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/
- Do honeyguides punish honey hunters who do not reward them after previous successful hunts? Historical anecdote might suggest this, but recent studies indicate the explanation is a little more prosaic.
- Using 3D printing you can inexpensively produce items for your bees and beekeeping that are useful, and either unavailable elsewhere or costly. Here is an introduction to the technology, and a guide to some things you can make.
- Strong colonies are much more productive, easier to manage and survive better. Maintaining them means risking the loss of a swarm, which requires risk management. This and other beekeeping risks are often worthwhile, because the benefits are considerable.
- Winter preparations should start during late-summer colony checks. With thorough preparation, the right colonies, low levels of pathogens and ample stores, losses should be very low, giving you — and the bees — a flying start the following spring.
- Provisional observations on a free-living colony, the timing of the onset of swarming, and comments on the validity of a recent Citizen Science survey of free-living bees.
- How does the queen walk around the comb, and why might this explain why shook swarms (and recently hived swarms) do so well?
- Wasps shouldn't be a problem for strong hives, but can quickly overrun weak or unbalanced colonies. How to prevent wasps from becoming an issue, stop them accessing your hives, trap them, and find, and destroy, their nests.
- The shook swarm is an efficient method to transfer a colony to fresh comb and simultaneously minimise the Varroa mite levels in the hive. However, there are some important considerations that must be taken into account to ensure success.
- Finding and clearing a new apiary, and preparing the colonies to populate it, together with an early 20th Century explorer, a surprised mouse, a bonus swarm, and — 'the horror, the horror!' — predicting when laying workers appear.
- Other than during supersedure, it's unusual to see two queens in the same hive. However, queens do not always fight, and there's a long history of establishing and maintaining two queen hives to increase colony productivity.
Swarm Season is here!