168 - Carolyn Breece and Ellen Topitzhofer - Late Winter Hive Management

Speaker 1: From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators.

I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the department of horticulture. For those lucky souls in Western Oregon, it feels like spring is upon us. A man's Anita Bush I saw just down the block was in bloom, and Rosemary starting to have some blossoms. It feels like the worst is over when it comes to beekeeping. Winter is over, and the colonies are going to grow, but in fact, this is the most delicate time for a honeybee colony. To help us navigate through the late winter and bee management, I've invited two people whom I trust implicitly with beekeeping advice, Carolyn Brace and Ellen Topenzhofer from the Seguili Epiculture Lab here at Oregon State University. Now another late winter institution here in Western Oregon is the annual Beevent Pollinator Conference. It is kind of a regional conference for pollinators. And it's going to be online this year so anybody from across the country can attend. And it's really great because all the speakers have been guests on pollination. We've got Jim Cain.

He's going to be speaking. Catherine Lacroix, remembers she did that great episode on exotic mason bees. And then August Jackson, who we've had on the show twice. As we have had, I think Jim Cain's been on the show three times. You don't want to miss this.

It's going to be it's always the first Saturday in March, so March 6th this year. It's only $20. Go ahead and register and you're going to really enjoy it. I'm going to be online. Anyways, without further ado, here's Ellen and Carolyn on winter management. Hey, all right. So I was welcome. I'm so glad to have you guys on here. Carolyn and I are in rainy Corvallis and Ellen, where are you?

Speaker 2: I am in Orland, California.

Speaker 1: Orland, California. What? How is the weather down there?

Speaker 2: Oh, it's pretty good. We have we've had a little bit of rain, but it's been it's been warm. It's been I think it was a high of 60 today. And yeah, the bees are flying like crazy out here.

Speaker 1: So you're down for almond pollination, I imagine. Yes.

Speaker 2: Yep. A lot of bees are being moved in right now or have already been moved down here to get ready for almond pollination.

Speaker 1: You know, before we get started, is it when it rains and it's wet like that, must be difficult to move bees in?

Speaker 2: Yes. And it's difficult for me to get our truck through the orchards too. Things are pretty saturated after a rain. And so I can see a bunch of a bunch of tracks of people trying to get their bees in when after a big rain, I think it's I think it's really tough for beekeepers to navigate through the orchards to get their bees in.

Speaker 1: Well, this is a great starting point for thinking about late winter winter managers. What I wanted to have you both on the show for. There are still a lot of people who have bees in Oregon. We're we're not going to have that almond pollen and nectar coming into our colonies. And I guess, you know, a lot of colonies don't die in December or January but in the last months of winter. And I just wanted to ask you both, why are honeybee colonies so vulnerable at this time of year.

Speaker 2: Yeah, well, the winter months are I mean, it's it's a colony. Dormancy period, right? Meaning where, you know, they can't fly or forage for most of the time, if not all of the time. But starting now, you know, in Oregon, I think that we're seeing colonies that are starting to grow again, even though we still have winter conditions.

Right. And so the queen is laying more eggs. And we're seeing newly emerged bees right now.

But the bees have eaten a lot of their honey stores and they might be running out of food, especially since they're more active now than, you know, in December or January. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah.

I mean, in Corvallis will have a day when the sun decides to come out and, you know, beekeepers get excited that their bees are flying and they might even be bringing back some pollen. Right. But then, you know, we'll get we'll get a week-long stretch of rain and the colony can't do anything, you know, other than, you know, stay inside and eat all day. Right. So I think the biggest reason colonies would be especially vulnerable, especially vulnerable right now would be that it would be a food issue.

Speaker 1: Caroline, do you have anything that you wanted to add to that? Oh, Ellen, you were you were just winding up there. I could hear.

Speaker 2: Well, I think I think there's also another example of, you know, colonies being vulnerable right now is that you could have colonies that were heavily parasitized by Varroa in the fall. And many of the bees have died already in those colonies.

