After the hard work of harvesting and extracting the summer honey crop, followed by tidying up the resulting sticky mess, it is rather pleasant to have a little break from beekeeping. We add the pungent pads of Formic Pro to brood boxes at the same time as we remove cleared honey supers, and they are … Read more
I used to think that the goal of the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association (BIBBA) is primarily about encouraging beekeepers to raise queens from selected breeder-queens, and thus improve the quality of their stock. I don’t think many people would argue against such a noble cause. It’s in the name of the organisation; if … Read more
“Wild” honey bees have recently been classified as “endangered” in the European Union on the “Red List” of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This seems to have been based on a paper by Patrick L. Kohl & Benjamin Rutschmann (2025) which is not yet peer-reviewed and seems, to me at least, to … Read more
Quite a while ago, I remember speaking with Randy Oliver (scientificbeekeeping.com) about some work he was interested in doing to look at pollen substitute bee-feed. He was, at that time, testing some propriety pollen patties and comparing them to natural pollen. Later, he went on to look at the ratios of the essential amino acids … Read more
I went to a talk recently, at my local beekeeping association, to hear about ‘sustainable queen production’. The speaker is a genuine chap, who believes in what he is doing, but I found myself disagreeing with nearly everything he said. Well, maybe I disagreed with half, and most of the rest was describing a type … Read more
Personally, I am becoming alarmed at the degree to which there is a shift in the way beekeepers view the rather drastic step of not treating their bees for varroa infestation. I feel similarly about the rapid rise of a certain new political party, but I can’t discuss that here. Have normal folks lost their … Read more
There is a good write-up in the October 2025 BBKA¹ News, by Clare McGettigan, giving some headlines from their survey, which was carried out in partnership with COLOSS². I understand that a much more in-depth analysis, incorporating results from other countries too, will become available in due course. For now, I will be passing on … Read more
A recently published article in Scientific Reports suggests yet another way in which varroa mites are bad for honey bees. Varroa reduces bees’ surface antimicrobial defences. Apparently, many social insects do something called “venom bathing”, which basically involves coating their bodies with venom from sting glands. The main component of bee venom is melittin, which … Read more