If you’ve kept bees for any length of time, you’ve probably come to realize that doing so effectively requires a lot of work. In particular, bees are often vulnerable to disease as well as mites and other pests. Controlling these threats may be quite difficult, and many beekeepers opt to enlist the help of chemical […]

Please enjoy July’s Video to Buzz About!   Please enjoy this video of a lecture given by Jamie Ellis at the 2014 National Honey Show entitled “Addressing the Sustainability of Beekeeping in the 21st Century”.

Catching a Swarm Sponsored By: Brushy Mountain Bee Farm Shane Gebauer, president of Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, demonstrates how to capture a bee swarm with the Hipps Swarm Retriever and install it in a super. Knowing how to catch a swarm is important both for capturing new swarms you want to add to your beekeeping […]

To a new beekeeper differentiating a drone from the queen can be a little confusing. I remember the first time we did a hive inspection with our first colony. It was after we not-so-gracefully dumped our package bees in the new, empty hive and sealed it up for two weeks hoping we did everything right. […]

Story and photos by Jennifer Sartell An adult bee’s diet is primarily made up of three types of food. Honey, Nectar and Pollen. In this post, we will discover how each of these food groups provide essential nutrient to a bee. Nectar Where does nectar come from? Nectar actually begins in the leaves of plants. […]

Last year I wrote an article on the ten most common mistakes I see new beekeepers make. The continued popularity of this article and the high volume of mistakes I see beekeepers make has prompted me to write a sequel! So, here are five more beekeeping mistakes I hope to help you avoid. 1. Poor Record Keeping Not […]

Moving colonies successfully and gently from one hive to another takes planning and good bee math.

It might be a weird subject to read about, (it was even weirder to research) but the reproductive practice of the honey bee is a fascinating thing!   All bees begin life as an egg. Fertilized eggs will grow to be female bees and unfertilized eggs will become drones (male bees). The queen has control […]

A honey bee is approximately a half of an inch long. Though tiny, it is made up of many complicated and interesting parts. The honey bee is one of the most streamline designs of any creature. Each part is tailored to a specific purpose, and does that purpose well.     The body of a […]

This is my first summer keeping bees in straw hives called “skeps.” Come follow my journey!

The Varroa mite is a Pandora’s box that humans will never be able to close. They are here to stay and they aren’t going anywhere despite all our efforts to treat them away. According to USDA’s Report on Honey Bee Health (PDF), published in 2012, the parasitic mite, Varroa destructor, remains the single most detrimental […]

When you open your hive and look at the busy moving mass of tiny golden bodies, it is but a mere snapshot of the working hive. The bee colony is constantly regenerating itself. In fact, every 6 weeks or so you essentially have a new hive. Any bees that were born two months ago have […]

As beekeepers, the ability to monitor our hives comes in short bursts of activity usually  in the form of regular hive inspections. For the most part, unless you have an observation hive, this time spent deep in the nitty gritty of the bee’s daily life is only for a few short moments. As we remove […]

In order to explain treatment-free beekeeping in a manner that is productive, it is first necessary to understand that there are many definitions of what exactly “treatment-free” means. In this article, I bring to light various opinions that exist and put forth a definition that attempts to clarify the topic of treatment-free beekeeping for the […]

Join beekeepers Becky Tipton, Dawn Combs, Robert Riley, and Steve Tipton as they discuss their different beekeeping methods and what they can suggest to a beginning beekeeper. To hear more podcasts from MOTHER EARTH NEWS and Friends, click here.