So the colony cluster of some colonies may be really small because of Varroa pressure, previous Varroa pressure, making it more difficult for them. A small cluster would make it more difficult for those bees to stay warm and to stay alive.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I can imagine, you know, smaller colonies and it looked real big going into fall, but the Varroa mites, you know, those bees weren't going to last very long. And now you don't have a lot of bees and must be hard to keep the temperature the right temperature and all sorts of other colony presses just don't work so well when you have so few bees. Caroline, do you have anything that you want to add on this in terms of why colonies are vulnerable or how the colonies at OSU look? What do you sort of expect in the colonies at OSU this time of year?

Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think this is probably one of the most stressful times of the year. It's you do so much for preparation. You try to feed as much as you can in the fall and you do all your Varroa treatments and even do some of the oxalic acid treatments in the dead of winter. But it's still very stressful. And especially this year, we've had a pretty warm winter, a few cold snaps here and there. But in general, it seems like it's been pretty warm. And that means that the bees aren't clustering as tightly and they might be eating more. And so we just don't know if they're eating through their stores too quickly.

So we go around and we kind of do some checks if the weather is good, is nice enough for us to actually open the lids, or we just go and heft the back of the hives to see if they're too light. And so, yeah, we have come across several that are too light.

Speaker 1: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So describe the heft. Tell me how you get the heft of a colony.

Speaker 3: You just take the lift off the back end of it up by the handle. And in the fall, the colony should be so heavy that you can't even lift it. This time of year, though, they've been eating, the bees have been eating, and lightning that loads so much that you're probably going to be able to lift it. And if it's really light, then it's time to get nervous and it's time to feed. Okay.

Speaker 1: So what do you do? Now you've gone, you've felt some colonies are feeling a lot lighter than they were in the fall. How can you get fed into a colony that's running light in February?

Speaker 3: Well, this would be considered emergency feeding. It's just that you've done everything you can to try to get their honey stores up. But now it's, now you need to feed sugar in order for an emergency to cover them between now and spring when you can start to feed syrup or when the nectar starts coming in.

So there are a lot of options to do this. You, first of all, you could use just plain old granulated white sugar. My favorite way to feed emergency feed is to make these sugar bricks. So I take 10 pounds of white granulated sugar, put it in a bucket, and add just one cup of water. And that seems like very little water, but it actually goes a long way. Then take your hands and mix them up and get the consistency of wet snow. And then I pack it in these, these tins. You can get those like lasagna tins that are disposable at the store. And then just pack it in really thick and leave it overnight and they get rock hard.

And then I put that the next day, put that right on top of the cluster on the top bars. And the bees have very easy access. You do need a spacer to put on top of the hives to make room for the sugar bricks. But once they have that brick on there, it's, it feels just like insurance. So if they don't need it, they don't need it and that's fine. But if they do, it's right above the cluster and ready for them.

Speaker 1: Okay, I have some brick questions. Okay. So I'm going to get like a five-gallon pail and I'm going to put, how do I do this? And how do I get it out of there? You just kind of trowel it out or?

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's just like snow at that point. And so you just pack it into these trays just like snow. Okay.

Speaker 1: And so how, and the rim, how much of a rim, I guess it depends on what kind of tray you use. You want it to, you want the rim to sort of go up to the depth of the tray. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 3: I should mention the tray is really just a mold. So we have used paper plates in the past. With, there are all kinds of molds you can use, but eventually, I'll just pop them out. And so I won't be putting the tray on the hives.

It'll just be, I'll pop out the sugar brick and put it on top. Okay, gotcha. So yeah, you do need to make sure you have the right size. The brick can't be too thick and the lid won't shut. And I don't know, I guess too thin, you're not gonna have enough feed.

Speaker 1: Raises the question like how big a brick, how do you, so you were talking like a plate, a paper, a big serving paper plate, that would be maybe the minimum size of a brick that you'd want to use.

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's a minimum size. And you know, if you make them that size, you might just have to do, to feed them a few times. Oh, right. Some people actually create candy boards. They make candy boards to put on top of their colonies.

