Links below to get his books on Queen Rearing.

Born October 13th 1871, Tampico, Illinois

Died: October 30th 1926, Vincennes, Indiana

Jay Smith was an active writer in the bee journals of his day and wrote two of the most loved and used of the queen rearing books still being used and followed by many today. He is most famous for his other book, Queen Rearing Simplified, but his second book, Better Queens, written 25 years later is the culmination of his work in queen rearing.

From Michael Bush’s website where both of Mr. Smith’s books may be read in their entirety:

“I wanted this book available because I think Jay Smith was one of the great beekeepers of all time and one of the great queen breeders of all time. There are many queen breeding books by scientists or small-scale breeders, but this is by a beekeeper who raised thousands of queens every year. I think that is much more applicable to practical queen rearing. It is also a method that does not require grafting, good for those of us who can’t see well enough to graft, and does not require the purchase of special equipment, good for those of us lacking in the funds to buy one of the graftless systems on the market.” Michael Bush

Biography and Contributions to Beekeeping
Born in Tampico, Illinois, Jay Smith was one of the most skilled queen breeders in American history. His books Queen Rearing Simplified (1923) and Better Queens (1949) set out practical methods, including rearing queens in strong colonies and the Jay Smith cell-starter. Queen breeders still study his methods today.

Better Queens (1949) and Queen Rearing Simplified include photos of his methods and equipment. Scanned copies are on the Internet Archive (archive.org). Michael Bush also hosts a transcription of Better Queens on his website, bushfarms.com.

Old bee journal archives. Jay Smith, who worked out of Vincennes, Indiana, wrote often for Gleanings in Bee Culture and the American Bee Journal from the 1910s to the 1940s.

Click on photos below to read the books.

From the Find a Grave Website:

Jay J. “The Bee King” Smith (1877-1926) – Find A Grave Memorial

Some years ago, after receiving my Journeyman Beekeeper certificate, I was asked to teach a module at my local beekeeping association’s annual beginner’s class. Over the years, I have continued to teach at least one module most years. Now, some years later I find that I have, over the years, taught most of the topics.

Here we have extracted the information from the PowerPoints, program agendas, and verified by online research. Chapters, each about three pages, make this a short and concise study guide.

The mock test provided here is an opportunity to test your knowledge and immediately grade yourself with the answer key following each section of the test. Rationale and references are provided for deeper dives into the material.

You may find an error(s). For that reason and towards that end, I have provided references to take you forward in your own research.

If you find it of some value let me know. If you find it a liability you can let me know that too.

Read it. Keep it. Share it.

Certified_Beekeeper_Study_Guide_Ver3.0.pdf

Certified Beekeeper Test Bank – Combined.pdf

Why the Path from Beginner to Master Craftsman Matters
 
Anyone can buy a package of bees, set up a hive, and call themselves a beekeeper. The bees will usually forgive a great deal. But there is a difference between keeping bees and understanding them, and that difference is what the progression from beginning beekeeper to certified, journeyman, master, and finally master craftsman exists to close. It is a ladder worth climbing, for the climber and for the whole craft.

Why structure matters
Beekeeping is learned in fragments. A mentor shows you one way to read a frame of brood. A YouTube video contradicts it. A neighbor swears by a treatment schedule that a book calls obsolete. Without a framework, new beekeepers collect opinions rather than knowledge, and the gaps stay hidden until a colony pays for them.

A tiered program replaces that patchwork with a map. The certified level establishes the fundamentals: biology, equipment, seasonal management, pests, diseases, and safe handling. These are the things every beekeeper should know before their mistakes affect other people’s colonies. Nobody keeps bees in a vacuum, and a colony that crashes with mites or American foulbrood can carry the consequences into every apiary within flight range. The first rung is a duty to your neighbors as much as an achievement.

Testing what you think you know
The most underrated value of certification is the examination itself. Every beekeeper believes they understand more than they do. Studying for a test exposes the places where confidence outran knowledge: the swarm-cell question you answered by habit rather than reason, the disease you could name but not distinguish. A practical assessment is even less forgiving than a written one, because bees do not care what you memorized. A program that makes you demonstrate skill, rather than merely claim it, builds the humility that good husbandry depends on.

