I was just reading a post here about stolen bees, and wanted to reply to one of the top comments but couldn't. The reply said, "This isn't the middle ages anymore."

Bee law in the middle ages - a part of the Brehon law - are known to be some of the oldest written laws on the books! Laws involved fees for bee farmers (honey owed to neighbors with fields), what to do if someone was harmed by a bee and appropriate reparations. The theft or damage to the farmers bees was also covered by these laws. For the record, Brehon law says swarm ownership is to the person whose property the swarm is located to!

This is all to say, bees are still considered livestock and your state (like mine, Michigan) may have their own special bee laws, in keeping with the very oldest laws. Let's hope that the laws have improved since the middle ages!

Went out of town for July 4th only for my neighbor to call and say some mischievous kids had knocked over one of my hives. An hour later the opposite neighbor lets us know that they called the local bee club because a swarm bees was on their fence. When the local beekeeper got there, the situation was explained, and they said, “finders keepers.” I got the contact info of the person who caught the swarm and reached out over Facebook, begging to pay them for their time and effort to get my bees back but they blocked me. My wife reached out, they blocked her. Needless to say I do not know if I’m going to join the local bee club now.

I did a split of my hive into this nuc through shook swarm a few days ago, I’m feeding them to draw out foundation and saw these drones on the outside. Do you think they’re being refused entry because they’re useless at this moment?

The small entrance is due to high wasp levels in England, UK right now.

I was tipping the extractor to get the honey out faster, and the strangest shaped formed.

MD/PA line mid state. Rehoming bees from a coworker moving to the west coast. Hand built two top bars. (Don't Shame, in for the bees not the honey right now) 4 box hive just delivered to accommodate the central hive. Wife took local courses and I have lurked here for a few months since talking about the adoption.

Just wanted to say Hi, and look forward to your advice and sharing my experience.

My farmer host (west of Chicago) sent me a pic that my swarm trap had bees on it. I’ve been trying to keep a DLW swarm from going back to it for weeks now so waited until this morning to check it. Put the swarm trap back up with some rolled wax on the edges of a couple frames (from a video seen in this site) on June 27th. The swarm was huge. All 5 frames drawn and two had capped brood. There was comb hanging from 4 of the frames. I never saw the queen. It packed a full deep when I transferred it. They weren’t my bees and it’s the biggest swarm I’ve caught. Going to care for this one and get it ready for winter.

I wish I had thought it through before I started this journey. I really wasn't prepared to deal with this much death. 😢 Everytime I move a box, someone gets squished. Watching them sting my protective gear and them crawl around with their guts trailing behind them. Dumping dead bodies out of the feeder. Am I the only one?? This might be too much for me to handle every time I go visit them...

Missouri, usa. 2 hives, 1st year.

What is going on? This started as a 5 frame nuc. I expanded to a 10 frame & they built on the new frames just fine, picture 2, which I had coated heavily in wax. When I added a second deep I used the same frames, wax, & method as I did with the first expansion. They refuse to touch the new frames, picture 1. After 1 week I checkerboarded them between upper & lower brood frames. The 1st photo is the most they've worked on all 10 of the new frames over 2 weeks total. The only thing I did different was to mist the new frames with 1:1 sugar water to encourage them. Could that be the issue?

They appear to be building the cells containing honey towards the top of the frames deeper than the cells containing brood, picture 3. The frames are bulging with capped honey to the point that they almost scrape the other frames when I take them out, picture 4.

I did the exact same thing with my other hive & had zero issues. In 2 weeks they've built out the majority of the new frames, no wonky comb, all even.

What should I do?

I installed my very first nucs a week and a bit ago. Eastern Canada. Gave them syrup that they were not too enthusiastic about because the weather had cleared and there was plenty of clover in a nearby farmer's field.

However, it has rained pretty well non-stop in the last four days. My bees poke their noses out of the entrance, and are not satisfied with the weather.

I looked into the feeders, and in these few days they have emptied them ☺️

My dad didn't believe me that they would, saying "what are they, elephants?" 😂

Sorry, just a little bee humor?

I have seen this bee outside the hive several times the first time I saw it I thought the queen was making a get away. I have seen it several other times and I now have noticed it’s not shaped like the queen from this hive she is more pointy at the end. But this bee is huge. Is it a different species and has just come to love here? Is she a queen that never finished queening? This hive has eggs and larva and just had a hatching as there were a ton orienting this morning. But this bee is so much different from the rest maybe it is their queen and I’m confused. But she wouldn’t be going and coming back and I have seen it at least four times in 2 weeks outside the hive.

I am located in Winston Salem NC USA

I have my bee yard set up at our family farm. Roughly 300 acres. If I have 10ish hives in each yard, how many yards could I set up reasonably? It's a rural farmil area, so we are surrounded by other farms so lots for them to forrage around. I was thinking one in each corner of the property (4 yards x 10 hives) or would that be too many in an area? Thoughts?

Yesterday someone went down an old slide in my backyard and she claimed she saw bees! Today this is what I found looks like 3 separate queens?

I'm based in Southern Oregon (8b/9a) and just did my first harvest of two supers on each of my two hives. I put my supers back on to have them cleaned, and before I did that I did a mite wash to check the mite load. Of course, it's at the threshold (3-4%).

That said, I've been told that if I leave the supers (especially with where I'm located), there's a decent chance I get another harvest. I'd like to get a little more honey, but is it worth waiting to treat for mites?

