Feeding Bees for Winter

1857 — Made the first successful shipment of bees into California, introducing commercial beekeeping to the state and laying the foundation for its honey industry.
1857 — Invented the section honey box.
1859 — Invented the Harbison, or California, hive; received a patent for the section box on January 4, 1859.
1860 — Authored An Improved System of Propagating the Honey Bee.
1860 — Helped organize the Pacific Apiarian Society, the first beekeepers’ association west of the Mississippi.
1861 — Authored The Beekeeper’s Directory, a 440-page work still regarded decades later as one of the most practical manuals of its kind.
1869 — Partnered with R. G. Clark to introduce beekeeping to San Diego County, shipping 110 colonies south by steamer.
1873 — The firm of Clark & Harbison shipped the first carload of honey to cross the continent from California.
1874 — Relocated permanently to San Diego with his family.
1876 — Awarded a medal and diploma for his San Diego County honey at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
1912 — Died in San Diego at age 86.

Frontier stock

Harbison came from people who had already done the hard work of settling a wilderness once. His grandparents, John and Massey Harbison, were among the first white settlers of western Pennsylvania, near Freeport on the Allegheny River, where his grandfather built and ran the region’s first grist mill — and where the family endured the raids and reprisals of the frontier wars along the Allegheny, Erie, and Ohio frontier. His grandfather fought in the punitive campaigns led by St. Clair and Wayne that eventually ended the fighting. On his mother’s side, his grandfather William Curry was a Continental Army armorer and one of Washington’s minutemen, present at the Delaware crossing and the surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton. It was a lineage built on showing up for hard, dangerous, foundational work — which is more or less what Harbison went on to do for an entire industry.

He grew up on a farm in Beaver County, and there is nothing in his early life to suggest beekeeping — the family trade, apparently, since his brothers William Curry Harbison and Andrew also became beekeepers and nurserymen.

Gold fever, then a nursery

In 1854, at 27, Harbison caught the same fever that pulled tens of thousands of young men toward California. He sailed from New York that October aboard the steamship Northern Light, crossed via the Nicaragua route, and connected on the Pacific side with the Sierra Nevada — filling in for the Yankee Blade, which had just wrecked off the California coast. He reached San Francisco on November 20, 1854, and went straight for the gold camp at Campo Seco in Amador County.

Mining, it turned out, was not for him. After a few discouraging weeks of hard labor and thin returns, he gave it up, moved to Sacramento, and took work at the Sutterville sawmill to get by while he figured out what he actually wanted to do. What he wanted to do was work with plants: he sent to Pennsylvania for seed and a small shipment of fruit trees, and by early 1855 had established the first fruit and shade tree nursery in the Sacramento Valley, at Sutterville. He followed it with larger importations from prominent Eastern nurseries in the fall and winter of 1855 and again in 1856 — stock that, by most local accounts, became the founding genetic base for the orchards that eventually lined the Sacramento River.

Bringing bees to California

Nurseries were a warm-up. In May 1857, Harbison went back east specifically to bring bees to California — an undertaking that had essentially never been done at commercial scale, since colonies did not travel well and no one had moved them across a continent and an isthmus. He left New York with 67 colonies and, after roughly a month in transit, landed them safely in Sacramento. The gamble paid off well enough that he repeated it again that fall with a second shipment, equally successful. He had, in effect, single-handedly founded California’s honey industry: before Harbison, there were essentially no managed honey bees west of the Rockies; after him, there was a state that would come to dominate American honey production for the rest of the century.

He kept the nursery and apiary businesses running together near Sacramento, and by 1870 his operation along the Sacramento River had grown to roughly 2,000 colonies — an extraordinary scale for the time, requiring a crew of hired hands to manage.

The business was not without enemies. Harbison had ongoing friction with fruit growers in the area — bees and orchardists have never entirely trusted each other — and at one point the tension turned violent: an entire apiary of his was burned, the hives doused in kerosene and set alight, a form of sabotage evidently common enough in beekeeping disputes of the era to have its own recognized method.

The section honey box and the Harbison hive

Harbison’s most consequential invention came in December 1857: the section honey box, a small removable frame that let a colony produce honey already packaged, cleanly and attractively, in a small salable unit — as opposed to the messier business of cutting comb out of a fixed hive body. It was, by the assessment of his contemporaries, the single most important innovation in comb-honey production of the era; he was granted a patent for it on January 4, 1859, and first exhibited section box honey publicly at the California State Fair in Marysville in September 1858. Two years later he built the section box concept into a complete hive design — the Harbison hive, sometimes called the California hive — which he described fully in The Beekeeper’s Directory in 1861. It became one of the very few hive designs, alongside the Langstroth movable-frame hive being developed contemporaneously in the East, to see wide standardized adoption, remaining the dominant design in California apiaries for decades.

Between the two inventions, Harbison also found time to write. An Improved System of Propagating the Honey Bee appeared in 1860, and The Beekeeper’s Directory — 440 pages covering the whole of practical bee culture — followed in 1861. Even a subsequent generation of beekeepers, writing decades later, considered it one of the most useful and practical manuals the field had produced.

In 1860 Harbison also helped organize the Pacific Apiarian Society, believed to be the first beekeepers’ association formed west of the Mississippi River — an early sign that he saw himself not just as an individual operator but as a builder of an industry that needed its own institutions.

San Diego and “King of the Beekeepers”

In the fall of 1869, Harbison partnered with R. G. Clark to extend the business into San Diego County, then still largely unsettled scrubland. The two men selected 110 colonies from Harbison’s Sacramento apiaries and shipped them south aboard the steamer Orizaba, landing in San Diego on the morning of November 28, 1869. Clark stayed on the ground, scouting the county’s canyons and mesas for the best forage ranges — chiefly the native sage that would make San Diego honey famous — while the partnership expanded with further shipments over the next four years. When Clark and Harbison dissolved the partnership in 1873, Clark took his share of the proceeds into the El Cajon Valley, where he planted the county’s first raisin vineyard; Harbison moved his family permanently to San Diego in February 1874, settling not far from the valley that would come to bear his name, Harbison Canyon, near the Sweetwater River about 23 miles east of the city.

The results of the Clark & Harbison venture were, by any measure, spectacular. San Diego sage honey developed a reputation that reached international markets, and the operation’s visible success drew a wave of new settlers to the county — many of whom took up land specifically to farm and keep bees themselves, on the strength of what Harbison and Clark had proven possible. By the mid-1870s Harbison was operating thousands of colonies across a dozen locations in the county and was, by some contemporary accounts, the largest honey producer in the world. In 1873, the firm shipped the first carload of honey to cross the continent by rail from California — a shipment that, within a few years, grew into ten-car honey trains bound for New York and made the Harbison name recognizable in Eastern markets that had never before seen San Diego on a map. Three years later, in 1876, his San Diego County honey won a medal and diploma at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia — the World’s Fair marking the republic’s hundredth birthday, and about as prominent a stage as American agriculture had at the time.

It was this combination — inventor, industry founder, and now the visible face of California’s most improbable export — that earned Harbison the honorific by which the beekeeping press knew him for the rest of his life: “King of the Beekeepers.”

Family and later life

Harbison married Mary J. White of New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1865. They had three children: a son who died in infancy, and two daughters, including Florence, who moved with the family to San Diego in 1874.

He settled into San Diego life as more than a beekeeper — building a two-story residence at 12th and C Streets where he lived until his death, and investing in real estate, orchards, and a wholesale grocery concern, the Harbison Wholesale Grocery Company. He kept bees on a diminishing scale into old age; by the early 1890s he maintained roughly 500 colonies, mostly leased out to others to work, and at his death owned about 100. He died in San Diego on October 12, 1912, at age 86, having lived long enough to see the industry he had personally founded in 1857 become one of the signature agricultural products of an entire state.

Sources: San Diego History Center — John S. Harbison: Pioneer San Diego Beekeeper; Alpine Historical Society — John Stewart Harbison, Pioneer Beekeeper; East County Magazine — Historic Tale: John Harbison, King of the Beekeepers; John S. Harbison Papers, 1857–1920, Online Archive of California.

Source:
Image The City and County of San Diego: Illustrated and Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Pioneers, Page 157, 1888
The ABC of Bee Culture, A. I. Root, 1903 page 415

Additional information here: http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/1969/october/harbisonimages/

Out Yards and Bringing them Home

28 Monday Sep 2026

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Bringing them home from the out yard. It will take a couple days of moving to get all the hives back home. The first step was simply lightening them up a bit by pulling a box of capped honey off each hive. It has been a good year

The Mouse They Couldn’t Carry Out

27 Sunday Sep 2026

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A mouse gets into a hive in October, drawn in by the warmth and the stores the way anything with sense would be, and the bees kill it — stinging it to death is well within their means, guarding an entrance a mouse fits through easily enough. What they can’t do is remove it. A field mouse dead in the bottom of a Langstroth deep is a problem with no exit: too heavy to carry off the way a dead bee gets carried off, one worker to a corpse, out over the landing board and dropped in the grass. So, the bees do the other thing available to them. They coat it. Propolis first — that dark, resinous, faintly bitter substance foragers pull off poplar and pine buds not because it feeds anyone but because it plugs gaps — and then wax over that, layer after layer, until the mouse is entombed inside the hive it broke into, mummified, sealed against the rot and disease a decomposing body would otherwise seed into the colony’s air. The intruder doesn’t leave. It becomes part of the wall.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that the rational mind is like a fire: throw anything onto a strong enough one and it becomes fuel, material the fire uses for its own purposes rather than material that defeats it. He wasn’t writing about bees, and probably never watched a colony entomb a mouse — but the bees perform this without the philosophy, constitutionally, the way they do everything. They didn’t evolve a way to remove every threat that gets into a hive. They evolved a way to convert what they can’t remove into something that can’t hurt them anymore. The obstacle becomes the wall around the obstacle.

Epictetus said it more plainly, a couple of centuries before Marcus wrote his private fire metaphor down: every situation has two handles, one by which it can be carried and one by which it can’t. A dead queen is the clean beekeeping version of this. Open a hive in May and find no eggs, no queen, workers running the comb in that aimless way that tells you before you’ve confirmed it — and the colony has exactly the two options Epictetus described. If there’s no young larva anywhere in the box, the colony is carrying the situation by the handle that breaks: it dwindles for a few weeks, laying workers start dropping unfertilized eggs into cells built for one, and it’s over by summer, no rescue available once that clock runs out. But if there’s larva under three days old anywhere in the box, the same crisis has the other handle. Workers select several of those larvae, flood the cells with royal jelly, and in sixteen days there’s a virgin queen ready to fly out, mate, and requeen the colony that supposedly just lost its queen. Identical event. A dead queen either kills the colony or restarts it, and the difference isn’t luck — it’s which handle got grabbed, which in this case just means whether the beekeeper caught it in time to know there was a choice at all.

A swarm teaches the same lesson from the other direction, and it stings more because it looks like the beekeeper’s failure rather than the bees’ success. You miss a week in April — busy, or it rained, or you told yourself the colony wasn’t strong enough yet to need checking — and you come back to find half the bees gone, a fistful of capped queen cells left in the box, a virgin due to emerge any day. Carried by the first handle, that’s just a loss: half a colony’s population and most of a season’s honey crop, gone into somebody’s tree or somebody’s chimney. Carried by the other handle, it’s the most honest inspection report you’ll get all year. The colony just told you, without ambiguity, exactly what your spring management missed — that you supered too late, or didn’t check for swarm cells in the roughly 5 and a half day period between egg and capped queen cell, or left a queen in her second year past the point her pheromones still suppresses the urge. Take that seriously and the fix isn’t complicated: earlier supering next April, a swarm-cell check built into the calendar instead of left to memory, a requeening schedule that gets ahead of the colony’s own plans instead of reacting to them. The swarm cost you bees. It also handed you, for free, the one piece of information that prevents the next one.

That’s the whole operation, really, run across every setback a season produces. A queen that turns out to be a drone layer isn’t just a dud — it’s a question about where she was sourced, and whether that apiary had the drone saturation to guarantee a solid mating flight, worth asking before the next order goes in. A hive robbed out isn’t just a dead-out — it’s a lesson in how fast an entrance needs reducing once a flow closes, learned once, at the cost of one colony, so it doesn’t have to be learned twice at the cost of three. Wax moth damage in a stack of stored supers isn’t wasted equipment — it’s rendered down, the good comb salvaged, the moths themselves an argument for tighter storage next winter that costs nothing to implement once you’ve seen what loose storage costs. Every one of these is the same shape: something happens that you didn’t want, and underneath the loss there’s a piece of information, a skill you now have that you didn’t, a change worth making to how the yard runs, an old arrangement worth renegotiating, some steadiness you didn’t have in March that you have by August. None of that undoes the loss. The dead-out is still dead. But it stops being only a loss the moment you go looking for what it left behind.

None of this is a trick for feeling better about a bad season, and the bees aren’t doing it to feel better either — they don’t feel better or worse about a mouse in the hive, they just seal it and move on to the next frame. That’s the part worth taking from them literally: not the acceptance, which comes cheap, but the conversion, which takes actual work — prying the lid back off a box that disappointed you and asking what it’s made of now instead of just what it cost. The mouse is still in there. It just isn’t a threat anymore. It’s wall.

