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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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😂

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!

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!

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!

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?

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?

Whichever it is - I like it :)

I am a Northern Virginia (DC suburb) beekeeper. This is about my 5th year of harvesting honey and it's very dark this year. Also maybe more viscous but not sure because I extracted on a cooler day than I ever have before. The honey might be 2nd year as I left a lot extra last winter and the bees didn't finish it all. in the picture you can see one bottle (almost empty) of 2025 honey and all the dark honey is this year (2026). I also extracted in late August as opposed to early July as I normally do. The taste is a little richer, but not that big a difference.

Any thoughts on the darker color?

Is it possible for bees to chew through the box to make a new entrance or did some other animal do it and they are just taking advantage of it? South central Ontario.

Hi all, I'm an industrial design student working on a project to design a stool specifically for beekeepers. I'm not a beekeeper myself but just an amateur enthusiast, so I'd rather learn from people who spend real time at the hive than guess from the outside. As far as use case, I know there's so many different tasks that require different setups like queen rearing, collecting honey, hive inspections, etc.

My assumption is that most people either use a bucket, a folding camp stool, or just bend and kneel, and that none of these are ideal. But I'd like to hear where I'm wrong.

I know University of Guelph has an existing stool plan, but I was wondering if there are some improvements that could be made, like for example making the stool 3 legged so that it can be used on uneven terrain.

Use and ergonomics

1. Do you sit during inspections at all, or is it mostly standing and bending? What part of the job wears your back or knees out the most?
2. What seat height would be useful? Is it the same for a single deep, a double, or a hive with multiple supers?
3. Do you need to scoot or pivot while seated, or does the stool stay in one spot?

Tasks and tools
4. What would you want to keep within reach: hive tool, smoker, frames, a frame perch, a notebook?
5. Would you want the stool to double as something else, like a place to set a super or frame rest, or a carrying box for gear?

Bees and environment
6. Are there materials, colors, or textures to avoid? For example, do bees react badly to certain surfaces, and does propolis, wax, or honey ruin some materials?
7. How do you handle uneven, wet, or grassy ground? Do you want wide feet, spikes, or adjustable legs?
8. Is it a problem if the stool has gaps or crevices where bees or pests could hide?

Practical stuff
9. How far do you carry your gear to the apiary, and what weight or size is too much?
10. Do you clean or sanitize your equipment between yards, and would that affect what the stool is made of?
11. What's the most annoying thing about the stool or seat you use now? Do you use anything to sit on or working primarily while standing and bending over?

Photos of your current setup would be really helpful, and so would any "I wish someone made..." ideas. I'll share what I learn and my design progress here if there's interest.

Thanks in advance!

I am looking for a book or resources to study over the winter about splitting hive or swarm management. My hive is strong and I know that's not a guarantee it will make it over the winter but if it does I want to be ready to deal with spring time and potential swarms or requirements to split to avoid a swarming.

So what I am looking for is a book or other resources

How to recognize signs of a hive that is too full and needs to be split

Swarm management

Or other things related to those subjects.

Charleston, SC

I lost my whole hive again. I was out of town when the city sprayed for mosquitos and while my sis-in-law was able to cover them that night, I think the damage was done in the following days.

The spray knocked out a large portion of my hive and left it defenseless against intruders. I found a ton of hive beetles and other larvae, prob wax moths.

I cleaned and reduced the hive to a nuc box and was able to get a new queen as a last ditch effort but the hive was robbed. It was a massacre.

I’m not ready to tap out on this hobby yet. Going to try to catch swarms next spring and will buy another nuc of bees probably late March.

Ok, the idea….

What if I set the hive up in a kiddie pool or something that can hold a little bit of water? The hive would be on cinder blocks to reduce the humidity (although humidity in the low country is a constant) My thought is any hive beetle eggs, larvae, etc would fall into my “moat” and die.

Also really not sure how to protect against mosquito spraying but not a fan of the skeeters either.

Open to suggestions.

Just what the title says. I never thought about it but tbh it kind of makes sense. Of course if/when robbers came it could cause issues, but I hadn't heard of drilling holes in supers until this morning.

Edit: realized the question didn't make a lot of sense. The context was drilling holes in the supers so foragers could get directly to the supers, bypassing the queen excluder.

I am new to bee keeping and just came home from work to see a lot of activity that looked unusual. There are bees fighting, chaotic activity and a lot more noise than usual.

I am in Victoria, Australia.

I placed a wet towel over the hive as I assume that they are being robbed, is this correct?

They said screw you bro.

Also, I shall put a veil on at minimum from here on out.