On Saturday, the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association held their annual Field Day at the Washington Park Arboretum. The event was well-attended, expertly organized, and truly fun. The featured speaker, Dr. Zachary Huang of Michigan State University, is a wealth of information and a great photographer. During the long day he displayed a pleasing combination of […] Read more
Remember the swarm that stayed in a tree for four days before I retrieved it seven times? Well, yesterday—eleven days after it moved into the bait hive—I recalled that the top brood box was missing a frame. I decided to put one in there before the bees filled the empty slot with comb attached to […] Read more
I want to share an interesting conversation I’ve been having with Oregon beekeeper Morris Ostrofsky. After I posted about how to use swarm guards, he challenged the idea that virgin queens can sometimes get through them. He wrote: I had a conversation with Dan Purvis some years ago regarding virgin queens and queen excluders. Dan […] Read more
In contrast to a swarm-control split where you need to know the whereabouts of your queen, a walkaway split can be made without having to find the queen. The steps for setting up a walkaway split are easy: The queenless portion will soon begin to raise a queen of their own from very young larvae. […] Read more
Hives can be split for many reasons. A beekeeper may split a hive in order to increase the number of hives, to raise queens, to increase the number of workers, or to keep a hive from swarming. There are dozens of ways to do a split, depending on what you are trying to do and […] Read more