I've had it for about a month. And usually when I leave honey on the kitchen table it'll crystallize by now. This one hasn't and also it doesn't taste like most honey, instead it almost tastes like burnt sugar.

It was also on sale for $10 / kilogram at Starsky (Toronto, Canada)

It's very runny, I placed a drop in my thumb and it runs after about a minute.

Anything I can do to validate?

Western Quebec: did a bit of 2:1 feeding today, topping up the feeder. I have a set up inside an empty box over the top board, basically where a honey super would go. It works well, an easy lift of the lid, fill the feeder, close it up. Done and done.

Today, it's the first/only mild and dry day for a while, relatively speaking, so I thought I'd go a layer deeper and check on their progress for winter stores. I had my jacket and gauntlets on, but no smoker.

MAN ALIVE the girls were miffed. I was being gentle and calm, only got one frame out to have a look and had to stop. One burrowed into my glove (the elbow length leather ones), stinging my wrist, and one clever girl got inside my hood somehow!

No harm done, but sheesh. They are fed and cozy again. No big deal to get into the feeder every other day or so, which is about their pace for full ups, but looks like it will be about a week and a half before I can try inspections again, which is probably fine.

Just storytelling here ! 🐝

I’m a 5th gen beekeeper and I run a free swarm alert service.

This season, people have reported over 5,400 honey bee colonies living in walls, roofs and trees through it, close to twice last year’s number through my site. This fall alone looks set for around 1,800 to 1,900, going by the pace so far and the shape of last autumn.

That’s paid work and a different skill set from swarm catching, and I’d like to understand how the pros handle these sorts of reports.

If you do removals removals, whether it’s your main business or the odd cutout for a neighbour, I'd be curious to know

• where your jobs come from today (word of mouth, your own site, pest control referrals, Facebook, club lists, Thumbtack and so on)
• what you’d change about the jobs you get (callers expecting it free, half of them turning out to be wasps, no photos before you drive out)

If you have two minutes to answer I'd really appreciate it, I'll post the (anonymous) results here in the sub https://tally.so/r/7RBaZz?src=reddit-beekeeping

i live in montreal and im interested in beekeeping does anyone have some tips on how to get started, where to buy equipment and bees and things like that

I live in Michigan and was traveling for most of September. Consequently, I just treated my hives for fall mites (today was 80 degrees). Question is, can I leave the strips in after 42 days? My concern is it will be too cold to open the hives to remove them. I might luck out but if not was wondering how to proceed.

I've been using these for a while, mainly for feeding in the spring (a nuc for example). Anyway, I now have a hive that's light in weight so I thought I would give it some 2-1 syrup while the weather is still warm here (Northern NJ).

I'm very paranoid about robbing, having experienced it and seen it many times. So i put the feeder on, taped all the cracks between the boxes as an extra precaution to dampen any scent, and quickly poured the syrup in and closed it up. I like to wait around to make sure no robbing was triggered. Then I noticed some bees drinking from a small puddle that had formed on the side of the hive stand. I was sure I hadn't spilled any syrup and the weather was dry so it couldn't be rainwater. I felt it with my bare hand...STICKY. The damn feeder had a leak! Actually from both sides! There was a trickle running down the other side as well. No holes were visible. This is an emergency b/c the robbing will start! I immediately removed it and dumped it out far, far away. I put on wet towels and wiped the sides of the hives boxes where the syrup had run down. Robbing did start but I believe the wet towels were enough to stop the damage. When I went back later, it was calm.

I took the feeder home and filled it with water and sure enough, two leaks. I was able to spot the hole on one side but on the other, it seemed to be coming out of the bottom with no discernable hole or crack, but it definitely was leaking. The feeder had been stored in my garage which never gets below 50 or above 70 and hadn't been used in a while.

I still have a couple of them but I am testing them first before I put them on a hive. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had just poured the syrup in and left the area.

These are pictures from a nuc in Central America. There were no bees left in the nuc, only dead brood and lots of small larvae eating pollen and honey (smaller than wax moth larvae) - see the first picture. We initially believed these might be small hive beetle larvae. However, on other frames, we found also pupae (other 2 pictures), and from what I know, Aethina tumida needs to pupate underground (the larvae leave the hive and burrow into the soil for the pupal stage). Is it possible that both the larvae and pupae are of Pseudohypocera kerteszi? Thanks for help. (We burned the nuc, so I cannot take more pictures).

Upon my last inspection, I have two colonies with cause for concern.

