There are actually three ways to clear bees from honey supers. (1) Use Bee Go which is very smelly and can keep everyone out of your truck for 2-3 months, or use Fischer’s Bee-Quick which has hardly any smell at all, (2) use a bee brush to brush the bees off each frame, and (3) […]

This was the first Beekeeping College of this kind in Florida. It was held on March 13-15 in Apopka, FL. Thursday 13th was for the experienced beekeepers. We had some lectures and then we went to the bee yard and had a test on lighting a smoker and keeping it lit for […]

After the state convention, I spent couple of days with my son’s family in Orlando, FL. We played golf until about 1:15 Monday afternoon. That’s when I started back home to Pensacola. I had already planned to pull honey on the way home.
I spent the night at a friend’s home in Chipley. […]

There are three honeys that I want to talk about. Wildflower, Gallberry, and Tupelo. The reason is I get the question quite frequently, “How do you know what is what?”
The answer is simply that I help the bees decide what nectar to collect. Each hive will work on one nectar source at a […]

The one caste I have not talked about is the drones. They are the only ones that can go from hive to hive without worrying about being stung to death. They are just like children, everyone puts up with them.
There are over 2,000 drones per hive. They do nothing for themselves except walk […]

Sometime between the cooks and guard bees, the middle aged bees are called upon to make wax to repair cells and to build new cells. The older bees cannot make wax anymore and the newly hatched bees are not mature enough. I would guess that 2 to 4 days are spent at this job […]

The question was raised, “How long does it take house bees to graduate into Nursing?” The answer is : I don’t know. According to one source, the first 3 weeks are spent doing household chores. The last 3 weeks are spent in the field force foraging for pollen, nectar, and water. […]

The life of all honeybees starts as an egg, about the size of a comma “,” which is laid by the queen in the bottom of a wax cell in the brood area of a hive. A worker egg hatches after 3 days into a larva. Nurse bees feed it royal jelly at […]

When a new worker bee hatches from her cell, she gets a long drink of honey then, while her wings are drying, she will clean her cell and get it ready for another egg. Then she will join all the other new bees and older housekeepers and clean the hive. They will clean impurities […]

The queen’s only job is to lay eggs. From the time she is mated until the day she dies (up to 7 years), she is the sole propagator of the hive. Without her laying the eggs, the colony will die. During the Spring nectar flow, the workers only live about 6 weeks. About 2500 […]