Journeyman: where practice becomes judgment
The journeyman stage is where the program stops asking what you know and starts asking what you can do consistently. Knowledge of queen rearing, colony assessment, and management across a full season has to show up in the field, year after year. This is also where beekeepers begin to teach. Explaining a concept to a beginner reveals whether you truly hold it. Through the journeyman stage, the beekeeper moves from consumer of knowledge to contributor, which marks the difference between a hobbyist and a practitioner.

Master: depth, breadth, and service
The Master Beekeeper level demands both depth and breadth. It rewards the beekeeper who has gone beyond the colony in front of them to study honey bee science, pollination, products, regulations, and the larger ecology in which bees live. Mastery here is not about owning the most hives. It is the ability to diagnose, to reason from first principles when a situation matches no checklist, and to give sound advice when colonies are failing.

In an era of honey bee decline, pesticide pressure, and widespread misinformation, trained, credentialed beekeepers function as a stabilizing force. They are the people local associations can rely on, the ones who staff the educational offerings, bring up and mentor Journeymen, and come through when the Department of Agriculture asks for input. A Master Beekeeper credential tells the public that someone has been tested and can be trusted. That kind of trust is a form of public infrastructure.

Master Craftsman: the craft turned outward
The final step differs in kind rather than degree. Master Craftsman recognition traditionally goes to those who have added something to the craft itself: original research, teaching at scale, authorship, program leadership, or sustained contribution to the beekeeping community. If the earlier levels ask how well you keep bees, this level asks what you have given back to the craft.

That is the oldest idea in any craft tradition: the apprentice receives, the journeyman practices, the master refines, and the master craftsman passes the work forward. Each generation of beekeepers stands on those who documented, tested, and taught before them. The craftsman repays that debt.

The case for beginning now
The strongest argument for starting the journey is that the path itself produces the benefits, long before any title arrives. Studying makes you a better observer. Observing makes you a more patient manager. Mentoring makes you a clearer thinker. Community involvement connects you to people who will help when a colony fails in February. And the habit of continuing education keeps you current in a field where best practices change with every new pest, pathogen, and research finding.

There is also a quieter reward. Bees are an endless teacher, and the beekeeper who commits to a structured path gets far more out of every season. A frame of brood becomes a text to be read, and a failed colony becomes data rather than just grief.

The ladder is long, and no one is required to climb all of it. But the beekeeper who begins, who earns the first certification and keeps asking what the next rung demands, will keep better bees, serve their community more fully, and find in the work what every genuine craft offers: a lifetime of learning that never runs out.

Every beekeeper eventually arrives at the same irritating discovery: the fanciest lure on the market gets outperformed by an old, unwashed hive body that you didn’t want to clean. It isn’t superstition. Scout bees house-hunting for swarm are running a chemical audit, and an old brood comb has already passed it. Years of larvae, cocoon silk, propolis, and beeswax leave behind a residue of fatty acids and aromatic compounds that read, to a bee’s antennae, as “colony here, safely, for a long time.” A fresh bait box with a dab of lemongrass oil is a hopeful advertisement. An old hive full of drawn comb is a track record. That your old, blowtorch-scheduled hive keeps getting occupied before you can sterilize it isn’t bad luck so much as the bees reading the listing correctly.

The chemistry underneath both the folk methods and the modern lures traces back to one gland: the Nasonov gland, tucked at the tip of a worker’s abdomen. When a forager finds something worth telling the colony about — a good forage patch, or a promising cavity for a swarm to move into — she fans this pheromone to draw her sisters in. Its main components are citral (a mix of geranial and neral), plus geraniol and small amounts of nerolic and geranic acid — a lemony, slightly rosy blend. That’s precisely why lemongrass oil, rich in citral and geraniol, works as well as it does: it’s not masking the bees’ own signal, it’s counterfeiting it convincingly enough that scouts treat the box as pre-vetted by one of their own. Lemongrass-based lures show up across the literature and the hobbyist world alike, from Peru to Europe, to the swarm-trapping forums, and it’s the active ingredient in most commercial lures.

