If you've registered, you should also receive an email with the link, but if you do not receive the email, you can go to the Extension website and search for "Beekeeping Around the World" and click Watch Now at any time.

And that goes for the entire 2023 season, the 2024 season and each one as it becomes available.

So we're very excited today to have Etienne Tardif as our speaker.

Etienne has a mechanical engineering background.

He got his start in beekeeping with a geologist friend as part of a mine reclamation project.

He now lives in the Yukon territory and has kept bees for the last 12 years in northern climates where he takes a very data-driven approach to keeping his bees.

He has collected data to understand the annual bee cycle, temperatures, humidity, carbon dioxide and oxygen in wintering hives.

His current focus is winter thermal regulation, bee nutrition and bee health.

In 2021, he received funding to conduct a Yukon honey origins project to better understand the nectar sources there through pollen analysis and honey.

And also is conducting work on local honey chemical characteristics using NMR.

He really loves learning and sharing his findings and observations, and I love his day-to-day driven approach.

And I'm very excited to hear what he's gonna teach us about today.

So when you're ready, Etienne, go ahead.

- Sounds good.

For those who know me, there will be charts in my presentation.

I'll try to...

But you'll see, a lot of the notes are there more for your future reference.

So I'll make sure this whole presentation is available for everybody.

So let's put it in presentation mode.

So as mentioned, I live in the Yukon, so I've been there since, (exhales)

about just over 10 years, 12 years now.

This is my place, so it's smack in the middle of the boreal forest.

Alaska is about a hundred kilometers, like a hundred miles over the mountains on the other side.

So we're on the interior side, so the cold dry side.

The forest here is mostly pine with spruce, aspen and poplars and lots and lots of willows.

The forest is littered with lingonberries, so low-bush cranberries, and a lot of different native plants.

And then the picture on top here is a typical winter where once I put my bees to bed, they're there for a good seven months to eight months before I get to do anything with them.

So one reason I put temperature probes or sensors, humidity sensors, and I guess the last couple years, CO2 and O2, is to give me an understanding of of what's going on in those colonies.

So I've had up to 36 sensors in a single hive to give me an idea of the whole cluster movement and temperature loss in that whole thermodynamics snapshot.

Let's see, so what I'm gonna do in this talk is I'm gonna take you from spring to spring.

And it is mixed up a little bit, but it's how I used things I've seen in the environment, some of my measurements to adapt my beekeeping to my local climate.

When I did start, there was a couple of old time beekeepers, but there wasn't much, I'll say, institutional knowledge, so not much knowledge sharing.

So over the last 10 years I've really focused on education, building a knowledge base and then sharing out and creating a network in the Yukon and in northern climates, Alaska and ourselves, so that we can actually share and grow and learn from our mistakes or lack of knowledge.

So in a nutshell, you can see Yukon's up there north of British Columbia next to Alaska.

That dark blue is where I am.

But you can see they've been beekeepers all the way up to Inuvik on the Arctic Ocean or just near the Arctic Ocean.

They do struggle, they don't do really well, but I'd say Dawson City, Fairbanks, that area, folks are able to overwinter and do decently.

So the climate is subarctic in the interior, it's very dry.

We've got about 40,000 people in the Yukon.

It's the size of Sweden or a big country and there's hardly any folks.

So there's actually more moose than people up there.

I do, so from a beekeeping perspective, I think we're up to about 300 colonies now total in the territory.

And the success rate hovers between 60 to 75%.

And we're not big honey producers, but the honey we do produce is usually fireweed, really nice, native plants.

And we do get 20 bucks a pound, so it's actually quite nice.

We don't have any government regulations so we're self-run.

So one of the reasons I actually started education is to teach folks about diseases and best practices so that we don't actually don't make a mess of our environment and go too crazy with bees.

So one thing I usually do when I start my talks is, I guess the audience is from all over the place, but I focused on Penn State.

And it's just so we compare apples to apples.

So if you're interested in doing comparisons between locations, there's a website called web, or sorry, Weather Spark.

And it allows you to compare up to four locations in the world.

And then there's a series of charts.

So what I did is I did the temperature profiles.

And then so it gives you, the nearest to me is Whitehorse, but Whitehorse is actually quite warm compared to where I am.

So I use Haines Junction, which is nearby and has very similar climate to me.

And then you can see around Penn State, I guess the sensors at the, or the weather stations at the airport is that.

So it allows us to understand where we're coming from.

And then there is one of the charts on the same website.

When you do the comparison, it compares the growing season.

They have growing degree days, how much rain, how much wind across the season.

So it's a really, really nice website.

So it gives you an idea of the length of our season versus, say, around the university there.

So my colonies, I have a busy work life, professional life, as I guess I do leadership coaching, technical coaching, business improvement and a bunch of different stuff in my work life.

So I do quite a bit of travel.

So I try to keep my bees to about 4 to 12 colonies, depending how busy I am.

I do have three bee yards.

And you'll notice my bee yards have a pallet fence going around, and now I have geotechs, block paper around the yard and that's to help me create a microclimate.

One, to activate the bees earlier in the morning, but also to melt the snow and help manage some of the winds we get.

And it's also really good for bears.

You can see there's an electric fence in front of the pallet.

So what the hard fence does is it actually slows down the bear, it makes them more hesitant.

And then the approach to wire and zap.

So there's a lot of grizzlies and black bears in my area, but they've never bothered the bees.

I use mostly mutts for queens.

Most of the bees come from Southern BC.

Sometimes I bring in Saskatraz from Saskatchewan.

But I found the key is a dark queen, so darker bees is the key.

Italians up here do terrible 'cause they just grow too big and they just eat too much.

And then my typical winter survival is in the 90 to 100%.

I did have a couple of one season where I lost all my hives, and I'll talk about that.

But I understand now the root cause of that.

