I keep losing colonies every August, and I used to think I was doing something wrong. Then I learned about the mite bomb. A mite bomb is what happens when a Varroa destructor-infested colony collapses in summer and dumps thousands of mites onto neighboring hives through drifting and robbing bees. The phenomenon is one of … Read more

I still remember the first time I heard a queenless roar. I was standing beside a Langstroth on a warm May afternoon, and the colony was louder than any hive in the apiary. It was not the soft, contented purr I had come to expect. It was a rising, agitated buzz that made me step … Read more

I’ve opened hives in late February expecting a healthy cluster and instead found a thousand bees head-first in empty cells. That image is burned into my memory, and it is exactly why I wrote this guide on how to tell if your colony is starving before it dies. Starvation kills more colonies than most beekeepers … Read more

Hefting a hive is the single fastest way to know whether your bees have enough food to make it through winter. I learned this technique in my second year of beekeeping, after losing a colony to starvation that I thought was fine. One quick tilt of the box tells you more than almost any other … Read more

Bees abandon the upper brood box for predictable reasons: the colony is too small to occupy two stories, the queen excluder is blocking upward movement, honey has solidified into a “honey-bound” ceiling, or the queen simply prefers to lay eggs in the lower chamber. Understanding why your bees abandoned the upper brood box is the … Read more

You walk out to check your hives on a warm morning and your stomach drops. There are thousands of dead bees piled in front of one colony. Some are still twitching on the ground, spinning on their backs with their tongues stuck out. Your first thought is probably Varroa, or maybe a bad queen. But … Read more

Your colony swarmed even though you added space because swarming is a multi-week decision, not a single event. By the time you noticed queen cells and added a super, the swarm impulse was already locked in. Adding space after the decision has been made does not reverse it. I have lost count of how many … Read more

I’ve lost more hives to varroa mites than I’d like to admit. After losing three colonies in back-to-back winters, I built a written varroa treatment calendar for my apiary and I’ve only lost one colony since. This guide is the full version of what I now use, adapted for USDA zones 3 through 9, so … Read more

If you have been weighing oxalic acid dribble vs vaporization for varroa mite control, you already know both methods get the job done. The real question is which one fits your colony conditions, your climate, and your schedule. After running both treatments across my own apiaries for several seasons and watching results in dozens of … Read more

If you keep bees, Varroa destructor is the single biggest threat to your colonies. The good news is that a simple test called the alcohol wash mite count tells you exactly how bad the problem is inside any hive. I have run this test on dozens of colonies over multiple seasons, and it is the … Read more