The the Middle East, tradition has a longer paper trail than most. Melissa officinalis — lemon balm — carries a name that is itself a fossil of this practice: “melissophyllon,” bee-leaf, a term used by classical writers describing beekeepers rubbing the herb inside empty skeps to draw swarms in, a habit that persisted through Ottoman and Persian beekeeping into more recent village practice. Its citronellal and geraniol content puts it in the same chemical family as lemongrass, which is presumably why it works by the same mechanism. Firing the traps and letting the oils soak into porous clay or willow is a reasonable way to make a short-lived scent last through a whole scouting season, since the wood or clay becomes a slow-release reservoir rather than a one-time spritz.

In Japan, the orchid genus Cymbidium includes species Cymbidium floribundum that attracts the Japanese honey bee by producing 3-hydroxyoctanoic acid and 10-hydroxy-(E)-2-decenoic acid. That second compound, 10-HDA, is the single most abundant component of queen mandibular pheromone: it’s part of the chemical signature a colony uses to recognize “queen present, all is well.” The orchid isn’t quite mimicking a swarm-aggregation call so much as borrowing a fragment of the queen’s own scent to get workers to visit.

Every lure, from a $30 can of commercial swarm attractant, to a Peruvian handful of lemongrass, to your own home recipe, is trying to counterfeit the one thing you can’t fake — a cavity that has already proven itself. The bees are not swayed by marketing. They’re swayed by evidence, and your old comb has more of it than anything you can buy.

A Management Plan for the South Carolina Midlands

Seasonal Beekeeping in the Midlands – A Management Plan for the South Carolina Midlands

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.

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.

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.

Walk into any bee club meeting and you’ll find people forty years into it still showing up on a Tuesday night to hear a talk on splits, still taking notes, still asking questions in the parking lot afterward. Nobody makes them go. They go because the bees don’t care how long you’ve kept them — a colony can still surprise you in your fortieth season the same as your first. The moment you decide you already know enough is the moment you stop being able to keep bees well.

1. Decide you’re in it for good

Some people keep bees for a summer and quit. Others keep the same three hives the same way for thirty years and never get any better at it — same mite treatment on the same schedule, same reaction every time something goes wrong, no real curiosity about why. The beekeepers worth learning from are the ones who never stopped approaching every season as a new thing to study: a new queen line, a new way of reading a frame, a new theory about why that one hive always builds up faster than the others. Nobody expects a first-year beekeeper to run a operation cleanly. What a good mentor actually wants to see is someone still trying to get better at it — not a finished beekeeper, just one who’s still growing.

2. It’s not the hours in the beeyard, it’s what you’re paying attention to

You can suit up every weekend for ten years and still not really know your bees, if all you’re doing is popping the lid, glancing at a couple of frames, and closing it back up. Time in the apiary isn’t the same as learning. The beekeepers who actually get good are the ones who inspect like they’re trying to be wrong about something — checking the colony that’s behaving strangely instead of just admiring the one that’s doing great, pulling the brood frame to actually count eggs instead of assuming the queen’s fine because bees are flying. A stack of inspection notes doesn’t make you experienced. Notes on what confused you and what you figured out do.

3. Don’t be afraid to lose a hive.

Every real beekeeping lesson costs a hive at some point — the one you let requeen itself, instead of buying a queen, because you wanted to see if it would work, the one you went into without gloves because you wanted to actually feel what was happening instead of just avoiding getting stung, the one you tried overwintering in a single deep against everyone’s advice because you wanted to know for yourself. Most beginners never run these experiments, because they’re afraid of opening a dead-out in spring and having the club’s old-timers say, “I told you so.” But the beekeepers who actually learn something are the ones willing to be wrong — to lose the hive, own it, and be able to explain exactly why it happened. A dead colony teaches you more than a dozen healthy ones that did exactly what the manual said they would.

This piece expands on “Everything Starts with a Tasty Meal” by sassafrasbeefarm (Beekeeping365, August 1, 2021). The original essay makes a simple, argument: hive pests like Small Hive Beetles, wax moths, and yellow jackets can’t reproduce until they eat, so a beekeeper’s best defense is cutting off their meal. What follows is that argument traced down into the actual biology, chemistry, and behavioral ecology that back it up — and a couple of places where the research complicates the picture in interesting ways.