And understanding the environment, my honeys and some re-incurring infections and how that worked really helped resolve that issue.

So for me, these are my typical late winter clusters.

So you can see these are sometimes they're singles, they're doubles, but the boxes are full of bees.

I even overwinter five frame nucs outside in a special location.

But I've done about six or seven over the years, and I've gotten, I think I'm at 80% success rate on my nucs overwinter.

I don't retire old queens if she's still laying and still is doing decently.

So I'll put her in a five-frame nuc, and then I'll use her as a resource queens.

'Cause to ship of queen up here in the Yukon costs me about $90.

So I can't afford to pinch a queen unless, I guess, she's at the end of her life.

But you can see, so these boxes are full.

So I've learned initially when I was first starting, my clusters were probably four frames big.

And now I can get them to a full box coming outta winter, and it makes spring and earlier nectar flows reachable, and it allows me to encourage swarming, so the swarm behaviors.

So then I use that to do my splits and grow my colonies.

So one of the key things I talk to, especially beginner beekeepers, is take walks from end of winter to fall.

You need to be walking your neighborhoods, your areas, your farms and get a really good understanding of what the flower, the bloom flow is, 'cause that'll really help you understand your cycle, 'cause it's all about pollen and it's all about nectar, and variety.

Some places up here they target say the fireweed on big forest fires.

So basically as far as the eye can see, it's all fireweed.

It's great for honey, it gets really, really good price.

But then on the backside is it's a monoculture.

So it's a single type of flower and it's at a critical juncture when the bees are actually creating their winter bees.

So I'll talk about that a bit.

So lots of one flower is great, but it does put your bees at a disadvantage, especially if it comes towards the end of the season.

So the goal is a lot of times folks understand things they need to do but oftentimes they don't know why they do it or when they need to do it.

So those are things I'll try to answer and show you what I did to figure that out.

So in the spring, I can't remember where I took this, I adapted it from something I saw down south, and then I created a calendar for managing new packages in nucs.

So I do a lot of mentoring.

I did some workshops and some some weekend trainings for new beekeepers.

And so from my experience in general, so I do let them know it's always plus minus a couple of weeks.

It's never an absolute.

Calendars are dangerous if you take in verbatim without understanding the cues from nature.

So these are a guide, but there's a lot of cues that come from nature that trigger different types of decision making.

One of the important things that I coach folks on is assessing the queen.

So I'll talk about making sure you know how to check up on your queen and making sure she's performing or she's doing what she needs to.

And then trying to understand if she is, great.

If she's not, is it the queen, is it the environment, is it something that you're missing?

And I'd say it's important that you understand all the keep steps that you do in a typical season.

And then this is an example of the same thing.

Like I said, this'll get shared to you.

So that second spring is really where the fun begins, because that's where you need to start learning to manage swarming behavior and making your splits, growing, equalizing your colonies and all that type of stuff.

And you can see there's some patterns where there's still two feet of snow on the ground and I start doing things in some of the colonies.

So most of my inspections are about five minutes long per colony maximum.

I'll do a bigger inspection in the spring on most of my colonies, and bigger means I'll probably check the box of frames just to see what's left for resources, the condition of the brood nest, how many eggs, larvae, capped brood, number of baby bees.

I don't really check for the queen, 'cause if I see eggs I'm happy.

And coaching I do is if you have no purpose to go in that box, don't go in that box.

So if you don't know why you're inspecting, don't inspect.

You need a reason.

And like I said, I'll do an inspection in the spring, and then typically when I pull my honey I'll do another full inspection and which is usually late July, early August.

And I'd say that's probably the only two full inspections I do.

I always have a sharpie in my pocket, and as I'm inspecting the frames, if it's a brood, I'll put a B on it.

If it's a pollen, I'll put a P.

If it's a honey and pollen, I'll go an HP.

If it's an empty, just a drawn out frame, I'll just put C for comb.

You can use whatever nomenclature you want, but that's how I do in my inspection.

So a lot of times I'll go in from the left the first week, and then from the following week I'll go in from the right or 10 days later.

And that way I get to see most of the frames in the span of, say, 20 days, and I get a good feel for how things are going.

And things you check for, like I said, pollen, general health honey stores.

The next slide here is I use screen bottom boards, and then I will talk about my wintering, but I actually have my preferred wintering method is with an open screen bottom board in the winter.

But I'll make sure you understand how I do it without impacting the bees.

So the bottom board is wonderful.

The screen bottom board is wonderful, especially the insert 'cause it lets you understand what's going on in that box without actually opening up the box.

So typically, 24 hours before I do an inspection, I'll go and I'll clean these trays.

I'll clean 'em off with spray water, maybe a bit of vinegar or something so it's nice and clean.

And then the next day when I do in my inspections, I'll get a good understanding of fresh wax, so what frames are being drawn out and expanded.

The dark cappings tells you about the bees hatching out.

In this case here, I was like, oh, there's some chalk root issues.

Early season, the other thing for me is I do OAV treatment, so oxalic acid vapor treatment.

Early in the season when there's a bit of snow left and before I trigger brood rearing on purpose, I will do an OAV.

And the reason is I want to know, one, the count.

So I like doing post-treatment counts.

If I'm not treating, I am getting an idea of what the natural drop is just by looking at this screen, at this tray.

But basically I hit 'em with two treatments in the spring, and typically, and then one treatment in August to give me an idea of the count.

And that's pretty much all the treatment I have to do up here, which is good.

So for assessing the queen, I'd mentioned that I trigger brood rearing, 'cause my season is really short.

So when I first started, my clusters coming out of winter were pretty small.

So like I say, four frames, they'd make it, they'd ramp up and be ready for July.

'cause all the old timers told me our nectar flow in the Yukon is in July, from the second week of July.

So that was where my brain was at.

So I was doing everything to get my bees ready for mid-July.

And then, but then my clusters were small.

