Category All Aricles

The first time someone handed me a lit smoker, I assumed it worked the way a sedative works: puff enough smoke into a hive, and the bees go quiet the way a nervous dog might settle down at the vet.…

The first time I watched it happen, I nearly grabbed my hive tool to intervene. A worker bee had another bee gripped by the legs, dragging her limp body straight out through the entrance and off the landing board. I…

Bumblebee winter survival is one of nature’s strangest gambles: late one October, I found a fat, sluggish bumblebee digging methodically into the loose soil at the edge of my garden bed, seemingly in no hurry despite the cold snap forecast…

I once found a swarm the size of a football clinging to a fence post three houses down from mine, and it stayed there for two full days before finally lifting off toward a chimney a quarter mile away. At…

I run bees, not a coffee shop, but the two turn out to be more connected than I expected. Somewhere in the research rabbit hole I fell into for a completely different article, I ran into a fact that stopped…

Vulture bees are the strangest exception in the entire bee world. If you’d asked me a year ago whether any bee on Earth eats meat, I’d have laughed. I keep hives. I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit…

A frame of spotty, discolored brood is enough to make any beekeeper’s stomach drop, because the first thing that comes to mind is almost always American foulbrood, the disease that ends with a match and a shovel. Most of the…

Ask a beginner beekeeper to guess where a honey bee sting lands on the bee sting pain scale, and most say four out of four without blinking. They’re wrong, and the man who proved it spent three decades letting nearly…

I checked a hive on a cold January morning a few winters back, more out of habit than necessity, and put my ear against the box before I even lifted the lid. There was a low, steady hum coming from…

I pulled a super out of storage one September and found something that stopped me cold: silk tunnels running through the comb like a spider had lost its mind, and a trail of dark frass where clean wax used to…