins this chaotic, huge, chaotic flying of bees outside, they coalesced into about a six to eight foot wide mass and then departed to the south. The rabble rouser bees or the scout bees that were leading them finally had the queen join them and when the queen join them off they go. That's what I witnessed the first time. I just stood there mesmerized and watched it as
I lost a swarm out of one of my hives. The second time I saw that was probably two or three years later. And as soon as I saw this mass exodus starting, I pulled, it was in two deeps, and I pulled the top deep off and I interrupted that tendency of whatever the bees were leaving. Started pulling frames from the bottom deep that had brood on them and basically did a split on the
spot. with the swarm trying to coalesce. Well, as the queen is one of the last out, she stayed on the bottom deep because I think I interrupted the process by removing frames. And so I had the queen that was going to swarm and the swarm resettle on the bottom deep. In the meantime, I pulled some frames up, put some new frames in, took the second deep and set it aside as a second hive to allow them to make a queen with some of the brood frames and managed to catch
the swarm mid midstream. So you can, if you catch it in the middle, because that whole process that I talked about in the first element probably didn't take but maybe five, no more than 10 minutes at most, maybe five minutes that whole event was over when I lost the swarm to the south.
And then a few years later I saw a swarm and fortunately When I was working with some nukes, this is the third time I saw it in my hives the swarm coalesced and landed on a bush maybe 20 feet away from me and I was able to get a stepladder and Bucket and capture it and put it in the new hive and the thing that was interesting about the third time I saw the swarm is there was a secondary swarm the afternoon out of that same hive I witnessed both of them with a virgin queen
and So I got another bucket another empty hive and ended up catching the the virgin queen who was at what they called an after swarm after the first swarm which was probably twice as big a size as the after swarm was but still two swarms out of the same hive on the same day and three times in my career i've been in the yard when i've actually seen a swarm First one I lost, the second one I stopped in the middle, and the third one I caught them after they landed in
the bush. So it's an interesting thing. And I think the thing that amazed me is the whole process is over in probably not much more than five minutes. Do you ever just take some time, take a chair, just sit out by the beehives and watch them? I do that as often as I can. You know, a sunny warm day, I'll go out and... I don't necessarily sit in a chair, but I'll sit and watch the bees coming and going. It's a relaxing thing to do.
It's interesting to see what they're bringing back in, whether their bodies are somewhat seem to be engorged when they're bringing back in nectar or water in their honey crop, because they do look a little larger in the abdomen when they are carrying stuff back in. And it's just relaxing to hear the constant low buzz of the bees, knowing that they're not upset, you're just observing them. And they come and go and
don't seem to be minding me. They're watching, standing and watching them for a while by myself without interfering with them. And it's just a very relaxing thing to do. And on the other side of the coin, you learn a lot by just watching them coming and going. I think it's something that we don't do often enough, most of it, especially if we've been beekeeping for a long time. I'm gonna put out a little challenge for everybody.
This week, just in the next few days, do that sometime, maybe early morning, maybe evening
at dusk or something when it's nice and. calm and pleasant and take a chair take a beverage if you want and just relax and spend some time reminding yourself of the joy and the peace that comes from bees and that's a challenge for commercial beekeepers too because they don't it's a business i get it but enjoy the bees as well okay last thing richard before i let you go do you have a wild and crazy beekeeping story you want to share with us Well, by the second year, at the
time I was a high school teacher and I had a freshman student who was just every, he knew I had B's that first year and he was just full of questions. So I told him if he could get his parents to buy him the woodenware, I would give him a swarm or I would buy a package and I had already arranged to buy two packages that second year and I would give him one. Well, to my surprise,
his parents got him the woodenware. And so in the second year of my beekeeping, I'm not only learning myself, but now I'm trying to help him do his beekeeping. So by my third year, which was his second, he had reached the point where he was going to be able to take some honey. And so he tells me one day, yeah, I took my honey supers off this like midweek Wednesday. with the idea that come Saturday I was going to go
process the honey. But what he did is he set the honey supers under an awning of the garage, which was not enclosed. And he told me when he went back that Saturday after having setting them out on Sunday or on Wednesday, that the bees had virtually taken every bit of honey out of those honey supers and taken it back to the hive, which surprised him and gave us both a
lesson in how fast they can quickly return. Whatever you've taken away if you haven't extracted it or put it in a place where they can't get to it They are amazing. I keep saying it over and over and over. Hey Richard wall Thank you so much for being with me. Check him out and be culture magazine. He has an article every month Do you do every month? Yes, I do I've On my fourth year of an article every month that's aimed at
the beginners. My pages are always in blue I usually have on average about three pages and any mistakes in there are mine because there's not too much editing that goes on. I know the read the articles, but I don't get many critiques about change the sentence or do something here. So it's my experience with my beekeeping starting 16 years ago, which is where most of this come from a lot of things that I've learned and managed to come across of my own doing. Thanks for your
time today, Richard. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thanks again for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Remember right now to follow or subscribe and share this podcast. Also a quick shout out to Vita Bee Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid
Strips. Thanks guys. Enjoy spring everybody, enjoy your bees, and remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.