So what I started doing is I use 15% real pollen in pollen patties, and I've set up my wintering hives with a little insulated slot that I can quickly pop open without disturbing the bees.

And then I could put two pounds of pollen patties on top of my colonies.

So I do that usually mid-March to probably the third or end of March.

And like you know, I have sensors on most of my colonies.

I don't need a lot, just a single one.

And over the years now, pretty much a couple hours after adding those pollen patties, that colony spikes up to 35 C or 95 F.

And then that tells me, so that's my first cue on the assessment here, is the queen is there and laying.

'Cause if the temperature doesn't spike up, then I know that there's a good chance that there is a queen issue in that colony.

Not always, but in general there is a queen challenge in that colony.

So, remember, there's still two feet of snow.

We're still getting minus 20, minus 15, sometimes minus 30 temperature in pretty much every day.

So remember, I insulate my colonies so I'm not worried about the cold.

The bees are nice and comfy in there.

There's still plenty of honey.

I've never had bees starve, and I'll talk about that in a bit, so the bees are fully resourced.

I do like them getting a cleansing flight before I do this.

But I do monitor bee guts, so I know what's in their guts.

So this year I do have to make sure they have a cleansing flight before I do it 'cause their guts are full of stuff.

And if I do that it might trigger a dysentery event, and I don't want that.

So early March, I'm hoping my first inspection is sometime in April, or sorry, late March.

And then I'm hoping 28 days later is when I want to do my first inspection.

Okay, so what I'm looking for is at least six frames of bees.

Four, they'll make it but they'll struggle, and it'll be a later peak.

But that's what I'm looking for at the start.

So because I fed pollen patties, 28 days before when I opened that box, I could see the number frames with brood, I can see eggs, I can see larvae, I can see capped brood.

I even see little baby bees walking around, so those make me really happy.

So what that does is now I know where I'm at in the season.

Okay, so that's my first assessment.

So my second assessment, it's about two weeks later.

So I'm gonna open that box, remember I put letters on the frames to say this is a brood, this is honey, a number of frames of Bs.

And two, three weeks later I'll go in there and I'll assess.

Okay, I'll count the frame of Bs, and then I can see, okay, am I adding extra Bs?

And when I say extra B, like B the letter on the frame, so I had two brood frames three weeks later.

Am I at three or four brood frames?

And that's what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for an expanding nest 'cause that tells me that the queen is doing really well.

The bees are actually transitioning well from winter to spring and they're well up on that population curve.

So it's important that you assess that queen, especially for those with long winters because you can't wait.

So I make one mistake and I don't get any honey.

They'll get through the winter, but basically it ruins the season.

So to me it's critical to identify as early as possible if my queen is good.

And then I'll do a third assessment.

So now we're in May, mid-May by the second or third assessment, so prior to June.

This is where I'll make my call.

So if there's steady growth, the queen is good.

If it's the same number of bees or less, I either need to requeen ASAP if there's queens available on the market, or I use those bees and combine it with another colony.

If the queen is in there, sometimes she's getting old.

She do okay in a nuc box in a smaller volume, but basically I need to make a decision.

And one thing I learned over the years is when to quit.

So sometime I've you try to baby that weak colony through spring, through summer, and then it just takes so much of your time away.

So I've learned now, I do these assessments.

After two or three assessments, if the queen is not moving or the colony's not moving, it's time to move on.

So if the bees aren't sick, combine them with another colony and move on 'cause there's no point.

So this is just an example, I had a dog, I do a lot of daily walks.

So there's ways of understanding your nectar flow and your pollen flow.

And literally these black lines here, these are all the different flowers, the pollen colors and when they're blooming, when frost happens, when the killing frost is.

And literally now I've figured out that from late May to end of July is our nectar flow.

It pretty much flows the whole season.

And the reason I didn't know that is I never had enough bees in the box to collect surplus.

So now coming out of by May, my bees are ready for swarming so I can do my splits, and then I have plenty of bees in my box by early June to actually take advantage of some of these wonderful nectar flows.

I did speak a lot about this, so I do have numbers backing.

So at the front end I do pollen patties, but also, because our killing frost is early August, I've learned now to start feeding pollen patties right when I pull that honey super to make sure the queen continues laying until early September.

Okay, and then I want her to do dwindle down.

'Cause I've noticed that this is the temperature of the brood nest, then you can see it's around 35 Celsius, so 95 F.

And without feeding pollen patties, usually by early August you can see the queen is starting to shut down.

And then I had to feed pollen patties to keep her laying because of the age.

So if I don't do March, late March pollens patties and August pollen patties, it means that my bees will be about 300 days old coming outta winter.

So by doing this I reduced the age by about a hundred days.

So now my bees are just under 200 days coming outta winter.

And then I quickly learned too that bees actually need a dearth, a pollen dearth to start generating winter bees.

So the reason I don't indefinitely continue feeling pollen patties into September, October is I want winter bees and my winters are really long.

So by the end of August, so the 1st of September, I no longer add any pollen patties, I cut 'em off.

And then this dwindle starts happening early September.

And it's wonderful.

So then it means the majority of winter bees, a winter bee is pretty much a pre-nurse bee.

So as long as there's brood in that box, insignificant numbers, it means that most of the bees will become nurse bees, take care of a generation, and then they become forger and they're summer bees and then eventually die.

So if you want long-lived bees, you have to stop feeding pollen patties.

Or at some point, if you don't have a dearth of pollen and you almost get pollen year round, just know that there's no winter bees in that box.

And if you get a cold spell and your bees are stuck in a box for six weeks, they're at risk.

Okay, so a lot of folks don't realize what winter bees actually are.

It's a bee that hasn't been a nurse bee yet.

And if the bee's been a nurse bee, she's not a winter bee.

And then so she will have trouble overwintering longer periods.