And I think this is a great idea. And then they fill that entire space with this sugar candy. And it's a lot of sugar. And they just leave that over the winter and they sleep better at night because they know that there's enough available.

Speaker 1: This is the candy board above the inner cover or it's like a board that goes, it just fits the dimensions of it. I don't know what a candy board is.

Speaker 3: It's, if you think of a spacer, like a one-inch spacer going around the colony, the bottom is a very wide gauge screen or mesh. So maybe like a half-inch mesh. And so it's open for the bees to get through.

You can crawl through as much as you want. And then you place that right on top of the top bars and then put the inner cover on. So the bees should have immediate access to the sugar.

Okay. So those are sugar bricks. So lots of different ways. And people can make these and there are so many recipes out there. There are all kinds of things people add to it like lemon juice glucose syrup or fructose granules. There are so many different things out there. To me, I like to just keep it simple and just go white sugar and water. It doesn't take a lot. I don't cook it, but you can.

So there's a lot of different options out there. Other people will just simply take dry white sugar and fill the feeder or other people might. Really? Yeah. And that's, that does work and it's a great way to have sugar available. However, if you have, if it's cold and the colony is clustering, they may not be warm enough to break the cluster and walk over to the feeder. So, there is, so use a little caution when you do that method. Another good method is to just pour the white sugar on top of the inner cover. And the bees can crawl up and access the sugar through that little hole in the middle. So, yeah, some people have had great luck with just plain dry white sugar. A bonus to that is it absorbs moisture. And so as we all know moisture is such a challenge in Oregon in our hives.

And so if anything can absorb moisture, then that's definitely a bonus. I suppose you could also use newspaper and put newspaper on the top bars, poke a few holes, and just pour some white sugar on top. So it's just immediate access for the bees and, and that's, that's the best way. If you have a dead out and there's some extra honey that's remaining, you could, you could drop those honey frames in your colony, as long as it's warm enough where you can kind of like open the hive and dig around a little bit. And you really want to make sure those honey frames are right next to the cluster, so they don't have to walk too far to get to it.

Speaker 1: Oh, that makes sense. You could put it right on the edge and it's one of these small colonies that Ellen described and there's no way they'll make it over there. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Ellen, how does that cover everything for you as well?

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, I think that's a that's good, that's a good amount of discussion for what you can do for emergency feed.

Speaker 1: I mean, I often think of you guys as a pair. You're, you often be kept together. So you probably your tricks are very similar. Yes.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Well, speaking of feed, I was talking to, you know, one of a beekeeper we all, we all know really well, Harry Vanderpool, and he was talking about feeding pollen patties in the late winter. And I just want to ask you, why do people use pollen patties and when should they be using them, when should they be applied?

And, and yeah, let's start there. Then I want to move on to how a beginner can navigate this dizzying world of all sorts of patties, but let's start with, how, and why people use them and how should they be applied.

Speaker 2: Well, I mean, typically, you know, beekeepers will feed pollen patties when there is a pollen dirt. And so I think, I think feeding pollen patties is a, it's a big part of fall management for that reason. The fact that there is not a lot of pollen readily available for foraging bees in Oregon, at least. There's not a lot of pollen out there right now, especially in the cold, wet, rainy, you know, Oregon, but I don't know, again, this is a dormancy period for bees too. So when I don't know, I think, I don't think beekeepers should be feeding pollen patties right now, unless their winter is over, you know, and the case of Harry Vanderpool, his winter is over, right? He's moving his bees down to California for the almond pollination, right? And so for almost every commercial beekeeper in the Northwest, you know, the winter is over right now.

And so they are, you know, starting to feed, you know, both pollen and syrup, you know, in a way they're trying to stimulate their colonies for this massive pollen flow that's about to hit in mid-February or earlier, you know.