Happy Birthday – Christoph Johann Heinrich Gravenhorst

26 Saturday Sep 2026

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Christoph Johann Heinrich Gravenhorst
Born 26 September 1823 · Died 21 August 1898

Image: Wikimedia Commons — Unknown author (Public domain)

A schoolteacher from Brunswick, Gravenhorst invented the Bogenstülper, a straw skep with curved movable frames. It combined the warmth of a traditional straw hive with modern comb management. His textbook Der praktische Imker (1873) went through many editions, and in 1883 he founded the Illustrierte Bienenzeitung, an important German bee journal.

Beeswax Fair Entry

25 Friday Sep 2026

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So, I show my 15 year old son my State Fair wax entry which has taken me probably 8 pours to get at least good enough to hopefully not be disqualified. He looks at it and makes for the grab with his grubby, greasy, paws to inspect it. Having lived with him for 15 years, I head him off and swoop the wax away, right from under his grasp. Kids don’t realize we’ve been watching their antics from the beginning and possess parental clairvoyance.

Beekeeping Vocabulary: “Q” is for…

24 Thursday Sep 2026

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Queen bee with attendants by Pollinator at English Wikipedia

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is, “Queen.”

Queen honey bees are created when worker bees feed a single female larvae an exclusive diet of a food called “royal jelly“.^[35]^[36]Queens are produced in oversized cells and develop in only 16 days; they differ in physiology, morphology, and behavior from worker bees. In addition to the greater size of the queen, she has a functional set of ovaries, and a spermatheca, which stores and maintains sperm after she has mated. Apis queens practice polyandry, with one female mating with multiple males. The highest documented mating frequency for an Apis queen is in Apis nigrocincta, where queens mate with an extremely high number of males with observed numbers of different matings ranging from 42 to 69 drones per queen.^[39]The sting of queens is not barbed like a worker’s sting, and queens lack the glands that produce beeswax. Once mated, queens may lay up to 2,000 eggs per day.^[36] They produce a variety of pheromones that regulate behavior of workers, and helps swarms track the queen’s location during the swarming.^[36]

Source Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee#Queens

Bees Down by The Congaree River

23 Wednesday Sep 2026

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I have this theory. It’s about soil type, moisture, and water sources. These hives placed down by the Congaree River have all three.

Beekeeping Vocabulary – “N” is for…

22 Tuesday Sep 2026

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Tulip poplar, Credit: Dcrjsr, Duke University

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is “Nectar.”

As is the case with many beekeepers, I sell honey. Mostly at farmer’s markets, food co-ops, and local events and festivals. I am always amazed at the how eager people are to learn more about honey bees and beekeeping. But one thing that very often opens their eyes in a big way is when I mention that every drop of honey in my jars is from the nectar of flowers. “What, from flowers?” I gently explain that flowers very often contain a sweet syrup in them and that’s one of the things the bees are gathering. Almost everyone remembers childhood days of sucking honeysuckle flowers so when I mention this a lightbulb comes on for them. I sure do get a kick out the occasional person that has just simply never thought about it though. They usually walk away saying, “Wow, I never through of that!”

From Wikipedia:

Nectar is a sugar-rich liquid produced by plants in glands called nectaries, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to animal mutualists, which in turn provide antiherbivore protection. Common nectar-consuming pollinators include mosquitoes, hoverflies, wasps, bees, butterflies and moths, hummingbirds, and bats. Nectar plays an important role in the foraging economics and overall evolution of nectar-eating species; for example, nectar and its properties are responsible for the differential evolution of the African honey bee, A. m. scutellata and the western honey bee.

Nectar is an ecologically important item, the sugar source for honey. It is also useful in agriculture and horticulture because the adult stages of some predatory insects feed on nectar. For example, the social wasp species Apoica flavissima relies on nectar as a primary food source. In turn, these wasps then hunt agricultural pest insects as food for their young. For example, thread-waisted wasps (genus Ammophila) are known for hunting caterpillars that are destructive to crops. Caterpillars however, do eventually become butterflies and moths, which are very important pollinators.^{[citation needed]}

Nectar secretion increases as the flower is visited by pollinators. After pollination, the nectar is frequently reabsorbed into the plant.^[1]

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nectar

Beekeeping Vocabulary – “O” is for…

21 Monday Sep 2026

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This week’s vocabulary term is:

“Orientation Flight”

Age related tasks of honey bees culminate in foraging, this being the final group of tasks they perform before death. Although the starting age for foraging is variable, it commonly peaks in bees over 20 days of age. Until this point the bees that were mainly nest bound leave the colony to collect nectar, pollen, water, and propolis so therefore need to familiarize themselves with the landscape and landmarks outside the nest and the position of the nest entrance. They do so by taking orientation flights in the days preceding their first foraging flights. Young bees walk out of the hive, fly a short distance in front, turn by 180 degrees so that they are facing the hive, then hover back and forth in arcs. After a few moments the orientation flight becomes characterized by the ever increasing circles around and above the hive and after a few minutes the bee returns to its hive without carrying any pollen or nectar (Capaldi and Dyer 1999). The orientation flights tend to take place on warm windless afternoons. Interestingly, on these flights, ‘foragers to be’ take the opportunity to void their feces, as they had not had a chance to cleanse previously (Winston, 1987).

Source and for full article: http://www.arnia.co.nz/honey-bee-orientation/

Beekeeping Gloves

20 Sunday Sep 2026

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Blew the thumb out on the glove to the far left. Sad to see this pair of gloves go. But at least I still have the almost new, excellent, serviceable gloves on the right.

I’m unashamed of using gloves. I admit to moving too fast at times, going in when I probably shouldn’t, using too much or too little smoke, and otherwise making errors leading to stings. And I admit I don’t care for being stung.

Not to mention the black widow spider I find sometimes lurking under a hive stand.

Two Takeaways from the Eastern Apicultural Society’s Summer 2017 Conference

19 Saturday Sep 2026

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Last month, upon returning from the Eastern Apicultural conference in Newark, Delaware, a friend of mine asked me what was the single most meaningful thing I learned. I sat there and a hundred things ran through my mind. I finally said, “Every day offered me new information and different ways to look at what I’m doing in the bee yard.” Now that I’ve had a couple weeks to process some of the material (I took about 75 pages of notes), I have two things that I’ll share here that I think are important for this time of year and going forward.

The first is the ever present focus on mites. Almost every lecture I attended, no matter what the title, mentioned the need to deal effectively with Varroa mites. It seemed like some of the speakers were somewhat apologetic regarding the historically cautious use of some methods used to kill mites. One speaker said the commercial beekeepers got it right by treating at select intervals between pollination contracts and honey flows to deliver 2 or 3 treatments a year to control Varroa levels. Hobbyists, instead, were told to monitor mites and treat accordingly. Add to that the sometimes cumbersome mite assessment methods and too many people simply did not treat at all leading to lost colonies and mite bombs for their other hives and their neighbor’s hives.

Another comment I heard more than once concerned mite assessment. Whereas in the past we assessed to determine the need to treat, now the focus is on assessment to determine if our treatments are effective. It’s now official, “You have mites.” The only thing in question is how many. Given that thresholds for treatment have been reduced over the past years, plus with unexpected mite bombs, it’s now prudent to periodically treat your bees for mites. The reason for doing mite counts now is to determine pre-treatment and post-treatment mite levels. And, you might ask, which is now considered the most important? The later, post-treatment mite level because if the treatment was not effective in lowering your mite level to an acceptable level then another treatment is in order. Without this post-treatment mite level you’re simply left scratching your head if your colony dies over winter. And if you’re pressed for time, as we sometimes are, and don’t have time for a pre-treatment mite count, treatment, and post-treatment count? Well, it’s not ideal and you won’t gather as much information, but the pre-treatment mite count is the first to omit if you must.

So, what did I hear mentioned regarding treatments? I was somewhat surprised at the number of speakers that said they were treating with Apivar (Amitraz), a hard chemical. Why were they using a hard chemical? The outstanding efficacy of 97 – 99% knockdown of mites along with no residual in wax seemed to be its primary selling points. It is a 42 day treatment and honey for human consumption should be removed. Additionally, speakers talked of rotating their use of treatments and not using the same treatment repeatedly. Oxalic acid is still a favorite and perhaps the cheapest if applied by drizzle during the broodless period. Randy Oliver and the University of Georgia are running trials on oxalic acid shop towels and if the results are favorable it is hoped EPA approval will follow. Other treatments are also considered and used based on the time of year, if honey supers are on or off, and dependent on temperature. Commercial operators also factor in the hive movements between crops, before or after spring splits, and other factors. It seems mite treatments are now a given and the only thing to consider is the time you can get one (or more) done between seasons, honey, broodlessness, the fall spike in mite populations, and pollination contracts. It’s a dance but a serious dance for those who make their living from bees and need to keep them alive and healthy.

The other thing I learned (remember I said I’d mention just two) is honey bee nutrition and its importance. When we think of feeding the bees we often think in terms of syrup and various concentrations of syrup. But pollen is where it’s at nutritionally. Poor quality pollen makes weak bees. Nutritious pollen from diverse sources makes lots of bees, healthy bees, and strong bees able to handle the many stressors bees face nowadays. Many years ago I sat in a nutrition class in college and my professor said in no uncertain terms that protein was the currency standard for nutrition. It seems that applies as well to bees. Bees’ immune systems are compromised with poor nutrition. At the same time we see now, more than ever, they are faced with having to detox from man made and environmental chemicals. Only good nutrition provides them with the tools needed to keep themselves healthy, make strong future generations, and combat environmental stressors. Of course, for the beekeeper, finding land with optimum forage is difficult but we must also do what we can to not overtax areas with too many hives while we seek out better environments for our bees or improve their current settings. While nutritional supplements were mentioned the jury is still out on some of these supplements. It seems good pollen is always a good choice. One solution is pollen harvesting during times of plentiful pollen. In response to the beekeeper trapping some pollen the bees will “assign” more pollen collectors to make up for the beekeeper’s trapping. The beekeeper can store the collected pollen for later use during those times when pollen is either of poor quality or during pollen dearth. I’ll be placing pollen traps on some of my hives this coming year. It should be interesting and if I have extra it will be yet another product of the hive for me to sell at market.

I really could go on for hours here. At EAS there are multiple workshops, lectures, and educational offerings going on simultaneously over the course of 5 full days and evenings. Often I would arrive at 7:00AM for breakfast and not return to my dorm room until 8:00 or 9:00PM at night. It’s exhausting and exciting. I do recommend you attend one and here’s my surprise for those that have endured my article: EAS will be in Greenville, South Carolina in 2019! If you really want to experience a honey bee learning experience like never before make plans to be there. You won’t regret it.

For more information on EAS click here.

The Queen Your Worst Winter Leaves You

18 Friday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping, beekeeping management, beekeeping pest management, beekeeping seasons, mites, Winter

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It’s September. The colony has never looked stronger, there is no visible danger anywhere in the yard, and this is exactly the point at which winter is either being prepared for or it isn’t.

By September the part of the year that actually decides winter survival has narrowed down to a couple of windows most beekeepers don’t notice closing in. The clearest is the mite treatment. The bees a colony rears in September and October aren’t built like the bees it reared in June — they’re the diutinus generation, fed differently as larvae, carrying the fat reserves and vitellogenin that let a bee live four or five months on cluster instead of the ordinary six weeks a summer forager gets. Whether that generation comes out of the cell healthy or compromised is decided while it’s still capped brood, which means a mite treatment timed to catch it in September works, and the same treatment applied in November is a beekeeper doing the right thing on the wrong date. There’s no makeup exam. The winter bee is reared soundly or she isn’t, and the difference won’t be visible from outside the box until one week in February when it’s far too late to matter.

The other window is stores, and the South Carolina Midlands version of this is a little different from the version in the beekeeping books written for colder places. The winters here are short and mild enough that colonies rarely starve for lack of total honey the way a colony in the upper Midwest can. What often kills a well-provisioned Midlands hive in January is isolation — a cold snap that locks the cluster in place for four or five days straight, on a frame it has already stripped, while two frames over sits capped honey the bees never got cold enough, for long enough, to be forced to cross to. Beekeepers here lose colonies with the pantry two inches from the corpse pile, both of them found under the same lid. The fix isn’t more honey. It’s how that honey gets arranged in the box in the fall, and whether it’s positioned before the first hard cold arrives or noticed after.

None of that is dramatic work. It’s a syringe of oxalic acid timed to a brood cycle, a frame moved six inches to the left, a hive vented with a small notch to allow moisture to escape. It happens in weather so mild you’d have to remind yourself there’s a reason to be out there at all. And then winter arrives and does the only thing winter was ever going to do, which is reveal, without negotiation, whatever got decided in September. There’s nothing left to diagnose or manage in the moment by February. The beekeeper who prepared is, in February, watching an undercover buildup of spring bees. The beekeeper who failed to prepare finds out what nature actually thought of their plan.

Some years that revelation can be devastating. You open six hives in the first mild week of March and five of them are dead — a fist of bees, heads down in empty cells, no visible disease, nothing wrong except that the September work wasn’t enough, or wasn’t done, or was done late for a mite load that had already gotten ahead of the treatment. That’s the shock the whole enterprise runs on, the possibility everyone who keeps bees for more than a couple of winters eventually meets: the apiary you built over three seasons reduced to one box by a cold snap in January.

