Featured Stories
Communication with Pheromones
Honey bees are eusocial, meaning they live in highly complex social colonies, with multiple casts and tens of thousands of individuals of overlapping generations.
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How to Treat Varroa Mites — A New Perspective
Add to Favorites My wife and I took a beginning beekeeping class before becoming backyard beekeepers. We learned about wax moth treatment and how to manage ants in beehives. We …
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What’s Wrong with my Homemade Fondant?
Beekeepers add vinegar to fondant recipes under the mistaken idea that you need to invert the sucrose for the bees. This is not true. Most nectar is mainly sucrose, but the instant the bees ingest it, their saliva breaks it down into glucose and fructose.
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Steps for Successfully Filtering Beeswax
Add to Favorites When people find out that we are honey bee farming, they always ask about the honey. But bees also produce beeswax and something will need to be …
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How to Make Beeswax Candles
Giving homemade holiday gifts is our family tradition. One of my favorite homemade gifts to give is homemade beeswax candles. They are easy, inexpensive, and perfect for neighbors, friends, teachers, and anyone you want to spread cheer to.
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Catch and Release Powdered Sugar Roll Varroa Mite Test
Knowing what a hive’s mite load is can mean the difference between a hive surviving the winter in a healthy state ready to tackle the next honey season and an almost guaranteed untimely death from the viruses and diseases contributed to high varroa loads.
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Conduct an Alcohol Wash for Varroa Mite Monitoring
Monitoring Varroa destructor’s infestation levels is arguably one of the most important tasks on a beehive inspection checklist — yet mite checks are also the most commonly forgotten task. This doesn’t have to be with so many fast and simple methods available.
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The Importance of Winterizing Beekeeping Equipment
Add to Favorites By Alexis Griffee, Florida Winterizing beekeeping equipment, while the hive sleeps, avoids problems when the weather warms up. As the cooler weather rolls in, our thoughts on the farm …
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Movements of the Winter Bee Cluster
Add to Favorites The honey bee cluster moves up in winter and down in summer. The downward movement is easiest to see in a feral colony built into a tree …
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Common Langstroth Hive Setup
A Langstroth hive is the most common beehive in developed countries. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth (the creator) observed that if 1 cm space was left between the cover of a hive and the top bars, that the bees would not fill it with burr comb or propolis—it was deemed walking around space.
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