The other thing about winter bees is, I always pronounce this wrong there, but vitellogenin, so that fat body, the lipids that they start collecting when they do become winter bees, is used to transfer immunity to the new generation.

Okay, so if you've got a bunch of summer bees that are forced to become nurse bees and they don't have good I guess vitellogenin levels, they won't be able to transfer the same level of immunity that a healthy winter bee could.

So hence the reason a lot of scientists up here, when they do bee sampling, they actually sample protein levels and lipid levels in the bees.

It's to give them an indication of are these winter bees, are they summer bees?

So feed strategy, so if you're a new beekeeper, it's all about wax, it's all about drawing honey out and building frames.

So a lot of folks they don't think they need to feed, and under feeding the first season is, especially up here and in lots of places in Canada, it's one of the root causes of first-year failures, is there's just not enough wax, enough drown-out equipment in that box for the bees to successfully overwinter.

And then late spring I do a combo of, I'll use a light syrup to start to get them going.

I might put some HiveAlive in there to help cleanse things.

Some of these additives, it's more for control versus eliminate diseases.

So if you've got a Nosema issue, and it's peaking, there's not much you can do.

It is what it is.

But some of these additives do help maintain but they won't actually eliminate, so just FYI on that.

And then eventually, I do have another slide on the late season feed.

So generally in my existing colonies, I have plenty of honey.

So most of my wintering colonies have 30 to 50 pounds left in spring, so I typically never have to feed in spring.

I do some feeding in the fall, and I put no more than about 20 pounds in my colonies because I let them collect that May-June honey, which is nice, beautiful honey.

And that stays in the brood box, and I don't touch any of that.

So the bees go into winter with some nice early season stores.

And the reason I know that is I do pollen analysis and lots of microscopy, and I can see what my bees are eating when, and then it actually matches with the forge cycle.

And I know when those flowers are in brood.

So literally early in the season, people that are good with wintering realize that preparing for winter actually starts in spring.

I run mostly singles.

And my goal, this is more of a double approach, but my goal is I like putting heavy honey frames in the bottom box as soon as possible.

I put my empties on top, I keep my brood in the top.

And then here this C might be basically capped brood.

I move it down 'cause it's more resistant to cold than open brood, so there's some management that I do there to help speed things up.

But like I mentioned, I rather run singles so I don't have to worry about that.

But the key for me is I try to get heavy honey frames at least two, one on either side or four really early in the season.

So late July when I pulled my honey, I do a, like I said, an inspection, I check the store level and then I add a pollen patty.

Typical inspections are five minutes, OAV early in the season, and then I check in August.

And then I typically do my splits late May, early June.

I do get lucky to raise my own queens here sometimes, but I'm the only beekeeper in the area.

So I take my nuc with the old queen to another yard and then I do some swaps so that the existing colony, if I leave swarm cells in there, (swallows) excuse me, queen cells, then it'll get mated by those other bees that I bring over.

So I do use my multiple, I guess, yards to actually move different genetics back and forth.

Okay, summer, you could notice the pollen here.

So same time, different yard.

You can see this one here, this green stuff, that's fireweed, and up here it's a mix of fireweed.

There's some Brassicas in there.

Some dandelions, hawkweed and some of the darker reds are actually rust bores.

So I'll talk a bit about rust bores later, 'cause sometimes this whole thing here is rust bores.

So it's things that I have to deal up with up in the Yukon.

So one key thing is it took me a while, but once I figured out that here it says late, but it's actually early June, late May.

Sometimes I have willow honey, 'cause the willows here start blooming from late April into July as the soil thaws out and the sunny side versus the shaded side and all the willows bloom in a nice swooping cycle, which is great.

So in my singles management, like I said, come outta winter, I've got a single deep, it's wonderful.

I don't really have to put a feeder on, but I'll put the pollen patties.

And then mid-spring I'll put in a honey sweeper, usually a medium, no excluder.

Okay, and then what happens is the queen will go up to the top box and she'll actually lay a nest up there.

And then I'll leave her up there for about two weeks, maybe three weeks at the most, knowing that any brood that's up in that second box will take 21 days to hatch out.

If there's drones, it might be 24 to 26.

And then probably two, three weeks later then I'm actually missing the excluder here, there should be an excluder.

So then what I'll do is I'll chase the queen down.

Sometimes I'll have two hive bodies, it depends.

And then I'll put the excluder, and then I start putting my honey supers on top.

So literally that's my cycle.

And if I'm running a double, then it's a double.

If it's a single, it's just a single.

And eventually I pull the honey, do my splits.

And literally that's how, by adding a medium super here with new excluder, it lowers the swarming instinct, it gives a more space.

And the bees hatching from nice clean wax is beautiful.

So I've got about 10, 15 boxes of nice wax that I use for these mediums.

A lot of our diseases are linked with stress.

So when your bees are stressed, they're more prone to certain diseases.

So poor nutrition, sometimes too much condensation in the box, like chalk brood is associated here.

Poor nutrition, single-source pollens make you more prone to Nosema, peaks in mite populations.

Beekeepers going to the box so much, so we are a pest sometimes as beekeepers, so we over-inspect, over-worry about what's going on in that box.

And like I said, queen performance.

So those are things we need to manage.

This is pre-winter health risks.

So I do collect pollen but I collect pollen to understand what the bees are bringing in.

And this is, again, just an example of the mix.

And you can see this is August 3rd, August 3rd, pretty much at the same time, two different yards.

And you can see this one's almost just fireweed.

And then this one is 90% fireweed.

So by adding, I won't say supplements, but pollen patties, especially, this is when I'm adding the pollen patties, the volume is much less than, say, two weeks before.

So I need to make sure I get healthy winter bees.

So I'll add pollen patties for the next month.

So feeding strategy, late summer.

Literally I pulled a honey, I'll start trickle feeding two to one, one to one a couple of times, and then I'll start bulk feeding.