Speaker 1: You know, that's how Harry described it to me exactly. He said, you know, I don't want to start feeding pollen patties until I know there's a reliable pollen flow on the other end of those patties. If you, I think what he was trying to convey to me is exactly what you were saying. If you fed pollen patties and they ate the pollen patty and then there's still nothing, the colony would have all this brood and it'd be stuck. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. So, and I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure if there are a lot of hubby beekeepers that would feed pollen patties this early in the season. But yeah, I would definitely side on, you know, waiting until there's a little more reliable forage for them outside before starting to feed.

Speaker 1: Carolyn, is that you don't use pollen patties at OSU? Is it kind of not a, it's something in the spring, you just let the natural pollen flow kind of bring the colonies up?

Speaker 3: We do. We use protein patties. It's, I think it does sort of, stimulate them in the spring and especially when it's, there isn't a lot available. So maybe it's raining and they can't get outside and there's still a lot of brood in the colony. And our springs are so variable and unpredictable.

So there's, it's just another one of those insurance things where it's nice to have if it's needed. So yeah, we do, we use protein patties in the spring, but we use them a lot more in the fall.

Speaker 1: Okay, so this is not for, for OSU's purposes, this is not a late winter management tool. This is something that may, in the spring, you have some nice, you have some nice days, some pollen comes into the colony and then it gets wet for two weeks. You're like, ah, we better help them out. Something like that. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, well, I know, well, that's good to get that clear. I guess just as we were talking about pollen patties, there's been a lot of nutrition research from the best nutrition research, I think, you know, anywhere out of the Segealy lab. How do beginners navigate this dizzying array of protein supplements on the market today? It just seems like there's, you know, I was surprised I went to APA Monday a couple of years ago and I had been sort of out of the beekeeping world and I noticed the pollen patties are green now. I was a little horrified, but

Speaker 2: yeah, there are a lot of different kinds of pollen patties to choose from and I could definitely see how a new brand new beekeeper wouldn't really know where to start when it comes to like choosing which one to buy. But would you steer them off it?

Speaker 1: Would you say, hey, would you steer them off it? Would you say, actually, when you're starting out, you don't really need these?

Speaker 2: No, I mean, I do believe in feeding pollen patties when appropriate. I do especially think that's for the fall in Oregon. But I think that like for a beginner, you know, I mean, like you, I think that they should definitely just buy the pre-made patties. Right? There's a choice between buying those one-pound pre-made patties or mixing them yourself.

Right? And so definitely for a beginner, especially I would just go with the pre-made one-pound patty. We also buy those at OSU, pre-made patties. Me as well.

Yeah. And I think a lot of kind of the big differences between pollen patties right now is the percent protein that they have. And so, you know, the higher the percent protein content in that, in that pollen patty, the higher the quality of that pollen patty would be for the bees in theory.

Right? And of course, they would, they also tend to be a little more expensive, the higher percent protein patties. But I don't know, I guess that's the trade-off. But yeah, if I were to steer beginner beekeepers in some kind of direction, you know if you're looking for a higher quality pollen patty, I would aim for a higher percent protein.

Speaker 1: You know, I was watching on YouTube, I agree with buying them pre-made. I was watching the speaker we had at the OSBA conference, an excellent conference this year, Ian Stepler from Manitoba. And he had, is that his name? Yeah, he had this big like mixing thing. And it was, he put a dust mask on because it was so like that yeast extract is so choking. And it was a messy, messy, he had a big, you know, he had an industrial size equipment and it was like, but I can imagine someone trying to do it in their kitchen.

Speaker 2: It would be messy, messy, messy. And I see the, I see advantages to that too. You know, you as a beekeeper can make your patties, you know, the right, the consistency that you want it to be, right? Some beekeepers prefer a softer pollen patty, right? But, you know, I think it's getting a little bit into the weeds, you know, for a beginner.

Speaker 1: Okay, you guys, well, let's take a quick break. Well, let's come back and we'll let's play with the scenario that you've found out, you've got some callings that aren't doing so well, and what you can do at that point. Okay, we're back.

