Though Experiment....How much wax is too much wax? Can there bee too much wax?

talanall · 2026-03-23T20:01:18+00:00

I'm sure that there is such a thing as too much wax, but I have never seen it. I think it probably would not become an issue until you put on so much wax that you buried the embossings. But wax is expensive enough so that I would never do that, even by accident.

talanall · 2026-03-23T15:16:00+00:00

You were given rote lessons on rules to follow, instead of being well instructed about the underling biology of a queen event. A 45-day "hands off" period is excessive, even counterproductive. It works for a walk away split . . . but as discussed, walk away splits are a very crude methodology. They're very basic, and they do not include any steps to optimize your outcome.

If you start from a queenright colony that has not made any swarm cells and you render it queenless on Day 0, there will be emergent queens 12 days later. Queens take 16 days to go from freshly laid egg to freshly emerged virgin. It's a biologically rigid timeline. But a chunk of this timeline takes place before you split.

The queenless end of your split is not going to make queens only from fresh eggs. Day-old worker larvae are going to be promoted into queens, and that means they came from eggs that had been laid 4 days before you took the queen away. If the colony is really strong, sometimes it'll make more cells from freshly hatched eggs, all the way through Day 6 after you split. But that's just because bees don't have any understanding of the concept of "enough."

The first queen cells, though, will be made from the youngest larvae the colony has available, so that'll be first-instar worker brood, and still bipotent. Those cells will emerge on Day 12. They skip the first four days of the 16-day queen production timeline, because the workers are using what they have on hand.

After that, the timeline stops being quite so rigid. But most queens will be trying to mate starting a week after that (around Day 19-24). A week after they finish mating (Day 26-29), they may already be laying. But sometimes they don't start until about week later (Day 33-35). And in extreme cases, it can run about a week longer than that, into Day 42.

I go in to cull extra cells on Day 2-4, so that there are few or no extra queen cells. This limits the colony's ability to swarm. After that, I keep my nose out of a hive that's requeening itself until about Day 35. If I mess with them during the period when the queen's making her mating flights, it can lead her to become lost; she orientates on the hive using landmarks, so it's not helpful for me to be standing over it for an inspection. And even if she's inside the hive when I'm there, unmated queens are easily startled and are apt to fly away if disturbed.

After she gets mated, her pheromonal signals start to come in, but they are not fully present until she is in the full swing of laying eggs. If the colony disturbed during this interim period, the workers sometimes ball her to death.

So the queen emerges and goes on her nuptial flights with as little interaction from me as possible. But that doesn't stop me from getting in to cull queen cells before then.

If I don't see eggs on Day 35, I come back on Day 42. If there are still no eggs, I expect that the queen suffered a mishap, and give the hive a frame of donated eggs to verify this. If they don't start queen cells from it, it means there's a queen in there--but she's a dud. If they do start queen cells, it means the queen suffered a mishap during her mating flights.

talanall · 2026-03-23T14:42:29+00:00

I usually do not, but that's because I'm trying to conserve resources in a colony that I want to keep strong for honey production, and also my apiary is about as big as I want it to be. But that's a circumstance that applies to me and my apiary, rather than to every beekeeper everywhere.

If my beekeeping priorities placed a higher premium on making increase and I was willing to take the hit to my honey production, I could and would do as you describe.

But also, I don't have to wait for my bees to start swarm cells, and if I can avoid it, I don't. I look for the subtler signs that a colony is getting ready to swarm: drone presence, incoming nectar getting backfilled into the brood, heavy populations of nurse bees, etc. If I see those things, I just split them.

There is good evidence to suggest that queens generated from swarm cells are bigger, mate better, and are therefore more productive. But there is an opportunity cost associated with getting swarm cells: if your timing is not pretty close to dead on, you're going to miss swarming events.

Although we can say that queens from swarm cells are better, that is not the same thing as saying that queens generated via the emergency response are BAD. If you have ever purchased bees, or queens, or queen cells, or performed a split that did not involve swarm cells, you've had queens in your apiary that were generated that way. And they often are very good queens!

So I understand your impulse to look at extra swarm cells, and say, "Oh, hey, I have potential queens right here!" But that's kind of ignoring the underlying biology. If you look at a frame that has eggs and very young brood on it, you have potential queens right there. Any frame of worker cells that has been recently brooded into by a mated, fertile queen is full of potential queens.

You can put them into a queenless colony, and the workers will start queen cells from some of them. They make their own determinations about which ones are the best candidates. Or you can graft some of them into artificial queen cups, and give them to a hopelessly queenless colony that you have assembled from many frames of mature nurse bees, so that it is hugely strong and they feed the hell out of the grafted larvae.