But look at what the sixth hive is. It isn’t luck exactly, though it can feel that way standing over the wreckage of the other five. That colony’s queen, in that exact yard, with that exact mite load and that exact arrangement of stores, is the one whose genetics and whose beekeeper’s fall work actually held. She’s not just a surviving queen. She’s a data point nobody else in the yard produced, and by May you can graft off her — raise two dozen queen cells from larvae she laid, distribute them into splits made from nothing but comb and bees, and rebuild the apiary from one box back up to six or eight, every one of them carrying the exact combination of thrift and resistance that got her through the winter that killed her neighbors. The catastrophe doesn’t just survive total failure. It gets used as the selection event, you’d otherwise have to pay a breeder to run for you. Whatever culled the rest of the yard is also what tells you, with more certainty than any book written on bees ever could, which queen was actually worth keeping.

Many of the actual variables were ever under your control. You don’t control whether the winter runs hard or mild, whether a neighboring beekeeper’s untreated colony gets robbed out in October and hands your yard a mite load you never generated yourself, whether a warm stretch in January fools a cluster into breaking early right before a real cold front arrives to punish it for trusting the weather. What you do control is the September work — the treatment applied before the winter bees are compromised, the honey moved into reach before the cluster is committed to a single frame, the small venting notch you made in the inner cover. And you control going forward after a hardship. The decision to requeen from your own survivor colonies turning an unplanned event into an opportunity to improve your stock.

Moving forward is making our best decision in the here and now.

The Comb You Didn’t Draw

18 Friday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping history, package bees

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Pick up a nuc in April and there is a specific kind of gift sitting in that little five-frame box, and it is not the bees. Bees you can buy in a package with some sugar syrup and a queen. What you’re actually paying for in a nuc — what makes it worth more than a package’s price — is the comb. Five frames, built out cell by cell, worker-sized and true, brood in all stages, and a laying queen, working the day you install the nuc. A colony spends roughly six to eight pounds of honey to secrete one pound of wax. A single deep frame, drawn edge to edge, represents an otherwise quantity of honey from some other colony’s labor, converted at a brutal exchange rate into a structure you now own outright and did not build.

You didn’t draw that comb. Somebody’s bees did — a colony that may be gone now, split apart, requeened, sold off piecemeal into nucs just like this one, its actual members scattered or gone the way a summer bee goes, in five or six weeks, to old age. The comb outlived every bee that made it. You are standing in a beeyard handling the accumulated, compounded effort of colonies you never met, and starting your season several weeks ahead of the beekeeper next door who ordered a package and is watching bees chew wax into shape one sheet of foundation at a time.

Widen the frame and the whole hobby looks like this: You didn’t invent the movable frame — a Philadelphia preacher named Langstroth worked that out in 1851 so that nobody after him would have to destroy a colony to rob its honey or make splits. You didn’t isolate the mite that’s been quietly killing colonies since the eighties, or work out the oxalic acid dose that kills it without killing the bees, or breed the hygienic lines that groom mites off each other’s backs. You didn’t write the extension bulletins, run the queen-rearing trials, or lose the hives that taught somebody else what not to do, so that it could be written down and handed to you as a forum post you read for free on your phone at the kitchen table before you’d owned a single box. Every convenience in that beeyard was purchased by someone else’s now dead colonies, someone else’s ruined Saturday, someone else’s decades. You inherited all of it the moment you decided to keep bees.

So what do you do with the head start?

Some beekeepers take that comb, that mated queen, that inherited decades of other people’s mite trials, and build something with it — feed when the flow is thin, super ahead of the nectar instead of behind it, split before the bees decide to swarm and do it for you, and by June they’re standing over boxes heavier than anything they could have produced from foundation alone in their first season.

And some beekeepers take the identical box of gifts and let it sit. They hive the nuc on schedule and then don’t come back for three weeks, because there’s always something else — a show to finish, a group chat to keep up with, a Saturday that gets spent scrolling instead of driving out to the yard. The bees, given nothing further, do the ordinary thing bees do when nobody’s paying attention: they fill the box they were given, run out of room, and swarm out of it in April or May, taking half that inherited comb’s worth of bees with them into a tree somewhere, gone. The beekeeper who regains their interest in June or July finds a queenless remnant in a box that once held a running start and calls it bad luck.

No, the non-gratuitous beekeeper was handed five frames of brood and comb, a mated queen, a working five frame version of a production hive, a mite treatment protocol proven on somebody else’s dead colonies, and a whole discipline’s worth of knowledge accumulated and written down for their benefit, so that they could let the box sit unopened now complaining that the flow was short this year, wax moths killed the colony, that the queen was a dud, or that beekeeping is harder than the forums made it look.

The fact is it is not harder than it looks. It is easier than it has ever been in the history of anyone keeping bees, and the difficulty you’re running into most seasons is not the bees. It’s the beekeeper, standing at the truck, deciding whether to drive out this is the weekend. The comb is already drawn. The mated queen is already laying. Nobody is going to ask what you did with either of those things except you, standing over the box next October, looking at what got built on top of the generous start you were given for free, paid for by previous generations of beekeepers.

Beekeeping Vocabulary – “P” is for…

17 Thursday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping, beekeeping vocabulary, honey bee vocabulary

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Diadasia_Bee_Straddles_Cactus_Flower_Carpels_close-up

By Jessie Eastland – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58944849

This week’s beekeeping vocabulary word is “Pollen.”

Pollen is collected by honey bees and other pollinators and used as a food source. In the process of these pollinators travels they transfer pollen from one flow to another thus satisfying the reproductive needs of plants. The result is the production of a fruit, nut, seed by the flower of the pollinated plant. It’s a symbiotic relationship whereby the bee gathers a source of food containing proteins, lipids, and vitamins and the plant gets successfully pollinated.

From Wikipedia:

The transfer of pollen grains to the female reproductive structure (pistil in angiosperms) is called pollination. This transfer can be mediated by the wind, in which case the plant is described as anemophilous (literally wind-loving). Anemophilous plants typically produce great quantities of very lightweight pollen grains, sometimes with air-sacs. Non-flowering seed plants (e.g. pine trees) are characteristically anemophilous. Anemophilous flowering plants generally have inconspicuous flowers. Entomophilous (literally insect-loving) plants produce pollen that is relatively heavy, sticky and protein-rich, for dispersal by insect pollinators attracted to their flowers. Many insects and some mites are specialized to feed on pollen, and are called palynivores.

In non-flowering seed plants, pollen germinates in the pollen chamber, located beneath the micropyle, underneath the integuments of the ovule. A pollen tube is produced, which grows into the nucellus to provide nutrients for the developing sperm cells. Sperm cells of Pinophyta and Gnetophyta are without flagella, and are carried by the pollen tube, while those of Cycadophyta and Ginkgophyta have many flagella.

When placed on the stigma of a flowering plant, under favorable circumstances, a pollen grain puts forth a pollen tube, which grows down the tissue of the style to the ovary, and makes its way along the placenta, guided by projections or hairs, to the micropyle of an ovule. The nucleus of the tube cell has meanwhile passed into the tube, as does also the generative nucleus, which divides (if it hasn’t already) to form two sperm cells. The sperm cells are carried to their destination in the tip of the pollen tube. Double-strand breaks in DNA that arise during pollen tube growth appear to be efficiently repaired in the generative cell that carries the male genomic information to be passed on to the next plant generation.^[12] However, the vegetative cell that is responsible for tube elongation appears to lack this DNA repair capability.^[12]

Helpful Hints as You Prepare Your South Carolina State Fair Entry

16 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping, beeswax, comb honey, education, honey, honey judging, state fair

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Entering your honey and beeswax in competition can be fun and profitable. The payouts for first through fourth place awards aren’t going to make you wealthy but that ribbon should make you proud of your accomplishment. Your honey will be judged by Certified Honey Judges, trained in the art and science of honey judging. Your entry speaks highly of your efforts to be recognized as producing a South Carolina beekeeping product that represents the very best South Carolina beekeepers have to offer.

Let me begin by saying I’m no expert. I decided to enter last year’s State Fair for the simple reason that I enjoy almost all aspects of beekeeping. Entering the fair competition was, for me, a way to explore another aspect of something I find rewarding. I had no idea I’d win anything; I just wanted to participate. After doing my research I found that the rules vary a bit from show to show but there are common threads that run throughout – cleanliness, consistency, presentation, and beauty. Your entry should reflect your pride in your product while following the presentation guidelines of the particular show.

Wax and ribbons

This article will attempt to explain how to enter your honey and beeswax for judging at the South Carolina State Fair. It is not all inclusive and the reader is encouraged to visit the State Fair website for particulars related to entry dates, categories, drop off and pickup dates, and other particulars. At the end of the article I’ll list important links to the State Fair and the entry department. Registration may be made either online or via postal mail. And the cool thing is it’s free to enter as long as you do so during the regular registration dates. This year Regular Registration begins July 1^st and closes September 1^st. You can enter after these dates (until September 16^th) but there is a rather costly entry fee to pay for each entry during late registration.

The South Carolina State Fair accepts entries in the following categories related to beekeeping:

1 pound jar extracted honey (light)

1 pound jar extracted honey (dark)

1 pound Muth jar (light)

1 pound Muth jar (dark)

Pint jar extracted honey (light)

Pint jar extracted honey (dark)

Quart jar extracted honey (light)

Quart jar extracted honey (dark)

Pint jar extracted honey with comb (light)

Pint jars extracted honey with comb (dark)

Quart jar extracted honey with comb (light)

Quart jar extracted honey with comb (dark)

1 pound cut comb honey (light)

1 pound cut comb honey (dark)

1 pound beeswax

Also, dipped and molded taper candles, and molded ornamental beeswax have also been added.

Best Beekeeper Exhibit – The topic for beekeeper display is Honey Bees Contribution to our World.

Honey Display

That’s a lot of categories to enter. Wow! And most have 1^st place through 4^th place awards! Let’s get started talking about how you’re going to take home a ribbon this year!

Before we begin, let’s talk about your timeline. Decide now what categories you wish to enter. Calculate how much honey you’re going to be entering in this year’s State Fair. Do the math. You may find that you’ll need quite a bit of honey. After you determine the categories and the amount of honey you will be entering set aside an additional 25 – 50%. This will provide you with a margin of safety in case of a spill, you need to re-strain, and provides for loss due to pouring from one jar to another. Don’t worry about setting aside too much as it will still be saleable afterwards should you have more than needed. You just don’t want to run short as you prepare your entries – you want consistency in your show batch and that will be easier if you have a bit more rather than a bit less than you plan on entering.

Once you decide what categories you will be entering, register online or by mail. It’s free if you register before September 1^st so why wait? Registering will also help you get mentally into setting your timeline of tasks for preparing your entries.

Tip: Fiona Apple sang a song titled, “Slow Like Honey” but you shouldn’t be slow getting started in preparing your entries. Honey moves slowly. Bubbles and foam rise slowly. The steps needed to produce your final entry will take time and your best entry will be one that’s not rushed. It’s one of those hurry up and wait situations. So get started now, be patient, then during the preparation period tweak your entry and progress towards your final finished product.

First let’s talk about those entries involving Extracted Honey in 1 pound, 2 pound, pint, and quart jars:

Extracted honey will be judged on:

Density – water content above 18.6% will be disqualified.
Absence of crystals.
Cleanliness of honey – Without lint, without dirt, without wax particles, without foam.
Flavor – ONLY for honey flavor adversely affected by processing.
Container appearance and cleanliness.
Accuracy of filling.

While all honey entered must be in glass jars, the 1 pound jars must be in Queenline type glass jars. There is also a category for 1 pound Muth type jars. These can be purchased at most bee supply companies. If you can visit a local bee supplier that carries them you should do so as this will enable you to select the clearest jar without flaws, bubbles, scratches, and other imperfections. At this point you may be thinking, “What does the jar have to do with honey judging?” and you’d be right to think this but remember your presentation is extremely important if you’re going to win against the best beekeepers in South Carolina. We already know you’ve got the best tasting honey in South Carolina, just like I have, but what sets dozens of excellent honey entries apart is going to be the fine points and that starts with presentation. Just like a fine dinner at a nice restaurant versus a trip to your favorite fast food joint, the experience counts. So, start with a jar as perfect as you can find.

Tip: Take that jar and wash it inside and out. Place it in the dishwasher and turn on the extra shine setting. Clean it and polish it until it shines inside and out.

Density – moisture content above 18.6% will be disqualified.
Your honey will be checked for density. Hopefully you remember from your beginning beekeeping class that honey should contain no more than 18.6% moisture. The USDA standard for Grade A and Grade B honey states honey should contain a solids minimum of 81.4% (or 18.6 moisture). All honey submitted for judging will be checked and a moisture content above 18.6 will be disqualified.

Tip: Check your honey before submission to ensure a moisture content of 18.6% or less by using a refractometer. I recently saw one on Amazon for $24.00 but I’m sure someone in the club will check your moisture for you if you don’t have one. A good rule of thumb is capped honey will be 18.6% or less in moisture so take no chances on the honey you’re going to enter by only using capped honey and you should be safe. Rationale: Honey with lower moisture content resists fermentation. The best grades of honey will not ferment due to the lack of moisture.