The Original Insight

The essay’s logic runs like this: Abraham Maslow argued that humans secure basic needs — food and safety — before pursuing anything more sophisticated. Other animals, lacking our behavioral flexibility, run a cruder version of the same program: an instinctual sequence that starts with food and ends with reproduction. Small Hive Beetles, wax moths, and yellow jackets are, in this framing, simply hungry opportunists trying to eat and then breed. A beekeeper’s job is to jam the machinery between those two steps — deny the meal, and the pest never reaches the reproduction stage. The essay then sketches two tactics: starve the pests (entrance reducers, right-sized equipment, careful feeding practices) and trick them (bait traps that exploit hunger without luring in honey bees).
It’s a good insight. It also turns out to be a fairly accurate compression of several decades of chemical ecology and behavioral research — with a few added wrinkles that make it even more useful.

Fact-Checking the Starting Point: Maslow’s Hierarchy

Worth pausing on the source material itself. Maslow’s hierarchy comes from a single 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” published in Psychological Review — not a book, not a series of studies, a single theoretical article. Two details are commonly missed. First, Maslow never drew a pyramid; the triangular diagram everyone pictures was a later addition by management writers popularizing the idea, not something in the original text. Second, the strict “you must fully satisfy one level before the next kicks in” reading of the theory doesn’t hold up well empirically — later cross-cultural survey work (Tay & Diener, 2011) found people pursue safety, belonging, and growth needs in parallel, not in a rigid queue, and some psychologists have flagged the hierarchy as more of a compelling narrative than a well-tested model of human behavior.

None of that sinks the beekeeping essay’s use of it, though — if anything it sharpens the analogy. Maslow’s theory is at its weakest describing humans, who really do juggle multiple motivations simultaneously. It’s a much better fit for an insect, which has neither the neural hardware nor the behavioral repertoire to do anything but respond to its most pressing physiological state. A hungry beetle is not deciding whether to prioritize food or selfactualization. For a simple nervous system, “deficit needs dominate behavior until resolved” isn’t a debatable psychological theory — it’s close to a complete description of how the animal operates.

Instinct’s Own Logic: Proximate Drives, Ultimate Ends

Biology has its own, more precise version of the essay’s food-thenreproduction chain, developed decades before anyone tried to apply Maslow to bugs. The ethologist Niko Tinbergen (1963) proposed that any animal behavior can be explained on two separate levels: the proximate cause (what mechanism triggers the behavior right now — a hormone, a smell, a hunger signal) and the ultimate cause (why that mechanism was favored by evolution — because it improves reproductive success). A beetle following an odor plume toward a beehive isn’t proximately “trying to reproduce” — it’s proximately responding to an olfactory cue that smells like food. But the reason that response exists at all, baked into the beetle’s nervous system by natural selection, is that ancestors who found food reliably out-reproduced ones who didn’t. Food-seeking is the proximate mechanism; reproduction is the ultimate function it serves.

This matters for pest management because it tells you where the chain is interruptible. You can’t argue a beetle out of its hunger, but you can jam the proximate mechanism — block the smell, remove the food, or disrupt access — and the ultimate goal simply never gets reached. This is also why Small Hive Beetles, wax moths, and yellow jackets are such persistent, fastreproducing opportunists in the first place: all three are classic examples of what ecologists call an opportunistic, “r-selected” life history (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967) — organisms built to find a rich, short-lived resource patch and convert it into as many offspring as possible before the patch disappears or gets defended. A beehive bursting with pollen, honey, and brood is about as rich a patch as an opportunist could hope to find.

Case File 1: The Small Hive Beetle’s Hijacked Alarm Bell

The Small Hive Beetle (Aethina tumida) is the clearest illustration of the essay’s whole thesis, and the actual chemistry behind it is stranger than the essay lets on.

Beetles don’t find hives by luck. They home in on a specific odor blend, and the dominant component of that blend is isopentyl acetate — the honey bee’s own alarm pheromone (Torto et al., 2007, PNAS). Worse, the beetles carry a yeast, Kodamaea ohmeri, that colonizes fermenting pollen and hive debris and, as it grows, produces a volatile bouquet that mimics that same alarm pheromone (Benda et al., 2008, Journal of Apicultural Research). In chemical-ecology terms, this is a kairomone: a signal that evolved for one purpose (bees warning each other of danger) but that a second species has hijacked to its own advantage (beetles using it as a dinner bell). The result is a nasty feedback loop — a few beetles ferment some pollen, the yeast smell draws in more beetles, and a hive with “few beetles” can suddenly host hundreds.