One of them swarmed earlier this fall and failed to produce a mated queen. It has no brood left in the hive and definitely no laying queen but the population is still moderate. The other one has a laying queen but has an extremely low population and exhibits symptoms of varrosis (treatment recently started). This was actually my best honey producing colony this year.

My action plan is to combine these two weak colonies so that the population of the queenless colony can help carry the other hive through the winter. However I have never combined colonies before and I have some questions about logistics.

The two hives are currently located about half a mile apart, which raises the question of re-orientation.

Does the moved hive need to be force re-oreinted or will the newspaper divider have a similar effect?

If it does need re-oriented, does it make more sense to move the hive, force an orientation, and then combine the hives or does it make more sense to just move the hive, combine it with the other one right then (after dark), and force an orientation on the whole consolidated hive?

Hi, I’m in southeastern MA where winters can be harsh. I’m just curious as to how many keepers wrap their hives as opposed to just insulating the top cover?

From r/royalcaribbean

I have a Vevor two frame honey extractor with an electric motor. It has been trouble free for a couple of years.

Recently, it started squeaking loudly. It appears the noise originates at the bottom of the extractor body, not the top. When I inspected the shaft and its receiving cup in the bottom of the barrel, it looked like it was a metal on metal interface. Should there be a nylon bushing or some other component there to prevent wear and squeaking? The Vevor site and a google search hasn’t answered the question for me.

Thanks in advance for any advice you have.

Located in Northern California with 11 hives.

Hi, winter sneaked up on us and we are considering making our own cold-stired bee-Fondant by cold-mixing 3 parts icing sugar with 1 part white sirap.
I know that bees have issues with starched, but is the 2 % in the Icing sugar such an issue. We would be using it as winter feed- and we expect at least 6 months until the next flow

OK, so my kid's hive swarmed about a month ago and took most of the honey with it. Good news is that there's currently lots of drones and a new queen in the hive, but there's only about 75% of one super worth of honey in there.

I'm assuming that's not enough honey to survive a Southern Michigan winter. What can I feed them to get them through until spring? I've heard that they need like 40 pounds of honey, but we're brand new to this so any advice would be great.

First year beekeeper. I searched through other similar posts, but none of those "white bees" looked quite like mine, so I thought I would ask. Western PA. Picture taken yesterday. I saw this on several bees in two of my three hives. Could it be the pollen that others mentioned? Oct 10th seems a little late for this in my mind. I had done OAV treatments twice in the past 10 days. I thought maybe it was residue from that? Hoping hoping hoping it isn't a sign of sickness, although I know I have some mite issues.

Looking for tips, advice, horror stories, etc.

I have a tiny back yard and this is my first year, I really enjoy having hives and thought about expanding. My neighbors are cool, but don't want to risk it. So looking at small farm land, to start first bee-yard.

Now "small farmland", is like an oxymoron, so not finding stuff small enough to use and afford, or rural enough to keep beehives. Anyone pick up land just for this activity, any stories to share or advice to give?

Thank you!

Im in Connecticut btw, A lot of the bees survived, but the smaller hive was definitely not gonna make it through the winter so I combed through the enter hive to thoroughly inspect the hive and I found the queen with no attendants and there are almost no brood lol which makes sense cuz it’s October but no attendants I mean these workers must hate her lol, anyways I killed her and combined my hives and we’ll see how it goes, I’m gonna do an oxalic acid treatment once I can get my hands on a vaporizer, if you are in the Fairfield county and are willing to let me borrow one lmk!

Link to the previous post
https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/s/EbNmyxgrwt

I currently have 35 hives in central NY. I’ve been beekeeping for 8 years.

I normally treat my hives in September with Formic pro but time got away from me.

The majority of my hives are 10 frame double deeps.

Stopped into my local bee supply store and got some apivar strips. He said I should only need 2 strips per hive. It says on the packaging FOB <10 2 strips, 11-15 3 strips and 16-20 4 strips.

I’m worried that when I put them in 2 is not going to be enough. I got a 60 pack and a 12 pack.

I know the population is decreasing right now but….

Does anyone know where I can find FREE DIY plans for an observation hive?

😂 I apologize in advance 😂

Day 3 - maybe the worst day so far? Video is the collected casualties from a single hive. I posted 3 days ago about a mass death on my 4 hives in my single apiary at home.

I'm in Southern Tas and we are Varroa free so it's nothing to do with mites.

I'm suspecting CBPV but there are 2 facts that are bothering me.