Absence of crystals:

Absence of crystals in the entry will also be checked. All honey will crystalize given enough time. The ratio of sugars contained in the honey determines how fast the honey will crystalize. Depending on the floral source some honeys may crystalize in a matter of months. Other honeys may last a year or even longer. Other factors contributing to the crystallization process include the presence of particles in the honey such as pollens as well as storage temperatures. The judges will check for crystallization by shining a light through the honey to detect minor crystals. Using last year’s winning entry would probably not result in a repeat performance as the honey will probably have detectible crystals. Rationale: Although we know that honey can always be re-liquified, the lack of crystals assures the market customer that the honey has been properly stored and is fresh.

Cleanliness of honey – Without lint, without dirt, without wax particles, without foam.

Of course no one wants to see a bee body part floating around in their honey. But neither should you worry much about your honey not being ultra filtered either. Pollen is a natural component of honey and is expected. While the presence of naturally occurring pollen is expected, neither should your entry be hazy or cloudy with pollen.

Items such as lint, pieces of wax, and bubbles should be absent.

Tip: Don’t use cheesecloth to strain your fair entry. Start your straining with your standard stainless steel sieve using the finest mesh. Then allow it to sit for a few weeks so that any wax and particles rise to the top of the jar where they can be skimmed off. If you’re not pleased with the clarity an additional straining can be made using a lady’s stocking. Be cautious though as the fine mesh of the stocking can introduce very fine bubbles which will take some time to rise to the surface of the honey for removal. When straining honey let gravity do the work as forcing it through the mesh by wringing will increase fine air bubbles.

This process is going to take some time. Honey is thick and wax particles and bubbles move slowly. Ideally you should set aside your honey now to give it time to start clarifying. After giving it a few weeks you’ll want to open the jar and skim off the particles and foam. You may find you want to then do another straining through a lady’s stocking before pouring it into your specially prepared jar for your entry. Then you’ll wait again for bubbles to rise. Eventually you’ll be satisfied.

Tip: When you make your final pour into your presentation jar over fill the jar to within a quarter inch of the top. This will allow you to skim off any foam or pollen a day or two before you take your honey to the Fair. It will also allow you to remove that extra honey such that your fill line is perfect (more on this later).

Tip: Placing the jar on a window sill will gently warm the honey allowing bubbles and foam to rise a little faster and will reward you with seeing the honey get clearer each day.

Flavor – ONLY as adversely affected by processing.

You don’t get extra points for having the best tasting honey in South Carolina. Actually, some honey judging competitions do have a “black jar” contest where the honey is judged on taste alone. No doubt everyone’s honey is going to taste the best to them and it’s purely subjective so “black jar” contests are separate from standard honey judging.

What you need to know as far as taste goes is that you can lose points for “off tastes.” That is, if your honey has an overly smoky flavor from over smoking the hive when you pulled your honey. Or perhaps poor handling of your bee repellant when you harvested has caused an off taste. Another possibility is allowing your honey to sit too long before processing causing some uncapped honey to ferment which may have affected the flavor. Yet another reason honey can have an off taste is overheating in the extraction process. And if your honey has a taste of spearmint, tea tree oil, wintergreen, or lemongrass oil it’s going to be obvious your entry was adulterated with feed syrup. In conclusion, you won’t get extra points for five-star tasting honey but you can lose points for errors that may have affected the flavor of your final product.

Container appearance and cleanliness:

As already mentioned, the visual presentation of your product is important and reflective of the effort you have made to show off your entry. Don’t let even a speck of dirt escape your detection inside or outside of your jar.

But don’t stop with just polishing the jar, absolutely no fingerprints should be on the exterior or interior of the jar. Your lid should also be spotless without dents, scratches, labels, or signs of rust. Although any lid is allowed, a nice one piece lid allows the judge to easily remove the lid to evaluate the lid and the honey. I prefer white lids although I believe gold tone is also available.

Tip: Take an extra lid with you on the day you take your entry in for drop off. There should not be any honey on the interior of the lid. The steward receiving your entry understands this and will patiently wait while you change jar lids before submitting your entry. (Another method is to use plastic wrap between the lid and the jar and remove the plastic wrap prior to submission).

Judges will not disqualify a jar because of an air bubble (in the glass), but try to get the best jar without ripples, nicks, scratches, residue (stickers, honey, adhesive, finger prints etc.)

Also, if reusing a jar, make sure there are no lingering odors. On opening the jar it should smell like honey.

Tip: When entering pints and quarts show off your honey rather than the jar. A simple, plain, thin walled (mayonnaise type) pint or quart glass jar allows your honey to be the star of the show.

Important: Do not affix any label to the jar or lid. Your entry will be appropriately marked with an identification slip when received by the show steward on entry day.

Accuracy of filling:

jar1 It’s important that you give the customer their money’s worth. To that end, a standard has been set that will be judged in honey contests. A rough estimate is that your honey fill line should be above the bottom of the lid such that no air is observed when the jar is looked at from the side. Stated another way, no light should be seen between top of the honey and lid. Aim for a point at the bottom of the spiral that the lid screws onto.

Photo Credits: (left) Courtesy Southcentral Alaska Beekeepers Asso. (below) Courtesy Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Assn.

jar2

(Note that the jar on the right is not ready for judging as there are particles on the inside of the jar around the top. This should have been “cleaned up” prior to submitting it for judging.)

Tip: When doing your final adjustments use the bottom of a spoon to touch the top of the honey removing any floating particles. Also, use your spoon to clean the area around the inside and outside of the glass where the lid will be. The judges will note any debris inside or outside of the lid area.

End of section on Extracted Honey Entries

Let’s take a break before finishing up with the other entry categories. I’ll not give as much information on the following items for a couple reasons. First, the basics already covered are the same: cleanliness and adherence to the standard. The other reason is I have not competed in the cut comb or chunk honey categories. I have done some research though and will gladly share what I know. Additionally, I’ll be running this article by a couple people that have more experience than I for their approval before I distribute the article. And finally, I encourage you to do some research yourself. You’ll find that there is some variation between honey judging rules and guidelines although the basics are usually consistent. Most of what you will find below is from the South Carolina State Fair guidelines.

Onward we go:

All Classes with Chunk Comb (light and dark – all entry weights)

Chunk Honey is cut comb placed inside of jars before filling the jar.
Neatness and uniformity of cut – Upgrade for parallel and 4-sided cuts; downgrade for ragged edges.
Absence of watery cappings, uncapped cells and pollen
Cleanliness of product – Down-grade for travel stains on comb, foreign matter, wax, foam or crystallization.
Uniformity of appearance in capping structure, color, and accuracy of fill.
One (1) piece of comb in jar.

Comb cut the right way up – it’s a fault to put it in sideways or inverted

(I’ve heard some people melt a bit of wax in the bottom of the jar to hold the chunk of comb down in the jar.)

Cut Comb Honey (light and dark)

Cut comb honey is comb cut from the frame. Foundation should be thin and without wire.

Entry is one pound cut comb.
Neatness and uniformity of cut, absence of liquid honey.
Absence of watery cappings, uncapped cells, and pollen.
Cleanliness of product, absence of travel stains, absence of crushed wax.
Uniformity of appearance.

Beeswax
Single piece, pure beeswax, minimum (at least) 1 pound (16 oz.) but not to exceed 17 oz. There is no standard for molds as long as the wax block meets the above weight guidelines.

The optimum color for pure beeswax is light canary to straw yellow. Wax should be clean, uniform in appearance, and have a pleasant aroma. Cracks, ripples, finger prints, or debris or shrinkage deduct from points. I’ve seen polished wax and unpolished. Last year’s winning entry was unpolished.

Preparation of beeswax for entry is challenging. It will most likely require multiple meltings and strainings for it to become completely free of debris. This can be accomplished using a double boiler or crock pot(s). Never place wax directly on a heat source as it will readily ignite and exposure to high heat can adversely affect the finished product.

I use a couple old crock pots I have acquired at thrift stores. In one crock pot I melt the wax and, using a ladle, I pour it through a coffee filter sitting on top of a metal kitchen strainer. As the melted wax filters through it drops into the second crock pot which is set on its lowest setting. Sometimes a couple filterings like this gets the wax clean but a lot depends on what condition the wax was in to start.

When pouring into the mold melt your wax using the least amount of heat possible. You want to avoid wide swings in temperature as the wax will shrink as it hardens and a wide temperature variation increases this effect. Also, try to let the wax harden slowly to minimize cracking and shrinkage. I pour my wax in my barn, which can easily reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit so it takes a while to fully harden. I usually keep an eye on it and as it cools and shrinks I add just a bit more melted wax to fill any shrinkage on what will eventually be the bottom of the wax block. Also, make sure your mold is level so that your finished product sits nicely on the show table.

Be patient, it may take several attempts to get a satisfactory block that weighs at least 16 ounces but less than 17 ounces.

Elsewhere on the web is this excellent, very detailed description on how to prepare wax for showing. Wax for Show By F. PADMORE

Best Beekeeper Exhibit

I would direct the reader to speak with Danny Cannon (Fair Booth Coordinator) at South Carolina Beekeepers Association for information on this entry. It involves a physical exhibit related to beekeeping. A beekeeping theme is presented each year. The topic for this year’s beekeeper display is “Honey Bees’ Contribution to our World.” Also, there is a space limitation of 3 exhibits. The Booth Coordinator must have you registered in order to exhibit your entry.

In closing, hopefully I have answered some questions related to entering and preparing your honey and wax for judging at the South Carolina State Fair. As I mentioned earlier, I’m far from an expert on this topic but felt the need to get some information out there for those that might want to participate in yet another honey bee related activity. Below are some links that you may find helpful as you further investigate various methods and try to reach for that perfect entry for this year. Happy beekeeping and I’ll see you at the State Fair!

Reference Links:

South Carolina State Fair Entries: https://www.scstatefair.org/competitions

Honey Judging and Standards by Malcolm T Sanford: http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/media/entnemdeptifasufledu/honeybee/pdfs/AA24800-Honey-Judging-and-Standards.pdf

Judging Honey by Dewey Caron: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/mb/sites/default/files/docs/breecec/Judging%20Honey%20by%20Dewey%20Caron%202015.pdf

USDA Extracted Honey Grades and Standards: https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/extracted-honey-grades-and-standards

USDA Extracted Honey Inspection Instructions: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted_Honey_Inspection_Instructions%5B1%5D.pdf

Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Honey Contest General Rules: http://www.metroatlantabeekeepers.org/honeyContest.php

Eastern Apiculture Society – Honey Show Prep: http://www.easternapiculture.org/resources/honey-show-prep.html

Southcentral Alaska Beekeepers Association: http://sababeekeepers.com/DemoBooth.html

Showing Honey at Fairs by E.C. Martin: http://beesource.com/resources/usda/showing-honey-at-fairs/

North Bucks Beekeepers Honey Show Preparation: https://www.nbbka.org/honey/honeyShow/preparation.aspx

Two Takeaways from the Eastern Apicultural Society’s Summer 2017 Conference

15 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeper education, beekeeping, education

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Happy Birthday Alexander Butlerov

15 Tuesday Sep 2026

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Born 15 September 1828 · Died 17 August 1886

Image: Wikimedia Commons — Unknown author (Public domain)

Biography and Contributions to Beekeeping
One of the founders of structural chemistry, Butlerov was also Russia’s leading champion of rational beekeeping. He wrote the popular manual The Bee, Its Life and the Chief Rules of Sensible Beekeeping, founded the journal Russian Beekeeping Leaflet, and promoted frame hives among peasants. In 1877 he brought gentle Caucasian bees from the northern Caucasus to central Russia. Soviet writers called him the father of Russian rational beekeeping.

The Bees Have No Word for Dearth

14 Monday Sep 2026

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The flow doesn’t taper here in the South Carolina Midlands so much as it closes. Within a few days of the first week of June the whole yard changes character — bees that walked over your gloves in May now follow you back to the truck, and the frames that were getting drawn out and filled last week are getting licked dry instead. Harvest is the last act of a season that has already ended, and every split you make afterward gets made into an empty landscape, on sugar you carried out there yourself, because there is nothing coming in to make it on.

You knew this day would come. You have known it since February. It’s seasonal, in the same place it was last year and the year before, and knowing it never seems to change how the first dry week feels — the sense that the timing is wrong, that the nucs needed another three weeks, that it isn’t fair to shut the tap the same month you’re supposed to start post season splits. The dearth arrives anyway, on schedule, indifferent to all of it.

Watch what the bees do with the same event. When income stops, the colony contracts — the queen’s laying pulls back toward what the minimal nectar income will carry, foragers that were working nectar go to scavenging and to testing their neighbors’ entrances, guards get serious about the door. There is no deliberation in it and no grief. The colony is not being brave. It simply has no forecast to be disappointed by: a summer forager lives about six weeks, so not one bee in that box worked the early spring poplar and not one of them will see the goldenrod. Grievance requires a comparison — a good year to measure this one against, a version of June that owed you something. Nothing in the hive can hold that comparison. Dearth is a word out of the beekeeper’s ledger, a complaint dressed as a technical term. The bees just call it June, if they call it anything, and go on working what’s actually there.

Here’s the part worth staying with, though, because it’s easy to read all that as a sermon about living in the present and stopping too early. The bees are not living in the present. A colony in a flow behaves like an organism that regards scarcity as an absolute certainty — it stores far past any conceivable need, caps it against moisture, and then defends it with its life. Everything you harvest is a provision made against a future the bees have never individually seen and cannot possibly remember. So, they do the entire work of anticipation, seriously and at real cost, and they do it without any of the dread. The provision and the anxiety turn out to be separable. One of them is doing the job, and the other one is riding along claiming credit.