This is precisely the mechanism the original essay gestures at when it asks whether a feeding program “announces food availability with fragrant oils.” Fermenting syrup, spilled feed, and exposed comb all produce the same class of volatile organic compounds that this whole detection system is built to find. You’re not just feeding bees; you’re broadcasting.

The essay’s “deny them food” strategy also holds up well at the mechanical level. Colonies with reduced or modified entrances host measurably fewer adult beetles than colonies with open entrances (Ellis et al., 2002a, cited in Neumann, Pettis & Schäfer, 2016) — entrance reducers aren’t just folklore, they’re a documented barrier to invasion. But the research adds a genuine complication to the simple “starve them out” model: strong, healthy, foodrich colonies actually attract more beetles than weak ones, precisely because they have more to offer (Neumann, Pettis & Schäfer, 2016, Apidologie). What determines the outcome isn’t food availability alone — it’s whether the colony has enough workers, relative to the amount of comb it’s trying to guard, to intercept the beetles once they arrive. Weak or queenless colonies with a low bee-to-comb ratio are dramatically more vulnerable to serious SHB damage than strong ones, even when the strong ones host more total beetles (Annand, 2011, and Mustafa et al., 2014, both cited in Neumann et al., 2016). This is the scientific basis for “hive rightsizing”: matching the number of boxes and frames to the actual size of the colony isn’t about tidiness, it’s about keeping the ratio of guards to guarded comb high enough that food denial can actually be enforced.
And when bees do catch a beetle, the “deny them food” strategy turns out to be under active evolutionary counterattack. Honey bees can’t easily kill a Small Hive Beetle outright — its shell deflects stings and bites — so instead they wall it into a small propolis cell and post guards, sometimes for months (Ellis, Pirk, Hepburn, Kastberger & Elzen, 2002, Naturwissenschaften). By the essay’s logic, an imprisoned, foodless beetle should starve. Most don’t. Researchers found that trapped beetles solicit food from their guards through the same begging behavior honey bee larvae use, and the guard bees respond by feeding them protein-rich glandular secretions via trophallaxis — mouth-to-mouth feeding (Ottati et al., 2021, Journal of Experimental Biology, titled, fittingly, “Prisoners receive food fit for a queen”). The beetle isn’t just hungry; it has evolved a way to trick the bees into feeding it inside its own prison cell. It’s a small but vivid example of the arms race underneath the essay’s tidy metaphor — every time bees close off one route to food, some pests evolve a workaround, and beekeeping pest management is really an ongoing skirmish, not a single move that ends the game.

Case File 2: The Wax Moth’s Cruel Paradox

Wax moths (Galleria mellonella, the greater wax moth, and its smaller relative Achroa grisella) run a similar food-to-reproduction script, but with a twist that refines the essay’s “deny them food” rule even further.

Female wax moths lay eggs in hive cracks and crevices, and the larvae tunnel through comb eating not the clean wax itself but the protein residues embedded in it — pollen, cocoon silk, and brood-cell debris left behind by developing bees. A moth can’t complete development on pure, never-used wax; it needs that protein signature of an active or recently active brood nest. Here’s the paradox: research indicates female wax moths often prefer to oviposit in strong, healthy colonies, because that’s where the richest concentration of brood-associated protein is. Yet it’s the weak colonies that suffer the worst wax moth damage — not because moths target them, but because a small, understaffed workforce can’t patrol enough comb surface to find and remove eggs and young larvae before they tunnel in and become unreachable. It’s the same lesson as the Small Hive Beetle case, arrived at independently: food availability draws the pest, but colony strength — not food denial per se — determines whether the pest actually gets to complete its life cycle.

