The Peace Bee Farmer

While honey bees do not fly in cold weather, they do venture out of their hive on the occasional warm winter day. Bees make cleansing flight...

  Drones are the male reproductive members of the honey bee hive. Drones perform no work in the hive and have but one duty: They mate with q...

Honey bee colonies are made up of large numbers of bees, but they rely upon only a few bees for reproduction. Each colony has one female...

Human societies throughout the world have measured their calendars according to the changes in seasons. Today is the winter solstice, th...

Queen bees mate in flight. In areas where Africanized Honey Bee genes are not prevalent, honey bee queens are allowed to mate with drone...

One of my beekeeping friends recently asked me what it means when you find a large number of drones in the hive. My response may not have el...

Being social insects, honey bees share in the duties of the hive. Each individual does not perform all of the daily tasks of the hive. The ...

The Varroa mite is the greatest killer of honey bees. These pin-head sized mites attach to the developing brood and adult bees and suck the...

Honey bees build their nest from combs configured around six-sided cells of two sizes. The majority of the bee hive consists of sheets of c...

This has truly been a year of unusual weather here in the Arkansas Delta. We have seen cooler temperatures and more rain than normal. The ch...

In the summertime, hive inspections are made less frequently. Because the honey supers are placed atop the hive bodies, it may mean moving h...

Honey bees build their nest in an orderly fashion. The cavity space is occupied by honey comb built to fill the available space. Sometimes t...

At Peace Bee Farm, we enjoy the purple martins for half of the year. These largest of the swallows arrive in February, nest in artificial go...

For a queen bee to be worthwhile to the colony, at least three things must have come into play: She must have come from good genetic stock; ...

As social insects, honey bees share the responsibility for the reproduction of the entire colony with two types of bees, queens and drones....

Honey bees are social insects. Each honey bee colony has a single queen bee. She is of utmost importance to the colony, as she lays all of t...

A springtime inspection of the bee hives reveals strong colonies with bees boiling over the top bars of the frames. While the late winter i...

As we approach the beginning of spring, the honey bees are rapidly expanding their colonies. While the bees huddled together in a small clus...

As spring nears, the bees are continuing their preparations for the change of seasons. While inspecting hives this week, we find drone honey...