Then go one step further, because this is the thing the dearth actually taught me and it took a few seasons. Honey exists because dearth exists. A colony that never faced a hungry stretch would have no reason to lay up eighty pounds of anything — the surplus you take off in early June is precisely the measure of how seriously the bees take July. There is no available version of the year in which the flow simply keeps running and you still get a harvest. The hardship you spend the spring dreading is not an interruption of the enterprise. It is the foundation of it, the whole reason there’s a surplus to argue over in the first place. You are, in the most literal sense, harvesting the bees’ answer to the problem you’re upset about.

Which reframes what actually goes wrong in a bad summer. The dearth itself kills very few colonies. What kills them is being managed as though it hadn’t started — supers left on for a flow that isn’t coming, a June nuc with a wide-open entrance it hasn’t got the numbers to defend, wet frames set out in the yard in daylight, syrup slopped at the doorway of a weak hive in the middle of a robbing summer. It’s expecting a July queen to mate in a week of poor flying weather and lay like an April queen, then reading a slow buildup as a bad queen rather than a dry month, and requeening a colony whose only problem was the seasonal calendar. And it’s the quiet one: the brood nest contracts while the mite population does not, so the ratio climbs all summer in a hive that looks, from the outside, like nothing much is happening. Nearly every one of these events is solved by a beekeeper working in May. The beekeeper’s injury comes from the mental fight against a natural process, not from the dearth.

Dearth is a certainty. Nothing you do in that yard removes that certainty. You cannot push the poplar back a week because you were traveling, or ask the clover to hold on until the nucs are stronger, or negotiate with a dry spell on the grounds that you lost four colonies last winter and are owed a break. Push on that and you’ll be worn down long before it is. What you can move is yourself — earlier. Feed before they get light instead of after. Reduce the entrances before the robbing starts rather than during. Make the splits earlier knowing they’ll be carried, not hoping they’ll be fed by something outside of your control. Do the mite count in the middle of the dearth, when the numbers are ugly and still fixable, instead of in September when the winter bees are already being raised on borrowed time.

Call that acceptance if you want. In the yard it mostly looks like a seasonal calendar and a bag of sugar, and a beekeeper who has finally stopped having opinions about June.

On Beekeeping Presentations

13 Sunday Sep 2026

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Excerpt from Journeyman to Master Beekeeper Guidebook – Revised 2026

Presentations

Preparing for the oral and field master exams takes more than mastering the knowledge base — it takes the ability to present that knowledge clearly, logically, and in a way others can actually follow. There’s an old truth behind this: if you really want to learn a subject, teach it. Explaining a concept to someone else forces you to organize it, test it against questions you hadn’t considered, and find the gaps in your own understanding long before an examiner does.

So put yourself in front of an audience whenever you can. Volunteer to teach at your local club, speak at monthly meetings, staff a table at a farmers market or festival, and say yes to civic groups and school visits. Every one of these is practice, not a detour from it.

Starting now, treat every talk as your oral exam — the impromptu explanation at a farmers market, the crowd that gathers while you’re removing a swarm, the five minutes in front of your club, the school assembly. Present with the same clarity, structure, and confidence you’d bring to the real thing. Afterward, critique yourself honestly: What landed well? What would you explain differently next time? Where did you lose the audience, or stumble over a concept you thought you knew cold? And when it goes well, say so — recognizing what worked is how you learn to repeat it.

Do this consistently, and the oral exam stops being a single high-pressure event. It becomes just another talk — one you’ve already given, in one form or another, dozens of times before.

Happy Birthday William Longgood

12 Saturday Sep 2026

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William Frank Longgood (1917–2000)

Born: September 12, 1917 — St. Louis, Missouri Died: August 9, 2000 (aged 82) — Cape Cod, Massachusetts

William Frank Longgood was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and teacher. Born in St. Louis, he spent most of his working life in New York, and only came to beekeeping — and to the book he’s remembered for by beekeepers — late in that life.

Journalism career

Longgood graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 1940 and spent the next two years in Niagara Falls working as a radio salesman and writer. World War II interrupted the career he was building: he served in the U.S. Armed Forces from 1943 to 1946. Afterward he returned to reporting, first at the Newark Evening News (through 1948), then at the New York World-Telegram, where he stayed for seventeen years, from 1948 to 1965.

It was at the World-Telegram that Longgood did the work he’s best remembered for as a journalist. In 1954 he won the George Polk Memorial Award from Long Island University. Then, in 1963, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time, with fellow World-Telegram and New York Sun reporters Sylvan Fox and Anthony Shannon, for their coverage of the crash of American Airlines Flight 1 into Jamaica Bay on March 1, 1962, which killed 95 people.

After leaving daily journalism in 1965, Longgood spent three years as a text editor at Time-Life Books (1965–1968), then taught writing at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1966 to 1972.

Books

Longgood was the author of seven books over his career, ranging well beyond bees. His 1960 book Poisons in Your Food was an early and pointed critique of chemical additives and antibiotic use in the American food supply — the kind of consumer-advocacy journalism that prefigured much of what would come later in the environmental movement. His 1972 book The Darkening Land documented environmental pollution and was well received critically.

Beekeeping and The Queen Must Die

Longgood came to beekeeping relatively late, well after his newspaper career had wound down, and it was this hobby — not journalism — that produced the book beekeepers actually know him for: The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men (1985, W.W. Norton). It is not a biology text, and it doesn’t try to be. It is a beekeeper’s meditation — part natural history, part personal essay — using the hive as a lens for thinking about mortality, order, sacrifice, and the uneasy parallels between insect societies and human ones. Reviewers and beekeepers alike have praised it less for its technical content than for the quality of its prose: it reads like a career writer’s love letter to a hobby he found late, written with the same eye for narrative and detail that had won him a Pulitzer decades before.

Here’s a nice review found here on WordPress by Bees with ebb:

https://beeswitheeb.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/the-queen-must-die/

He relocated to Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1973, and lived there until his death on August 9, 2000, at age 82.

The Mystery of the Missing Spiracles by Staci Siler

11 Friday Sep 2026

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The Mystery of the Missing Spiracles
by Staci Siler

It read like the gravest of murder mysteries. There was a spiracle missing on the side of my honey bee. The book I read said it was supposed to be there but it was conspicuously absent. What was wrong?? Was I looking at a serious mutation in my bee? Was it contagious? What was going on!!!!! Where was that spiracle?

It would be nice if the answer were easy… Or rather, I should say the answer is easy…. but complicated.

Read one book and there are nine spiracles on each side of a honey bee. Read another and there are ten. Read a third book and there are two spiracles on the thorax and a fourth will claim three… So who is right??? Who is wrong??? What is going on and where is that spiracle???!!!???

To get to the answer to the question of two or three spiracles on the thorax, we have to learn a little about honey bee biology. A spiracle is, basically, a hole in the side of the honey bee through which the bee breathes. When the bee is a young larvae, there are ten spiracles along the side of it’s body — two on the thoracic region and eight on the abdomen. As the honey bee grows, a ‘waist’ develops which separates the thorax from the abdomen but it starts right below the first segment of the abdomen. As such, anatomical pictures of the adult honey bee look like this:

On this picture, you can see that the Roman numerals, which number the segments of the abdomen, start at I on the thorax, where the third spiracle is at. As such, it would be technically correct to say there are two spiracles on the thorax but…. it would also be accurate to claim three spiracles to the ‘thoracic area’ or claim three by acknowledging the way the first abdominal segment is positioned on the thorax.That did very little to solve the initial question though as we are still left with a missing spiracle. So… if the larvae started out with ten spiracles, where did it go?

Here is a picture of the young larvae, with all ten spiracles marked as dots along the centerline of the larvae.

Note that the tenth spiracle is located on the Roman Numeral, VIII, the eighth segment of the larval abdomen. But if we look back at the adult honey bee we saw above, there is no eighth segment… is there???Actually, there is. When the honey bee goes through metamorphosis, the eighth segment which contains the tenth spiracle ends up tucking up inside the seventh segment. It is not visible but it still exists. That said, is the tenth spiracle, though functional as a larvae, still functional or even connected to the breathing sacs in the adult honey bee. See below image:

Note: only spiracles one through nine are listed.

The latest addition of the Hive and the Honey Bee lists the tenth spiracle as located in the spiracular plate associated with the base of the sting and, given it states there is a way for the spiracle to stop the escape of air, it lends credibility to the thought that the tenth spiracle, though often forgotten, is functional. There is no notation for it in the above picture but other texts list it as having the second largest opening of the ten spiracles which would imply it is anything but vestigial.

So… we have found the missing spiracle. You won’t see it if you put a magnifying glass on the bee’s abdomen but the tenth spiracle does exist, it is just not readily visible unless you are willing to get up close to the honey bee’s sting — an area beekeepers generally try to avoid.

Which is the more accurate answer? Two or three, nine or ten??

I guess, as long as you take into account every reason for the differences (nine visible, ten functional — three on the thorax if acknowledging the transfer of the abdominal segment, two on the actual thorax) you could say any one of those variations and be correct… Technically…..

Ref: R.E. Snodgrass, Honey Bee Anatomy

Staci Siler is a Master Beekeeper living in South Carolina. She teaches all levels of beekeeping classes and frequently speaks at beekeeping associations across the state.

The Great Reducer Rebellion — Or, How Not to Swap a Bottom Board

10 Thursday Sep 2026

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Thor’s Fight with the Giants by Mårten Eskil Winge, 1872

Hehehe. I just came in from a walk through the bee yard, and I owe you an update — and possibly a search party for a hammer.

One of my hives lives off by itself, built up under a tree after I caught a swarm there this past spring. That hive grew so fast, so quickly, that moving it stopped being a simple weekend job and became a “someday” job instead. So it just… stayed. And grew some more.

The problem is what it’s sitting on. In a pinch, I’d set that swarm up on a bottom board I’d built for on-the-road captures — a thin sheet of lauan plywood screwed to a couple of spacers, with a 10-frame deep stacked on top. It was only ever meant to be temporary. It has now been the permanent foundation of a four-box hive for months, because I have known for a while that I needed to swap it out for a proper bottom board — some day.

Yeah. Some day never showed up.

But today, with a stretch of rain and general crappy weather finally behind us, I decided today was the day. Hehehe.

Now, the human mind is a curious, deeply persuasive thing, and mine knew better than to try dismantling a large, four-box hive on a damp day just to change a bottom board. So it did what minds do best: it negotiated. It swapped the real job for a smaller, more “reasonable” one — just slide an entrance reducer into place — and my mind convinced me this counted as real progress. The fact that it was still raining lightly somehow never came up in these negotiations.

Effort 1: I show up empty-handed except for the reducer. It’s too long. About five bees take immediate, personal offense and run me off.

Effort 2: I return properly dressed — suit and hive tool this time — and try again. The reducer jams sideways and won’t budge, even with the hive tool working it like a crowbar. Roughly twenty bees vote, unanimously, against reducers as a concept, and run me off a second time.

Effort 3: I come back in full gear — suit, gloves, hive tool, and now a hammer. Thirty-plus bees are waiting before I even get the reducer positioned. I set it and start tapping it home. Within seconds, fifty to seventy-five bees pour out to make their objection extremely clear. I set a new personal land-speed record finishing the install. Then, apparently under the impression this had become a biathlon, I set a second land-speed record sprinting back to the house.

Inside, I discover I’ve brought company: a dozen or so hardcore bees, still fully committed to the cause, riding along on my jeans, my suit, and my veil. I spend the next ten minutes evicting them, one at a time.

Final verdict: the reducer is in. The hive has been left to defend itself, as it clearly prefers. Lesson learned — they really didn’t need my help.

I do still wonder, though, where I dropped that hammer.

The Smoke Between Us: What’s Really Happening When You Smoke the Colony

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

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You crack the outer cover before you’ve even lit the smoker — just a peek, you tell yourself. Bad idea. A guard bee lifts off the top bars and bumps your veil, and you can already hear the pitch of the hive climbing half a step. You set the lid back down, take a breath, and get your smoker going properly this time. A few cool puffs at the entrance. A few more under the lid once it’s cracked again. Wait just a bit.

And just like that, the hive exhales. The hum drops. Bees that were staring you a minute ago are now walking calmly across the frame you’re holding, going about their business like you’re not even there. You pull the frame, look it over, and not a single bee so much as flinches toward you.

It feels a little bit like magic. It isn’t. It’s chemistry, instinct, and a survival response so old it predates you, me, and every beekeeper who ever lived — and it’s worth understanding exactly what you’re doing to that colony every time you squeeze the bellows.

The Alarm They Never Get to Sound
Here’s what almost happened before you grabbed the smoker. That guard bee in front of your veil was seconds from raising her abdomen and releasing a chemical signal from a gland near her sting shaft — a compound called isopentyl acetate, along with dozens of other volatile chemicals riding along with it. It smells like bananas to some people, which is exactly why old-timers will tell you not to eat one near the hive. To a bee, that smell means one thing: intruder, mobilize, attack here.

