Early each spring I’m on the lookout for a frame of bigleaf maple honey. It blooms before the honey supers are in place, so I rifle through the brood boxes, looking for that special treat. In anticipation of this event, I often put an empty frame at the edge of a few brood boxes the […] Read more
I like to shelter my hives from the rain. A sheltered hive gives the bees a dry place to land and keeps rainwater from seeping in around the entrance. It also keeps snow and hail from blocking the entrance. It’s probably not very important in most places, but here where it rains for about nine […] Read more
Do you remember the Stockholm Syndrome? It’s a behavior seen in some hostages in which they develop sympathy for their captors, often to the point of defending them. The most famous case in America is Patty Hearst who, after being captured by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, eventually joined them and helped rob a […] Read more
No matter how you do it, you must stop robbing or you may lose your colony. Robbing bees will tear open all the honey cells and clean up every last drop. Fighting between bees will kill many and, once the hive is overpowered, predators such as wasps will move in and kill any remaining bees […] Read more
The best way to make yourself into a target these days, is to say something negative about urban beekeeping. You may as well paint a bull’s eye on your beesuit. And those yellowjackets I’ve been complaining about? They can’t hold a candle to an angry urban beekeeper. Hear that? Those are arrows zinging by and […] Read more
After Monday’s post on yellowjackets I learned a lot about wasps. A representative of the Rescue Corporation–the people who make those plastic yellowjacket traps that I love–sent a positive i.d. on my nest: Vespula vulgaris. These are known as common wasps or, in North America, yellowjackets. Dave at Georgia Wildlife Services, Inc. wrote to say […] Read more
This morning a reader from Roseburg, Oregon commented on The queen excluder controversy which reminded me of some observations I made this summer while experimenting with queen excluders. I discovered that my colonies with excluders produced just as much honey as those without. However, the colonies with excluders seemed to follow a different protocol for […] Read more