Tag - nucs

feeding bees

How to feed stacked nucs in winter

4 years ago

25 Comments

A package of bees can be intimidating to a new beekeeper. © Rusty Burlew.

honey bee management

Nuc or package: how to buy honey bees

7 years ago

23 Comments

Bees and their queen on a honeycomb. Pixabay

honey bee management • how to • wintering

How to over-winter a nuc

12 years ago

17 Comments

honey bee management • how to • queen bees

How to keep queen bees in reserve

12 years ago

65 Comments

beekeeping equipment • honey bee management • queen rearing

Keeping a nuc might look like a waste, but it’s...

13 years ago

61 Comments

beekeeping equipment • how to • making increase • queen rearing • swarming

How to start multiple hives from a swarm-control split

13 years ago

19 Comments

honey bee management • wintering

Dead queen on the landing board

13 years ago

9 Comments

wintering

You can move nucs inside for cold weather

13 years ago

2 Comments

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. This book started zillions of people on their path to beekeeping. If you haven't read it, you should.

QueenSpotting: Meet the Remarkable Queen Bee and Discover the Drama at the Heart of the Hive by Hilary Kearney. You have to be a scrooge not to love this book. It even includes 48 queenspotting challenges.

The Bees in Your Backyard by Wilson & Carril. If you have any interest at all in the "other bees," you need this book. These are the bees we need to save.

Manuka: The biography of an extraordinary honey by Cliff van Eaton. The discovery of manuka honey and its medicinal properties.

Regardless of dictionaries, we have in entomology a rule for insect common names that can be followed. It says: If the insect is what the name implies, write the two words separately; otherwise run them together. Thus we have such names as house fly, blow fly, and robber fly contrasted with dragonfly, caddicefly, and butterfly, because the latter are not flies, just as an aphislion is not a lion and a silverfish is not a fish. The honey bee is an insect and is preeminently a bee; “honeybee” is equivalent to “Johnsmith.”

—From Anatomy of the Honey Bee by Robert E. Snodgrass

The non-native European Honey Bee is the state insect of:

Arkansas
Georgia
Kansas
Louisiana
Maine
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
New Jersey
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Tennessee
Utah
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin

Not one native bee is a state insect. The closest relative of a North American native bee to make the list is the Tarantula Hawk Wasp, the state insect of New Mexico.

Minnesota now has a state bee as well as a state insect. Bombus affinis, the Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee, has been so honored. Good work, Minnesota!

Connecticut’s state insect is the European “praying” mantis. Although they are beneficial insects, they are not native to North America.