Under normal circumstances, that message travels fast. Nearby bees pick it up through their antennae, and within seconds you’ve got a small squad converging on the exact spot where the first bee raised the alarm. It’s an efficient, ruthless bit of biology — a single sting recruits reinforcements to the scene of the crime.

Smoke breaks that chain of communication. It doesn’t destroy the pheromone or somehow calm the bee down emotionally — it overwhelms her sense of smell. Researchers who measured this directly found that after smoke exposure, a bee’s antennae simply stop registering the alarm signal the way they normally would. She’s not less alarmed. She just can’t smell the message anymore, and neither can her sisters. That fog lifts on its own, too — bees typically regain full sensitivity within about ten to twenty minutes, which is exactly why a long inspection calls for more than one round with the smoker.

A Bellyful of Honey and a Fire That Isn’t Coming
While all that’s happening at the entrance, something else is going on deeper in the hive — and it might matter even more.

Smoke, to a bee, doesn’t read as “a person is bothering us.” It reads as fire. And a colony facing fire has exactly one move: pack up and go. So workers throughout the hive start doing something that looks almost frantic if you watch closely — they push their heads into open cells and drink down honey as fast as they can, filling their crops the way you’d grab you’d wallet and photos on the way out the door. It’s not panic for panic’s sake. Honey is expensive to make — it takes roughly eight pounds of nectar-turned-honey to produce a single pound of the wax they’d need to start over somewhere new. If the home is about to burn, that honey is coming with them.

Here’s the part that actually helps you: a bee with a full crop is a different animal. Distended and heavy, she has a much harder time curling her abdomen around to drive a stinger home. She gets sluggish — genuinely lethargic, in the same unglamorous way you get lethargic after a holiday dinner you didn’t need to finish. Multiply that across ten thousand bees and you get a hive that’s chemically confused about a fire, physically stuffed on its own honey, and — for a little while — remarkably easy to work.

This is also why a smart beekeeper doesn’t smoke and immediately rip the lid off. Give it a minute. That’s the time it takes for the “we might need to evacuate” instinct to actually kick in.

An Old, Old Trick
None of this is new information to bees, and it turns out it isn’t new information to us, either. Tomb paintings from ancient Egypt show beekeepers blowing smoke over clay hives thousands of years before anyone understood a single molecule of pheromone chemistry. Some Native American beekeepers burned puffball fungus to the same effect. Even today, honey hunters in remote parts of Nepal climb rope ladders up sheer cliff faces to reach wild colonies, carrying nothing more sophisticated than a smoldering torch to do exactly what your smoker does.

The tool in your hand only got its modern shape in 1873, when a New York beekeeper named Moses Quinby built the first bellows smoker — a tin firebox with a hand pump, not so different from the one hanging by your hive today. True to his Quaker upbringing, Quinby never patented it. He just gave it to every beekeeper who came after him, which is most of the reason it’s sitting in your hand right now instead of some more complicated, proprietary contraption.

Doing It Well, Not Just Doing It
Smoke is a tool you can absolutely overuse. The goal is a light reminder, not a siege — a few cool, gentle puffs at the entrance, a short wait, a few more under the cover before you lift it. Thick, hot, billowing smoke stresses a colony more than it calms one, and it can leave your equipment and honey smelling like a campfire for longer than you’d like. Light and patient beats heavy and rushed, every time.

Back at the Hive
So the next time the hum drops and the bees on your frame go about their business like you’re invisible, you’ll know what actually happened. You didn’t trick them, exactly — you borrowed an instinct that’s been wired into them since long before there were hive tools or bee suits, one that ancient Egyptians and Nepalese cliff-climbers and a Quaker beekeeper in the Mohawk Valley all discovered the same way you just did: light some smoke, and for a few quiet minutes, the bees will let you in.

Gray Squirrels and Pollen Feeders

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

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14264805_10208468165676520_6204375263559427595_n

(Above)

Pollen substitute isn’t picky about who eats it — it’s protein, and protein is protein whether you’re a nurse bee building up winter bees or a squirrel putting on fat before the cold sets in. Hang a feeder full of the stuff outside a wood shop, and you haven’t built a pollen feeder. You’ve built a squirrel buffet with a “bees welcome too” sign.

They’re clever about it, too. They’ll perch right on the rim, work the powder with both front paws like a kid with a granola bar, and barely look up when you walk by with a hive tool in hand. And honestly, it’s hard to be too mad at them. Fall’s a hungry, hoarding season for every creature in the yard, not just the ones in your hive boxes. The squirrels are doing their own version of what the bees are doing — packing away calories now so there’s something to draw on when the temperature drops and the pantry gets thin.

The only real downside is math: a feeder of pollen substitute disappears a lot faster with a squirrel or two treating it like a standing invitation. If you’re finding your feeder emptied out faster than the bees should manage on their own, that’s your answer — and it might be worth a squirrel baffle or moving the feeder somewhere less shop-adjacent, unless you don’t mind sharing.

(Below) And here are a few pictures of this year’s effort. No squirrels this year after placing the feeders on PVC pipe and greasing the pipe. A little plastic protrudes over the opening to protect the pollen from any rain.

Happy Birthday Lloyd Raymond Watson – Pioneer of Instrumental Insemination for Honey Bee Queens

07 Monday Sep 2026

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L.R.Watson

Dr. Lloyd Raymond Watson (1876–1948)

Birth: 7 September 1876 — Cuba, Allegany County, New York, USA Death: 24 February 1948 (aged 71) — North Hornell, Steuben County, New York, USA Burial: Alfred Rural Cemetery, Alfred, Allegany County, New York, USA

Dr. Lloyd Raymond Watson was the first person to demonstrate a workable method for instrumentally inseminating a queen honey bee — and the man who gave the procedure its name.

The problem he solved

For most of the history of beekeeping, the queen’s mating flight was a closed door. A virgin queen leaves her hive, mates in the air with a dozen or more drones from colonies miles away, and returns carrying a lifetime supply of semen. The beekeeper sees none of it and controls none of it. Every other domesticated animal — cattle, horses, poultry, dogs — had been improved by controlling who bred with whom. The honey bee alone resisted, because half of every pairing was invisible.

Francis Huber had described the essentials of queen mating in the 1790s. Johann Dzierzon worked out in 1845 that drones develop from unfertilized eggs. But knowing how bees mate did not mean anyone could direct it. Through the nineteenth century, beekeepers tried isolated mating yards, island apiaries, screened flight cages — and a handful, including Nelson W. McLain working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1880s, tried to inseminate queens by hand. The attempts failed or produced results too erratic to build on, and by the time Watson took up the question the earlier work had largely been forgotten.

The breakthrough

Watson attacked the problem as his doctoral research at Cornell University, completing the Ph.D. in 1926. His apparatus was, by modern standards, startlingly simple: a stereomicroscope, a light source, hand-held forceps to open and hold the queen’s sting chamber, and a capillary syringe charged with drone semen. There were no micromanipulators, no CO₂ narcosis protocol, no purpose-built queen holder — only steady hands, good optics, and an anatomist’s understanding of where the semen had to go.

His success rate was inconsistent, and he knew it. But inconsistent success is a categorically different thing from failure. Watson’s queens could be inseminated, could be returned to colonies, and could lay fertilized eggs that produced workers. He had demonstrated to a skeptical beekeeping community that the thing was possible at all — and once it was possible, it became an engineering problem rather than a mystery.

He also named it. Watson deliberately chose “instrumental insemination” over the more common “artificial insemination,” arguing that nothing about the process was artificial — the semen and the queen were entirely real, and what distinguished the technique was its dependence on instruments. The term stuck, and it remains, so far as the literature suggests, unique to honey bees.

He published the work for the wider scientific world as “Controlled Mating in Honeybees” in The Quarterly Review of Biology (Vol. 3, No. 3, September 1928, pp. 377–390), and wrote extensively for the beekeeping press in the American Bee Journal, the Journal of Economic Entomology, and Bee World.

Career

Watson was an Allegany County man for most of his life. He took his A.B. from Alfred College in 1905 and his A.M. there in 1914, and eventually returned as a professor at Alfred University. In between he worked as an instructor in chemistry, as an extension apiculturist, as an assistant apiculturist with the U.S. Bureau of Entomology, and as a state apiarist — a career that moved back and forth between the laboratory, the classroom, and the bee yard.

In 1936 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded him a fellowship “for research toward the development of new and improved types of honeybees,” with a tenure of six months beginning 1 April 1936 and a further six months beginning 1 April 1937. It was recognition that his technique was not an end in itself but a tool — the first tool that made deliberate honey bee breeding conceivable.

Legacy

Watson opened the door; others widened it. Over the following two decades, W. J. Nolan, Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., Otto Mackensen, and William Roberts refined the procedure into something reliable and teachable. Laidlaw’s careful anatomical work on the queen’s valve fold — published in 1944 — explained why so many early inseminations failed and how to place semen so that it reached the spermatheca. Purpose-built instruments, CO₂ treatment to induce egg laying, and standardized technique followed.

Today instrumental insemination is the foundation of serious honey bee stock improvement worldwide. Every closed-population breeding program, every Varroa-resistance selection line, every effort to conserve a regional subspecies rests on the ability to know exactly who a queen mated with. That ability begins in a laboratory in western New York, with a man, a microscope, a pair of forceps, and a great deal of patience.

Eastern Apicultural Society 2018 – How Fortunate I Am

06 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeper education, beekeeping, education, hive inspections

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IMAG1739 Recently I have taken some time off from blogging. In fact about three weeks now. Except for the occasional scheduled posts of famous beekeepers, I have taken a bit of time for a diversion – an experience that I want to share with you here.

EAS 2017, Delaware

Last year I attended the Eastern Apicultural Society’s conference in Newark, Delaware. To say the least, I was taken by the scope and quality of the conference. At every turn I was impressed with the event. The lectures were outstanding, the speakers personable and approachable, and the venue perfect in many ways. I was literally up at 6:30am every morning, having breakfast with many of today’s notable beekeepers by 7:00am, and attending lectures and events until 8:30pm. But although I was trying my best to eke out every morsel of beekeeping goodness, I found it impossible to do it all. There was the microscopy track which was running concurrent with multiple lecture sessions, the honey show marched on in the background, the bee yard events, and the local excursions passing me by. I vowed to return this year to accomplish more.

EAS 2018 Hampton VA

This year, in Hampton, Virginia, I would take a bigger bite and try my hand with one of the other tracks taking place at the conference. But before I spill the beans, let me tell you a bit of my history. You see, I’m a beginner at this avocation called beekeeping. A mere seven years although my wife and children will attest I have been diligent in my studies. During those seven years I have purposefully tried to explore as many niches in beekeeping as possible. Some things, like honey bee removals from structures, were one and done events. I’ve entered honey shows and won blue ribbons and while somewhat rewarding I found it wasn’t my calling. I’ve kept some outyards on farms and gardens for the sole purpose of learning how to anticipate needs and scheduled visits. A couple of magazine articles were satisfying and added some financial assistance as I grew my apiary and purchased queen rearing equipment. Two years as the local association’s Secretary probably grew my knowledge base the most as I took part in responding to swarm calls, emails from beginning beekeepers, cold calling problem bee colonies, teaching classes, and surrounding myself with more knowledgeable beekeepers.

Along the path described above I checked off the boxes towards becoming a master beekeeper. And I found myself well on my way by the time I was at EAS 2017. But last year, at EAS, I saw what I wanted more than the microscopy classes or a honey show. I wanted the challenge of the EAS master beekeeping exam. Four tests – written, verbal, lab, and field. You get a pin and a certificate if you pass all four. The carrot on the stick for me was simply attempting and completing the challenge. I wanted to somehow put together my seven years of exploring and turn it into confirmation that I was well-rounded in the knowledge and skills of beekeeping. Not perfect, as my knowledge is far from complete; just a well rounded generalist.

So, this year I would give up many of the lectures and events to subject myself to mental exhaustion. Preparation started three years prior but in earnest after last year’s EAS conference. As this year’s testing approached I upped my study time and pressed my long since unpracticed study skills. Isn’t there some sort of saying about the difficulties in teaching old dogs? Well, I’m an old dog and things don’t stick as readily as they used to. Put another way, my mental hard drive has been filled for some time now with the events of life.

Just before walking into the written exam.

The EAS Master Beekeeping testing started with a meet and greet on Monday afternoon. There were about twenty-seven beekeepers there, some younger and some older, who would be taking some or all of the tests. Some were returning from a previous unsuccessful attempt. There you learn that there is no shame in re-attempting the test – in fact it’s the norm. The remainder of the room was filled with current EAS Master Beekeepers both sitting and lining the walls. The beekeepers testing were invited to tell their stories about what brought them there. The master beekeepers shared their stories as well and encouraged us to try our best, and to not be discouraged no matter the outcome. At some point the message comes through that this testing is not solely about spilling forth what we have learned but is also about the ability to persevere, to stand and deliver to our best ability, and to be open to learning during the testing. The meet and greet works to dispel the idea that one has to pass to be successful. What one should also be doing is learning from what is before them. Oh, I still wanted to pass the exams, but now I also had the goal to let this opportunity mentor me which took some of the pressure off.

The next two days and nights were filled with last-minute, self-imposed test preparation and rehearsing my one known oral test question (one verbal exam test question of four is known to the testee). At some point during this crunch time in the testing process it begins to become apparent that I am learning more about beekeeping and about myself.

