I was crouched over a patch of bare, sandy soil in my backyard three Aprils ago. I was watching what looked like a normal mining bee nesting aggregation. Then I noticed something off. A slim, reddish-brown insect kept hovering low…
Most people who’ve kept bees for a season or two know honey, beeswax, and maybe propolis. Almost nobody outside the hobby has heard of the thing sitting right next to the brood nest, feeding every single larva the colony raises.…
I lifted the lid on a hive one September morning expecting the usual hum and got silence instead. No bodies on the bottom board, no smell of decay, just frames of drawn comb and a few cells of capped honey…
I found the first sign at 6 a.m. on a September morning: a hive tipped on its side, frames scattered across the grass like a deck of cards someone had thrown in anger. Bees were still crawling over the wreckage,…
One solitary bee skips wax entirely — she bites petals off flowers and hand-builds a sealed, colorful nest in under two days. Here’s how. I was elbow-deep in research for the mason bee house guide when I first ran across…
One dog can inspect 100 hives an hour. Here’s how detection dogs are catching a deadly bee disease before it spreads — and why it works. Three days after opening a hive I’d been quietly worried about, I found a…
Think that’s a bee? It might not be. Here’s how to tell real bees apart from hoverflies, bee-flies, and other convincing impostors. A few summers ago I watched a woman at a farmers market back away from her own basil…
The world’s oldest beekeeping record is a 4,500-year-old temple carving. Here’s how ancient Egyptians kept bees — and what still holds up today. Somewhere in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum sits a stone relief that, as far as anyone has been able…
Bees really can get drunk on fermented nectar — and guard bees don’t tolerate it. Here’s what the science says about bee intoxication. I once watched a forager crash-land three times in a row on the same clover head, missing…
Honey found in 3,000-year-old Egyptian tombs was still edible. Here’s the real chemistry that makes honey one of the only foods that never spoils. Why Honey Never Spoils (Even After 3,000 Years) Somewhere in a museum storage room, there’s honey…
