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 You are only branding them, not for identification, but to know when one has been superseded.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 never did find where the bees were coming from. By the time it stopped raining, it got cold and the bees are not flying. So I will just have to wait until a warm day comes back and try again.
My grandson and I finally went to the apiary to get the bees off the [...]

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 [...]

I told you that I am enrolled in the Master Beekeeper Program sponsored by the University of Florida. I have taken the first test and have graduated to the rank of Apprentice Beekeeper. I couldn’t attend the following year as that was the time my wife was getting over her pancreatitis operation and I was [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Fish Fry/Mini-Workshop

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 [...]