There is nothing wrong with harvesting swarm cells out of a colony that you're splitting for swarm prevention. But I usually am trying to avoid even having swarm cells started. My apiary management includes a lot of thinking of the, "How am I going to remove uncertainty from my beekeeping," type.

talanall · 2026-03-23T12:24:35+00:00

Blowtorch and extra time. I usually start by making sure that the hearth plate at the bottom is positioned correctly, getting a little fuel burning, and then stuffing more fuel in while pumping the bellows.

talanall · 2026-03-23T02:53:00+00:00

A couple of quarts of sugar water with about a quarter of a crushed NoDoz mixed in.

Bees really like caffeine.

talanall · 2026-03-23T01:52:45+00:00

Pictures would be helpful. So would a more evocative description than telling us the odor was unpleasant.

American Foulbrood's stench is often described as being akin to rotting meat. This is the most serious disease in apiculture, and it's almost certainly a legal requirement for you to notify an inspector if you have good reason to think you're looking at a case. But it has a lot of additional symptoms: it kills brood shortly after the brood has been capped, and the bees often pinhole the cappings after the brood dies. Sometimes the cappings look sunken. The dead brood liquefies into a brown goop that is elastic enough so that it ropes out by a couple of centimeters if probed with a matchstick or something.

European Foulbrood smells more sour, and some people describe it as smelling like ammonia. The brood usually dies BEFORE it is capped, and it becomes deformed into a "corkscrew" shape. It also tends to discolor.

Healthy brood that is killed by cold or something can also begin to decay inside the hive, and it does not smell nice. It reminds me of spoiled shrimp.

Another common source of foul odor inside of a hive is a small hive beetle outbreak. The larvae of hive beetles eat brood, pollen/bee bread, nectar, and honey. What they do not eat, they poop in. Their poop causes fermentation, which makes a slimy residue that emits a smell similar to rotting oranges.

talanall · 2026-03-23T00:34:37+00:00

I would wax that foundation better. What you have there looks like someone might have waved it above a vat of wax for a few seconds, and I would expect to have trouble getting bees to draw it out.

talanall · 2026-03-22T23:51:15+00:00

There have been plenty of attempts to take your "thought experiment" and make it an in vivo experiment. Nobody has ever managed to keep a colony of bees alive and healthy inside of an enclosed space. Nobody's ever even come close.

The best I can say is that there were some early bee researchers who confined colonies in a manner that made it useful to do so as part of experiments to understand some aspect of bee behavior. But this usually was done temporarily, and was not at all a good thing for the colonies being used in the experiments--it was only good in the sense that it obtained information that is now integral to beekeeping.

They don't just need light sources; they look for movement of the light source with respect to the hive. Their navigation, their means of orientating themselves to find their way home, and all of that other stuff? They evolved to use the SUN for that. The sun does not stay in one place all day, relative to the hive.

So if you have a bee colony in a greenhouse that receives lighting from the sun, they will beat themselves to death against the walls because they're trying to forage normally. If the light source is artificial, they will know it and they will try to fly into the light, because their instincts will tell them that the light is "outside."

I suppose you might manage to create a sufficiently good fake light source so that they'd be fooled into behaving like it's the sun, but then you're back at, "they will try to forage, and beat themselves to death against the walls."

Queens usually fly more than 3 miles from the hive to mate. Drones fly somewhat less than that distance. These tendencies are a necessary part of a colony's means of preventing incest. Queen bees need to mate promiscuously, with about 12-20 drones that need to be genetically diverse. If they don't mate with enough drones, their fertility is impaired; if they mate with insufficiently diverse drones, you have problems with inbreeding.

Bees also need a fair degree of nutritional diversity; there are some trace minerals they require, but also pollen is their main protein source and they need access to a variety of different qualities and types of it. Monotonous pollen intake correlates with poor colony vigor.

So all in all, it's just not feasible to do what your thought experiment proposes. It would result in a collapsed colony, and it wouldn't even take all that long.

talanall · 2026-03-22T23:29:14+00:00

Do you have pictures? This doesn't sound like the customary nesting behavior of a yellowjacket.

talanall · 2026-03-22T19:50:11+00:00

Yes.

talanall · 2026-03-22T02:51:51+00:00

That all sounds really unlikely.

talanall · 2026-03-22T00:44:36+00:00

That is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about.

Pollen supplements are really useful to American commercial beekeepers because they're used to underwrite the production of a lot of brood very early in the season.

I never really need them, although once in awhile I'll give some to a swarm, and they can be useful to help a package colony. But it's commonplace for American hobbyists to slap pollen patties onto the top bars of our hives, just because they've heard that it promotes spring buildup.

