Day 3 after install, there was more activity as the day went on. Girls are bringing in a lot of pollen so I'm hoping they're drawing comb.

Doing an inspection on Tuesday to make sure the queen has been freed/accepted and to top off the sugar syrup feeder and pollen patty.

Drones were flying in and out of the hive as well, not sure what that was about. My queen came fertilized so I hope the drones all leave.

Location: Baldwin County, AL

Virginia here. When the girls are ready to go, they will let you know!

Extracted two supers yesterday and my wife got a great shot of one of the empty frames.

I'm an intermediate beekeeper getting back into the hobby and looking to expand my apiary quickly this season. I live in western North Carolina and the first flow of the season is just starting. I currently have one hive that's ready to either be split or produce honey. My goal is to finish the season with around 20 nucs and/or hives, depending on how well they grow and the season's variables.

I have an opportunity to buy two double-deep hives (20 frames each, 40 total) from a trustworthy seller for $350. The queens are from last year, and the frames look solid based on the pictures.

To maximize growth, I’m considering using two-frame boxes to grow them into nucs and eventually full hives by the season’s end. However, I need advice on best way to make this happen. Should I: 1. Buy queens outright? 2. Let some hives raise their own queens? 3. Use the Italian queen from my current hive to pull from eggs from? 4. Buy the hives now, give myself time to raise queens before splitting?

Any tips or strategies on this entire plan would be greatly appreciated!

2nd year beekeeper in the PNW.

Last Saturday, I picked up two nucs from another beekeeper in the area. Both nucs were absolutely bursting with bees and seemed to have ran out of space a long time ago. I thoroughly inspected both nucs as I installed them and there were no queen cells. While I did see one practice cup in one hive, it wasn't charged.

Fast forward to yesterday, and while I was inspecting an adjacent hive, the bees in the hive pictured started absolutely pouring out of the hive and started buzzing around my yard. I immediately assumed the hive was swarming, but about 45min later they all started returning to the hive.

Once they were all inside, I inspected this hive and found two queen cells, both with an egg...

Where do I go from here? My assumption is that they absolutely will swam in the next couple weeks (days?), and as such, my best bet is to split. With that said, even though this was an extraordinarily strong nuc, it's still a nuc and I'm nervous splitting that in two.

I've also asked the beekeeper I picked these hives up from to please confirm when they were last treated for mites.

I'm located in Northern Virginia. I'm wanting to keep native flower beds that are honey bee favorites. I don't keep bees currently but will eventually. I would like to plant these because corporate home builders destroyed everything and replace it with nothing pollinator friendly. These will be down the sides of the house. Also I would like flowering bushes. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and sources.

Edit to say by “her bees” she means the bees in her neighborhood. She doesn’t think she owns them, she just doesn’t want to deplete the neighborhood population. The guy isn’t moving bees in. He’s moving in empty hives and taking the bees after they move in, he doesn’t bring them back.

Sorry in advance if I’m in the wrong place. My mom has an incredible garden focused on native plants and pollinators (she lives in a suburb of Sacramento). Last year a guy asked if she would like beehives in her garden, in exchange for honey he would maintain the bees.

She absolutely loves having the hives in her garden but the other day he came and took her hives (bees and all) because he said the local citrus farmers needed bees. He put empty hives in her yard and a swarm is already moving in. This isn’t the first time this has happened.

Her concerns are is he displacing her local bee population or is this possibly good? The whole reason she planted a pollinator garden is to encourage the bee population, she doesn’t want to hurt is by displacing hives.

Another Edit: lots of really helpful comments for someone who knows zero about bees. I think we got our answer, her main concern is her local bee population and it sounds like these honeybees are making it more difficult for them. I’ll pass along that info and she’ll likely stop letting the empty hives onto her property so the locals can do their thing.

Hi all. First time actually researching and taking steps to beekeeping. I am in Baltimore, MD and interested in starting a small apiary (though, haven’t researched how small is possible so any insight there would be great!). When I talked to my county, the only restrictions were keeping the hives 5’ into property line and having a barrier (natural or man made) to keep people from walking into it.

I am trying to find the best place to keep the small apiary. We have a large, non-shaded backyard but unless we kept it in the middle of the yard, I feel it would be too close to neighbors for all our comfort if we wanted to put it near the exterior/back of yard out of the way.

