Episodes

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

There are, in most places, a mix of native and invasive plants that our bees will visit because they don’t distinguish good from …

If you have to feed your bees this fall, something probably went wrong this summer. Spring feeding, or feeding packages or splits…

Think about honey bees overwintering in a tree. There’s 4 to 6 inches of insulation, pretty good ventilation, and it’s lined with…

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

Right now, you have to make some decisions about how to overwinter your colonies. If you live in the deep south, there probably i…

Beekeepers are very often asked to help friends or neighbors that have “bee” problems…. honey bees, carpenter bees, yellow jacket…

When you finish extracting your honey crop, you have frames that have sticky, gooey honey in the cells, and on the frame surfaces…

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 o…

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 goi…

Beekeepers talk a lot about not having enough food or enough good food for their bees due to all manner of development, agricultu…

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

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? W…

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 be…

How many colonies had to be replaced last year? How many in winter, summer, total? How many beekeepers were surveyed? How many co…

A question from a book written 107 years ago comes up for discussion. “How do you keep your bees from bothering your neighbors?” …

It’s rare, very rare, but sometimes beekeepers have to kill all the bees in a colony. It can be a tragic, emotional and usually i…

Let’s face it. Unless you live in an isolated part of the world, if you keep bees, you will need to eventually deal with encounte…

Packages arrive with a queen and together are installed in a hive of some kind. In a few days to a week the queen is released fro…

Today, Kim & Jim review questions and answers asked in an ancient A. I. Root Co. publication, published in 1910. What’s changed, …

What is tanging? Basically, beekeepers use some sort of device, an old cooking pot for instance, to make a loud noise by beating …

Honey bees are purchased from commercial operations in business to sell bees to beekeepers. They can be sold as complete eight or…

Old comb. What is old comb? Old comb is that which is darkened through generations of tiny bee's feet (ok, for the technically mi…

Spring inspections, especially early spring, need a balance of not too often, but often enough to avoid problems. The first thing…