Key to the honey bee health is nutrition! Us humans can weather many diseases if we practice good nutrition. Same goes for the bees. Honey bee nutrition comes from two sources – pollen and nectar. Feed 2:1 sugar syrup (that’s thick!) this time of year. You want them to store it. In spring, we feed […]

Honey is derived from Nectar whose main ingredient is disaccharide Sucrose. The honey bee breaks this sugar down into two simple sugars: glucose and fructose. “Rippened Honey” is the nectar that has been reduced to 16-19% water content and capped. If you have some frames that are a mixture of capped and uncapped cells of […]

Royal Jelly Royal Jelly is a proteinaceous secretion of the honey bee’s hypopharynx gland. They are only noted in the Worker Bee as both Drones and Queens do not have them. Researcher Masaki Kamakura, demonstrated the presence of a protein known as royalactin increases the size and ovary development as well as hortens developmental time […]

Queen Queen is fed every 20-30 minutes at peak brood rearing. Queen larva grow 1500-1700 times weight of egg. Broodnest Facts Worker larvae grow 900-1100 times weight of eggs. In a normal hive at height of season, there will be: 300-1000 drones 25,000 older foragers 25,000 young house bees. 9000 uncapped larvae. 6000 eggs 20,000 […]

When a honey bee stings a person, it cannot pull the barbed stinger back out. It leaves behind not only the stinger, but also part of its abdomen and digestive tract, plus muscles and nerves. This massive abdominal rupture kills the honey bee. Honey bees are the only species of bees to die after stinging. […]

So you are now a beekeeper! You acquired your style of hive (Langstroth, Ware, Top Bar) and have even gotten your bees housed in it. There is actually a step to consider before all this that is critical to managing your hive. It is like getting a dog. Rather than throwing a dart at the […]

Dead European honeybees have almost 57 different pesticides detected, according to a new paper in the Journal of Chromatography. Should that be a concern? Not really. The great thing about modern technology is that we can detect parts per trillion, orders of magnitude what can be harmful. When we review the affects of radiation poisoning […]

Whether you are new to beekeeping or expanding your apiary, the placement of your hives always becomes a question. Textbook positioning of your hives may not be possible. Hive Registration Consideration should be given to requirements to register hives with the appropriate town, city, county, state agencies. To understand the need check with: Honey Bees […]

Drone Congregation Area (DCA) – The major component of the mandibular gland secretion of queen honeybees, 9-ODA ((2E)-9-oxodecenoic acid), has been known for more than 40 yr to function as a long-range sex pheromone, attracting drones at congregation areas and drone flyways. Workers and drones have their own separate flight regions in the air. We […]