So, okay, you've got, you find out you've got some callings that are struggling, maybe they died, and you want to get back to the numbers that you had in the fall. Is it too late to order packages and nukes? If it is, when should be, when should people ideally be getting these orders in?

Speaker 3: Well, we're talking in early February, and it's not too late. You can still get your nuke and packages ordered by now, but they do sell out. So, it's, so get on it if that's what you need to do. By now, you really should have a good idea of what colonies will be making it into spring and which ones you need to replace. So, so ideally, for your colony, your orders should be, they should be placed in January or February. But, you know, sometimes it just sort of depends on who you're calling as well. Sometimes beekeepers will have late-season nukes available all the way through May. So, so you might, you might not be out of luck if you're late on ordering.

Speaker 1: Well, I suppose that's a lesson to go into your colonies on a nice day in, in January and February to figure out if anything's really, really wrong. I suppose taking a peek.

Well, this opens a whole can of worms. I imagine people are really nervous about opening their colony until late March or something. But what do you guys do to sort of figure out if a colony is dead and you need to replace them? It's time of year.

Speaker 3: Well, we, we look for bee flight. So if it's a really nice day and most of our colonies are flying and we see one that there's just nothing going on, nobody looks, looks like nobody's home, then we'll go ahead and pop the lid and check out and see if they are alive or not. And, you know, what there have been times where we've caught colonies in the middle of starving. And we actually saved them. So, we saw them moving very slowly.

Speaker 1: Wait a second. Those are my colonies, weren't they?

Speaker 3: But you can't, like you can turn them around if you catch them if you intervene at the right time. So, we put our feet on them right away. But anyway, yeah, if you, if you see bees flying on these nice days and we're coming up to a few here in the forecast. So if your hives are alive, they probably will be flying in the next couple of days.

Speaker 1: I guess for beginners, the bee should be up on the top. So if you pop the lid up and there's just no bee, you look down between the inner spaces and then no bees, that's a that's a bad sign, I suppose.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1: It will be all the way in the bottom or something. They'll be, they should be up, up high, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3: Yes, definitely. Yeah.

Speaker 2: There are times when like they can be also really, really small this time of year too. And that can be kind of, I think a difficult decision for beekeepers who like, you know, you're not sure if like a softball size cluster is really going to make it at this time.

Speaker 1: So Oh man, I have to say, if I had a softball size, yeah, package, I guess I would be just like, I'm already in a package.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I guess I want to deal with it. I'm pretty frustrated. I'm impatient. So for those patient beekeepers, I guess that's the thing. There is a certain size when the colony is getting so small

Speaker 1: and all the ways that you described at the beginning of the episode, Ellen, that colony can't thermoregulate. It's going to have a hard time foraging the queen, maybe kind of damaged by all the cold. We had, we had Alison McCaffey a couple of episodes ago, and she talked about it, I knew about overheating at Queens, but I didn't know cooling of Queens can harm them. But I can imagine all sorts of things can go wrong when I guess that small.

Speaker 3: For sure.

Speaker 1: And I guess the point that you can't buy, it gets harder to buy packages as time goes by and trying to do that calculation in your head. It's small, February, I don't know. So softball, look for softballs, I suppose, in your softball size colonies. Right.

Speaker 3: Right. And if it does turn out to survive and thrive, then you have an extra colony. So it's probably better to order a package or a nuke and not need it. You could actually, you could sell a nuke if you didn't need it, or you could just expand your apiary.

Speaker 1: That's a great point though, Carolyn. I think that it gives you the insurance and you can always, you know, sell the nuke or something later on. But if you have something at that, it's kind of on the cusp there, and you really do want to have that bee colony, it is worth just making the investment and not taking a Hail Mary on it, I suppose.

Speaker 2: For sure.

Speaker 1: Okay. So I guess, Ellen, we had you on a past episode talking about Varroa mites, and I imagine with there's starting to be brood, there's got the Varroa starting to build. Is there anything at this time of year you can do to interrupt this growth?