And things people need to remember is honey is, it's an insulator, but it's also thermal mass.

It helps with regulating temperature in the winter when there's temperature fluctuation, so 'cause it gives away heat and actually captures heat.

So it's great at the stabilizing temperatures in that colony.

In winter, I've never had bee starve, so I stop wasting candy boards and all that type of stuff.

And I'd say a five frame nuc consumes maybe 10 pounds of honey here in seven months.

Single consumes maybe 30 to 35 pounds max, and then a double maybe 40 to 50 pounds max.

So my goal is always to have more honey than I need.

Why? It's for the thermal mass.

And typically those outside frames are the last one to be eaten.

So what it does is it ensures that the bees have healthy thermal mass in that colony year round, which just makes life so much less stressful for the bees.

So this year it's an example of a microscopy picture that I took this year, maybe a month ago.

These are a bunch of rust bores, and this was in the hind gut of the bee.

And then I also analyzed some of my honey this year.

I spun it in my centrifuge and prepped the sample like the labs do.

And then I did pollen analysis, and then noticed that there's more honey do elements in the honey than there was pollens.

And just the flavor, I've had enough honeydew now that I can taste it, but this helps confirm it.

So hence the reason my bees have heavy guts this winter.

And I need to wait for cleansing flights before patties can go on.

Again, this is just example of, we had a heavy frost.

I have a big patch of fireweed next to my back porch where we go to the car, and the bees were just humming on a warm August day.

And I knew there was no flowers left, and so what I did is I was like, "Hmm, what are the bees doing?" So I walked into my patch, and I would see the bees flying off with orange pollen on their legs.

And I thought, "There's no pollen in here." So I went to the colonies, opened up my debris board, and I could see all these orange pollen pellets on there, grabbed one, stuck it in my microscope.

I grabbed a leaf that had a bunch of stuff on it from the fireweed, rubbed it on a slide, and then did a compare and it was the same thing.

Same with this orange rust on the rose hips, the wild roses.

So this is a bee gut, and then you can start seeing trends.

The thing with Nosema, Nosema is an energy-robbing disease.

Usually honeydew has lower glucose fructose in it, so bees need to consume more to get the same amount of energy.

So there's all these things I've have been cueing in over the last little while that probably caused some of my stomach issues with my bees.

So on the honey front, you could see that a lot of times the bees build their nest, the brood nest in the middle of the frame and then they wrap it with honey.

So that's, yes, to get access to these stores, but heat rises.

A lot of times these honey frames, you'll get brood down here, and then you've get pinch out on the honey.

So literally it's like two, three bees across by 18 inches of bees.

So it's like I think 200 bees to fill a seam front to back, and that's all they would need to do to keep the heat captured in between these two frames, about 200 bees.

So I was like, "Huh, if these were empty frames," so the first coaching I give to new beekeepers is, if your frames are empty, there's no wax, no honey, get 'em out of that box, because they're pointless.

So then I get them to replace it with follower boards.

So basically it's a piece of wood or a piece of styrofoam taped up so the bees can't chew it, and then you fill in this cavity.

And that way there the bees have less space to maintain.

So a bit on wintering, and then I think I got about another five so minutes to go.

So you can see my wood shed, I think this was last year.

So there is a correlation between how much wood I have left in my wood shed and how much honey is left in my colonies, and I guess USDA zones or temperature zones.

So I'm up here in Zone 1B, so between Zone 1 and 2.

And then you can just see these are the different temperatures that these areas experience.

So there is a connection there, and that's where my engineering side came out, is I quickly realized that we overcomplicate winter in certain ways.

So imagine a tree, a lot of you have seen this type of diagram before, so you got a heat source, so the cluster.

You've got infinite insulation above, you've got moderate insulation to the bottom.

Then you throw in your honey frames.

So the honey frames and these brood frames, they can hold heat, so it's thermal catch.

Typically there's a single entrance and then so it means that there's convective currents of some type.

Convection is driven by the difference between the temperature inside and the temperature outside.

The bigger the difference, the more push or natural convection you'll have.

So it's like a buoyancy effect that happens, a stack effect.

Typically this volume here is about a single deep, condensation at some point below the cluster.

There'll be a point where the dew point is, and that's where the condensation will happen, and either drips out of the entrance or drips into the bottom, some type of cavity.

CO2 does happen.

Right now I think my oxygen level was in the 18% range, which tells me that CO2 is at about 4% in my colonies 'cause I can actually check it from my phone right now.

But it's been hovering between around 1%, so 10,000 PPM to 40,000 PPM.

And it's dropped down to I think 80, 80,000 PPM, so 8%, and the bees are fine.

And the bees are able to thermal regulate or ventilate when it's required.

And like I said, they can manage water and they can manage CO2 under the right conditions.

And, as beekeepers, we need to find that sweet spot for our location.

Two types of wintering.

So there's the no insulation, basically that cluster will cluster together.

The mantle creates an insulating enclosure so they can keep the core warm.

And then you've got bee butts sticking out.

They get close together as it gets cold, and that's what typical clustering looks like.

Usually it starts around, so 10 C is around 41 F is usually when it starts.

If there's brood in that box, they will actually try to maintain a much larger area at that 95 F, or 35 Celsius.

And the reason they do that is they're trying to protect that brood.

So there is, and these are the numbers I've crunched.

There's very little correlation between the heat loss and the hive box, I guess, insulation factor.

But when there's brood in there, the relation goes to .9.

So the R square shows a very high correlation when there's brood.

When there's no brood, there's no correlation.

When I look at enclosure driven, so more insulation, for me it's actually around minus 15, so around zero F before the bee start clustering.

When there's brood in there or no brood, add very little impact.

And then that's where I started realizing that the reason these colonies, the cluster-driven colonies consume so much honey in the spring is they're actually trying to keep that box warm and keep the brood warm.