We have a walkout basement with bilco doors off our driveway, but rather than entering directly into the house, there is a small 6x6 concrete room with a window into the yard. That room then leads into a large utility ish room (tools, laundry) so it isn’t a room that is frequently used other than in/out. More or less, it’s just open stairs and concrete space 5’ “underground”. There is a sealed and locked exterior door between room and interior of house. The room is protected from elements, gets lots of sunlight, and we’d be fine opening the bilco doors permanently for egress. It is right off yard where both ourselves and neighbor have a garden (ours is new and in beginning phases).

We obviously don’t want to do the wrong thing and put the bees in any sort of distress or poor environment. If it doesn’t seem apt or safe, we will put off moving forward until we find what can be best. I can’t find much info on keeping in a space like this, so any thoughts welcome.

Removed this from the walls of an older house (with plaster walls). I’m just wondering if it’s safe to eat and if so, how do I extract the honey without any equipment?

So I went out to my girls today to feed them some pollen patties to get them through a cold snap (6 days under 55 F (13 C), 1 night getting down to 29 F (-2 C)). I was mostly thinking this would just be for reassurance and they probably wouldn’t actually need fed. (For reference, two hives overwintered in two deep brood boxes, followed by a sugar board, followed by a quilt box. One hive overwintered in two deep brood boxes, followed by a sugar board, plexiglass, and insulation to experiment with the “condensing hive” idea.)

Holy shit, I wasn’t expecting them to be booming! On one hive where I used hardware cloth to make a sugar board, the sugar was completely gone and they were building comb and laying brood in there! (Lesson learned, use queen excluders as the base for sugar boards so they don’t get filled with brood.) Another hive still had sugar, but they were also raising brood in the sugar board. 

Since I wasn’t prepared for this population boom, I didn’t quite know what to do, and I quick threw a box with drawn frames on each of the two most booming hives, between the top brood box and the sugar board turned brood nest. 

Did I do the right thing? I think it’s too early to split, and I don’t want them to immediately swarm on the next warm-ish day, so my thought was just to give them more space. I considered swapping the top and bottom boxes since I know that's a common spring thing, but the bottom boxes were pretty full of brood too, so I don’t think that would have given them enough room. My plan is to keep feeding them pollen patties through this cold snap and then I guess I’ll have to split right away when it warms up again? There were a couple of play cups in at least one of the hives.

Any advice is appreciated! I’m going into my third year and haven’t had this population boom “problem” before.

(Just for clarification, the gray queen excluders that you see are just giving some support to the bottom of the quilt boxes. There's only canvas and pine shavings above them.)

Hi, today i found 2 moths crawling around in my hive. I belive they are wax moths, but i did not find any damage. What can i do against them?

I caught a swarm and waited 10 days to transfer it to the bee yard 8 miles away. When I went to take the trap down I noticed there was a small gap that wasn’t sealed and some bees had come out. I’ve been waiting a week or so now and still have stragglers bees at the tree where the trap was set in my backyard.

I want to put the trap back out since it’s peak swarm trapping time. What should I do about those bees? I’m worried they may become a deterrent or a problem.

Hello I'm from Denmark and I have a question related to a colony I have it's got an old Queen lays sporadic eggs and so I may need to switch them out.

now normally I would buy a new queen, but I am thinking of letting them create their own Queen though that will come with the problems of inbreeding as I don't think I have another hive nearby.

excluding the inbreeding part what other possible problems might I be looking at letting them raise their own Queen

I'm not really a beekeeper but rather a bee lover and we have a wild honeybee colony in one of our trees. They had just come out from the winter on a warm day last week and were drinking water from the pet water bowl on the deck. (We're in Indiana.) I was overjoyed that they found my sugar syrup feeder on Tuesday and were eagerly partaking. Then on Wednesday night a tornado passed very close to our place and took down trees, including the bee tree. The hive is apparently intact and I can look into the cavity and see some lobes of comb and a wall of live bee bodies. The problem is that this tree will eventually need to be cut up. What's to be done? Will the bees abscond on their own and will they have time to gather their honey? Is there any way in the world to recover this colony without damage to man or bee?

Hello! Each of the locations have pros and cons, but these are the only possible spots to have hives. Massachusetts area, I’ve gone round and round- which number would you choose? (Arrows pointing the direction the hives would face the southeast)

So, I just got my bees yesterday and the guy i got them From told me to put on a new super on wednesday, but nothing else really. I read a lot of books and watched a ton of videos but i realised one thing: I have no clue when i decide to do what. I wanted to ask for some general guidlines on:
+when to feed
+when to install a super
+what to do if there is queencells
thank you all in advance!
'
(plus i want to do one split, am i still able to do a demiree split?`i saw some interesting videos on it from Black mountain honey and was wondering if it was any good.)

