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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Not too shab-bee!

Worker bee life span during summer may only be 7 weeks, about 4 of them flying. During the winter some of the workers live 5 months or more. Drones live only one season if they fail to mate. If they mate, they die in the act. Queens have been shown to sometimes live for years but the average life span of queens appears to be decreasing.

Hello honey!

The easiest system I have found, which also cleans hive tools so that they can't transfer diseases to the next hive inspected is a tupperware spaghetti pasta container with rubbing alcohol. Place hive tool inside and lay the container on its side so the alcohol covers the tool. It doesn't take much alcohol to clean tool after tool this way and the tupperware top seals super well. Oh, the daffodils are just in the picture to hide the clutter in my house. And the J hook is my f

Not necessarily: even a color as unusual as blue appears in pollen in nature. The color of the pollen may even be different from the flower from which it comes. Rusty Burlew of honeybeesuite.com writes fascinating, researched articles on this sort of topic with illustrations. Here's one on blue pollen, possibly the most unusual color we beekeepers see in in our hives: https://www.honeybeesuite.com/bees-and-blue-beautiful-blue-blossoms-for-happy-honey-bees/#h-the-allure-of-

A fumble bee.

Because they've forgotten the words!