But the consumption on my side, and the reason I don't worry about starvation when brood starts is it's purely for food.

And in typical cases, the resting metabolic rate of the bees, so resting, is enough to keep the bees decently warm.

So this is where you can see in a cluster the cold temperature exposure.

It's over a much larger surface area where, in a enclosure-driven, it's actually just in the bottom here.

So there's not much exposure, and most of the bees up here are nice and toasty, and they do leave a channel open for ventilation.

And I'll show you that in a minute.

So this is just, I won't go through everything.

So if you know condensing hives or insulated hives, what we're trying to do is minimize ventilation, high top insulation, moderate sidewall, or lower levels of insulation on the sidewalls.

For most folks, I say, in Canada, R10 on the sides, most of Canada is nice and handy.

For Southern Ontario, Southern BC, usually like a nice seal.

The chloroplast shell that seals, protects against the wind usually provides about one R is plenty.

'Cause what folks don't realize is for every R, so let's just say you're at R1 and that's your base and you go to R2.

So you've just halved the heat loss.

If you add another R, and it keeps halving the heat loss.

Eventually you get to a point where there's no value in adding more installation.

So it's called the point of diminishing returns.

So it works the same with insulation.

So usually once you're beyond R5, if you're not in extreme cold, you've lost any value in additional R.

So I'm an advocate of some insulation but not crazy insulation.

And these are examples of outside temperature.

So the histogram for the season a few seasons ago, and then this was the average temperature inside that box.

You can see it's anywhere from, this is in the 60s to 70s Fahrenheit.

And then the core of the cluster was in the 70s to high 70s which is normal.

And when brood starts, it does pick up.

So this is advice for folks in the south who have to deal with warm temperatures in winter.

Let's just say it was cold and then it warms up, and then it gets cold and then it warms up.

So this is where, so this year I'm trialing insulated bottom boards.

So I blocked off my screen bottom boards, and it's the last time I will ever do that 'cause my bees are more active.

We've had a few warm spells, and what I'm noticing is the bees are getting hot.

So by having, yeah, by having an open screen bottom board in an enclosed area, so basically it opens into a slot into a crawl space that's fully protected against any drafts.

Usually there's snow piled around the base so there's actually no drafts or anything in there but the air is chilled.

And here the ground freezes 12 feet, 15 feet.

So if it warms up to, say, 32, 40 Fahrenheit, the bees have access to cool air that will help 'em stay calm versus that hole inside of the box warming up.

So it's a way of mitigating overheating when temperatures change drastically.

'Cause imagine it's minus 20.

Okay, you've put your fur coat on, you've got your mittens, you've got your hat, and imagine it takes you four hours to take that clothing off before you can actually lower your metabolic rate.

So what happens when temperature increases really quick?

The bees can't instantly change their metabolic rate 'cause they've been sweating, they've been working hard, and now they're like, "No, it's warm, now I have to take some clothes off." And they can't do it fast enough so then they overheat, so they may beard out and they may be causing some other issues, and it activates them.

So I love open-screen bottom boards, and I will always go with it now.

Like I said, I choose whatever volume, and it depends.

In August, I'll see how many bees are in there, and then I'll decide, do I go single, five-frame nuc or a double?

And typically what I do is my top box here is filled with insulation, and I'll show you that here.

So you can see how I cut out some two-inch styrofoam, and I stuff it in mediums and deeps, and that's how I create like really high R-value tops.

So this piece here goes in the bottom, it replaced this wooden thing, and this is where my pollen patty goes.

And this slot here drops down.

And in the winter I just put a temperature sensor here.

So it's there all winter, and it gives me an idea of where the cluster is or what the bees are doing, And then I also have a sensor at the front entrance about three inches inside the front entrance.

And that helps me understand what that cluster is being exposed to from a temperature perspective.

So that last histogram is from that bottom entrance sensor.

So it gives me an idea when the bees are breaking cluster, when they're cleansing, and all those other things.

Good.

Okay, I am going over.

And then this is my crawlspace.

So this is my base. There's an open slot here.

And then you can see here there's a piece of plywood but there's snow all around, and so the bees are good.

And the pieces of plywood here is to keep the bees from cleansing in the snow and from activating and lowering the impact of the sun.

Our sun here is quite low in the winter, very little energy and sometimes the surface may be a warmer and it falsely fools the bees to go cleanse, and then they just go die in the snow.

And this is also snow protection and wind protection.

And then you can see how I put my five-frame nucs in the middle of my colonies.

I've got two yards and I might overwinter.

I've got three yards, but I might overwinter one five-frame nuc per yard, sometimes two depending on how many old queens I have.

You can see here I've taken this a step further where I've scratched this pine board.

So sometimes I'll run it with eight frames, a 10 box, and then I'll put a piece of pine board in there.

'Cause the thing with polys, not much propolis on the sidewalls and not much moisture absorption.

So wood can suck in moisture and can release moisture.

So it's called absorption, so it goes back and forth.

So it's a way of helping regulate moisture, but also if you scratch this up and score it really, really good, the bees will actually start putting propolis on it, which is good.

So most of my colonies have these wooden inserts, and it's just straight white pine from our forest up here in Canada.

So northern wraps, so this is typical for the prairies.

There is a top entrance here, but when you're setting it up, basically we use Tuck Tape on top here to block the seams off 'cause it's too cold.

They can't really propolize it at this point.

Eventually it'll just be the small entrance in the bottom.

And then here she's cutting out the duct tape to open up the colony, and then so the bees have access to a top entrance.

So these are typically R10 sides and R40 sides.

So folks who do wood, they do four packs like that.

And it's the common way I'd say up in Dawson and in the Yukon in the prairies to overwinter wooden colonies.

One thing I did notice is poop and symptoms to certain diseases.

So this was amoeba and Nosema.

