Hello everyone,

do any beekeepers have experience with using an endoscope to check if the bees are still alive during winter? I watched some videos online but I was wondering if an articulating boroscope could even be more usefull to check cluster which are located higher.

Beekeeper located in Belgium, been beekeeping for a couple years

Thanks for the advice!

This last few days I have been seeing honey bees flying to the walls of my house just looking for something, my thought is they are looking for new home. My question is if I put out a new empty bee house will they move in it?

Currently dealing with some dead out hives that have been taken over by moths. Scraping the frames clean has been pretty gnarly. We usually wrap the boxes and frames in plastic wrap when we're done to try and stop the moths, but they keep chewing through. How do you keep them away?

I turned 3 hives into 24 this season in NY (personal hives).

I turned 7 into 22 (client's hives).

The client aquired 20 of my hives and 10 from an acquaintance of mine, putting him at 52 hives.

He genuinely loves honey bees -- and has been a very good client -- but is having a hard time with his "honey numbers".

I pulled 300 lbs from his 22 so far this season (haven't pulled Fall yet).

My hives were all new equipment. His hives were predominantly all new equipment.

If you're still reading, you deserve an award.

How much honey do you expect from your hives--especially interested if you're from NY.

I've been following the numbers, talking to larger outfits--30 lbs is their current average per colonie.

What are you seeing?

Xo

What are we thinking about these? Having a bit of an ant problem. Stakes go into the ground. Ants go in, carry poison back, colony dies. I am thinking bees won’t get into it on the ground and looks like the hole is pretty small.

This is my first year beekeeping and I only have two hives. I’m lucky enough that my bees filled and capped a super. I am going to borrow an extractor but I’m looking for advice on where to actually spin out the honey. We don’t have a garage. I’ve heard that it’s such a sticky mess that I shouldn’t extract in our kitchen. I’m not sure what the third option would be.

I had the idea of putting the extractor inside one of those spray paint tents.

I would love to hear where you do your extraction.

Also, any notable reasons I should chose to bottle in glass or plastic?

Thanks in advance! I’m in central New Jersey

The yellow hive is insulated with R30+ paneling and the white is not.

So I saw a video about bees that explains that they cannot fly at night, b they didn't experiment with bees in a room with the light on and the second they turned off the light, the bees just stopped flying and dropped to the ground

I was wondering, can the bees find their way back to the hive crawling, or do they essentially get plunged into what is essentially the b version of hell,b and get eaten before the night's over

Just started fall feeding with 2:1 syrup. Is it normal for the bees to go a little crazy? I put the top feeders on my 2 hives this morning and when I went out to check just now (late afternoon) they are flying around like orientation flights on steroids and in larger areas than usual. It's not robbing and I don't think (I hope) it's not swarming. I didn't spill any syrup.

So, Is it normal for the bees to get excited, for lack of a better word, when they start getting fall syrup?

South central PA, first year beekeeper.

Any advice is appreciated.

Edit: Sounds like it might be possible the high activity and syrup feeding were unrelated...

I am excited to have this show-up. I will use this product to bridge the gap between July and November OAV treatments. Inevitably some colonies are likely to collapse and hopefully these will keep me safe until Thanksgiving. I'm not sure if I'm going to do another mite wash before applying this but it is definitely nice to add another tool to the toolbox to fight the mites.

As stated in the Title my bees are at war with some hornets. I recently fed my bees with sugarwater and assume that this attracted the hornets. What can i do to help them? I'm located in northern germany and this is my first year as a beekeeper. Thanks in advance

hi all, i am new to beekeeping and could do with some advice. recently i harvested about 10 kilos of honey out of my hive however not from the frames they had built a structure in the roof rather than the frames. This is not the problem i need help with as i already know why this occurred but rather with the honey itself. due to having no structure we crushed and cut the honeycomb and filtered it through various sieves and jarred it. the honey seemed fine at first but now the jarred is very runny. I have read up that this is to do with moisture maybe however i am not sure. if anyone can help in telling me why this has happened or how i can fix it that would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

Hi. I've lived in my current house in Southern California for over 3 years.

And since day 1, I've always found 20 - 30 bees dead on my back porch, with another 10 - 20 still alive but barely moving on the walls.

This happens EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Why could this be happening, and what can I do about it?

Looking for advice on supporting next-gen beekeepers. Do any of you know any good programs that do a good job at scale?

There is a popular model where you send a bunch of equipment to a scholarship winner, but I'm not sure if that is the best way. Needs an education/curriculum side to it as well.

How would you do it?

Hello,

After harvesting the honey in july I gave my hives a few kg of sugar per hive and I also fed one more time in mid august so its certain they have some stock.

Today I will check my hives and I want to calculate how much extra food should I give each hive so I can be sure they have enough food but also some space left to lay.

All my hives consist of 2x 10 frame mediums. How much sugar is stored in one medium frame and how many left would be ideal as brood space?

Is there even a posibility to overfeed or will they simply stop taking in the sugar water?

Small time beekeeper here, just a couple hives. I’m on the east side of Washington state, near Idaho, in the US.

I put my honey in mason jars last year, as I always do. It has crystallized so hard that when I try to melt it in a pan of water on the stove, the expansion of the lower portion of honey cracks the mason jar. Last time I did it, I thought maybe I heated it too quickly, so this time I put it on super low, but it happened again. The crystallized honey is so hard I can hardly scrape it with a utensil—has anyone had this experience before? And how do I re-liquify the honey without breaking all my jars? How can I prevent this in the future?

Hi folks! Novice bee keeper from Australia here. I have a flow hive in my backyard.

I posted a few days ago about my backyard flow hive swarming. I was able to catch that swarm in a Nuc and it's on my property. My flow hive seemed happy after that (https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/comments/1fauhgc/catching_a_swarm_in_a_nuc_box/).

Two days later, and another swarm has appeared in my backyard, camped on a tree branch right next to where the first swarm was on the weekend.

I can't tell if this swarm is also from my hive or not. The swarm has settled and there is still lots of happy bee activity in my flow hive and in the new Nuc box I caught the swarm in on the weekend.

Any idea what might be going on here? Has my hive split again (two times in two days!?!)?

Is this a wild swarm that has tried to invade my weakened flow hive and been repelled to a nearby branch?

Regardless, I'm planning to try and catch this one too 😂

Hey all,

SE Michigan 1st year beekeeper. I tested for mites 3 weeks ago using an alcohol wash, and got 2 mites/ 200 bees. Today I retested and now have 15 mites / 200 bees. A significant jump :/

I have some Apivar strips, But have not used them yet. I’m thinking 7% is too high of a count and I should probably treat.

Any advice is appreciated on this.

I'm asking with litle hope honnestly. I'm in France and everything was fine until mid August, but now I have a European Hornet in front of every hive. One of them is pretty much dead, nearly nothing left in the hive.

I'll definitively Trap much more preemptivly next year but Can I do anything not too expensive right now to help the girls? They're fighting but clearly losing....

I'm in Maryland zone 6b/7a early September and have honey bee's living in an old railroad logs in the garden that makes in hard for us to access the garden. Is it too late in the season to get a beehive and hope they swarm and move into the new abode a few feet away or should i wait until the spring to set it up? Definitely want them to stay, but in a better location so we can access the garden and still enjoy watching them. Thanks.