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think Varroa mites are definitely starting to grow right now. I mean, in our hives at OSU, we're seeing a few frames of brood right now. And so, Varroa mites, as we know, depend on brood in colonies to reproduce. So, yeah, I think that it's a good idea for beekeepers to start thinking about their Varroa levels. And I mean, unless your colony is in the end stages of crashing from mites, there's a good chance that your Varroa levels are pretty low right now.

It's kind of the start of that seasonal cycle with their reproduction. So anyway, I think that because of that, because there are likely low levels of Varroa in colonies right now, I mean, I think it's a lot easier to control Varroa with mitesites. So, this time of year can be a great opportunity to get a head start on keeping those Varroa levels low. And yeah, I mean, since we have brood in our colonies, oxalic acid will not be very effective right now. If you go through the list of mite sites you can use, oxalic isn't going to be very effective. And a lot of the other mitesites, it's simply too cold to apply those mitesites right now. Honestly, I think your best and possibly only option would be to use apivar, which is the active ingredient is amitraz.

Amitraz is not sensitive to temperature. So anyway, if that were to be if you as a beekeeper decided that you wanted to control Varroa, I think that would be a great option. Apivar.

Speaker 1: You know, and that jives, I remember there was research at Met Had Nasser did in Alberta about the seasonality of apivar strips. And you know, the falls, it's not, it doesn't spread nearly as good as some of the earlier products like Valinate, which was an apistan, but it really does work well on these small bees. And you don't need as many strips.

You can, you don't have to use so much chemical. It's a great time. This early spring is a great time of year to use that product.

If you're into using synthetic products for sure. But the other thing that you said was interesting was that the oxalic acid and people think, oh, it's cold outside. But I guess the nuance that you're putting there is that really the brood nest was at its smallest in December. And in a year like this, where, you know, was as Carolyn was mentioning, the, it didn't really get that cold. That shutdown may have been very brief, I suppose.

Speaker 2: Yeah, if it's at all, actually, I wonder if we really had a true, because our winter was so mild this year, I wonder if we even had a true break in the brood cycle or not.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, that's good to know. So I guess we, covered the question, I sent my, I guess, questions in advance. All right, I had, when should you go into your colony and do an inspection? But we already covered that. But is there anything that we missed when we were talking about that? Like, I guess, you know, just waiting for there to be some good bee flight. And I imagine all you're doing, Carolyn, at this time of year is, you know, popping up the lid, looking down on the bees, and not digging through. When, when does it get warm enough to kind of like, you know, dig in the nest a little bit?

Speaker 3: I think when you, when you see bees really flying and, and in full force, and when it's, you know when you don't need a jacket to go outside and work your bees, that's, that's probably when it's okay to go ahead and dig through a little bit more. Yeah, they just, you just don't want to chill the brood.

So, so as long as it's warm enough for you, and for the bees to be flying, I think it's okay, to go ahead and take a look in there.

Speaker 1: Okay, so we come through and unfortunately you find out that you have a dead colony. I guess, what, you know, what steps do you do take before reusing this equipment and, you know, maybe, you know, putting a new package on it or, you know, using that equipment for a nuke, what steps do you take when you find these dead-outs?

Speaker 3: Well, the first step is to figure out why it died in the first place. So take a moment and lay out some newspaper, get, put it on the table with really good light, and go ahead and just pick it, but the cells, it's best to do this with a brood frame, one of the brood frames from smack in the middle of where the cluster once was.

And, take some tweezers and just pick away at the cells and try to figure out what happened. Maybe it was starvation. If it's starvation, you'll see bees with their heads in the cells, and you'll see that there is no honey or, or any kind of stores in the corners, and, and honey is far away in the frames. If it could be, it could be Varroa, so your colony could have crashed due to Varroa infestation, and those signs, you might see some perforated cappings, and if you hold the, if you look at the roof of the cells, you might see this white crystalline stuff, and that's Varroa frass or their poop.

