Honey Bee Obscura Podcast

Bees, honey, smoker smoke, and lots more all have their own aroma. Beekeeping is rich in its own smells. Most are fragrant, rich and a delight to work with. Some, not so much. This is a two-part seri…

At some point, whether by design or accident, many beekeepers consider expanding into pollination for hire with their bees. What does that mean and what does it take? What should be considered before…

Every kind of hive has some kind of bottom board. Typically, Langstroth type hives have a bottom board that is removable. Many are reversible, too. That is one side has a ridge going around three sid…

If you are comfortable outside on Christmas Day, you probably don’t have to worry about wrapping your colonies for winter protection. Otherwise, this episode is for you!

At least put up a windbreak. …

Do you remember what it was like when you first started keeping bees? Beekeeping was easier years ago, and most of us wanted more bees, more hives, more skills, more of everything beekeeping.

But the…

There are, in most places, a mix of native and invasive plants that our bees will visit because they don’t distinguish good from bad, noxious from native. They are looking for food, regardless of the…

If you have to feed your bees this fall, something probably went wrong this summer. Spring feeding, or feeding packages or splits is maybe more common, but there are some things to think about if you…

Think about honey bees overwintering in a tree. There’s 4 to 6 inches of insulation, pretty good ventilation, and it’s lined with propolis. Now think of our bees living in a box with less than an inc…

There’s a saying – Winter Begins in August and it’s already September. It’s time to start thinking about getting ready for winter.

What can and what should you be thinking about? Well, if winter is c…

Right now, you have to make some decisions about how to overwinter your colonies. If you live in the deep south, there probably isn’t much to think about. But if you live north of warm winter weather…

Beekeepers are very often asked to help friends or neighbors that have “bee” problems…. honey bees, carpenter bees, yellow jackets, hornets, bumblebees and the like. But most of us aren’t exterminato…

When you finish extracting your honey crop, you have frames that have sticky, gooey honey in the cells, and on the frame surfaces. There may be some crystalized honey in some of the cells, too. Maybe…

What do you do about ugly or mean bees? It can be difficult to determine which colony in a beeyard with several colonies is the one, or maybe one of several, that has scouting guard bees meet you at …

Every spring we beekeepers buy packages and set up nucs. Come summer, we start to look at what is going right and what may be going… well… not so right. Or at least, something is going but we’re not…

Beekeepers talk a lot about not having enough food or enough good food for their bees due to all manner of development, agriculture spread, and agriculture in general. To help fix that problem beekee…

Kim and Jim ask some interesting questions this week, maybe some you’ve asked yourself, or perhaps you asked a close friend.

For instance, should a colony being used for honey production spend time a…

Have you ever had European Foulbrood (EFB) in one or more of your hives? How do you know if it was EFB? What does it look like? What does it smell like? Does it smell like American Foulbrood (AFB), o…

It’s been hot in Ohio so far this summer (and a lot of other places too) but it’s also been wet.  Hot and wet can make keeping bees a lot harder than normal. Kim and Jim talk about hot summers and th…

How many colonies had to be replaced last year? How many in winter, summer, total? How many beekeepers were surveyed? How many commercial operations, how many sideline operations, and how many hobby …

A question from a book written 107 years ago comes up for discussion.

“How do you keep your bees from bothering your neighbors?” Back then, it was mostly cattle and horses beekeepers were worried abo…