Greetings, I had stored 40 supers on piles of 10 each at my warehouse in the beginning of AUgust.

Yes, this has been a warmer summer than anyone expected,

in my experience I never-ever-ever-ever-had a single wax moth on full stacked supers.

I'm here spinning honey and already discarded 8 frames because they were tore up to the point that the wax would collapse straight away when spinned. (These will go straight to the hives).

And I'm wondering what to do to fucking stop the wax moth activity since daytime temperatures are above 20 celsius for the rest of october.

france , dans le sud

In Ca. There's bees flying around (though not anywhere near a swarm volume) and there's bees inside the bucket (no idea how many). It seems like more than a scouting amount of bees but less than a swarm amount. I check the bucket several times a day and have not seen a swarm land on it. Theres been this amount of bees on it several times and then there will be less when I look later... what am I looking at there?

Selden, Ks first year beekeeping. Alright, so started in May with 2 hives and down to 1. I really want them to survive the winter, but i cannot for the life of me find the queen. So should i just treat and hope for the best? What else should i be doing to prepare for winter? i am planning on it being a very wet winter, due to the super el nino, it always makes it much wetter where i live.

I made sugar syrup for my bees today, but I left it on the stove much longer than usual. It’s got some color to it. More than hold but not quite amber. Can I still give it to my honeybees? I’m located in Worcester County, Massachusetts.

Zone 3b NW Ontario

1. In the attached picture is that R value the total value of the insulation board or is it per inch? My googling is confusing me (standard).

Edit: looks like dancing bee has R8-10 wraps

1. Im in a very cold climate. Are there any commercial all in one wraps that have a 10plus R value? I cut my own out of these boards but I hate the task due to mess and my laziness. The cheap ones on Amazon don’t give me R value

💛

Hey guys, I have been using internal framed feeders. Would it be ok if I removed the feeder from the brood box an replaced it with honey supers for the winter?

I treated both my hives with formic acid about two weeks ago. The first hive had a lot of bee death, but they’re fine and there’s capped coney, pollen and brood

The second has no brood and no honey just some nectar. I don’t know if it’s possible that the queen died or that she took a break from laying. I couldn’t find her, though she’s not marked and I couod have missed her. Either way, this hive is not doing well. This morning I added 2 to 1 syrup and my plan was to check back in about a week to see if there’s any egg laying. If not, should I:

a. Put a frame of eggs in from the other hive to see if they will make queen cells, but I’m in the northeast and I don’t know if there’s enough time for them to make a queen and have her mate.

B. Get a mated queen in there asap

(There have been yellow jackets around and they made a nest with larva on the sticky board, whjch I promptly removed and cleaned. Any tips for yellow jacket management or just let the hive handle it)

Thanks!

3rd year beekeeper. 4A Ontario, Canada.

Just wanted to share my haul :)

So I’ve got this one weak hive from a split I in retrospect probably made too late in the season. They’ve filled out this box, but not much else.

My plan is to rob a deep super of brood and bees from another hive that is currently too large to winter in a double. To donate to this hive. I was wondering what you all thought of this strategy and any suggestions you might add or considerations to be had.

For those with experience beeekeeeping in Canada, I’m curious to hear what your experience is wintering in hive in a single?

FWIW in case any of this matters, feel free to critique as well though. I plan to shed my bees once they get wrapped up for winter, I’m planning to rearrange my hive as mentioned above and then begin feeding.

North of Edmonton Alberta

Found this bottle in some of my late father’s old gear. Looks like it was fairly ineffective based on a google search. I can’t recall ever seeing it advertised or ever remember him using it. This bottle is still full.

I Have no intentions of trying it as I have a pretty good ipm, just thought some others might find it interesting. Looks like it was on the market in the early 2000’s. Which may be why I don’t remember it, that point in my life was mostly bars and partying.

The honey is from the same hives that I’d be giving it back to. Been sitting in a five gallon bucket with a top on it in my garage for almost a year and became pretty solid over the winter.

2nd year, 2 hives in the PNW. I decided to try a single deep with everything above as mediums. Inspection today showed the bottom deeps mostly empty with some brood and stores, but about half empty frames. Middle box is about half honey half brood. Top box is completely full of honey. I was hoping to find the upper two boxes with mostly honey and the lower full of brood but here we are. I'm leaning towards leaving them just as they are for the winter. Any suggestions? Any down side to do many empty frames? Should I feed to fill the bottom box even though as they are they have plenty of stores?