On the “trick them” side of the essay’s strategy, researchers have made real progress identifying the wax moth’s sex pheromone components (compounds including nonanal, decanal, and undecanal show up across several studies, with the exact blend ratio varying somewhat by moth population), and male moths have been shown to fine-tune their own pheromone release in response to the wingbeat frequency of nearby females — an acoustic-chemical feedback loop layered on top of the basic scent signal. Pheromone-baited traps built on this research are useful for monitoring wax moth populations in stored equipment, though they’ve proven less reliable as a stand-alone in-hive control method — which is exactly why the standard beekeeping advice is still to keep colonies strong and to freeze or tightly store unused drawn comb, denying the moth’s larvae both the workforce-patrolled hive and any long-term undefended stash of protein-laced wax to grow in.

Case File 3: Yellow Jackets and the Calendar of Hunger

Yellow jackets (mostly Vespula species) make the essay’s dearth-season observation almost self-explanatory once you look at their annual colony cycle. A single mated queen founds a nest in spring and spends early summer as the sole forager, hunting insects and other protein to feed her first larvae. Those larvae, in turn, secrete a sugary substance that they exchange with adult workers for masticated protein — a mutual trophallaxis arrangement that fuels the colony’s rapid summer growth. Through midsummer, colony demand is protein-heavy, which is why wasps are aggressively hunting live prey and carrion in that window.

By late summer, the calculus flips. The colony begins producing new queens and males instead of more workers, larval production drops off, and with it the supply of larval sugar secretions that adult workers depend on. A colony full of adult wasps that suddenly has far less of its usual sugar source has to go looking elsewhere — right at the moment natural nectar sources are also drying up. That collision is precisely the “food dearth” window the original essay flags, and it explains why yellow jacket pressure at hive entrances and feeders spikes hardest in exactly the weeks beekeepers most need their colonies left alone.

The essay’s “trick them without tricking your bees” strategy also has a welldocumented chemical basis. Heptyl butyrate is a synthetic attractant that draws several common pestiferous Vespula species into traps with reasonable species-selectivity, while doing essentially nothing to attract honey bees (Reierson, Rust & Vetter and related field trials). Large-scale trapping studies have shown that heptyl-butyrate-baited or protein-baited traps can measurably suppress local yellow jacket forager numbers for weeks at a stretch, though researchers are consistently clear that trapping alone rarely eliminates a well-established population — it reduces pressure rather than solving the problem outright, which is a useful caveat to add to the essay’s otherwise tidy trapping advice.

The Common Thread: Three Links in One Chain

Laid side by side, the three case studies point to the same refinement of the essay’s core claim. “If they don’t eat, they don’t reproduce” is true, but a pest actually has to clear three separate hurdles to get there, and each one is a different point of intervention:

Locate the food. This step is chemical, not behavioral — beetles follow hijacked alarm pheromone, moths follow protein-scented comb, wasps follow protein and (in season) carbohydrate cues. Anything that adds fragrant, fermenting, or spilled food odor to an apiary — including well-meaning feeding practices — recruits pests at this stage before a beekeeper even knows they’re there.

Get access to it. This is where physical exclusion works: entrance reducers, robbing screens, screened bottom boards, and right-sized equipment don’t remove the food, they just narrow the number of doors a pest can use to reach it, concentrating the colony’s limited guard force where it can actually do its job.

Complete development undisturbed. This is the step the SHB and wax moth research keeps landing on: a hungry pest that finds food and gets inside still has to survive long enough, uninterrupted enough, to finish its life cycle — and that survival window is set almost entirely by whether the colony has enough workers, relative to the space it’s defending, to keep finding and evicting it.
The essay’s two tactics — starving pests and baiting them — map neatly onto hurdles one and two. The bee-to-comb ratio research reviewed above adds a third lever the essay doesn’t explicitly name but clearly gestures at with “hive right-sizing”: defense capacity, not food access alone, is often what decides the outcome.

Putting the Science to Work

None of this changes the essay’s practical recommendations so much as it explains why they work and adds one more:

 Cut off the scent trail. Avoid open or fragrant feeding, clean up spills promptly, and be mindful that essential-oil feed additives and fermenting syrup produce exactly the class of volatiles that draw in opportunists looking for a hijacked signal to follow.

 Narrow the doors. Entrance reducers, robbing screens, and screened bottom boards reduce the number of access points pests can exploit and concentrate a colony’s guard force where it matters — a strategy with direct research support in the SHB literature.