Amoeba is a disease that affects bees in their malpighian tubules.

So it's like the bees kidneys and it affects those.

And I guess the root cause of that was an infection I had in 2017 where I lost all my colonies and the bees pooped everywhere and contaminated a lot of frames.

I did try to disinfect, but there was always one colony that would die every season.

And then eventually I used the Q-tips.

I tested inside my cells on some of my older frames.

I tested feces on top of the frames, and these were my clean frames on some of 'em.

And then I started noticing amoeba and Nosema all over the place.

So I learned to fumigate my frames but also replace my frames at a higher frequency, 'cause up here with very full bee guts, they will poop sometimes.

And I check the poop to see if it's contaminated.

So I do have a colony that has dysentery right now, but there's no Nosema in it, which is great.

But then sometimes I check the feces in the snow, and there is Nosema in there.

So you can actually take feces out of the snow, put it on a slide, check it, and then you'll see if that bee is at risk or that colony has the potential of having Nosema issues.

And then top ventilation, literally, like I said, temperature inside minus temperature outside.

So that temperature difference is the y-axis.

And on the x-axis here is the temperature outside.

The green and blue dots here, those are two different colonies insulated.

And this pink stuff in the bottom is a winter set of data for a wooden colony that didn't have insulation down south.

And you can see the slope of the line.

As it gets colder outside, the temperature difference increases.

So this is with the coldest spot in the colony.

So remember that the inside cluster is like 25.

So the temperature difference is actually in the 60s, 70 degrees Celsius at really cold temperature.

So there is quite a nice driver there for ventilation.

And you can see as the temperature warms, there's less temperature difference.

Hence the reason, for me, this is stressful.

When it gets too warm outside and the bees are too active, that's where you might get some ventilation issues.

This is an example of the temperature profile.

So I had nine temperature sensors here, three below this at the next level down.

This was me taking my IR camera, stickening in the bottom entrance and taking a picture up and a film.

And then I was filming every seam of bees to understand what the cluster looked like from below based on this temperature profile.

And you can see this was a couple inches from the bottom, maybe an inch from the bottom.

So the bees along these eight seams were pretty much right at the bottom.

And then over here this was the last seam, and it was wide open.

So it just confirmed my hypothesis that the bees leave an open channel.

And then I have this in time lapse, so then I can actually see how they're managing that seam, that open seam for ventilation throughout the winter.

So it was quite interesting.

Moisture, couple more slides.

So this is an example of a lot of people talk about RH, so relative humidity, it's a percentage.

But it's driven by, it's related to temperature.

And a lot of times people quote RH without the temperature.

So what I've done here is you can convert RH and temperature to how much water.

So grams per cubic meter or grams per cubic yard approximately, you call that absolute humidity.

So there's gray line in the bottom here, you've got all these outside temperatures.

And then this is how much moisture is in the outside air.

So you can see very little water here around minus 40.

Orange was at the entrance.

And then over here, this was the center, pretty much the center of the cluster, one of the warmest areas where the bees are.

And you can see they're trying to maintain around 12.

And then from the years of monitoring, I've noticed that it goes between 10 and 15 grams.

So around 65 RH at 20 Celsius seems to be their target.

And what folks don't realize too is once the bees start brood rearing, this here spikes up to 25 to 30 grams, 'cause now they're trying to maintain a brood nest.

So one reason the bees are so thirsty in late winter is now there's brood in there.

And you can see this is water available in the air.

So the only way they can get water is through metabolic water, so through eating, consuming honey and managing that surplus humidity generating by their respiration.

But a lot of times what we do is we vent all that moisture out.

We put Vivaldi Boards, we put candy boards, we put absorbent, we put all this stuff that sucks all that moisture out of the colony.

So the key is finding the right balance.

So my focus is how do I reduce consumption so that the bees have the right amount of water that they can regulate themself.

So osmoregulate, or hygroregulate, okay?

So bees, even at zero, really warm temperatures, they still need, it's only 20-some percent, 25, 30% of the water is available in the air, and the rest is they have to make it up.

Okay, so this is one principle that causes our bees a lot of stress is sometimes they don't have enough water in there.

And then the last little section is a lot of people think CO2 is bad.

I'm telling you right now bees can actually manage quite high levels of CO2.

There's still a lot of more research to be done.

But one reason my five-frame nuc can overwinter eight months with 10 pounds is likely to do with higher than normal levels of CO2.

And then it pushes the bee into a torpor, into an ultra low metabolic rate.

And there is some early studies, actually it's been a while, but potential impact of varroa mortality and higher CO2 levels.

This is likely more indoors because now the bees are all being exposed to it at a lower temperature in control.

But there's some interesting conversations there.

And then my last slide is pink line here. I love my charts.

So this was in December of not too long ago.

Pink line is oxygen.

So I've noticed CO2 sensors are really expensive.

They use a lot of battery, and my brain couldn't figure out how to program some of them.

My one CO2 could go to 10,000 PPM, but I knew levels in the colony go much lower.

But then I found myself an O2 sensor so I can measure hypoxia.

And then at lower temperatures, CO2 and O2 are inversely proportional to each other or correlated, which is wonderful.

So I can use it to measure hypoxia.

And over here you could see fairly cold, but then it would spike down.

So this was the accumulation of CO2.

Then I cleaned out my entrance, it spiked up.

Then I made my entrance slightly bigger, and then it still spiked down.

And then I went to a four inch by probably five eights lower entrance only.

And now O2 level was nice and flat.

But I want to tweak it a bit lower so I can maintain nicer, I guess, 2 to 3% is what I'm looking for.

But in a nutshell, those are the things I'm doing.

I'm trying to understand more about the environment so I can better my beekeeping, and then I share it out with folks so they can question it or use it or learn from it, and that's my my main objective.

So hopefully it wasn't too complicated, but that's my talk.