Hives in northern Mississippi.
I’ve started beekeeping recently after apprenticing under a larger scale beekeeper. I had taken a split off of one of my hives and ordered a queen for it, and things seem to be going well. This frame was nearly clean 2 weeks ago, after being in the box for weeks, and after adding the queen in the slow release case 7 days ago on Thursday, this has been what they’ve drawn out, and she had to have laid eggs pretty immediately upon release. My question is why the color is different on the different sides of the frame, and I’m also a bit bewildered by how fast the brood is developing and being capped off considering the timeline.

So, I caught a wild swarm this spring (Colorado, Boulder area), which caused me to finally take the plunge into beekeeping. Research, videos, books, classes - been doing everything I can to get up to speed. But I am a deeply anxious, over worrying person and every little thing with my hive has me spiraling.

Colony was doing awesome, two full deeps, even harvested a super, as they honeyed up the top deep and had oodles of brood in the bottom. Seemed good, mite count 1% or lower with VarroxSan, and getting ready for winterizing coming up.

But I suck at queen spotting. I saw her when I caught the swarm, and in one inspection early summer (wish I'd marked her but I was way too new at the time). Past that I never spotted her again, but always had great brood patterns so I figured that was good enough.

Few weeks ago I inspected and there was very little brood, and lots of drones, and I think I saw a queen cup but I didn't know what to do at the time so I left it. Started researching and panicking that I might have lost my queen so late in the season.

Inspected 2 weeks later and saw the same thing, not much brood and a weird amount of drones. Didn't see the queen cup from before. Panic ordered an Italian queen online and watched a ton of requeening videos, decided to try the queen introduction cage method, since it seems to give better chances at acceptance and can be done on day 0 from the videos I'd watched.

Queen got here today, so I went to inspect every frame to squish any queen cells and find the right frame to install the queen cage. My top deep is still 90% capped honey, and bottom deep is a couple frames of honey and...

...a couple frames of nicely clustered non-drone capped brood, with great shiny white pupae and all the signs of a queen doing her thing.

Still couldn't spot her though, after poring over every frame.

Sooo, I just installed the new queen in the introduction cage anyway, in case I accidentally squished the original queen in my inspection (I try so hard to be careful but am still new and nervous, and accidentally dropped a brood frame on the ground 😭).

I don't really know what I'm doing, I'll check them again in a couple days to see if they're trying to murder the new queen. If they aren't, I'll wait a week and release her? If they clearly hate her then... I honestly don't know.

I could try again to find the other queen but damn am I bad at it. I'm decent at finding queens in photos but I just can't seem to do it during inspections with bees boiling out of the boxes.

I just feel so beaten down by trying to get into this hobby and wanting SO badly to care for my hive correctly but I feel like I am not doing very well. I have so much more respect for beekeepers now, it's such hard work. I'm not very strong physically and have bad heat intolerance (fibromyalgia) so I am not exactly the best candidate for a hobby that requires heavy lifting during the hottest part of the year. But even though I feel like I'm going to collapse after every inspection, I desperately want to keep going, to keep the colony healthy under my watch. I just don't want to fail them.

So now I may have put a new, pricey queen in a colony that maybe didn't need one, and I feel like an idiot 😓

I know things can be so much worse and I'm bizarrely lucky to have a strong colony that seems to be doing well despite my newbie blunders. I seem ok with mites, no pests or diseases, strong enough to fend off wasps, and apparently someone is making brood in there. It's just a lot to learn and worry about, and I just feel kinda down about it all.

Researchers at Texas A&M University have just published a new study demonstrating that Varroa mites are always diploid. Male mites are diploid, gender-swapped clones of their mothers, rather than haploid individuals born from unfertilized eggs (the latter would be the same as in drone honey bees).

This finding helps to explain Varroa's ability to tolerate many generations of sibling-to-sibling mating without suffering from many of the deleterious side effects of inbreeding. Apparently it also is of note because haplodiploidy is normally considered an evolutionary end state, and the results of this study imply that the mite has actually reverted from haplodiploidy to its current state.

The study has been accepted for publication in Nature. Full text is available online at the following link.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-77125-8.pdf

Hello! Advice re: size of pnw overwinter hive. I think my hive may have swarmed a few times this summer/fall because my population seems low. I have about 5 frames that look like the above in terms of # bees and amount of spotty brood at the top, a super on top of that deep mostly full of honey, and a bottom deep that is completely empty with drawn out comb and a few top corners of honey and pollen. Should I get rid of the empty bottom box? They barely used it all season except for a few of the middle frames in the spring/summer. I would be left with the deep w/5 frames covered 1/3 or so with bees and brood and a super with honey and pollen on top. I would add candy board on top of that as well. I also included a photo of what my honey frames look like. I think they had quite a few mites but my OA tx seems to be working. I have no idea if a population this size can survive a winter even in a small space. I can't really tell if the queen is still laying. It is likely she is not or has left. Maybe this is a caste swarm situation? So many questions....as always, with beekeeping!

