Do you know the reason for marking your queen  and/or clipping one of her wings? Do you think that mutilating the queen is a sign of Satanism?
You are not mutilating the queen to practice for later using larger animals. You are only branding them, not for identification, but to know when one has been superseded. [...]

Thanksgiving and Christmas are over and I just sent my wife to Texas to visit her mother for two weeks. My middle son and his family, who are staying with us, just left to go up to the New England area to preach at one of his sponsoring churches, and maybe several other churches. I [...]

I have recently received information that explains the weight issue on less frames/more honey. You can go to my post that touched on this subject and go to the comment section,  so you can follow a little better.
A shallow honey super weighs about 25.30 lbs.
A medium (Illinois) honey super weighs about 30-50 lbs.
A deep honey [...]

Sunday afternoon was spent letting my son and Daughter-in-law pack for him to go to Africa for two weeks. My grandson and I just chilled and stayed out of their way. We should have gone to check on the colony in a lady’s garden, but we didn’t. Too much going on here and we didn’t [...]

I was sitting on the front porch this afternoon taking a break. As I was thinking of the projects I need to put on my To Do list, I noticed some bees landing on some Spanish Needle in my flowerbed. They were apparently gathering pollen, as their pollen baskets on their hind legs were quite [...]

I have said Read, read, and read some more. Well—-I followed my suggestion and have been reading (following links via the web) about a beekeeper in Southeastern Nebraska who uses top entrances only. I think I want to try that here. Not for the same reasons that he does like: keeping the snow out of [...]

As you know, I have lost down to only 8 hives. I have one swarm that was a very late swarm. I have not fed or medicated it, and it is still hanging on. It is in a nuc box in my front yard and I watch it as it struggles to survive. I will [...]

I want to apologize to you who have been following my experiences. I have been detained, derailed, and just plain procrastinating. Since my last posting, I have been to two workshops and have been bottling honey for sale. One of my outlets called me and said he had only two pints left and wanted to [...]

Yesterday, I collected an open air hive from the Pensacola Navy Hospital parking lot. It was in a Crape Myrtle tree about 12′ in the air. I backed the pickup under the colony  and placed a 7′ ladder in the bed.
The contact person helped me spread some of the lower limbs and tie them off [...]

My state bee inspector called to see if we could look at my bees last week. I wasn’t prepared for him, but this is the best way to go. We inspected my active yards and found no diseases and didn’t visually see any Varroa mites. That isn’t to say I don’t have any, just that [...]