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
I can’t remember if we are currently experiencing “fool’s spring”, the “spring of deception“, or some other amusingly named phase, but my bees are certainly enjoying it. In my area—and indeed across nearly all the UK—March provided more sunshine and considerably less rainfall than usual. This delightful situation is bound to change. The only certainty … Read more
I seem to have been quite busy lately, resulting in a lack of blog posts. A cynic might suggest that the real reason is that I have nothing much more to say, or that there are so many sources of beekeeping information nowadays that mine will be drowned out, so what’s the point? Well, the … Read more
The snow that had covered the ground here in Manchester, UK, has melted, and temperatures are set to be above freezing for the foreseeable future. By which I mean, the next nine days that my weather app sees. And we all know how reliable they are. But still, I’m optimistic; the days are getting longer, … Read more
Yes, I know. This is not a new subject. Everybody in the warmer parts of the UK will be thinking, reading, writing and talking about swarming, and how to navigate swarm season. This year, in my area, it is a bit tricky because the weather is still pretty awful (lots of rain, not warm) but … Read more
One of the best things about being the editor of a beekeeping magazine is that I travel the land meeting commercial beekeepers, recording our chats on my phone, and turn them into articles. I am just a fledgling, barely formed editor, and the number of such interviews is small, but I have already learned a … Read more
You could write a book on the subject of ‘how to handle swarm season’, and several people have. In the one thousand or so words allotted to this blog post, I shall therefore have to miss out quite a bit. Nevertheless, given the popularity of this subject and the time of year, I shall dive … Read more
One of my most-read articles concerns a form of swarm prevention that first saw light 131 years ago in the American Bee Journal. I’m not convinced that mine is even a good article, but anything to do with preventing or controlling swarming ranks highly whenever I do polls on beekeeping. It appears that beekeepers are … Read more