The Peace Bee Farmer

Throughout the spring, healthy honey bee colonies rapidly increase in population. This occurs as flowering plants are making nectar and p...

Honey bees live in cavities. In Ethiopia, natural cavities are hollow trees or crevices in volcanic rock walls. Ethiopian farmers also ke...

Fall and spring hive management in top bar hives is similar to that of Langstroth hives. Bees tend to build their brood nest in a top ba...

Beekeepers are making preparations for adding new colonies in the spring. While most will house their bees in modern bee hives, some wil...

The bee hive in the fall is full of bees, brood, and food. However, by mid-winter, the hive is partially empty. Short-lived summer bees ...

A beekeeper in Minnesota is carefully measuring the temperature inside his bee hives. He recorded a daytime temperature of 70 degrees Fa...

When honey bees swarm they frequently move into cavities previously used by other colonies of bees. They are attracted to old bee nests ...

In the fall it is important to look inside the bee hives and set them up for winter. Fall bee hive management is designed to help the be...

Three types of bee hives are used in Ethiopia. Ninety-seven percent of the hives are traditional hives, long baskets built at no expense...

Guta, Tucho, and Gedefa take me to see a number of the projects that the Education For Development Association is supporting. While my p...

Guta, Tucho, and Gedefa of the Education For Development Association staff take me to Laku Igu village to visit the farm of Teshome, one...

Beekeepers can establish or expand their bee yards by purchasing hives from other beekeepers, purchasing nucleus hives, dividing existin...

Ten neatly dressed women sitting in the shade of a spreading ficus tree appear to be conducting an important meeting. My Ethiopian cont...

A hot, dry summer is often the backdrop for a good honey production year. This year’s wet, stormy spring kept farmers out of the fields in ...

Natural honey bee hives in hollow trees often have multiple entrances. Bees fly in and out of knot holes or broken openings linked to the tr...

The past four years, marked by heavy colony losses, have been costly to beekeepers. News stories have made this a time of expanding awarenes...

Much of the craft of beekeeping involves positive and negative experiences being passed along among beekeepers. Recent blog pieces involving...

There are a number of reasons that people engage in tending to honey bees. For many the bees are used to provide pollination of crops. Migra...

Honey bees area unique among insects. In temperate areas, they spend the winter inside the hive alive and active unlike wasps and hornets th...

Some individuals are attracted to beekeeping’s lack of complicated modern technologies. In fact, most of the great inventions of modern beek...