Every June I stand in the same patch of garden and watch my bees make a decision I can’t fully explain by looking at what I’m looking at. Two rows over, there’s a bed of bright red dahlias my neighbor…
I’ve been stung by strangers and ignored by my own bees. That sentence sounds like a joke, but it’s the closest thing I have to a controlled experiment from twenty-some years of hive work. Visitors who tag along on inspections…
If you’d told me a decade ago that bees might, under the right conditions, choose to eat food carrying a virus over food that’s clean, I’d have laughed you out of the bee yard. Every instinct I’ve built inspecting hives…
I’ve pulled thousands of drones out of brood frames over the years, usually while hunting for a queen I’d rather not have found sitting on a frame full of them. Most beekeepers treat drones the way you’d treat a slow-moving…
I lost a hive in February a few winters back, and the frustrating part wasn’t that it died. Colonies die. What stung was that I’d walked past that hive three times in the two weeks before it happened and never…
A neighbor once showed me a bee hotel she’d bought at a garden center — beautiful thing, layered with pinecones, bark, and dried flowers, the kind of object you’d see styled on a patio in a magazine. She’d had it…
Most conversations about pesticides and pollinators default to honey bee colonies almost automatically — the forager coming back from a treated field, the contaminated pollen ending up in the hive. It’s a familiar storyline. What’s less familiar, and what a…
For as long as anyone’s kept bees, there’s been one line every beginner hears within their first season: feed a larva royal jelly, and you get a queen. It’s tidy. It’s memorable. It’s also, according to a study published in…
Honey bees do not fly at night. That’s not a soft rule of thumb, it’s close to a biological law — their eyes aren’t built for it, and a colony that behaved otherwise would lose workers to cold and disorientation…
I’ve spent enough afternoons crouched beside an observation hive to know that most of what a colony does looks like chaos until you slow down. Thousands of bodies moving in every direction, no obvious leader, no shouted instructions. And then,…