L.R.Watson The written test was difficult. But too often I simply looked at the obvious yet still called it wrong. True/false, multiple choice, short answer all reasonable if only my brain would tell me whether it was White, Wilson, Watson, or Woodley. The essay questions were a delight. Time to sit down, apply structured writing, and explain what I know without rushing an answer. I walked out giving myself even odds.

The oral exam was my weakest exam performance. I had spent too much time preparing for the known question and none preparing for the unknown questions. Well, how exactly does one prepare for the unknown? Yeah, there are ways. Any response can be structured just as any good essay can be outlined. Or frame your reply as a story-teller or perhaps present your monologue along a timeline. Start rehearsing at the farmer’s market and state fair booth. I knew this and have spoken with hundreds at markets and fairs so why did I stumble and miss the mark? The testers were kind but I know I fell short.

Dr. Caron overlooking the lab exam

Day two, on to the lab/practical testing. I had prepared for this by looking at pictures. I can read but thought a last-minute night of looking at pictures would be more beneficial and less stressful. Being a catalog nerd, I had the beekeeping merchandise down cold already – no need to study there. (Still I got stumped on one item that was used in candle making.) Onward… I had reviewed the diseases, especially the photos in the MAAREC book, Honey Bees and Their Maladies which proved beneficial. The microscopes proved to be easy enough except for my over thinking the specimens. Simma’ down now and relax. Afterwards, I gave myself less than stellar but better than even odds.

The last exam is the field test. Veils required; gloves shunned. No worries right? Let me say that although I am a beekeeper I do not enjoy being stung. But the thinking is a master beekeeper works his bees in a manner that minimizes stings. Hello? Does anyone here realize that it’s August? Dearth most likely? At home, 400 miles to the south, we are well into nectar dearth and the bees are cranky. Yeah, I do go gloveless sometimes, but usually I tend to rush things and know this about myself so I use white nitrile gloves – or leather if the bees are especially defensive. None for today though. So I wait for my time to go forth into the hive with an EAS Master Beekeeper. Then I see Landi Simone walk into to the bee yard and she and Paul are assigned to me.

Now, I really like Landi’s presentations. I’ve listened to her lecture titled, ‘Reading the Frames’ multiple times. I heard her lecture at EAS 2017 as well. In my mind she wrote the book on reading the frames. But now it’s time for her to role play the part of a newbee beekeeper and I’m to play the role of the experienced beekeeper. I’m going to read the frames to Landi Simone. Like they say at Disney, “On Stage!”

We stand at the hive and I do my external assessment. Paul stands in front of the hive. Yeah, he’s testing to see what I’ll say. I tell him to move out of the path of the bees. He wants to know why. I mutter something about UPS planes on landing approach to an airport runway. Landi offers a comment to my comment which depending in whether she is in character or out of character could be good or not so good. We proceed with the exam and I open the hive after applying just the right amount of smoke. Casually I say, “In South Carolina we always inspect the underside of the inner cover to assess the presence of small hive beetles and to smash them.” I glance down and instead of SHB the queen is running across the inner cover. Really? Now, this has happened to me only twice before in seven years but there she is in all her glory. I manage to get her to run down between the frames while silently praising Priestess Melissae. I mutter again, this time something about extra credit for finding the queen on the inner cover.

We proceed in dismantling the hive and all the while Paul is simulating the chattering of an excited first timer in the hives. I am trying to be patient but he’s eating up valuable hive time and I’m thinking his every question needs a complete answer or I’ll lose credit. At some point I’m explaining varroa mites and a different voice from somewhere booms out, “Tell me what a varroa mite IS?” Am I hallucinating or is someone calling out from the building’s roof? I turn to my right and yet another master beekeeper in an orange suit has appeared out of nowhere. I’m now completely derailed from my monolog and before I can shift gears and gather my thoughts he says, “What classification?” I tell him it’s not an insect so I would venture it’s an arthropod but from there I don’t know the taxonomy. He answers his own question, “It’s a parasite!” I take up his lead and start in with Apis cerana adapting to varroa which has not happened with Apis mellifera. Everyone seems somewhat pleased and the orange suit disappears.

Down, down, down we go into the bottom hive body, well past my typical time in a hive, and I still don’t have a definitive diagnosis for this troubled hive. Then a brief interruption from Paul who, continuing the role of the new beekeeper, is now complaining of a bee sting to his arm, I scrape out the stinger with my hive tool (he really does have a sting) and minimize the event although he wants more. Another question and I mutter something about too many questions – the bees are getting restless and have issued their warning and Landi is quick to ask, “Why are they making that noise?” I tell her, “They are telling us, it’s time to leave,” as I start to close up. After closing, I finally repeat some of what I have been saying all along: spotty capped brood pattern, too few capped cells for the amount of open brood, queen has filled open cells with brood (appear well fed and healthy) as the spotty capped brood emerges which presents as mixed larval ages on the frame. Oh yeah, and backfilling. All of which is accurate but I’m only talking symptoms and have not given a diagnosis nor a prescription. Finally, I offer up a closing statement: “Possible mites causing the spotty brood due to hygienic behavior but I can not rule out inbred queen. Check the mite count immediately and treat if indicated. Re-inspect in two weeks to see if the copious open brood pattern turns into a good capped brood pattern in which case the colony has re-queened already. If not then re-queen. And cut back on the feeding before they swarm.” As we walk away I have no idea if I have satisfied their questions or correctly read the hive. I didn’t do myself any favors getting cranky towards the end. Crap shoot on this one.

As I’m walking back to my car to put everything away I realize I’m exhausted. But I have a good feeling that it’s done – all done. I survived the exams. Not that I thought there would be torture if I didn’t do well. I was simply happy to have put myself out there and given it a try.

I had to return home the next day to fulfill a family obligation. I wouldn’t be at EAS to see those in my testing class who passed receive their pins and certificates at the Friday night awards ceremony. I wish I could have. A connection is established between the test takers even though most of us had only just met two days prior – stories between us about how our families thought we were a bit off our rockers for constantly reading about bees – actually a lot about that. Also possible divorces if the books didn’t get put away, wanting to prove to the spouse we could pass, and worry that we’d have the books out for another year.

I explored my strengths and weaknesses on the drive home. I would be happy with passing two of the four exams. That would leave only two for next year. I felt like I did poorly on the orals although they were giving me praise on the way out the door. Nice guys but I knew better. By the time I passed through the middle of North Carolina I had developed a better presentation. Next year I’d make every oral presentation a story. “Let me tell you the story of almond pollination and the beekeepers that ‘got er’ done.” Yeah, that’s the model I’ll use next year.

And what was I thinking on the field exam? I jumped out of character several times. And worse of all I implied they were asking too many questions. Definitely not a good mentor tactic. I’d get dinged on that one. In fact, I thought, that’s probably an automatic fail. Next year I’ll start with coaching my mentees on how we have limited time and if they have non inspection related questions, or wanted to ask about their grandmother’s allergic reaction, we need to do that before or after the hive inspection. And next year, afterwards I’ll hold a debriefing and tell them they need to do their homework before our next session. No more sandbagging on the homework and asking questions already covered in their beginning beekeeper class. I’d suggest they review their book before we start our next hive inspection. By the time I arrived in the Midlands of South Carolina I had my game plan in order for next year.

But most importantly by the time I arrived home I realized what I had gained from the experience. I learned what a better beekeeper would have done and said, both in the oral and field exams. The tests were a time for me to both deliver my knowledge and to take some knowledge away. “Trust in the system,” I remembered one master beekeeper saying during the meet and greet session. He was right. I was satisfied with what the system taught me and recognizing my blunders. I could fix those next year.

Friday morning my phone rings and it’s my friend and mentor Dave. He’s still at EAS and the test results packets have been given out. He wants to know if I want him to pick up mine. I tell him, “sure” and after a brief verbal consent to a lady at the front desk, he opens up the packet and begins to read the results to me. When he comes to the last one his voice lights up, “Larry, you’re a master beekeeper!” Now I know Dave and he’s not a prankster, but we all make mistakes so I ask him to be sure. He re-reads the scores and says it again.

: Dave and me at EAS 2018, Hampton, VA

In retrospect, I ask myself if I indeed passed. I’m sure I did not perform at my best. As with many things, some days things just flow, and on other days Murphy’s Law is in full effect. But I came through it displaying the ability to persevere, to stand and deliver to the best of my ability, and to be open to learning during the testing. That’s what they wanted even if I didn’t hit the high notes. So, in the end, I’m not really sure how they knew I learned as well as ‘spilled forth,’ but I have to trust the system.

How fortunate I am. My results came as I was driving my son to school – his first year in a dorm room. How fortunate I was to have him see how study results in a positive outcome. And how fortunate I am to have a wife that supported my effort despite months of my preoccupation with bee books scattered about the house from the dining room to the nightstand. And how fortunate I am to have been tested by Dr. Delaney and Dr. Caron. Some years from now when I’m old and gray someone might ask me about the testing and I’ll be able to say I took the test under these distinguished entomologists. And how fortunate I am to have been able to read the frames to Landi Simone even if I didn’t do it as efficiently or accurately as she. And how fortunate I am to have (with)stood and delivered on the oral exams to three great guys, Larry, Jim, and Bill, cheering me on through a tough half hour. I am indeed a fortunate beekeeper.

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Beekeepers get ready for Spring in the Fall

05 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping, beekeeping calendar, calendar, management, sustainable

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Get ready for Spring!

Lots of articles speak to the beekeeping year beginning in August or early Fall. Yikes, that’s now!

If you harvested back in June, you’ve probably spent the summer feeding your bees through the dearth. If you held off and harvested now instead, you likely pulled less honey, but you saved yourself the cost and hassle of feeding all summer. There’s no wrong answer here — just two different paths to the same destination. And that destination is this: now is the time to build the best bees you possibly can for winter.

Get Back In There

I know it’s still hot. Get back into your hives on the next reasonably nice day and take stock. You don’t need to pull every frame and rile them up — a calmer, more targeted look will tell you what you need to know. Check for:

Capped and uncapped brood — a sign the queen is still laying well and the colony is still building population.
Pollen stores — protein for raising those all-important winter bees.
Honey stores — their fuel for the cold months ahead.

And don’t just look — heft the hive. Pick up the back of it and get a feel for the weight, then compare that feeling to what you actually saw inside. Do this enough times and you’ll start to know, just from the lift, what “heavy” feels like and what “concerningly light” feels like. That instinct will save you a lot of frame-pulling in the months to come.

The Fall Flow Is Coming

We’re on the cusp of our brief fall flow, and soon your hives will start smelling like goldenrod — a smell some new beekeepers mistake for something gone wrong. It hasn’t. That smell should put a smile on your face. It means your bees are packing away stores and raising the fat, healthy winter bees that will carry the colony through to spring.

Every hive will look a little different right now. Some of you will have more honey than the bees need. Others will be staring at frames of empty comb. Read your hive for what it’s telling you, and then — like an artist choosing tools — decide what that particular colony needs to be ready for winter: a super pulled, a frame of stores shared over from a stronger hive, or simply patience while the flow does its work.

Now Is the Time to Deal With Varroa

Most beekeepers assess and treat for varroa right after they pull honey, whether that was back in June or is happening right now. Whenever your harvest happened, don’t put this off. The bees your colony raises over the next few generations are the bees that set the stage for a successful winter — and mite loads compound fast this time of year.

Sickly bees raise sickly bees. Strong, healthy bees raise strong, healthy bees. You want the beekeeping equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger heading into January — because when it’s twenty degrees outside and the pantry is running low, that’s exactly who you want on your side.

For the First-Year Beekeepers

If this was your first season, take heart: most first-year beekeepers hit the real pinnacle of the hobby next spring. That’s when the population explodes on this year’s drawn comb, and the “problem” flips entirely — instead of hoping your bees survive, you’re racing to stay ahead of them. It’s a genuinely fun problem to have. The bees will basically be saying, “Scotty, give me all you’ve got,” and you’ll be somewhere between thrilled and panicked, saying, “Captain, I don’t think she can take much more — she’s gonna swarm!” (pardon the paraphrase.)

Back to the Task at Hand

All of that is a preview of spring’s problems. Right now, the job is building better fall and winter bees, one more time, before the long dull stretch of winter sets in. Around here, in the Midlands of South Carolina, fall days are mild enough for bees to fly — they just won’t have much reason to, because there won’t be much blooming. You’ll be the one stuck inside, wishing for spring, watching for that first red maple bloom, or leaning your ear against the side of the hive to listen for that low hum as the cluster converts honey into heat.

So get out there now. Assess your bees, and point them toward a hive packed with strong winter bees and full stores for the season ahead.

Go for it. Build better bees.

Picture: Early Spring bees. Notice no leaves on the trees yet.

What the Hive Remembers and What You Don’t

04 Friday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping seasons, biography, outyards, South Carolina

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No bee that swarmed in June is alive by the time you write up the year in October. A worker bee in summer lasts five or six weeks; even the queen, who can live for years, wasn’t there for the swarm herself in any way you could call witnessing — she was carried along inside the cluster, a follower rather than observer. By the time you’re telling the story of that swarm at your bee club, every single participant except you has died of old age. The parent colony that “remembers” the swarm, if anything does, is not made up of any bees who were there.

