Nectar dearth is a phrase that you hear frequently in beekeeping. Simply put, it means that instead of your honeybees finding readily available nectar and pollen producing flowers, they are chowing down on their stored honey. And bees need honey stores to survive my cold winters here in the mid-Atlantic.  Supplemental feeding is the option […]

Once again, I find myself gloriously behind the times. In this particular case a few thousand years behind the times: I built and maintain a wall beehive—a colony housed in the wall of my bedroom. I have been calling it my Observation Hive because it has a plexiglas cover on the inside wall, but my […]

You have decided you need to feed your bees. Maybe you just installed a package in a new hive, and they have to build out all of the frames. Maybe you just moved a hive to a new location and you want to give them a boost. Maybe you caught a late season swarm and […]

The garden is starting to dwindle. The other morning I woke as the sun was coming up and I can’t tell for sure, but it looked as though we had a bit of frost on the north side of the lawn.   The tomato plants are turning black and there are dots of gold and […]

If you live in an area with the invasive Argentine ants, chances are you have issues with them getting into your hives. These non-native pests have colonized most of California and the southern parts of the U.S. Their massive super-colonies make them difficult to control, especially in the bee yard. These ants can easily overwhelm […]

Whenever we get a new package of bees, before we begin working with them, we spray them with a 1:1 ratio of water and dissolved sugar. This calms the bees and allows you to maneuver them into the hive while keeping them docile.   It’s not a good idea to use a smoker with a […]

When my husband told me he wanted to start keeping bees I was NOT on board with the idea. When I was 11 years old my dad was stung by a bald face hornet, had a terrible reaction and went into cardiac arrest. He made it through, but it was one of the most terrifying […]

Extracting honey every August for twenty years has honed my honey house preparations. Kind of like painting….. the prep takes longer than the actual work. I never extract in the house as it will bring stray bees in along with the frames. I have a potting shed adjacent to my bee yard which I have […]

Beekeeping Revolution Beekeeping, especially urban beekeeping, is picking up steam and buzz! When I first attended my “Beekeeping Basics” class put on by the local beekeepers club twenty years ago, older men in coveralls dominated and the joke was that the average age of a beekeeper was “from 57 to dead”. As a younger woman […]

Bees are mesmerizing. One of my favorite things to do is sit out by our hive and watch the bees bringing back pollen. Even this small glimpse into their world…only that ledge of coming and going is fascinating.   In today’s world of sharing our lives via the internet, beekeepers feel the draw to document […]