Tired of buying compressed smoker fuel, I looked for alternative fuels that would work better and were available around me. I have used pine needles before, but after some research I found oodles of natural materials ripe for the picking in my backyard. The variety of materials that you can use is only limited by […]

Honeybees work. They work all spring and summer to store up enough pollen and honey for their colony to survive the winter. However, sometimes, their best efforts are not enough and they can end up starving to death if their supplies run out. As you have read, in the early spring and late fall when […]

An herb garden is traditionally a busy place, with bees buzzing from plant to plant, their fuzzy little bodies perfect for trapping pollen and transporting it to the next flower. But declining bee populations means that we can no longer take these beneficial visitors for granted; we need to lure them with a choice selection […]

Why the smoker? A necessity for preventing bee stings, even more than wearing your trusty bee suit, the smoker disrupts the bees’ normal cascade of defense when they perceive a threat. Smoked bees will flee from the source of smoke (you!) rather than advance in a defensive reaction. The result is less flight and stinging […]

Winter survival of honeybees is one of the most common topics of discussion I have with people curious about bees. With extremely cold temperatures hitting most of the East Coast, this issue has come up again and again. A healthy full-size colony with an adequate supply of honey and a healthy queen can survive extreme […]

There are generally two ways in which you can raise mason bees. You can go at it with a hands-off approach and let nature take its course or you can take some quick and easy additional steps to ensure a healthier mason bee population. Any help really that you’re willing to provide will be appreciated […]

Mason bees look for tiny holes in the wild to lay their brood. Bee-friendly places might be holes bored into trees by other insects or the stems of dried reeds and other plants. Ideally, the hole should be around 8mm (around the width of a pencil) and 3-4 inches deep. The female bee will collect […]

Markus Imhoof outlines many of the problems facing beekeepers today in his book More Than Honey: The Survival of Bees and the Future of Our World, which Imhoof had originally produced as a documentary. His slant is strongly pro-bees and anti-pesticides and, in conjunction, anti-commercial agriculture. In particular, I found his interviews with a large […]

We’re starting to experience temperatures in the 30’s here in Michigan. The trees in our yard are bare of their leaves and it’s starting to look like winter. The sky has that long shadowy dreariness where even at the sun’s peak there’s still a hint of dusk.   In the winter, moisture is the bee […]

We have decided what to do with the top bar hive for winter. We last examined it in mid-October to check out how much food it had. There are 14 or 15 full-size combs drawn out. The four in front had each had brood, but were mostly empty when we examined them. There was honey […]

Making nucleus hives or “nucs” is a good way to expand your apiary without spending a lot of money and without the worry of introducing Africanized genetics from packaged bees. (Now that Africanized bees inhabit our more southern states, this is a concern.) You also will be creating queens that are best acclimated to your […]

For Northern beekeepers, it is way past the time to prepare for winter, but in the southeast, we still have 90° F days and the goldenrod is finally in full bloom! The weather this year has been a complete downer with it raining almost every day from 03 June until 09 September and then Hurricane […]

We recently checked back on our hive after installing the new beetle jails to replace the beetle blasters. As I wrote about earlier, I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the beetle blasters and was looking for alternatives. In the comments to my post, many other beekeepers have shared their own strategies there for trapping small hive […]

I’ve had a terrible time with mites in my beehives this year and not just varroa but tracheal mites as well. I do not use medications or chemicals in my beehives at all so I searched far and wide for a more natural way to help them out. I know many beekeepers who use and […]

We all know that bees can sting. Perhaps, after making honey and pollination, stinging might be what bees are most known for. It may seem obvious that bees protect themselves by using their stinger, but in reality, the sting is a bee’s last resort.   When a bee stings, it kills the bee. The stinger […]