Time and again I’ve noticed that beekeepers develop a keen sense of their environment. They use all five senses—and maybe a sixth—to decide how to best manage their hives. With their sense of sight beekeepers—some who’ve never cared much about plants—suddenly notice bees on a flower and want to know what flower it is. They […] Read more
Yesterday I when I pulled the drone frames out of the hives, I discovered the most populous hives were dripping wet under the cover. I had tried to prevent this by using upper entrances, but apparently the one-inch holes I installed were not big enough to keep the interior dry in spring. Part of this […] Read more
I have a fascination with honeycomb. In fact, it was lack of a source that drove me into beekeeping in the first place. Where I grew up—not far from Lancaster, Pennsylvania—buckwheat honeycombs were everywhere, their dark amber innards oozing from sweet-smelling wooden boxes. You could buy them from stands along the side of Lancaster’s gently […] Read more
Transgenic crops were first introduced into the United States in 1996 and have become a major component of American agriculture. In a transgenic organism (also known as a genetically modified organism) some genes from one species are spliced into the chromosomes of another species. This is quite different from traditional plant or animal breeding in […] Read more
Cascara (Rhamnus purshiana), a small tree in the buckthorn family, is now in full bloom in western Washington—although you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look very closely. The small nondescript flowers, growing in the leaf axils, are only about 3-5 mm across with five greenish-yellow petals. These trees grow in moist, acidic soils and tolerate […] Read more
The more you work with bees, the more you learn their patterns. After a while, you know pretty much what you’re going to see when you open a hive. But just when you think you’ve got them all figured out, they do something strange. For example, yesterday I opened all my hives. I went from […] Read more
Humans are so intimidated by insects that we continually try to eradicate them even while we mourn the loss of biodiversity in other species. But it doesn’t work that way. The interplay of life on Earth is vastly complicated and the species are all interdependent. Saturday May 22 is International Biodiversity Day and I urge […] Read more