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HoneyBee School & Supply

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HoneyBee School & Supply

Beekeeper Course – Queen Excluders

Queen excluders seem to be in one of two places in a backyard beekeeper’s inventory.  Either 1) leaning up against honey super boxes, ready for installation on the hive when the nectar flow begins.  Or 2) laying covered in cobwebs amongst other gadgetry.  It was often purchased when the beekeeper was green, but shortly, if ever, put into use. In many beekeeper course curriculums, a framed or unframed grid made of plastic or metal, queen excluders are often recommended.  Usually for use in a beekeeper’s first and second seasons. However, this is not good practic...
HoneyBee School & Supply

Beekeeper Class – Springtime Feeding of Newly Established Hive

It’s Important for Beginning Beekeepers to Feed Their Hive After installing a package of bees, a beekeeper can expect to feed syrup to the colony for the next 4-5 weeks. Some beekeeper instruction and beekeeper classes are opposed to this practice, claiming sugar syrup is an unnatural diet for honeybees. However, homemade sugar syrup is not harmful to bees (exception: if the sugar is burned in the process of making the sugar syrup, the syrup could be deadly). It is simply just another form of carbohydrate. Packaged cane sugar is a carbohydrate in the form of sucr...
HoneyBee School & Supply

Book Review: The Backyard Beekeeper, 4th Edition

Overview of “The Backyard Beekeeper” The Quarto Publishing Group released the 4th edition of Kim Flottum’s book, “The Backyard Beekeeper”, in 2018 and it is one of the recent books on the subject I have read. Back in my earliest years of backyard beekeeping, I was fortunate to hear Kim Flottum speak at a GCBA membership meeting, sometime in 2010, I believe. Mr. Flottum is a local beekeeping legend as he lives in the Medina area and has been the editor for Bee Culture magazine for decades. He is considered one of North America’s experts on b...
HoneyBee School & Supply

You Too Can Become a Beekeeper

Somewhere, somehow, you’ve had your interest peaked about honeybees and how to become a beekeeper. Maybe you have a local farmers market with a honey vendor. Maybe you see white boxes stacked at the edge of a field while driving to visit your in-laws. You decide to stop just thinking about it and look into it. But, like so many of our well-intended plans, it gets put on the backburner. Months, maybe even a year, pass by and you finally get around to learning more about beekeeping. After only a few minutes of reading online, your head spins with questions. Who does it...
HoneyBee School & Supply

New Beekeeper Course – The Development of the 3 Castes of Honeybees in a Hive

A new beekeeper will want to understand the basic hierarchy in their beehive. The female worker, male drone, and the queen bee all start out as identical eggs laid by a queen bee. Differences in fertilization and food determine whether the eggs will develop into a male or female bee and of which caste the bee will become (worker, drone, or queen). It is nothing short of miraculous how these two factors determine the developmental path for each bee and ultimately their role in the beehive/colony. Although the eggs laid by a queen are identical, the queen only fertilizes...

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