And, that's a surefire sign that you had a Varroa problem. And sometimes with, with deadouts, you still, there is some brood left, the capped brood, it's dead, of course, but you can still pull it out. So I love, I love doing colony autopsies, I think it's really fun, and it's just a great big puzzle. So, take those, take your tweezers, and pull the pupae out of the capped cells, and, and you might find some with mites on them still. Yeah. Yeah, so, that's a surefire way to know that you had a Varroa problem. And so starvation and Varroa, those, those are not problems that will carry on with your colony, your future colonies, so you can use those frames again. But what you really want to make sure you don't have is American foulbrood. So take your, pick away at that brood, look for, look for the brownish, well, they'll be dead. So they'll, they'll definitely be brown, but do the ropey test, look for scale.

So use the light really carefully and look at the bottom of the cell for that scale, perforated cell, perforated cappings. So you just want to really, really take a good close look at the brood nest and make sure that American foulbrood is not in your colony. It's rare, but it does, it does get passed on. So, if you suspect American foulbrood, get help in diagnosis and make sure before you use these frames again. So back to if it's not American foulbrood, this is a great opportunity to call out old comb. So if you have a comb that's black, or if the cells are getting smaller and smaller because they've just been built up so much, or they're, or you just know that they're really old, this is a great time to just yank those out of the, out of this, out of circulation and call them out. You can also spiff up your frames by scraping off the burr comb, scraping off excess propolis, scraping out the boxes and just, and just get them all nice and spiffed up for the new package or the nukes that you install.

Speaker 1: You know, I always, I always appreciate that you know, beekeepers who have a good cleanup line because the equipment's just so easier to move the next year. If you take your dead out and you don't get all that crud off the comb and you put a box on it, that's when you have like, I can't get this box up and the frame comes up, you know, can't get the frame out is because you didn't clean the box properly. You didn't take all that adhering wax off. It can be a real nuisance. This is great, and it's cold out. So the wax just snaps off the frame real, real easily.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually love cleaning out frames when it's really cold out. It's just a very satisfying task.

Speaker 1: It's a messy task too. I guess I didn't put this question there. But what do you guys do when you are doing that kind of comb cleaning, you take your box and you get off all, how do you do it so that your floor isn't full of wax? Like what's the trick to kind of like a good cleaning station?

Speaker 3: We either do it outside or we lay down a tarp. And a tarp is great. They'll protect the floor. And then if you just take it outside, hose it off or shake it out.

Speaker 1: Perfect. That's awesome. And one thing I was going to add, I remember in one beekeeper in southern Alberta, they had nice bright lights where their crew were doing this. And it's really nice, you know, not to, I imagine some people who are listening to this podcast have like, you know, their spouse has relegated their beekeeping to the basement, this cold, dark place. And that's not a great place to sort of look through your comb. You really do need a bright light to kind of look at it all.

Speaker 3: Yeah, you must have that kind of light to be able to detect these tiny little nuances, the diseases, disease symptoms. They're really important. You don't want to miss ASB scales for sure.

Speaker 1: Fantastic, you guys. Well, this is great. This gets me all set up. I'm really excited for this rain to stop and for us to start to get some of our first nectar and pollen flows. And it's coming. It's coming soon. It's been a long way. This is exactly what I needed to hear to kind of get me set and ready to go again. Awesome.

Speaker 3: Good. Yes, it's going to be a great year.

Speaker 1: It's got to be. Okay, we take care, and good luck with all your beekeeping this year.

Speaker 3: Okay, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thanks.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. The show is produced by Quinn Sinan Neil, who's a student here at OSU in the New Media Communications Program. And the show wouldn't even be possible without the support of the Oregon legislature, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research in Western Sarah. Show notes with links mentioned on each episode are available on the website, which is at pollinationpodcast. oregonstate .edu.

I also love hearing from you and there's several ways to connect with me. The first one is you can visit the website and leave an episode-specific comment. You can suggest a future guest or topic or ask a question that could be featured in a future episode. But you can do the same things on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook by visiting the Oregon Bee Project. Thanks so much for listening and see you next week.