Every spring, thousands of beekeepers watch helplessly as their strongest colonies cast swarms and vanish into the trees. The Demaree method of swarm control is one of the oldest and most effective ways to stop that from happening while keeping your honey crop intact. I have used this technique on my own apiary for years, … Read more

There is nothing more frustrating in beekeeping than capturing a beautiful swarm, carefully transferring it into a clean hive, and coming back the next morning to find every single bee gone. I have watched it happen, and so have countless beekeepers on forums like r/Beekeeping and Beesource. The good news is that absconding is almost … Read more

Every beekeeper eventually faces the same gut-punch moment: a hive that looked promising in spring dwindles to a handful of frames by late summer. Combining weak colonies with the newspaper method is the safest, most reliable way to merge those struggling hives into a single stronger unit before winter arrives. In this guide, I’ll walk … Read more

Making nucs from your own hives instead of buying bees is one of the most valuable skills a beekeeper can learn. I have been keeping bees for over a decade, and the first time I successfully split a strong colony into a thriving nucleus colony, I felt like I had cracked a code that changed … Read more

Every beekeeper has been there. You pull frame after frame, scanning thousands of bees packed across the comb, and the queen is nowhere in sight. Your stomach drops. Did she swarm? Is she dead? Did you accidentally crush her during the last inspection? Here is the good news. You do not need to find the … Read more

I’ve spent the better part of a decade hunting queens in colonies that seemed determined to hide them. Some of my earliest hives drove me absolutely crazy. I would lift frames, scan them, shake them, and still walk away wondering if I had a queen at all. If you are trying to find the queen … Read more

I’m a sideline beekeeper just like many of you, and I run about 20 colonies in my backyard and a small outyard. When I started keeping bees in , I bought every queen from catalogs. After five seasons of replacing failed queens at premium prices, I learned queen rearing basics the hard way. This guide … Read more

Should you requeen every year in beekeeping? The short answer: it depends on whether you run two hives or two hundred. Commercial beekeepers requeen on a tight schedule because they cannot inspect every colony individually, while hobbyists often keep a productive queen for 2 to 3 seasons without trouble. I have kept bees for over … Read more

After making a hive split, you can expect a new queen to start laying eggs in about 3 to 5 weeks, assuming the colony raises its own queen from emergency cells. The exact timing depends on whether you let the bees raise a queen naturally, introduce a queen cell, or purchase a mated queen. Weather … Read more

Walking up to your hive and finding half your bees gone is a gut punch that every beekeeper eventually experiences. The good news is that learning how to recover a colony that has already swarmed is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop in beekeeping. A swarmed colony is not a dead colony. … Read more