Just the thought of honey bees and zinc toxicity makes you all squirmy and anxious, right? Such a nail-biter of a topic is hard to resist, but here’s the spoiler: I don’t have an answer. Still, it’s a good question and I will explain why. How is zinc toxic? But first, a few words about […] Read more
Vince Poulin, a beekeeper in Vancouver, British Columbia, sent me an idea he had for feeding nucs that were stacked one atop another during the winter. This is a problem I’ve wondered about but never actually solved. It’s nice to be able to stack nucs or small colonies with a double-screen board (Snelgrove board) so […] Read more
Here is a quick reminder about the amount of food a winter colony can burn through. Contrary to logic, your colony will eat more during a warm, balmy winter than it will during a colder one. On warm days, honey bees will leave the hive and fly around looking for food, but flying is extremely […] Read more
Every few years we raise a new crop of beekeepers who want to feed bananas to their bees as a winter supplement. The forums are filled with anecdotal stories of bees thriving on ripe bananas while overcoming every imaginable pathogen and parasite. A recent Instagram posting explained that the potassium in bananas will help the […] Read more
If you haven’t heard, the Purina company is marketing a new protein supplement for honey bees, called Hearty Bee. The ingredients include something called “spray dried poultry blood,” which may sound unsettling. Since my mail is running strongly against feeding animal blood to vegetarian bees, I decided to look at the issue more carefully. Rewriting […] Read more
You recently fed sugar to your bees, either to supplement their winter stores or to cover an emergency shortage of honey. You figure the extra calories will see them through the cold months. But as you watch them come and go on a warmish day, you see them carry the crystals in their mandibles and […] Read more
What is it about the sugar syrup recipe? What makes sugar syrup so hard to comprehend? Based on the questions I see, making a simple solution of sugar dissolved in water seems to be the hardest, most mysterious, most whisker-pulling task a beekeeper ever confronts. Several times I’ve promised myself that I would never again […] Read more