I love these photos. Yesterday my top-bar hive was bursting at the seams. My husband kept urging me to check it for swarm cells and I kept putting it off. But finally, I dug through an egregious number of bees only to find a skeleton! It is so cool. It was lying on the screened […] Read more
The easiest method of raising a new queen is to move a ripe queen cell from a busy colony into a nuc or mating box stocked with nurse bees and brood. This is usually the first type of queen rearing a new beekeeper tries and it is both fun and effective. Plus it gives a […] Read more
Warped boxes are irritating. The boxes in the photo are only about two years old. They were painted and assembled when I first got them, but they still managed to warp. As you can see, the middle portions shrunk away from each other until a space large enough for bee passage appeared between them. Will […] Read more
Although I haven’t actually seen many mason bees around, it is easy to see they’ve been hard at work. This mason bee condo was empty two weeks ago. Now there’s only two spaces left and the lower one has a mason bee in it. The tubes on the left are where they hatched, and those […] Read more
I’ve been worried about the native bees. So far this spring we’ve had very few nice days, and I haven’t seen many native bees. Today, though, when the skies cleared for a few moments, I saw this big bumble in the azalea bush. I actually heard it long before a saw it–a deep, rumbling buzz […] Read more
Curlycup gumweed is a plant native to North America that attracts a variety of wild pollinators as well as honey bees. The name “gumweed” refers to the sticky, resinous material that is secreted from the flowers before they open. Gumweed was well-known to native North American tribes and used for a number of medicinal purposes. […] Read more
One of the most amazing things about honeycomb is the angle of the cells. At first the cell walls appear to be perpendicular to the foundation, but they are not. From the base of the cell, each cell lifts between 9 and 14 degrees toward the open end. That is, there is a 9-14 degree […] Read more