After six weeks in New Zealand, I traveled to Thailand to visit a second cousin. Tom has been living in Bangkok for the past twenty years, but he visits the U.S. from time to time, and we met once when I was a kid. We spoke on the phone in November. He almost remembered me. […] Read more
Varroa destructor hit the North Island first. It established around Auckland and spread gradually south. At first, beekeepers negotiated quarantine lines. Some apiaries were split down the middle, and boundaries had to be renegotiated every time the infestation spread. And in the meantime, an infested feral colony rode a hollow log into Wellington and Frank’s […] Read more
“New Zealand has experienced 45 earthquakes in the past 24 hours.” Frank gleefully clicks on an animated topographic map. “Little ones!” he assures me. It’s 10:30 pm on my first night in Wellington. We’ve been checking out local apiaries on Google Earth, and now Frank is tormenting me with tectonic activity. He traces a fault […] Read more
Editor’s note: Our international correspondent spent the second leg of her beekeeping trip in New Zealand. So far, she has written three articles about her New Zealand adventures, but we are waiting for final permission to publish the first two. Today’s story is about grafting larvae with the ultimate goal of harvesting royal jelly. We […] Read more
It is 45°C (113°F) outside, so we wax-dip foundation in the shed until 11:00 and then take our places alongside the 72-frame radial extractor. We move honey supers to the warming room to prepare them for extraction (warm honey runs faster), but that hardly seems necessary when the heat’s on high outside. It’s a three-person […] Read more
Sometimes little gems of wisdom get hidden within the comments section. In this tip, Jim of Withers Mountain Honey Farm in Flint, Michigan, describes how he bolsters new bee packages with brood from strong hives that might swarm. It is a way to equalize the strength of his hives while boosting packages and reducing swarming. […] Read more
In her second installment about beekeeping in Australia’s Outback, Maggie tells about scouting the eucalypt bloom and the threat of the Asian honey bee, Apis cerana. Martha takes me out to scout the bloom a couple of times. It’s basically a tree road trip. We’re sizing up snow gum, blue gum, stringy bark, red gum, […] Read more