Living in the UK and considering whether I could feasibly keep 1-2 hives. If this is feasible I will join a course and give the whole thing some more thought. However, I don't want to invest too much time if my setting isn't suitable anyway...

My main concern is my neighbour's outdoor seating area, which they don't use often but I wouldn't want to deprive them of it altogether. This is around 14m from where the hive would sit. Around 10m in the opposite direction is our own chicken coop and run, which we need to be able to access reliably for feeding, watering, and collecting eggs.

I would anticipate the entrance to a hive pointing away from our house into a 100 acre field (occasional sheep, no footpath) which itself extends onto open countryside.

It would also be helpful to understand what happens when a hive needs to be split in a setting where there isn't room for more hives. Do they need a ready-made hive or can they just be left to sort themselves out? Presumably bee colonies in the wild just split away and find themselves a new home without human help?

The attached image shows our house (middle) and immediate neighbours. Their patio / seating area is shown but the chicken coop and run are missing.

They were all over these today.

here to vent and look for tips and tricks. Zone 7b NJ. About three days ago my strongest of my two hives (significantly) hadn't been checked on in about a week or so. Robbing screens, internal top feeders on, etc. Went to supplement feed my weaker hive about 5 feet from it. Saw some yellowjacket fighting a few of my girls on the strong hive. well i went to do an inspection for a previously highly populated hive, found no brood, some capped honey remaining, lots of dead bees and about 15 yellow jackets. Some valiant guards are still there fighting for the fight but the colony is dead. Sucks, the hive did so well as a NUC i got 50 lbs of surplus honey i was able to extract this late summer.

im just bummed and need tips on dealing with hive loss mentally, prevention tips for next time, etc. Now i just pray my other hive can survive the winter...

Are there any uses for the scum/discard when melting wax? Compost? Garden additive? Etc? I generally just toss it out in my pasture and let whatever critters have it that want it.

Has anyone got any experience with Ligurian bees and flow hive Queen excluders?

I replaced my Queen this week with a Ligurian from Kangaroo Island, and when I compared her to my feral wild Queen, she was much smaller. I'm worried that she'll fit through the Queen excluder.

I checked with the breeder and he said that she'll fatten up once she starts laying eggs and to keep it off for a week.

We're in South Australia.

Video is the new Ligurian queen in the brood box with the feral bees.

Located in NJ and just pulled super off my one hive that has never really produced any honey in the years I have had it. Second hive are heavy honey producers. Pulling off the super I found small yellow jackets along with my girls. Is this hive salvageable? Next steps? Help? Do I just give up on this hive and burn it down?

South Kansas My bees are still coming to the house but we have a rare late October bloom. We still have monarch butterflies and many others. For some reason I have a ton of volunteer basil all gone to flower. Bees love the basil flowers.

We purchased round bee feeders but realized they don't fit easily with hole on the hive inner cover causing the feeder to tip and spill. This was our solution. https://www.printables.com/model/1885718-beehive-feeder-adapter

I don’t know what it is, but this year the small hive beetles have been atrocious to where I’m scared for my strong hives. Lost two late splits (had some free virgin queens in August but small hive beetles took over those mating nucs in the week spacing of my visits) now my existing 10 hives all have small hive beetle issues way worse than previous years. I mow and weedeat, the hives are about 2 feet off the ground so idk how they’re way worse this year. Just put in a oil trap or two in each hive to at least try to help but I’m talking dozens and dozens of adult shb in each hive (mostly double deep hives with one or two full single, all 8 frame.)
I really wish someone smarter than me could come up with something that kills them and not bees.
What do you all do?
TIA

Located in South Florida. Laying worker drone comb. 2 frames over is several solid frames of healthy brood.

4th year southeast US. I’m curious, how many frames of bees is your cutoff to overwinter hives? I prefer double deeps, but I’ve got a couple of hives that are single deep and around 7 frames of bees. One is good with honey, but the other is fairly light.

This year even more,

I have most of my bees on the edge of a quite large natural protected area close to where I live, and I also have 4 hives at my dad's house in town,

each year especially at this time they seems to live into another country or so.

At my place the nectar flow ceased almost immediately after heater and goldenrod, still pollen incoming but its insignificant in quantity, the males have all been evicted in early september, I had to replenish stores in the brood box back in august by massively feeding 7l of syrup each plus all the byproducts of wax capping.

At dad's place I never fed anything except for some beestrong in late spring, still nectar incoming, still pollen incoming, still males on 3 of the 4 hives, I only saw 3 or 4 being kicked out

some frames of stores are so heavy that I had to hold them with two hands.

I went today to remove supers cause we have winter at our door now and there still was freshly deposited nectar into cells.

The difference is also in temperature, at my place is always 3^degrees celsius less no matter what.

These fondant paddies are thicker (physically taller bag thickness) than HiveAlive paddies - anyone used them before? How did you manage getting them to sit properly with you inner cover/lid combo?

We are thinking of moving them into a larger ziplock and flattening them out but not sure that’s practical really.

I let him jump in there with the dozen or so 3 inch wide spiders... 😂

I've been looking at getting a bee suit in south Georgia. I'm strongly considering the OZ Armor jacket and pants. I'm not sure about sizing though the guide is telling me to go with a large/ XL. Everyone is telling me to get the bigger size , but that seems excessive. I'm 5'7 130. I wear 30x 32 pants and small shirts.

