If there is no queen there will be no brood, and therefore no reason to forage for pollen and bring it into the hive. Bees use pollen for one purpose and one purpose only to feed brood that are in the larval stage (open brood). Many people believe that pollen is used in the production of honey or that adult bees eat it neither of which is true. The first thing to watch for is pollen being brought into the hive. Verifying that everything is OK is just a matter of understanding what is seen. Most hobby beekeepers spend a lot of time watching their bees come and go from the hive anyway, because it’s so relaxing and enjoyable. But this is easily determined by observing the beehavior of your honeybees. If there are few, the colony is weak.īecause a honeybee colony is surely doomed if anything happens to its queen, verifying that she is present and performing her duties is the main purpose of inspecting a beehive. If there are more bees coming and going than you can count, the colony is very strong. A strong colony can easily have them coming and going at rates of hundreds per minute. If the weather is good, a colony of moderate strength will have bees coming and going at a rate of about one per second. ![]() ![]() The busiest hours are typically between 11am and 2pm. The stronger the colony is, the more bees will come and go each minute. The first and most obvious thing that you can determine by simply watching the hive entrance is colony strength. What’s worse than teaching these highly invasive, micro-management techniques and demanding that they be implemented, is not teaching you how to tell if your hive is healthy without ever opening it up which is what I’m going to do here. Many have taken classes at their local beekeeping clubs or elsewhere, where they’ve been taught the same old things inspect regularly, find the queen, check the brood pattern, check for disease, etc. It really is that simple, and oh yeah…there’s that whole “you get honey” thing, too!Īlmost all of our customers are beginner, hobbyist beekeepers. You get the benefits that they bring, and they enjoy greater proliferation of their species. Setting up a hive or two in your backyard benefits both you and the bees, alike. If there are bees in your area that’s great, but oftentimes they’re simply not around. So if bees don’t need us, why should we “keep” them? Although honeybees can take care of themselves just fine, that doesn’t mean you have honeybees in your backyard right now. In fact, it is humans who need honeybees, not the other way around. Obviously, a species that has existed for at least 10 times longer than us does not need us for anything. Even our most primitive ancestors came to be only about 6 million years ago. In contrast, human beings, in our current form, have been around for about 200 thousand years. ![]() Recent discoveries (think Jurassic Park) have shown that honeybees, in more or less their current form, have occupied this planet for at least 60 million years, and many scientists believe that they’ve been here for 100 million years or even longer. It’s very important to remember that apis melifera, commonly referred to as the European honeybee, is among the very oldest species to ever live on this Earth. Warré beekeepers, in general, are having great success by simply letting their bees be bees. ![]() They’re often accused of neglecting their bees or being “Bee havers” as opposed to “Beekeepers”. Many beekeepers who have decided to keep bees using the Warré method are criticized by people using the Langstroth method. has been taught in more or less the same way for nearly two centuries, with the main premise being that bees need beekeepers in order to flourish.
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