1) mass deaths starting the same day

2) zero evidence of type 1 infections

I contacted the nearby orchards, they haven't sprayed and won't until the contracted pollinators are moved off-site. I contacted local beekeepers and no one else is reporting anything unusual. The farm behind just hosts a few cattle and I check security camera footage the days leading up and there has been zero activity (except me) near the hives or on the field behind them.

I contacted BioSecurity the first day but they said unless I know it was pesticide drift, they won't test as it's too expensive. And the orchards are 450m away so not like next door.

So that leaves CBPV I guess. The hives do have foragers returning, sacs full of pollen and the like, and they are fine. I feel if they were sprayed they'd be returning worse for wear. It really seems like young and old bees just emerge from the hive and die. Like there is a blob of uranium inside killing everything off.

Anyone deal with CBPV before and can offer me some advice or tell me if what I am describing could be the infection?

As far as all hives being affected, there was some commonality between 3 of the hives. And that's Hive 2.

Hive 2 was very weak due to queen getting trapped above queen excluder for 2 weeks. So I donated some brood from hive 1 to hive 2 about 5 weeks ago.

Then when I inspected last week, probably due to the accidental brood break, hive 2 was very low on stores. So I took stores from hive 3 and gave it to 2.

When frames were donated to hive 2 from hive 1 and 3, I gave those hive a frame from hive 2.

So if hive 2 developed an outbreak from being week, I might have transmitted infected frames to hives 1 and 3.

Hive 4 however is about 10m away and received nothing from any of those 3 hives.

And just another theory, maybe hive 2 was suffering deaths earlier, but because it was weaker I didn't notice. It wasn't until the other hives had mass deaths that I payed attention.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. I'm incredibly devastated but I can't give up. I made a mistake somewhere and just have to learn from it.

We don't even have Varroa where I live so beekeeping here is easy mode compared to the rest of the world. Still feels terrible though, and it's hard not to want to give up when you watch your babies die and there's nothing you can do.

The thought of burning all my equipment and really starting over is heartbreaking though.

Ugh.. I have no idea what to do next..

/Rant over

Edit - I said no evidence of type 1 symptoms but I think I meant type 2 after doing some research. Essentially my bees are shaking, but no obvious dark greasy bees. But then from reading it's only a small number of bees that present those symptoms and i should see a few once I open the hive and can see if I spot them walking around. Will post update later today.

Edit 2 - Some reported on my FB post that they are a few blocks down from me and are suffering the same problem..

Edit 3 - the Bee store about 2km away from me has a display hive that lost about half the hive overnight. Same symptoms of bee death and pre mortem. I no longer suspect CBPV but a pesticide use by a local orchard that didn't care about pollinators.

We are located on a tropical island currently coming to the end of dry season. On 27th May we pulled a small hive out of a wall and put them in our flow hive. Since then the hive has exploded in numbers and they have been busy expanding their comb as expected. Today we opened it up to see progress and all our frames are nearly full!! See the photos of each frame for reference. We are itching to get the honey super on. Are we ready?? We are the first bee keepers on the island so there isn’t anyone to help with advise or know the seasons here. I’ve recently posted about wonky comb, and managed to fix that, and possible queen cell which isn’t there any more. Hoping to get some honey before Christmas! Thanks

Went in today to check on my nuc and happened upon my queen! Very happy accident because she was on the very last frame I pulled. Brood pattern looks great but my girls are refusing to build new comb on any of the empty frames.

My mentor suggests additional wax, checker-boarding the frames, and continuing to feed 1:1 syrup. Any additional thoughts, tips, or suggestions from the community? All info is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Zone 9b. Florida. Nuc installed mid-September.

First Harvest. Started a native Irish honey Bee sanctuary on May 20 world Bee Day this year. Inishturk Island is 15 km offshore and a perfect bio secure environment for the 2 hives. We also had a harvest and every 35 homes on the island will get one jar starting with the senior community. Big result for a small community

Located in North Carolina! Looking to get started! Kind of looking at flow hives! Any tips would be great for next spring! Thanks!

Last weekend I noticed what appeared to be a robbing event of what I believed to be a hive in overall ok health. Maybe a bit smaller in numbers, but nothing I can recall as ‘weak’. I threw a wet towel over it and stuffed some brush in front of the entrance was about all I could think to do at the time.

Went to check on them today and the hive was completely stripped of any resources, smelled a bit like fermenting, and had some wax moth larva in the pile of wax capping remnants on the bottom board.

This was all the bees that were dead in the hive. Where did the remainder of the bees end up? Can a robbing event wipe out an entire weak colony like that? Any other insight as to how/why? I figured I’d find a small holdout I would combine or something but was surprised to find nothing left.