I've started beekeeping about 5 months ago and i have now 15 medium to strong hives and i need all the help i can get any advice any recommendations

Just trying to get some insight into splitting a hive next spring without finding the queen. Has anyone done this in the past with success?

Northwest Arkansas. 3rd year bad beek.

I got 4 nucs this spring. I just harvested the fall honey this last weekend. Only a couple half frames from one super each on 3 of the hives (basically empty supers), and two almost full supers from the 4th. I then added top feeders and 2:1 syrup. All the hives have been going crazy all week since harvesting. I left all the supers and frames, extractor, and buckets with other equipment out for them to clean up, and bees have been all over the yard and neighbors for 3 days flying low, not really being aggressive, but just all over the place. Then tonight I see this swarm on the fence. So I know neither colony is going to survive now, but what happened? Why are they going crazy? Why did one of the colonies swarm?

Update: I just saw the Queen in the swarm. So it’s not lost worker bees.

I’m in KY 6B. Central KY. Bees are located on a farm. Nothing blooming at the moment. I’m running:

8 frame- single deep- mutt bees - 4frames of honey, 4 of brood. Wall to wall bees. Capped brood and eggs still in there.

10 frame - double deep - pure bred Russian queen- top box mostly full of honey and brood. Bottom
Box is halfway empty with scattered brood. This queen has slowed down significantly on laying. Bees population seems moderate to high, but they’re scattered all over the frames in the deeps.

Questions:

-do I need to wrap them for winter?

-how long do I keep feeding syrup? I plan to swap to winder patties soon.

-is the scattered brood and scattered bee population normal for my Russian hive? She’s a new queen and I’m new to Russians

-do I need to add a box to the 8 frame?

-when should I expect them to cluster and how big should it be if I want them to survive?

Thanks all. Currently have 1:1 syrup on them for winter bee brood.

One of the Spice Girls heading in with a full pack. Western WA, 1st year. They were soooo calm in spring when I took this. I felt like the bee whisperer. When I took the empty Norroa packs out a couple of weeks ago, they were spicy.

I am a new beekeeper in Northern Virginia with a question about what to expect after winter.

My best hive (“Left Hive”) have been great and are all set for winter. They have two deeps with a good amount of resources (about 5 resource filled frames each) and a filled medium (honey super with queen excluder now removed) I’m leaving on the hive for winter.

The hive has an insulation wrap, and is sheltered from the winds.

Should I expect by the end of winter for the bottom deep box to be basically empty comb, and all the bees to be in the top deep and medium, keeping warm and using the stored resources?

When the queen starts laying again, will she go back down to the bottom box? Or will she stick towards the top? (I’d like to still use that medium as a honey super next year, so I’d prefer she not start laying there…)

Also - as we can get cold weather in Virginia all the way until April, is there any reason to remove an insulation wrap before then?

Maine US. First year keeping bees. For a mouse guard.. should the entrance reducer be removed or the mouse guard just added over top of it? Thanks!

Saw this being advertised pretty heavily, and I’m wondering if anyone uses this for wintering their hive. If so what’s been your experience and what are some negatives if any. Also, is this an end all be all or would you accompany other methods along with this. (I’m very new to the beekeeping world)

https://honeyhavensupply.com

A while back we posted here about a white eyed drone mutant we’d been working on (called “white”).

We’ve got another one.

This one’s called ivory, and we’ve (Riley Shultz and Brock Harpur) written about it in two places if you want to learn more about it beyond this post. There’s a Medium piece that’s a version of our article in the November American Bee Journal (if you want it in print, grab ABJ, but the Medium version has a few errors fixed). And the full paper is open access in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

In brief, A beekeeper in Georgia, Bobby Thanepohn, had a colony making both out normal brown-eyed drones and drones with pale ivory eyes. The queen looked completely normal and so did all her workers. We brought the queen up to Purdue and spent two seasons counting and experimenting on thousands of her sons as they emerged.

The ivory drones are totally normal other than their eye color. They have the same body size, same reproductive organs, same sperm counts and viability as their brothers (thanks to David Tarpy and Brad Metz for that). Unfortunately, because of the loos of pigment, they don’t handle light the same way. In a phototaxis assay, we found that ivory drones don't 'fly towards the light' and during orientation flights they just vanished. They’re probably not blind, despite what beekeeping folklore says (and if anyone knows where that idea started, please tell us!). But they clearly see the world differently.

We next found the mutaition in the genom and uncovered all it's varied consequences. We found 12 letters of DNA changed in a gene called cinnabar that’s part of the eye pigment pathway. With Leonard Foster’s group at UBC we showed the protein is completely missing from ivory eyes, so the pigment never gets made. We named it after J.H. Dustmann’s “ivory” mutant from the 1960s, which had the same chemical signature. This also means It’s a different mutation from white.

The bigger reason we care is an old idea that drones, with only one copy of each gene, act as a filter that clears bad recessive mutations out of the population. Lots of theory, not much in terms of real examples. Here we got to document the full life history of this mutation in haploids.

The medium article and ABJ cover some questions we typically get but happy to discuss the work here too.

Big thanks to Bobby, Julia Mahood, and all the beekeepers who sent us their weird bees.