Bee-witched!

Throughout the world, people eat insects in their egg, larval, pupal or adult stages, a behavior known as entomophagy. However, the only insect that produces a food that it eats and that humans consume as well, are the honey bees.

If the honey bee queen can lay over 1000 eggs per day during spring and summer when the hive is most populous and most active, the bees from those eggs must die at a similar rate some weeks later. Why do you not see that many dead bees per day in or near the hive? Worker bees only live about 6 or 7 weeks in spring or summer so 100s of bees must be dying every day! However, bees have very hygienic behaviors. One of these is that any bee that dies in the hive is removed by the

“Mad honey" is honey from the nectar of certain plants, particularly the Ericaceae family, which includes rhododendron, pieris and other genera that might sound familiar to gardeners. Symptoms of poisoning by ingesting this honey include dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, hypersalivation, nausea, vomiting and paresthesia, cardiac complications and possibly death. However, in the United States, honey bees have other sources of forage and rarely collect the nectar of

Fooling with a bee!

Fooling with a bee!

A bee in a submarine!

The shortest distance between two buzz-stops!

The shortest distance between two buzz-stops!

Blab-bee.

On the school-buzz.

Or instead of harvesting that honey, the “honey bank” is right there in the beeyard, on hand to make up splits or nucs. No need to carry the honey frames in and out of the yard because they are where the beekeeper needs them. Sometimes internet videos call this having resource hives in your apiary, but all small scale hives are potential resource hives, and not just for honey frames. One colony has extra frames of pollen, another has capped brood, . . oh, this one has swarm

A rhom-buzz, of course.

Propolis can be really built up inside the hive at the end of winter and makes the first full inspection difficult. One way to keep down the vibrations and resonance of hive inspection is to keep hive tools sharp and use those sharp edges to cut through propolis unstead of prying and forcing frames and boxes apart. Brute force always results in more banging and disturbance. Instead of prying each hive apart from the one next to it or from the side wall of the box, cutting bet

Wait at a buzz stop!

It's about the time of year that beginning beekeepers are watching for varroa on their mite count (slideout) boards of their screened bottom boards but aren't always sure what to look for. So here's a varroa mite right next to a standard size matchstick with 3 more mites in the picture. The one close to the match is shiny because you are looking at its back; the others may be belly-up, but the distinctive thing about them all is the "butter clam" shape. A varroa mite is not o

To bee or not to bee! That is the question.

A Frisbee.

Swarm cells are planned by the workers and therefore are placed close to the center of the brood nest - the safest, warmest, most protected spot where the cells will receive the most attention. When the broodnest spans more than one box, the bottoms of the frames of the top brood box are prime locations for those royal cells. If there is no time to properly separate brood boxes for a full hive inspection, or too many hives to check them all thoroughly, often a beekeeper tilts

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