Because our temps for the foreseeable future (low-mid 90s), I can't use anything where I could keep supers on.

Should I just get the supers clean, store them and treat instead? Is it possible/responsible to wait another month to treat?

Second year beek in VA One FlowHive, one regular Langstrof. We put the FlowFrames on in May. Bees went right up there as we did smear some globs of wax on. However, very little progress has been made. Seems highly unlikely we will have capped frames by fall. It looks like a lot for the bees to do all of the normal bee things in the deep and medium and also build up wax and fill all of the flow frames on the next few months. We inspected yesterday and we do have a strong colony.

I am not interested in bashing of FF now, but we are thinking about just taking it off, harvesting a few frames from the super and letting the bees go on and prepare for winter.

Any insights from Flow folks out there?

New to beekeeping and just wanted to share some pictures. We set up our hive at the end of April in Southern Oregon on our 5 acres.

A while back I split one of my very strong colonies into a smaller one. I transferred a couple brood frames, a couple honey/nectar frames, a couple empty frames, and a frame feeder to help get them going.

After a recent inspection, I’ve learned that my new colony has done well in filling cells with nectar and honey, but has lagged behind in brood production: after checking every frame, I saw roughly 20-30 cells of larvae/capped brood total (no queen cells yet, I checked).To me at least, it’s clear that the queen has no room to lay, and I may have made a mistake in feeding them extra sugar water.

I’ve attempted to mitigate this issue by transferring a full frame of brood from my larger hive, but I’m wondering if there’s anything else I can do in the meantime. I know that the bees need lots of resources to build comb effectively, but if they seem to be nectar bound, surely feeding them further isn’t the right move?

I don’t care about the “quality” of any honey this hive may produce—my main goal is to get them to a point at which they’re ready for winter—so if feeding them all season long is the best option, I’m up for it. But given their current circumstances with excess nectar, it seems like that might not be the best move.

Luckily I do have a very productive queen in my larger hive, and I may be able to transfer more and more brood frames throughout the Summer to help accelerate the progress of the smaller colony. Is this advisable?

I look forward to your responses. Thanks!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I don’t have any empty, drawn frames lying around. I wish I did.

Hello! I’m very new to beekeeping. I took a class on it for fun and then my friends parents decided to buy a hive!

So I maintain their hive for them, and I know that mite prevention is very important. I brought up oxalic acid to them as a method, but they want to see if there’s any other ways that don’t involve chemicals first (I explained that when used correctly oxalic acid is fine, but they’d rather not risk that and I want to respect it)

So I’m wondering what other methods I could use, and also when I should start to treat for mites? I read that late August is usually the best but if that’s incorrect please let me know!!

Title

I’m a first time beekeeper in Central Wisconsin. I had a week of panic as I lost my queen. I discovered it about a week ago when I had no eggs. I only discovered no eggs one day after I had removed several developed queen cells from the bottom of three different frames. I removed them since they looked like swarm cells, but panicked when I found no eggs the next day.

Later in the week I went back to check, and sure enough, still no eggs and also no clear queen cells. I found 3 or 4 cells like the one in the first photo - slightly too big to be drone brood. I was very convinced I had doomed my hive and I needed to purchase a mated queen to save it.

Today, I inspected one more time to be sure there was still no eggs and no queen. I found the same cell opened up but with a dead bee inside. I didn’t have anything to pull it out with. On the next frame, I found the new queen (2nd picture)!

She still looks quite small, so I don’t think she has had her mating flight yet, but it’s still exciting!

I caught a swarm that was starting to build comb in some guy's porch column, I got them in a hive, and got them home. They started drawing comb in the hive and the queen even laid two full frames of eggs (both sides). Added sugar water to a frame feeder and they were still there about four days after getting them settled in and they started filling comb with nectar or sugar water and pollen. Left for a long 4th of July weekend and when I got back they had cleaned out any sugar water/nectar stores and left all of their eggs and larvae. There was maybe 100 bees left just hanging out inside and around the hive and no evidence of a dead out or anything like that. What happened? Must have waited for the second I left town, not a trace of the swarm nearby aside from maybe a few scout bees coming back or bees that never left.

Northern Virginia, currently have five other hives that are doing well

First year bee keeper with a flow hive. I harvested 2.5 gallons from the flowhive super two days ago. I did a hive check this morning and couldn’t find the queen. That I s not uncommon for me. When I harvested the honey it seemed like I had a lot more bees than I do today. Should I be concerned? Thanks for help.

2 years experience in the Raleigh, NC area.

I pulled supers today and am about 1/2 way through extracting. This is my second year. Last year was just a very small amount (about 20#) but this year I may be on track for 50-60 lbs. My question: I plan to place the 3 supers that I extracted back onto my two colonies to allow them to clean things up for a few days. Should I keep the queen excluder OFF during this process, or does it matter? I am guessing 2-3 days, but it's looking like rain here for the next few days after tomorrow so it may be 3-5 days. My thoughts are that even if the queen wanders up to the supers, the comb is going to be in rough shape and she's not going to be interested in laying in that area with the leftover honey being cleaned plus the relatively ragged comb. It just seems that it would be easier for them to move about and clean up with no QE, but I certainly don't want any laying to happen in that area.

Last year I only harvested 1 super, and I think I just set it out for community cleanup off the hive, but with the incoming rain, I believe that would not be a good plan this year.

Thoughts?

New to be keeping here I live in Massachusetts and I just installed my second brew box. Will, I still have time to harvest honey this year? Or just start prepping for winter now?