Featured Stories
Top Bar Beehives vs Langstroth Beehives
Not long after our teenage son started raising honey bees, a family friend built him a top bar beehive with an observation window using beehive plans from a homesteading book. It was such an amazing gift.
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Your Seasonal Beekeeping Calendar
When you are new to beekeeping, it’s good to have a game plan. Today let’s explore a seasonal beekeeping calendar and your to-do’s throughout the year.
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How Do I Harvest Royal Jelly?
To harvest royal jelly in any quantifiable amount, you’ll need several strong, healthy hives and a working knowledge of queen grafting.
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How Do You Catch a Swarm of Bees?
The simplest answer to “how to catch a swarm of bees” is this — get the queen and all the ladies in something you can safely transport them in back to your apiary.
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What Happens When the Queen Bee Dies?
Raising honeybees is a challenge. One day your hive looks good and a few days later you wonder if it’s going to live.
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How to Manage Ants in a Beehive
There is nothing quite like the sights and sounds of bees buzzing around, gathering pollen and nectar on a warm summer day. Summer and bees just seem to go together; unfortunately, so do summer and pests.
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How do Bees Mate?
Add to Favorites An interesting and deadly dance takes place all across the world; in fact, it’s necessary for human survival and yet goes unnoticed by humans year after year. …
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Can Different Species of Bees Mate?
Different species of honey bees cannot successfully mate with each other. Instead, you are asking about sub-species, sometimes referred to as races. An Italian queen and a New World Carniolan are merely different races of one species, Apis mellifera, and they are completely capable of interbreeding.
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Can Beehives Open Toward a Fence?
I am in Zone 8, I have three Langstroth hives next to a solid board fence. Can I turn the opening toward fence and how far away should the opening be from the fence?
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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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