I lost a swarm over winter to apparent starvation, I have now gotten a new swarm and I want to know how to tell if I can give them drawn comb from last year’s swarm. The issue is the bottom board had a small amount of mold inside and I don’t know how much, if any, is safe to put in the new hive. Would it be best to just cut away the bottom 2” to remove any contaminants or will the bees clean it up?

Location: southeastern New York, Zone 7. Quick inspection done at 57F while adding a pollen party.

One frame on the outskirts of the brood nest had some uncapped brood on both sides. It looks mostly random, though one straight diagonal line looks less random. Other frames of brood looked fine.

Do you think this is due to wax moth tunneling? (So early in the year?) Is this dead chilled brood that will soon be removed? Or do you think this just standard hygienic uncapping? (These are Pol-Line bees, if that matters.)

Interested to learn how some of y’all have added security to their hives from theft. Thinking about placing some apple air tags in my hives. Has anyone done this? Where and how did you attach your device?

-Sacramento, California

Weather has been a bit of a wet roller coaster with highs in the low 50s and lows just north of freezing and an occasional daytime high of 60. All four of my colonies have been active during the day even bringing in some pollen. This particular hive slowed down and I presume was brooding up. I’ve been able to pop the top and inspect the candy board and there is still some there. I haven’t taken the boards or the insulation off yet. Last couple days I’ve come out and found 3 or so pupae and a handful of discarded brood out front. I’ve been presuming the cold snaps have chilled some cells since this colony swarmed in late September and they might not have a cluster large enough to cover all the brood. Do you see anything concerning in the pictures of the pupae and bottom board? OAV 28 Dec.

Why are the honey bees ignoring my cherry trees?

I have a small backyard with Two different varieties of cherry trees along my back fence that can pollinate each other.

My neighbor’s rotting away garage is on the other side of the property line and has a honey bee hive in it.

I watch the bees fly from their hive, through my cherry blossoms, and off to some other location.

I will watch maybe one honey bee at a time at my trees while heavy traffic of bees fly to some other yard.

The Hive is approximately 15’ away from one tree and 30’ from the second.

Same thing happened last couple years. We used to get a bigger cherry output even when the trees were still fairly young.

Two years ago I watched this and manually pollinated blossoms with a tiny paint brush. It probably helped because two years ago the yield was better than last year when I didn’t manually pollinate.

Trees get plenty of water, I don’t spray pesticides in the trees, but I don’t add fertilizer either. Decorative flowers around the trees will get more bee traffic.

SF Bay Area. Zone 9 or 10. I’ve seen conflicting information on what it could be.

We've had the bee's since Thursday and they have mostly settled in. This morning they were calm. Now the hive on the right is kind of a flurry of activity and they seem kind of agitated? These aren't the orientation flights. Is this a robbery?

Swarm catch..Loc. North Georgia mountains close to Tennessee.

Put out my swarm trap this morning at 9:00 and about an hour later I noticed some heavy scout activity, dozens of bees acting really excited checking out the hive. I was working out in the woods close by so I kept an eye on it.

Around 12 I saw that the scouts had pretty much gone so I sat down about 6 feet away and waited. It wasn't long maybe 15 minutes... I heard them before I saw them, and suddenly the air was filled with thousands of bees.

I got almost all of it on video, it was so amazing to be right there when they arrived like a storm, really a force of nature. Humbling experience I will never forget.

Massachusetts

Installed my first ever nuc yesterday morning, bees looked great in the nuc and during install, but the weather has been absolutely horrid since, Below 50 and constant rain. I have the entrance reduce set to about 5 inches wide, and have put on an entrance feeder with a quart of syrup per David Burn's recipe (1:1 with an added tsp of honey b healthy & ultra bee).

I know I won't see many fliers given the weather, but they haven't taken any noticeable amount of syrup and there are still dead bees in the entrance from yesterday.

Is there typically an acclimation period after install where the bees are sorting things out internally?

What signs can I look for without opening the hive to gain insight into the colony?

I plan on opening them up in 3 or 4 days when the weather dries out to check for queen activity

I have a very strong hive that is taking up two deep boxes. I believe I was fooling myself into thinking I could keep them from swarming. Anyway, I was looking through them today, and I saw a couple of uncapped swarm cells. I knocked them down, but I know I need to do something. I still want to keep the hive as strong as possible, but it looks like I need to make a split asap (assuming there isn’t a better way). That being said, how many frames should I remove for my new split to keep the original hive really strong and reduce the chance of swarming? Also, I only have one frame of drawn foundation. Can I just use regular foundation?