After a break in August to talk about CCD politics, I’m happy to pick up the thread again on our evolutionary history of the honey bee with a view toward clues to good management. In July’s installment we stumbled upon one of those clues. Readers will recall that we talked about the evolutionary unit of …
Read MoreIn the history of apiculture in the United States, numerous bee supply factories appeared, beginning in the 1860’s to supply a growing honey industry. Most of these companies are out of business today, gone extinct, leaving as their fossil records mostly their bee supply catalogs and rarely special equipment they produced. One supplier, high on …
Read MoreLast month, I discussed the external anatomy of the honey bee. This month, I will turn my attention to the internal anatomy of the honey bee. I wanted to include high quality photographs of each organ discussed in this article so that the internal anatomy could be illustrated appropriately. However, such photographs are hard to …
Read MoreFlorida Apiary Inspection Program My name is David Westervelt and I am the Chief of the Apiary Inspection Section of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ (FDACS) Division of Plant Industries (DPI). Florida’s apiary industry is flourishing, with a rapidly growing number of “backyard” beekeepers. Many commercial beekeepers are expanding their operations to …
Read MoreAll beekeepers who produce surplus honey have one thing in common; marketing. The first job in marketing is preparation. Honey is a pure and nearly sterile product. Keeping it in that condition is the first consideration. It is possible to harvest comb honey without ever touching the comb. This is even possible with cut comb. …
Read MoreHistory of Varroa in North America The first discovery of Varroa jacobsoni (later renamed Varroa destructor) in the United States was made on Sept. 25, 1987 in Florida on colonies owned by a Wisconsin beekeeper. This beekeeper, Gary Oreskovic, was a supplier of package bees that were combined with packages from other beekeepers and sold …
Read MoreYesterday I hosted a ‘master’ class for seven relatively new beekeepers. We were reviewing some familiar territory—lighting the smoker, finding the queen, picking up and marking the queen, using the hive tool efficiently, equalizing colonies and a lot more. It reminded me of something a colleague said to me the first week of August, 1972. …
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Deaf: That’s how text books long summed up the hearing of honey bees. As it turns out, humans were using their own hearing to make the definition. Now it is being revealed that bees live in a world of sound that goes beyond our range – just as bees see ultraviolet light invisible to humans. Bees, …
Read MorePreliminary results from an international study The honey bee research association COLOSS(1) has today announced the preliminary results of their international study of colony losses over the 2014-15 winter. Data were collected from 31 countries. Egypt, Russia and the Ukraine participated for the first time in this initiative, which is the largest and longest running …
Read MoreSo called “stingless” bees have been managed by man in Mesoamerica since the time of the Mayan civilization, but are threatened by deforestation and urbanization, and traditional beekeeping using stingless bees has declined due to greater use of the more easily managed western honey bee. Despite this, there has hitherto been little information available about …
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- C.P. Dadant, Editor of ABJ 1912-1938
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