Beekeeping is really about keeping your bees alive. If you can’t manage to do that, you don’t have bees. It is not as easy to be successful as some people think and the learning curve is steep.
Following on from my article about using brood breaks to help with varroa management, I’m going to get into ‘death by charts’ territory today. Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Randy Oliver’s spreadsheet model, which can be tweaked to reflect one’s colonies and treatment […]
Varroa mites have been a big problem for honey bees in most of Europe and North America for thirty or more years. Many colony deaths stem from varroa and associated viruses, and many beekeepers probably don’t even know that mites were the culprit. After all, who does mite […]
This week I did a Zoom talk for the Suffolk beekeepers, which was fun. Well, as much fun as it can be for an introvert. Maybe the virtual environment suits people like me who shy away from big crowds and do better in a one-to-one situation. However, sometimes […]
Many beekeepers in the UK are in the process of removing supers and extracting their honey. The summer is nearly over, queens are laying less, and the bees are beginning to arrange their nests for the winter ahead. Most of the varroa treatments available to us should not […]
Somebody asked me yesterday, “what makes a good beekeeper?” I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that, but what I said was, “If you can keep your bees alive from year to year, you’re doing pretty well.” That’s probably not the best answer, but experienced beekeepers who […]
Mites, Weather & Queens I’m a beekeeper, so the majority of my posts are probably about varroa mites, the weather and queens. So many of the problems I’m likely to face are covered by these things. Varroa mites are a significant problem for honey bees, and that doesn’t […]
How this Walrus does it I harvested my last honey in August and treated for mites as soon as the honey supers were off. This works for me. Many beekeepers leave the harvest until later, maximising their honey crop, but I’m happy with what I do. At that […]
There is always something new to learn about bees. The same probably applies to almost anything. Material for my blog posts should be endless and easy to come by. Ubiquitous, you might say. I have a vast library of books, interviews with beekeepers, my own experience, research papers, […]
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date (William Shakespeare, from Sonnet 18) The End is Nigh Strange as it may seem, we […]
Losing sleep about bees Beekeepers, especially those new to the noble art, get anxious about a multitude of factors surrounding the keeping of their bees. I know this by looking at posts on beekeeping forums and letters in the bee press. Also, I remember how I used to worry endlessly about […]
