In this article, we ask the question: How long do beehives last? This is not a straightforward question. We look at old beehives, new age beehives, and the biggest beehive ever found. How Long Do Beehives Last? This can be divided into two subheadings to reduce confusion. How Long Do Beehive Boxes Last? I have … Read more
What does capped brood look like? We have a look at the difference between capped brood and capped honey. It is important to be able to identify the differences between brood and honey cells in your beehive. When I was a student I used to perform bee removals for pocket money. A talkative chap once … Read more
In this article, we look at the practice of splitting a hive to prevent swarming. We often are confounded by working out how to stop bees from swarming. A simple swarm control split can stop the loss of swarms. It is also important to know when it is too early or too late to split … Read more
Often as beekeepers, we ask the question: When to add supers to beehives? Adding supers to beehives is not as straightforward as it may seem. A beehive super is best added when conditions are right. When adding a honey super to a new hive we have to be careful not to do it too soon. … Read more
In this article, we look at what happens to a hive when it is queenless and how long can a hive be queenless. You will see that a hive can be queenless for a short period of time before changes occur in the hive. If these changes reach a specific threshold, your hive becomes hopelessly … Read more
In this article, we look at how bees initiate queen cell development and how the stages of queen cell development progress. The queen cell timeline starts with a freshly fertilized egg and ends with the emergence of a young virgin queen. This is a process that is crucial to the renewal and development of the … Read more
I am a beekeeper and in my twenty-five years of beekeeping, I have removed wild honeybee hives from some amazing places and learnt what a wild honeybee hive looks like and how it fits together. In this article, we will look at what a honey bee hive looks like, where do honey bees nest. And … Read more
In this article, we will look at how to make bumblebees go away without killing them. If we cannot make them go away, then we will look at how to remove them, and finally, once we have got rid of them, we need to look at how to stop them from coming back. What is … Read more
Wondering if bees have compound eyes? Bees have two compound eyes and 3 simple eyes or ocelli. This means bees have 5 eyes. In a worker bee, each compound eye has 6900 facets – each facet is a small eye, meaning that bees really have 13803 eyes. For simplicity, we refer in this article to … Read more
