Featured Stories
You’re Invited to Become a Member of Backyard Beekeeping
We have some EXCITING news to share! There is something new in our community … introducing the brand-new Backyard Beekeeping Membership and Magazine!
Read More
Brood in Honey; No Queen Excluder — What Now?
Many people don’t like the idea of queen excluders until they get to this point. Brood in the honey supers is a difficult problem to solve, and the solutions are not ideal.
Read More
Raising Honey Bees with Pets and Livestock
When we decided to start raising honey bees, one of the things we needed to consider was the safety of the other animals on our property. If we had a large property where we would be able to put our hives away from our other animals it would be easy, but we don’t have a large property.
Read More
How Long Can I Keep a Caged Queen Bee Alive?
Caged queens can be kept a week to 10 days, and perhaps a day or two longer. But queens lose quality when they are kept from laying for long periods, and the quality of their pheromones decreases, so always keep the storage time as short as possible.
Read More
Why Did My Bees Remove the Frame Foundation?
The bees simply bite off a chunk of wax, mix it with their own saliva, chew it into the right consistency, and then build new comb with it somewhere else in the hive. If later in the season they want to use the frames they borrowed from, they will repair the entire thing such that you can barely see what they did.
Read More
Can I Put Out Extracted Supers Without Encouraging Robbing?
Finding a source of ready-made honey excites the bees, almost to the point of frenzy. So providing wet supers gets the bees agitated and more willing, it seems, to attempt robbing.
Read More
Hygienic Bees Smell Disease and Do Something About It
One form of social immunity is called hygienic behavior, wherein many young workers resist the spread of pathogens and Varroa mites by detecting, uncapping, and removing unhealthy brood.
Read More
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.
Read More
How to Harvest Honey — Video Tutorial
In this video tutorial from Backyard Beekeeping and Miller Bee Supply, we’ll take you through the basics steps of harvesting and extracting your honey.
Read More
Steps for Successfully Filtering Beeswax
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 done with the beeswax when you harvest honey.
Read More