Steve Donohoe 
Beekeepers blame queens for everything from bad temper to poor honey crops. But quality in the strict sense means one thing: reproductive competency. Here is what the research says about how to assess it — and why the old timers saying queens aren’t what they used to be may well be right.
How brief pollen shortages can weaken colonies weeks later I was going to write about the so-called “June gap” – a period between spring and summer when, at least in my area, the available forage for honey bees can dry up. However, the phenomenon can occur anytime, and it connects to apiary site selection, migratory … Read more
Word has reached me through the beekeeping grapevine that colony losses this winter have been high, particularly in the South and East of England. Time will tell whether this plays out, but my information from certain sellers of queens and nucleus colonies seems to support that story. Pre-orders of queens and nucs are skyrocketing. My … Read more
When I was a child, obesity was much less common than it is now, and we ate things like lard. In fact, lardy cake was a delicious treat that I used to purchase on a Saturday from a baker shop in Brockenhurst (they still sell it occasionally). We ate bacon and eggs, steak and kidney … Read more
“Keep local bees.” Or, increasingly, “Keep locally adapted bees.” It’s among the most repeated lines in UK beekeeping, usually delivered with the confidence of a law of physics. And to be fair, it often works as advice. Local queens can perform well, and local colonies can overwinter reliably. But the phrase “local bees” is doing … Read more
What the evidence shows, and what it doesn’t Since the late 1990s, varroa resistance has resurfaced repeatedly — Africanised bees, the Gotland survivors, hygienic breeding programmes, and more recently treatment-free narratives — each time framed as a solution, and each time constrained by ecology, genetics, and scale. Talks promise it, social media celebrates it, and … Read more
Honey bees have been around a lot longer than humans, and the way they organise their colonies and their lives seems to work very well for them, even if it sometimes seems a little strange to us. They have a system involving three types of adult bee (the queen, workers, and drones), three types of … Read more
As an editor of a bee farming magazine (called Bee Farmer, would you believe?), former director of BeeCraft, author, blogger, podcaster (sometimes) – you get the picture – I’m always interested in communicating valuable information on keeping honey bees to others. There are many others doing something similar, and probably better. The challenge that we … Read more