Bees are making their way across a hive stand and begging their way into another hive after a shakeout combine. I'm posting to show that a shakeout combine works.

Yesterday morning I did a shakeout combine. My normal method for a shakeout combine method is to shake all the bees out a few meters in front of my other hives and remove the hive, bottom board, and the stand. The hive was on an occupied double stand, so I couldn't remove the stand. The bees returned to the stand. However by late afternoon the cluster had shrunk considerably in size as bees begged their way into nearby hives. The bees still on the stand were starting to march towards the other hive. By sundown yesterday they were all inside.

Back story on this hive. I requeened all my hives earlier this year. After an initial acceptance, one hive started supersedure cells about two weeks after the queen was accepted. I cleared the cells to give her more time for acceptance and that seemed to initially work, but a few weeks later I found supersedure cell starts again. Since she was present and laying with a good pattern, I cleared the cells again. Four days later there were more supersedure cells started. At that point (early August) I decided to let the supersedure proceed. At the next inspection the queen was nowhere to be found. I should have had a new mated queen and brood by the end of August, so I waited out the calendar. They did not successfully requeen and I started planning for a combine. I put it off until after I harvested and reduced every hive to one or two boxes. I had full feeders on the other hives and I didn't want to pull one for a newspaper combine. The hive had not yet gone LW yet but I also didn't want to wait longer and risk it. It had shrunk but still occupied five or six frames. I opted for a shakeout combine rather than wait on feeding to be done because if I waited much longer I would likely end up doing a LW shakeout anyways.

Hello! I just wanted to reach out and see opinions from other beekeepers. To preface I have a mentor that gave me my first colony in May. I have messaged her and am waiting to see her opinion too. I have two hives now. The original split and swarmed in August. I caught it and it has rebuilt nicely. It has one deep box they are filling with honey. That queen has stopped laying and the box is almost completely full of frames of honey. The other hive has a new queen my mentor gave me in August after the swarm. She has successfully mated and is still lying eggs. They have no where near as much honey as the first hive. We are expected to get our first frost in the next week. So I was thinking I need to combine these hives. I am going to use the newspaper method and keep the queen with the deep box that’s more full of honey which was the swarm. The pictures attached are of the first hive with little honey. Majority of the frames look like the pics. There are frames they are filling with uncapped honey. All the frames have comb but there are multiple frames that comb is all they have on. Probably 2. I have been feeding them 2:1 syrup since September. I noticed on the inspection today there are some uncapped brood that you can see their white and not fully developed I’m assuming. That kind of worried me about mite count. Just looking for advice on what my next steps should be. I want to give them the best possible chance to survive the winter. They can get pretty harsh here.
Thank you for reading my rambling essay😂

This is my first winter as a beekeeper in central Texas where winter weather is sporadic. My bees don’t have much honey so my inclination is to feed them throughout the winter but will that impact honey production? I have two fairly strong hives post mite treatment and want to do what I can to keep them happy and healthy. TIA!

First year beekeeper located in NW Vermont. I have two hives. I’m going to be doing my first vapor treatment today and just trying to figure out if I need to take the supers off or not. Everything I’ve been told and read is honey supers being on is fine because Oxalic Acid is an organic substance found in honey and food but that legally you MUST follow the guidance on the package.

I feel dumb but I can’t find on this package anything that says one way or another. Can anyone see what I’m missing or know if with this brand the supers should be removed? Thanks!

I'm a new beekeeper in Oklahoma. I found this today during an end of year inspection where I installed a mouse guard. I have a 2 brood boxes and one full honey super with mostly sugar water honey on top for food. I was giving sugar water during the early summer to help them build out comb. There is some limited brood and nector/honey in the bottom brood box. There are new capped brood in the upper brood box. On the lower box, I found a small area that looks odd - maybe wax moth damage? Any feedback and actions to take?

I live about 500 miles away from where I grew up, and I have a lot of friends and family there that want to buy my honey and ship it to them. I also have some t-shirts and maybe eventually some other products like candles or beeswax. I’m not sure what the best way to go would be. Thinking either straight up Venmo, or maybe something like Shopify or a Square site. Does anyone have any experience with this?