BeeKeepClub’s Beekeeping Blog

Varying aspects about the lives of honeybees are mysterious to those who do not know much about them. For your learning about the honeybee life cycle, here is a useful article that we have prepared for you. It details the various processes and stages that take place for honeybees to reproduce and be able to do the many of the awesome things that they do. All readers stand to benefit a lot from this article; not only those that are beekeepers. It has many practical tips and knowledge that will make you a better beekeeper and more friendly to honeybees in your area.

The survival of honey bee colonies in winter is important in beekeeping. It ensures the beekeeper has a colony to start the new production year with. Wintering honey bee colonies emerge stronger in spring when they have high number of bees. Insulating beehives helps prevent heat loss. Bees in an insulated beehive use less energy to warm the hive. Fewer bees die in such a honey bee colony. This article guides you through how to insulate a beehive for winter.

A honey press is a machine that squeezes honeycomb between two surfaces. It can use either rollers or a pressure plate, though the typical ones are those using a pressure plate - also called a bucket honey press. Typical features of a bucket honey press include the pressure plate, a receptacle for comb with honey that can let honey flow through it and use of some force on the pressure plate. Application of force on the pressure plate crushes the comb placed underneath. The crushed comb releases honey from the cells. Various methods of collecting the extracted honey and putting it into a receiving container are provided for. They are usually incorporated into the design and manufacture of the device.

Honeybees are, without a doubt, expert architects and manufacturers. They may be tiny insects but are the only ones that produce food products that can be consumed by humans. They also build perfectly-sized honeycombs or cells that house brood and store honey. The success of any honeybee colony boils down to its organization at the core. Drone and queen cells play an important role in the honeybee colony, housing the male honeybees and future queens, respectively. These spectacular structures are built by the worker bees and have been a subject of study for decades. Both queen and drone cells have distinguishing features that shall be discussed in this article.

Similar to festooning, washboarding is another intriguing honeybee behavior. Washboarding is not an individual honeybee behavior but rather a collective or group behavior that occurs inside and outside the beehive, more so, on the beehive surface. It is mainly done by young worker bees and usually occurs at end of nectar flows.

Top bar hives are single-story beehives that can be used in both hobbyist and commercial beekeeping. In a top bar hive, the comb hangs downwards from removable bars. These bars form the roof of the beehive. A top bar hive has one rectangular box only. It is wide and allows for beekeeping methods that have little interference with the honey bee colony. Top bar hives generally have very high beeswax yields but less honey yields. Other types of types of popular beehives are the Langstroth and the Warré hives (check out our article on the comparison of these beehives). Read on as we discuss top bar beekeeping for beginners.

A committed beekeeper will be comfortable with heading great distances to create new hives, and that means having a good quality vehicle. In some cases, as Today have highlighted, bees will choose the vehicle themselves. The average beekeeper will hope for a greater level of control, however, and that will involve having …

A structured approach in barrier management gives you the best results in pest and disease control. It allows you unique insights into the barriers you establish and their effectiveness. You are also able to follow up and monitor performance of the barriers with ease. The barrier management system for pest and disease control in your beekeeping operation makes the operation safe, with your better understanding of risks.

Some of the challenges that are on top of the list when you ask any beekeeper what cripples their business include varroa mites, low honey production, colony deaths, and reliance on chemicals. These in addition to a myriad of other problems that beekeepers face, make it almost impossible for them to raise successful colonies. Fortunately, scientists and beekeepers have been focused on coming up with solutions to the problems they face. And thanks to their effort we now have the Thermosolar Hive. This is a one-of-a-kind hive that helps beekeepers raise successful colonies without the need to use chemicals to eliminate the deadly varroa mites.

Applying pesticides to control various organisms and diseases that affect human interests in agricultural and urban environments, has effects on honeybees and other pollinators in general. From reading this article, you will understand why pesticide use is bad for bees and other pollinators. The article also looks into the various factors that impact the degree of effects of pesticides on bees. In addition to understanding the problem, read on to know the various methods you can use to alleviate the bad effects of pesticides on bees. You also learn about many available alternatives to pesticides. Using the information in this article, you can thus easily change your practices to provide better environments for honeybees and be able to control pests, diseases and weeds.