When beekeepers make splits they frequently destroy all the queen cells except one. Other beekeepers routinely remove queen cells to prevent swarming. Others simply excise queen cells whenever they see one. To me, a queen cell is a valuable thing—something to covet—and the thought of destroying one gives me the willies. If you have 10 […] Read more
I had an enlightening email conversation with a 74-year-old fourth-generation Dutch beekeeper who has been in the apicultural business since he was 12. Now, that’s a lot of beekeeping! Even though he learned the craft from his father and grandfather, Evert Jan van Tongeren remains fascinated by new ideas and the latest insights into beekeeping. […] Read more
Rather than accepting crystallized honey as a unique product, we waste a lot of effort trying to “fix” it. Some consumers actually dispose of solidified honey, believing it “turned” or became unsafe to eat. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, clumsy attempts to prevent crystallization, or to re-liquefy solid honey, can do […] Read more
One of the problems with setting up a horizontal double-queen hive is getting everything level and flush so the queens can’t find little openings where they might leave their own hive and get into the neighboring one. In the original post about this system, Bill Hesbach mentions that he prefers to connect the bottom boards […] Read more
My favorite part of beekeeping is tinkering with the hives, trying a crazy idea I heard somewhere, or experimenting with a new piece of equipment. The process of learning, tweaking, and improvising is much more exciting to me than seeing how many pounds of honey I can squeeze from a hive. In some years, all […] Read more
For as long as mankind has pursued honey bees, he has been fascinated by the shape of comb cells. Since that first discovery, many types of intelligence have been ascribed to honey bees that might result in their extraordinary ability to build perfect hexagons. If you ever tried to draw a regular hexagon, one with […] Read more
When we think of pollination we imagine a honey bee foraging on a flower, collecting nectar or pollen, and inadvertently transferring some of the pollen to the next flower she visits. I’ve always thought that solitary bees might be more efficient pollinators for several reasons. For example, solitary bees seem to fly faster between flowers, […] Read more