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/
- Bait hives, ley lines, exotic parasitic mites and formic acid treatments … a spring medley of good and bad beekeeping topics.
- Winter DIY projects to make my beekeeping this year a little easier. Things for frames, mini-nucs, supers, finding bees, vaporisers, and queens. Some are novel, some are improvements, and some are poor facsimiles. All kept me entertained, and may help you in the months ahead.
- What's the best method of swarm control? Some would judge this in terms of equipment needs, or lifting involved, or the number of return visits. However, if you also consider the population of bees in the colony, I'd argue there's one clear winner.
- A recent study suggests that a beeswax Jenter-like system produces bigger, better queens than are reared by conventional grafting. Does this offer a worthwhile alternative approach to the current expensive (plastic) commercial queen rearing systems?
- A pick'n'mix collection of swarm-related information this week. The planning and equipment needed for swarm control, and hiving bivouacked swarms. Some preliminary results on absconding swarms and re-hiving distances, and another over-confident prediction of when swarming will start.
- Early hive inspections — and why you shouldn't — some thoughts on variable spring weather and progress in predicting swarming, and how the accuracy of the waggle dance varies depending on who is watching.
- Colonies are highly selective when choosing larvae to rear queen. Standard (grafting-based) queen rearing methods are not. In this post I briefly discuss the science of larval selection, and then present two easy practical methods that take advantage of our current understanding of the process.
- Do wet winters kill bees? Winter losses in '25/'26 appear to be unusually high. Inevitably, the miserable winter rain is blamed. However, I suspect the problem may be due to the earlier drought, a shortage of pollen, and the timing of winter bee production.
- The financial outlay you need to make when starting beekeeping is less than the commitment the catalogues imply you should make. Buy wisely with compatibility and longevity in mind, but also invest in a couple of luxuries that will make your beekeeping easier.
- Colonies can starve in early spring. It takes just a few days of adverse weather for colonies to run out of stores. This week I discuss preventing starvation in managed colonies, together with some observations on the survival of, and finding, overwintered free-living bees.