And yet the colony does, in its own way, keep a record. Walk up to an established colony and you can read its recent history off the comb itself: the ivory new wax they built out in a good flow, the darker brood comb worked over years, the clean, glassy cells where they laid up stores against a winter that already happened. A forager who dies today has already passed her waggle-dance directions to the next generation of foragers before she goes. None of it lives in any single bee’s memory, because no bee has a memory that outlasts the season — the memory lives in the structure, in wax and pheromone and behavior encoded so thoroughly into the colony’s habits that the colony can lose every bee that was present for an event and keep behaving as though it remembers. A superorganism doesn’t reminisce. It just keeps doing what worked, materially, in comb, whether or not anyone in it recalls why.

You, on the other hand, remember the way people do — which is to say, badly, and only with effort. Everything true of human memory in general is true of a beekeeper’s memory of the bee yard in particular. The swarm you caught off the fence post gets, with each retelling, a little larger, a little higher up, a little more dramatic in the catching — the same mechanism by which the fish gets bigger, and the mountain gets steeper in every story anyone tells twice. You’re not lying. You’re doing what memory does by default, which is treat every recollection as a working draft rather than a locked file, rewritten slightly each time it’s pulled back out. A memory of a hive inspection is really a memory of the last time you told someone about the hive inspection — a copy of a copy — and if you never tell it, never write it, never pull it back out at all, it doesn’t sit in a drawer waiting. It fades, the way whole chapters of a life fade once there’s no one left to tell them to.

This is, it turns out, exactly the problem beekeeping used to solve for itself without anyone framing it that way. Before extension offices and YouTube and the online forums, what a person knew about bees came from an old-timer down the road who’d learned it from someone before them, told and retold at the hive itself — swarm season stories, wintering stories, the year the mites took half the county’s hives, all reinforced by repetition the way any oral tradition is reinforced, right down to reviewing each day’s words and deeds morning and evening before committing to memory rather than to paper. A bee yard, if you let it, works like a memory palace in the most literal sense — walk a familiar place in a fixed order, hanging each thing you need to remember on a particular snapshot or landmark along the way, and that is uncannily close to what a beekeeper already does without training for it, walking from hive to hive down the row, each box calling up what happened there last time you stood in front of it. The mentor who walks the row with a newer beekeeper, telling the story of hive four’s failed requeening as they pass it, is making memory a social, repeated, walked-through act rather than a private, one-time filing.

That kind of transmission is exactly what’s gotten thinner as beekeeping, like most things, has scattered into people who don’t share a bee yard with anyone who knew them starting out. A hive journal on an app can hold the facts a person used to only get by standing at the boxes with someone older who’d tell it to them again next spring, and it can hold them accurately, in a way retelling does not. But a journal can’t do the other job the old method did almost by accident, which is keep the knowledge exercised. A fact that only exists in a file, never pulled back out and walked through, is not so different from a memory nobody tells anymore — technically preserved, functionally dissolving, waiting in a dusty corner for a query nobody’s likely to run.

Which leaves the harder question sitting underneath all the record-keeping: if you took away everything you remember — the swarm, the bad mite year, the queen you watched get balled and killed by her own bees for reasons you never fully worked out — would you still be the same beekeeper? The colony wouldn’t blink at losing its history this way; it isn’t carrying one in the sense you are, and it replaces every witness to its own past on a five-week cycle without missing a step. You don’t get that deal. Whatever you are as a beekeeper is bound up, more than you’d like to admit under examination, in a set of reconstructed, embellished, quietly fading recollections of boxes that are mostly gone now, repainted, requeened, or dead-out and cleaned up years ago. The hive keeps its continuity in wax, which doesn’t lie but also doesn’t care. You keep yours in story, which cares a great deal and gets it wrong more often than the confidence in your own telling would ever let you suspect.

Mentoring Cold Calls

03 Thursday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping

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Excerpt from Journeyman to Master Beekeeper Guidebook – Revised 2026

Mentor as Much as Possible

In anticipation of, and readying yourself for progression within the Master Beekeeper Program, make yourself available to new beekeepers, especially when something has gone wrong in their hives. These “cold calls” are as valuable to you as they are to the beekeeper you’re helping. Each visit is a chance to sharpen your own hive inspection routine, sharpen your assessment and diagnostic instincts, and get real practice reading a colony under conditions you don’t control — the same unpredictability you’ll face in your own advanced field exams. There’s no better rehearsal for that exam than doing it for real, again and again, on hives you didn’t choose and problems you didn’t stage.

Treat every mentoring visit as if you were delivering your field exam. Walk the site, inspect the hive, and reach your diagnosis and recommendations exactly as you would under evaluation — no shortcuts because it’s “just a mentoring call.” Then, after each visit, debrief yourself: How was your presentation? Did you explain your reasoning in a way the new beekeeper could follow and learn from? How confident were you in your read of the colony’s condition, and did your plan of action hold up? Where did you hesitate, second-guess yourself, or miss something you caught only in hindsight?

Over time, this repetition is what turns a competent inspection into a practiced one. Use every mentoring visit to refine your full routine end to end — site selection, exterior assessment, frame-by-frame reading, and the summary, diagnosis, and recommendations you deliver at the end — until it becomes second nature. The more new beekeepers you mentor, the more field-ready you become yourself.

The Hive You Never Owned

02 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in bee health, honey bee losses, sustainable

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Every beekeeper eventually develops the habit, whether or not they’d call it a philosophy. You walk out to the bee yard in October, look at the strongest hive you’ve got, heavy with stores and roaring with bees, and some part of you notes — almost without meaning to — that this might not be what you find in March. You don’t dwell on it. You just note it, the way you note weather, and keep working.

It’s tempting to think the point of noticing in advance is to make the loss hurt less when it arrives. Test that theory on an actual dead-out. Pry the lid off a hive in March that you’d half-braced yourself for since October, and see how much the bracing bought you. You’ll still crouch there running your hive tool along cold comb, still feel the specific disappointment of a colony that made it through the hard part of winter and then didn’t, in the last stretch, for no reason you can pin down. Bracing for it doesn’t appear to be an anesthetic. If it promised to numb you in advance, it’s a promise the bee yard won’t let it keep.

I think the habit is doing something else. Not dulling the grief, but correcting a claim you’d started making without noticing you were making it.

Here’s the claim: that the hive is yours. Not “yours” in the sense of the box you built, painted, and hauled into the field — that part is real enough. Yours in the deeper sense, the sense where you’d be owed an explanation if it failed. But you didn’t make the bees, and you don’t run the colony. You built them a structure to live in, learned to read what they were doing, fed them when the flow was thin, treated for mites, wrapped the boxes for winter — and then, mostly, got out of the way. A beekeeper is closer to a landlord than an owner, and not even a very powerful landlord. The colony can supersede its queen without asking you. It can abscond in June for reasons you’ll spend all summer failing to reconstruct. It can thrive under your care for three years and then, in one bad week of mites you caught too late, be gone. None of that was ever fully within your control, however carefully you kept the record cards.

Every beekeeper who’s kept bees long enough arrives at some version of the same sentence, even if they’ve never read a word of philosophy: I didn’t lose the hive. I had it for a while, and now I don’t. The distinction sounds like a word game until you’ve actually stood over the boxes both ways — once telling yourself something was taken from you, once telling yourself a tenancy simply ended — and noticed that the second version is the one you can actually do something with. You can clean the woodenware. You can figure out, honestly, what you’d change. You can requeen the neighboring hive that’s still alive and needs you now, this week, more than the dead one needs your grief. The first version mostly just generates blame — at the mites, the weather, your own late feeding — with nowhere useful to send it.

None of this is a claim that the loss shouldn’t hurt, or that it’s a failure of technique or temperament if it does. A good beekeeper who loses a strong colony feels it, the same as a good landlord feels it when a good tenant moves out unexpectedly. What changes isn’t the feeling. It’s whether you also carry the second injury underneath it — the sense that the world owed you a colony that would live, and reneged. Working bees for any length of time seems to eventually wear that second layer off a person, whether they wanted it to or not.

The hive in the yard right now, working the goldenrod as this gets written, is held on the same terms every hive before it was held on. That was true last October and it’ll be true again this one. Nothing about tending it well changes the terms of the lease. It just means you’ll have done right by the tenant while it was here.

SC Midlands Beekeeping Calendar for September

01 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by Beekeeping365 in beekeeping, beekeeping calendar, calendar, management, South Carolina

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Photo credit: https://chriscondello.wordpress.com

As always, All beekeeping is local. Here’s my offering for the beekeeping calendar for the South Carolina Midlands for the month of September: Plan on checks twice this month but do not work unless necessary to prevent triggering robbing.

September weather usually continues to be hot in the Midlands. Don’t expect extended cool weather until mid-October. In the meantime, slightly reduced temperatures may open up some alternative Varroa treatment options.

The main management issue this month is a continuation of last month’s focus on pest management. Pests are growing in numbers while bee populations are typically falling in response to a reduction in available nectar. Varroa, Small Hive Beetles, Yellow Jackets, and other pests can overwhelm a hive leading to decline. A weakened hive then becomes vulnerable to robbing and wax moths. The beekeeper must get ahead of the pests, as responding after a problem is observed may be too late.

1) Continue to monitor and control pests – Varroa, Small Hive Beetles, and Yellow Jackets. If you have not yet treated for Varroa now is the time to assess and act accordingly.

2) This year’s hive beetle population seems to be greater than last year’s. I suspect this is due to last year’s warm winter, increased rainfall this spring and summer, and overall supportive weather. Place traps or Swiffer pads in hives before you notice a problem. Check traps weekly and replenish or replace as needed.

3) Yellow Jacket traps with lure can be placed around the apiary. There are several low cost or no cost do-it-yourself trap plans online. If you see yellow jackets attempting to breach security at the hive entrance observe how your bees handle the situation. A strong hive will eject the intruder in short order. Keep hives strong by adjusting hive internal volume to bee population. Poor Man’s Yellow Jacket trap.

4) Depending on your location, some of these plants may have already bloomed. Rose of Sharon, Magnolia, Crepe myrtle, Sunflower, White Boneset, and Sweet Autumn Clematis. Cotton and Soybean is blooming east of the Midlands. Goldenrod and Asters begin to make their appearance this month. We sometimes get a short fall nectar flow. If we get a fall nectar flow you’ll notice a renewed vigor on the landing board and lots of pollen entering the hive. The smelly sock odor of goldenrod will be noted when you open the hive and sometimes when walking through the apiary.

5) Typically, no local Midlands queens are available in September. If you need a queen you’ll probably have to order one from out of state or buy one from a vendor that has ordered from out of state.

6) It’s crunch time to combine weak hives with strong hives. There is a saying, “Take your losses in the Fall.” Experienced beekeepers combine their weak hives with stronger hives knowing they can split next spring and nothing is lost. (Assess and make sure the weak hive is not weak due to disease before combining.) Better to strengthen a strong hive than allow the weak hive to perish. Use the newspaper method between boxes with slits to allow the bees to become accustomed to each other. Remove the weaker queen prior to combining. Note: Again, assess and make sure the weak hive is not weak due to disease before combining.

7) Use entrance reducers as appropriate. Many colonies have been bringing their populations down over the course of dearth period. Adjust their entrances accordingly. Addition of an upper entrance such as a notched inner cover is advisable prior to entering colder weather to allow for ventilation (cover with screen if robbing pressure is a concern).

8) Increase feeding this month to stimulate the brood rearing of nurse bees which will raise your winter bees. You may use a 1:1 mix during this time but nothing thinner. Coupled with autumn pollen flow this can give a boost to improving the quality of your winter bees. Some beekeepers begin the use of 2:1 this month. The decision is yours based on your assessment of your hives, their stores, and whether you think we’ll get cooler weather sooner rather than later.

9) Begin to tip colonies forward from the rear to assess their weight. Notice the number of frames of honey stores inside so that you can compare what you are feeling with what is actually inside. You will need this assessment skill during winter when you shouldn’t open the hives.

10) If not yet done, make efforts to bring all hives with extra supers down to overwintering configuration. For ten frame hives that usually means one deep and one medium OR three mediums. If you left an extra super on to feed during dearth, now is the time to remove it and any queen excluder used. If you have eight frame hives do the math to accomplish the same internal volume.

11) The occasional late swarm caught this time of year can be housed briefly in a box and fed. They will pull out some nice comb but anticipate combining them after a short while with an established colony.

12) Prepare your honey and wax entries for the South Carolina State Fair. Helpful hints can be found here.

13) Attend your local association’s monthly meeting. Volunteer to educate the public on the importance of honey bees by signing up to work a shift at the upcoming SC State Fair booth.

14) It’s September and time to start preparing for autumn! Enjoy the following resources as you prepare your colonies:
Fall Management by Rusty Burlew at Honey Bee Suite

Autumn Management In The Southeast U.S. by David MacFawn

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John S. Harbison (1826–1912)

Timeline

Frontier stock

Gold fever, then a nursery

Bringing bees to California

The section honey box and the Harbison hive

San Diego and “King of the Beekeepers”

Family and later life

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William Frank Longgood (1917–2000)

Journalism career

Books

Beekeeping and The Queen Must Die

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Dr. Lloyd Raymond Watson (1876–1948)

The problem he solved

The breakthrough

Career

Legacy

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Get Back In There

The Fall Flow Is Coming

Now Is the Time to Deal With Varroa

For the First-Year Beekeepers

Back to the Task at Hand

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