 Right-size the box to the bees. Keep the amount of comb a colony must defend proportional to its actual population. An over-supered, understrength hive isn’t just an SHB risk; it’s a wax moth risk for the same underlying reason — not enough guards per square inch of comb.

 Bait the hunger, not the hive. Species-specific attractants — mineraloil/vinegar SHB traps, pheromone lures for stored wax moth comb, heptyl-butyrate traps for yellow jackets — exploit the same detection systems pests use to find your hive, redirecting that hunger somewhere it can be safely dead-ended instead. This is a version of what integrated pest management researchers call a “push–pull” strategy: making the protected resource harder to find or reach (push) while offering a more attractive, disposable decoy nearby (pull).

 Expect an arms race, not a solved problem. The SHB’s trick of getting guard bees to feed it inside its own prison cell is a useful reminder that every defensive measure is answered, eventually, by some counteradaptation. Pest management in an apiary is maintenance, not a single fix.

Closing Thought

The original essay ends by suggesting that during a food dearth, it pays to think like a pest for a while. The research bears that out more literally than the essay probably intended: these pests aren’t reasoning about anything, they’re running fixed chemical and behavioral programs tuned by evolution to find food fast and convert it into offspring before the opportunity closes. That’s actually good news for a beekeeper. A fixed program is a predictable one. Learn the cue it responds to — a hijacked alarm pheromone, a proteinscented comb, a queen’s shifting nutritional demands — and you don’t have to outsmart the pest so much as quietly turn its own wiring against it.

Sources:
Review, 50(4), 370–396.
 Tay, L., & Diener, E. (2011). Needs and subjective well-being around the world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 354–365.
 Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433.
 MacArthur, R. H., & Wilson, E. O. (1967). The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press.
 Torto, B., Boucias, D. G., Arbogast, R. T., Tumlinson, J. H., & Teal, P. E. A. (2007). Multitrophic interaction facilitates parasite–host relationship between an invasive beetle and the honey bee. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(20), 8374–8378.
 Benda, N. D., Boucias, D., Torto, B., & Teal, P. (2008). Detection and characterization of Kodamaea ohmeri associated with small hive beetle
Aethina tumida infesting honey bee hives. Journal of Apicultural Research, 47(3), 194–201.
 Neumann, P., Pettis, J. S., & Schäfer, M. O. (2016). Quo vadis Aethina tumida? Biology and control of small hive beetles. Apidologie, 47(3), 427–466.
 Ellis, J. D., Pirk, C. W. W., Hepburn, H. R., Kastberger, G., & Elzen, P. J. (2002). Small hive beetles survive in honeybee prisons by behavioural mimicry. Naturwissenschaften, 89(7), 326–328.
 Ottati, S., et al. (2021). Prisoners receive food fit for a queen: honeybees feed small hive beetles protein-rich glandular secretions through trophallaxis. Journal of Experimental Biology, 224(2), jeb234807.
 Reierson, D. A., Rust, M. K., & Vetter, R. S. Traps and protein bait to suppress populations of yellowjackets (Hymenoptera: Vespidae).
International Conference on Urban Pests proceedings.
 Boyd-Wilson, K. et al., and related field studies on greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella) pheromone identification and biology (various regional studies).

Here in the Midlands of South Carolina we are well into the pest control season for honey bee management.

It’s time to begin pest control. For wax moths, manage internal volume as we enter the period of declining population by removing space so bees can adequately cover the frames. For SHB, you have multiple methods such as oil traps, dry unscented Swiffer pads, hive tool whack-a-mole, vacuums, and/or interrupting their life cycle with soil drench, DE, or bait. Choose one or more. Pictured: Pool salt and GrubX.

Stress reduction for bees. Reduce pest pressure on your bees through pest management. Kill SHB at the source – as they seek to pupate in the ground.

Register for the State Fair honey show this month! Photo: watching wax harden is like waiting for a pot to boil.