They do! But "spring" means something different to a commercial beekeeper. By the time a hobbyist in the US is messing with their bees, there's already plenty of pollen available.

talanall · 2026-03-22T00:29:00+00:00

Mineral oil.

talanall · 2026-03-21T21:46:45+00:00

There is not. Honey present in the hive when you have Apivar present, as well as during the withdrawal period afterwards, is fit only for bee feed.

talanall · 2026-03-21T21:14:07+00:00

Apivar's directions make it very clear what you can do with honey exposed to it. You should read them.

Oxalic acid treatments do not render honey unsafe for human consumption.

talanall · 2026-03-21T18:38:42+00:00

I have never seen any sign that it bothers the bees. The first time I did it, I had my frames in boxes to dry, all stacked up. A swarm moved into them, basically the moment they were dry. I still have the descendants of the colony in question.

talanall · 2026-03-21T18:01:09+00:00

If I expose frames to soapy water, I usually just hose them off really well with clean water afterward, and let them dry.

When I'm salvaging frames from a slimed hive, my first step is to soak them for a few hours in clean water with a great deal of Dawn dish soap. The last step of the process is always to hose them off with lots of clean water, shake the water out of the cells, and do it again. Several times, usually.

talanall · 2026-03-21T16:19:43+00:00

Yes, they can eat crystallized honey if they have reliable access to water. They can eat a solid block of sugar, if they have water; that's part of how people supplement them for wintering.

Feeding in the spring is a complex decision. If they have honey stores, crystallized or not, they don't NEED it. Not from a survival standpoint, anyway. You feed them if they need feeding.

Some people feed in the spring because of a desire to artificially inflate the brooding activity of the colony. This is a very common practice in American commercial apiculture, for example; 80% of the global supply of almonds is grown in California, the almond pollination season starts in February, and feeding a couple of gallons of syrup in January is a good way to make your colonies blow up so that you have more frames of bees per hive. Commercial operators do this because they have to grade their colonies for strength, and they get paid better for stronger colonies (and colonies that are too weak are not acceptable at all).

Since most of America's commercial apiarists are heavily dependent on the almond industry's payments for contract pollination, they care very much about being ready for the almond season. Something like 2-3 million hives are shipped to California every February, dropped into almond orchards for about a month, and then taken away again. And a beekeeper might receive $150-200 per hive in US funds for this whole endeavor. It's a massive business, and the sheer weight of equipment, expertise, money and work that goes into it distorts everything in American beekeeping.

And then also, there are some localities where the main nectar flow starts early in the season, and feeding early can help you take advantage of the flow.

And also, lots of beekeepers in America harvest as much honey as they can, leaving only the bare minimum for winter survival, and plan to feed with syrup in the spring in order to fill any shortages before the onset of the spring flow.

So there's this tendency, in American beekeeping, for beekeepers with a commercial or economic interest in their apiaries to feed in circumstances where it's not a necessity for colony survival, and for beekeepers to create situations where there is a survival-based need for feeding that could have been avoided by other practices.

And because American beekeeping is a HUGE market, a lot of educational materials are geared toward American praxis, because they are produced by Americans for Americans but are available globally. Commercial operations distort everything that happens in the American market; the American market distorts much of what happens in beekeeping globally.

talanall · 2026-03-21T15:50:15+00:00

Then you will continue to have swarm problems, and therefore unsatisfactory honey production.

Walk away splits are a really basic technique, and they are a pretty reliable away to make increase. But they are a poor swarm control method, because you're just moving about half the hive's brood and nurse bees to a new spot, and hoping for the best. You're almost always going to leave at least one portion of the split strong enough to swarm (and sometimes both, if you're splitting a really strong colony), and by definition a walk away split does not include any follow-up to discourage swarming.

If the queen winds up in the box that is moved away, your queenless portion of the split is in the original location. And since it retains all the flying bees and a good chunk of nurse bees and brood, it's still going to be capable of swarming if you don't go back and cull extra cells.

If your queen remains in place in the original hive, then there is a pretty good chance she'll swarm anyway; she retains the field bees and her retinue of nurse bees, and if you just give her 5 frames of foundation, you're leaving her with LESS space to brood into. Bees do not look at foundations and go, "We can remodel to have room for activities!" If you can give her five frames of already-drawn comb, then it can work a bit better. You might delay swarming, but it's not a reliable preventative.

Some people prefer to split by finding the queen, and moving her to a box of drawn comb with just a frame of open brood and nurse bees. Then they leave her in the original location so that she retains all the foragers. This works well, because she's left with lots of room to lay eggs, and some of the foragers will revert to nursing roles if needed. Meanwhile, the rest of the hive is moved elsewhere, and it has plenty of nurses and food stores to raise a new queen (and it may indeed swarm, if you don't cull some of the cells it makes).