- Thank you so much. So fascinating.

I love your data-driven approach, of course. (chuckles)

I love data too.

Okay, so everyone we are over, but I will still ask Etienne a few questions.

Remember this is recorded, so if you have to go, you can still watch this Q&A in about a week when it appears online.

Okay.

I'm only gonna be able to pick a few questions here.

So...

Are there any feral bees in your area?

- No, there isn't. It's too cold, the trees are too small.

There might be the odd one in a shed.

But in Alaska along the coast there is, but it's much warmer there.

But yeah, no feral bees.

- I see.

It seems like you have a nice isolated area for breeding.

Do you ever concentrate on any drone production at all?

Or you just hope- - The challenge is, is the length of the season.

By the times the drones are mature, it's that early seasons.

And because I'm getting my bees ready so early, sometimes the drones haven't caught up in population at the right time.

So I'd say I wish.

But we do get frost every couple of weeks, so doing my own queens is hard.

It's not a thing I actively do.

It's more of a side project and it's a nice to have.

- I see.

So swarming would be pretty dangerous for the colony?

- It is, and that's why I keep a couple of open cod, like I have a swarm trap in my chicken yard, 'cause it's all protected with the bear fence.

And I maintain a colony, like an empty box there with some frames so that...

And it's about 100 meters, 200 meters from the bee yard, so it's an ideal spot for the bees to come back to if I missed it.

- Mm-hm.

So you mentioned that sometimes the bees get a cleansing flight.

So what is your kind of definition of a warm day?

Like what temperature are they flying?

- Like a proper cleansing flight might be 5 Celsius, so between like 38 Fahrenheit, 40.

They will fly a bit around like 0.

But it's a very, it's like the bees just on the outside.

There might be a handful of bees going to cleanse.

But until it gets like 5 to 10 Celsius, it's not a good cleansing flight.

So that's my challenge is...

And for example, the reason I don't use slighted racks anymore is it created a cold space below the colony, so the bees actually couldn't go cleanse even on warmer days 'cause it was too cold underneath there.

So that's why I don't use slighted racks anymore 'cause I need the bees to cleanse as early as possible.

- I see.

So I'm curious, because it's one of my research areas, about your honeydew honey.

So you said that it causes dysentery.

I'm guessing ash content is what you're seeing under the microscope.

- Yeah, so a lot of algae, a lot of rust spores.

And there's fungal spores, but you can just see, when I look at the feces right now, I can see so many things that they haven't digested.

And even some of the pollens are just flowing right through and they're not being properly digested.

And if you look at the gut, it's fried eggs everywhere with the brownish fungal spores.

And then sometimes I see the algae in the feces at the end.

And then when I test the honey, you could see the background mass when you're doing your honey sample on the slide.

There's a texture there and that's that ash content.

And then you sometimes see that in the bee guts.

- Hmm, so is that from aphids there?

- Yeah, we've got 55 species of aphids in the Yukon.

And they're all plant, they have their favorite plant hosts.

So there's some on the fireweed, the poplars, the spruce, the rose family.

And it seems to be, I've got two honeydews here.

I have a spruce honeydew, and then I've got a more deciduous tree, so like a willow, aspen, poplar-type honeydew.

And it depends.

So the spruce one is less heavy than the leafy plant type, if that makes sense.

- Hmm, I would love to have a sample of those honeys. (chuckles)

- Sure. I'm sure I can send one down.

- That would be amazing.

Okay, I need to ask the questions that audience asked for, not mine.

Let's see, one more question.

Just so everyone knows, we did put Etienne's YouTube channel in the chat.

If you missed it, if you just google YouTube and his name or Yukon Beekeeper, you will find it.

And apparently there's a lot more information about your overwintering setup and things there so you can get your questions answered through that.

And I guess last, I'll just ask you, you said that you fumigate your frames.

What are you fumigating them with?

- Yeah, I left that vague.

So you use 80% acetic acid.

So acetic acid is vinegar, hyper.

It's very dangerous.

So you need all your PPE, your gloves, your goggles, your face shield.

'Cause imagine I think vinegar is like at 3%, 5%, not even that.

So we're talking 80, 85% vinegar.

And what you do is there's a lot in the prairies.

If you google acetic acid fumigation, there's procedure from Alberta, a bunch of different places.

And what it does is they've been doing it for the last 60 years, there's some research outta the UK that it is effective against Nosema, and it looks to be effective against amoeba, so that other disease that I have to deal with.

And it's a way for me to inspect my frames.

If there's too much feces, scrape the wax off, keep the wax for me, chuck the frames.

Because an example is the bees will come outta winter with, say, 10, 12 frames of bees, lots of bees.

But within a month, there's no more bees left.

And there's a rapid spring dwindle.

And just to answer that question is, I've taken the queen from an infected colony, and I could see eggs, I could see larvae.

It looked like she was doing her thing, but they can't nurse so the worker bees just can't do anything with her.

So then I would take that queen, put her in a queenless colony, and then, bang, that colony would just, she'd do beautiful frames of brood.

And within a month, that queenless colony coming outta winter was ramping up.

So I was like, "Huh." So the queen is not infected.

So I've done that twice now.

So I don't pinch those sick queens anymore.

I know that colony's done, 'cause every bee I test has amoeba, has massive Nosema.

But I can take that queen and reuse her in my queenless, the calling that came out with a queen issue.

And then Bob's my uncle. So it's really good.

- Very interesting.

Well, thank you so much for your time and your information.

Thanks, everybody, for coming.

Great session. Lots to think about now.

- Sounds good. My pleasure.

- So thanks, everybody.

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Beekeeping Around the World: The Yukon Territory

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Recorded Feb 13, 2025

Join Etienne as he shares his year-round approach to managing bees in northern climates. Learn how every decision impacts honey harvests, colony growth, and winter survival.

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