Wikipedia: Petro Prokopovych (1775–1850, Ukrainian: Петро Прокопович) was a revolutionary Ukrainian^[1][2][3][4] beekeeper, the founder of commercial beekeeping and the inventor of the first movable frame hive.^[5] He introduced novelties in traditional beekeeping that allowed great progress in the practice. Among his most important inventions was a hive frame in a separate honey chamber of his beehive. He also invented a crude queen excluder between brood and honey chambers.^[6][7] Petro Prokopovych was also the first to ever model a ‘bee beard’ after delineating and calculating ‘bee swarm behaviour”, inspiring students for generations.^[8]

From http://beekeeping.com.ua: Petro Prokopovych was born in Ukraine, in the village of Mytchenky, near Baturyn, where he spent his childhood. The parents sent eleven-years-old Petro to Kiev-Mohyla Academy, where he studied for eight years. 

After the academy he wanted to be a teacher. However, the future genius of beekeeping was to go to a military career. Despite it was quite successful (the state awarded him, etc.), in 1798 he resigned.

At the brother’s small bee-garden the retired officer admired the life of mysterious small flying beings, which were kept in primitive hives, made from pieces of log. 

In 1799 Petro Prokopovych decided to devote himself to beekeeping and in 1808 he already had 580 bee-families. All these years he tried to understand the internal life of bee-family and to improve existing methods of beekeeping. One of directions of his research was looking for a way to take honey without wanton destruction of the family. 

In 1814 the tireless search resulted in the invention of the first in the world dismountable frame beehive, in which it was possible to control family and to actively influence the course of its development. In this beehive Prokopovych for the first time has considered a frame as a module of bee-hive – which used today by millions beekeepers all over the world. It was a landmark in the history of beekeeping, which has begun the epoch of rational beekeeping. 

One more his invention – the wooden partition with apertures, which were passable only for working bees. It made possible getting pure honey in the frames. 

Amos Root highly praised the inventions of Prokopovych: ” His frame has much in common with a modern section frame with openings for passage of bees, the walls of his beehive were joint in the lock. He applied methods, which far outstripped his time “. 

Prokopovych possessed not only the gift of researcher but also that of teacher. The school, founded by him, during 53 years of its existence prepared more than 700 qualified beekeepers with the most advanced experience of that time. The school apiary in 1855 had 2542 bee-families. 
Prokopovych published more than 60 articles in the newspapers and magazines. Many of his findings remain important now; for example, the drugless method of treatment foul brood by driving of bees to a new hive. 

Prokopovych considered beekeeping the most profitable branch of the agriculture and proved it, having become rather rich man. He had 6600 beehives of his own design only. 

Petro Prokopovych is buried  in a village Pal’chyky in the Chernigiv region, where his beekeepers’ school was located. The monument of Prokopovych is erected here,  the Ukrainian Institute of Beekeeping is named after him.

All this plus a great gravestone showing him with a removable frame!

This time of year, in my truck, I keep a deep 10 frame Langstroth box with 10 frames installed, screened bottom board, inner cover, and either migratory or telescoping top. And a ratchet strap to hold it all together for transportation. The entrance reducer is either closed or I replace it with #8 hardware cloth folded in a “U” shape. I also have ready for quick loading a swarm bucket with attachable telescoping painters pole and a ladder.

Additional, sometimes useful, items I usually have on hand include: A queen clip, a spray bottle of imitation almond extract, small and large limb pruners, and a spray bottle of sugar water to spray them with before the shake.

Turn your telephone on with volume up this time of year. You need to ask how high. If they say “not too high” ask what that means. Head height? Taller than two men, etc. How large is the cluster – baseball? soccer ball? or basketball? Are they in a bush or tree? If they say they are flying around their front porch ask if they are clustered? (yes, people call because their ornamental holly is blooming and attracting bees). After you determine they indeed have a honey bee swarm and not miner bees, yellow jackets, or carpenter bees, get the address and get there soon.

When you return home with your swarm now in your equipment let them settle down for a couple hours before you open them and insert a frame of open brood from another hive. This will typically lock them to the hive (remember they didn’t choose your hive as their preferred cavity). One final item is to place a feeder on them. They will want to draw comb and it takes carbohydrate to do so. You can get some fantastic drawn comb in a short amount of time from a swarm. Then open the entrance to let them fly and orient to their new home.

Here’s another method used called the queen’s throne. It uses a frame of brood or brood comb to lure the bees into the bucket. In the video he is capturing bees at a school yard and wants to minimize flying bees.

Add any tricks you have below.