Professor David Evans is a virologist studying the biology of single stranded positive sense RNA viruses, including poliovirus, hepatitis C virus and deformed wing virus of honeybees. He has a fascinating, practical beekeeping blog, https://www.theapiarist.org/

• And then there were three
  May 30, 2025
  Queens in a hive, swarms arriving and yet more queens. Some strange supersedure events with a possible explanation, and grafted larvae, pluripotency and the eventual size of the queen. Something for everyone, except Genesis fans.
• Is this the future?
  May 28, 2025
  Pollen and nectar availability defines the best locations to site hives, but also identifies areas where beekeeping should be limited to avoid damaging competition with native pollinators. Scientists in New Zealand have recently completed this type of landscape-scale resource mapping.
• Apiaries
  May 23, 2025
  Apiaries provide the stage for the little dramas of beekeeping. Sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy, but always memorable. What features are needed, and what should be avoided, in a good apiary?
• Swarms and queens
  May 16, 2025
  Observations on scout bee activity and waggle dance accuracy, multiple swarms in a bait hive and preliminary results rearing 'bigger, better, queens' using oversized 3D printed queen cell cups.
• False economy
  May 9, 2025
  Miticides are not inexpensive, until you compare them to the cost of replacement bees and lost honey production. Not treating is both false economy and tempting fate but, with coordination and advance planning, savings can be made.
• 'Innovative' mite treatment
  May 5, 2025
  Brood breaks created by queen caging allow miticides to be applied to broodless colonies. Could high mite/virus levels mid-season help select for resistance or tolerance mechanisms, without detrimental effects on colonies?
• Judgement Day
  May 2, 2025
  In the apiary, every day is Judgement Day. Good judgement involves ample information, some insightful interpretation, and understanding. Bad judgement involves a lack of information, guesswork, wishful thinking and sentimentality.
• First impressions last
  April 25, 2025
  Honey labelling involves an interesting combination of market research, design, information transfer and selling regulations, coupled with consideration of the label and printing costs. How can you create small (or large) numbers of labels flexibly and economically?
• The memory of swarms
  April 18, 2025
  More on collecting and hiving swarms, their memory, how and when to treat them for mites, and a Citizen Science survey of whether swarm absconding might be due to scout bee activity.
• Another reason to use drone comb in supers?
  April 14, 2025
  We can now add 'faster honey ripening' to the known benefits of using drone comb in honey supers, though whether these outweigh the consequences of a queen getting above the excluder is debatable.