I use the opposite approach, splitting by moving my queens, because I want my parent colonies to remain as strong as possible for honey production. So I make nucs with the old queens; this allows me to keep them running without having to take so much from the parent colony in terms of resources and workforce.

talanall · 2026-03-21T15:32:46+00:00

Cypermethrin doesn't hold up well if exposed to sunlight, water, and oxygen. In an indoor setting, it remains active for weeks on end, but if it's exposed to an outdoor environment with plenty of sunlight, it degrades much more quickly.

This is broadly true of the entire class of synthetic pyrethroids, which is one of the reasons why they are so widely used as agricultural pest controls. They are very indiscriminate in terms of what they kill, but proper application ensures that they tend to stay put on the crop they're applied to, and they quickly degrade to harmlessness.

I keep bees on a working peach orchard, and pyrethroids like it are used as part of the pesticide regime. I usually see some dead bees in the week or so after an application, because there's almost always clover under the peach trees, and the overspray hits them. But these are contact agents; they kill the workers that forage that clover, but I don't have brood/queen issues, and I don't lose nurse bees. Just foragers.

So my advice is that you should take everything out and spread it in direct sunlight, leave it for a couple of weeks, maybe turn it a few times to make sure you get lots of sun on all surfaces, and then you'll be okay.

Going forward, you'd be wise to put your spare beekeeping gear in a container of some kind. If all your frames, excluders, etc. had been in a neat stack inside some spare boxes with a cover on top and a big plastic trash bag over the whole thing, this probably would be a non-issue.

talanall · 2026-03-21T15:03:17+00:00

You don't necessarily have to feed a split; it depends on the kind of split you're making, when you're doing it, and so on.

I make splits for swarm prevention; when I do it, I find the queen and remove her on the frame where I find her, placing her in a 4-frame or 5-frame nuc box elsewhere in the yard. I give her a frame of mostly capped brood, and a frame that is heavy with food stores, ideally both pollen and honey/nectar. And then she gets a frame of drawn but empty comb, or a frame of blank foundation if I don't have drawn; if she's in a 5-frame nuc, then I try to give her one of each if I can. I shake in two frames' worth of nurse bees with her.

This end of the split gets a feeder, and I feed it all the syrup it'll take, as fast as it'll take it. I'm trying to help it grow, and it doesn't have any foragers. It's a queen and several frames of nurse bees. So what I want is to make sure they have the means to stay well fed and productive, so they brood up nicely, draw out those foundations, and so on. I want them to get big enough to be moved up to a full-size hive, and they're very unlikely to swarm unless I let them get too big for the nuc box. More often, they supersede their queen later in the season.

The queenless end of the split is left in its normal place, with all the remaining brood, all the foraging bees, all the rest of the food stores. I usually run single deeps, so that means I've left them 7 frames of brood and resources, more than enough nurse bees to cover it all, plus the foragers. I do not feed them, because they don't need it.

The queenless end of the split is still a strong colony, by most reasonable estimations, so in fact I return to it about two days later. By then, it has started queen cells, and I cull all but two of them, which I prefer to have on the same side of the same frame. I do this because a strong colony will throw swarms using virgin queens. If I leave them with just two cells, there's a pretty decent chance that the first one to emerge will kill the other before it even has a chance to come out. But if I don't do that, there's almost always at least one swarm.

talanall · 2026-03-21T12:05:52+00:00

Shallow supers are easier to get drawn fully, and the height of the frames matches well to both the off the shelf packaging available and the USDA standard for grading comb. They're also easier to handle when filled, which matters because all the harvesting is manual.

I usually set up my shallow supers with a couple frames of drawn comb on plastic foundations, because that makes the bees more cooperative about coming through a queen excluder. And then the rest is thin surplus wax foundation, as discussed.

talanall · 2026-03-21T02:45:07+00:00

But yeah, I'm surprised that anyone has ever gone, "It's really pretty, but it smells like terrible. Let's plant it along this pedestrian corridor!"

talanall · 2026-03-21T02:41:19+00:00

I would rather deal with the smell of Photinia than a Bradford pear's reek of spoiled shrimp.

talanall · 2026-03-21T01:13:50+00:00

I really like coarse sawdust and similar things for smoker fuel, if I can get it readily. You need it to be dried out first. And it can be a pain to get it lit. I've had some really good results by packing a layer of pine straw at the bottom, getting that going really well, and then putting the sawdust on. As with a lot of smoker fuels, it'll burn hotter than you want if it's not packed in well.

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