You’ve probably been hearing a lot about disappearing honey bees through the media. All of this media attention given to the plight of the honeybee is causing a lot of people to become interested in beekeeping. Some of them are jumping in and becoming hobby...
Beekeepers, like bees, tend to have a language of their own. To the non-beekeeper, or newbee, the technical jargon beekeepers use can become rather confusing. The other day when speaking to a non-beekeeper, I casually mentioned we were out the day before...
This past Saturday I was reminded once again on how fragile the world we live in is, and in particular, how quickly things can go wrong in the apiary. I had just cracked open the cover on the last hive I intended to split in our home apiary. It was a robust Italian...
Spring time is the busiest time of the year for beekeepers here in Michigan. Beginning in March we go through our apiaries and cleanup any dead outs (e.g. hives that didn’t make it through the winter.) Once again, we were fortunate this year in that we only lost...
Winter was late in coming this year, but once it arrived you couldn’t miss it! This morning I was reading the weather outlook in the Michigan Farm News (written by Jeff Andressen the meteorologist with the MSU Extension) and if they have it right, the recent...
Winter was long in coming here in W. Michigan. We still had some very temperate sunny afternoons in November. On one of those afternoons I visited one of our apiaries to see how the bees were faring. There were a few bees flying, gathering water from a nearby low spot...
