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NOTICE!! DATES FOR BEGINNER COURSE WILL BE CHANGING TO BEGIN IN EARLY JANUARY AND END IN EARLY FEBRUARY--STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS JUST NOTIFIED THE COOPERATIVE EXTENSION THAT THEY WILL BE TAKING OUR MEETING SPACE FOR EARLY VOTING FROM MID-FEBRUARY THROUGH EARLY MARCH. IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, THE REVIEW ...

I'm assuming you are working with wax foundation; a really strong hive with a really good nectar flow will pull out the remainder of the mess and repair the comb (fill in with new comb). If the hive is not really strong, is not in the nectar flow, or is not in a situation where the bees feel they ne...

The new queen is at work. I checked the nuc this morning and found the queen backed into a cell. When she moved out I examined that cell and a few around it and saw eggs.

I have watched the queen disappear and 4+/- queen cells develop since the arrival of these bees. As of Friday, 1 queen cell had emerged and the rest were being torn down. Just a few minutes ago I saw a small queen on one of the frames. I hope she will be able to get mated, make it safely home, and s...

You are going to have rough patches. We all do. The idea is to learn from them, change practices, and do better. The rapid collapses I have seen in my hives was from varroa infestations not detected early enough and probably vectoring some type of bad virus. Slower collapses seem to be either from s...

It would if it weren't a real article from 1953.

I'm not too sure about this-- Robbing Control. . . During a recent visit from Paul Hol- combe, New Jersey State Inspector of apiaries, gave us a very useful thought which sometimes works quite well in the control of robbing, particularly when working in a bee- yard. We found it useful and almost the...

You probably made the right decision going the way you did. Taking your losses in the fall has always been a difficult lesson for me to learn and put into practice, but I am doing it more and more. I have started serious queen evaluations earlier than I used to, in early August. Having more than 2 h...

I can't remember what Wally said about how long it takes robbers to become incorporated into a target hive. I hope he sees this and answers for you. If the hive is small enough and you have the equipment, you may want to reduce the hive to a nuc with a robber screen on it. I did this with a very sma...

The bees are back in town! I don't know if they returned sometime late yesterday afternoon or early this morning, but the small abscond has returned to the bait hive.

The bees treated my place like a bed and breakfast. I released the queen early this morning and at noon, the bees were clustered off the bottom board of the bait hive. I tried to scoop them back in and they took off and left in the direction they came from yesterday.

The latest arrival came in at 2:26 pm today. I heard buzzing in the back of my yard and watched the arrival of what turned out to be about 1 medium frame of bees. I had not seen scouting and it was unclear just where they were heading, so a little Swarm Commander convinced them to come to the front ...

Check with Beez Needz to see if they still have nucs. I think they did a couple of weeks ago.

If I was going to do that, I would make it quick and make it toward dusk.

It normally takes bees around 24 hours to chew through newspaper with a few slits put in it. I would let it go awhile longer and then see how the combining went. If robbing attempts have lessened, that is a hopeful sign that the queen has good pheromones and the hive will be better organized in defe...

Langstroth quoted another source to the effect that robbing does not usually take place unless a colony is queenless or has a diseased queen. My experience where there is persistent robbing of a colony is consistent with this. I can usually stop robbing of a queenright hive by shutting it in with a ...

This is the first time this season that normal hive manipulations triggered chaos among my bees. The hive most under attack is the one I was working on. It has a marked queen laying a poor pattern and a few supercedure cells in progress. The hives most under attack got reducers back on, and the one ...

Abscond81123_IMG_0875.jpg These bees arrived yesterday. I have them on one old medium frame. I don't see a queen and it looks like some of these arrivals may have been killed trying to enter active hives. They did not take advantage of some bait hives I have out. There are not enough bees to make i...

Rose of Sharon_IMG_0856.jpg Okra_IMG_0863.jpg Bees are emptying my nectarometer in a couple of hours or less, and are waiting for me in the morning when I bring out the pint of the day of honey water. I have watched bees deliberately work the okra bloom and the rose of sharon. I have seen them expl...