For keeping healthy bees, good practices are essential. On the other hand, there isn’t a 100% guarantee that your colonies will always be healthy only because do everything right. This is the harsh reality I’m afraid. Nonetheless, there are a lot of things we can do to keep honey bee colonies healthy. In the honey…
Most beekeepers have colony losses in winter. This is something that happens even to the best beekeepers. Winter, after all, is the bottleneck for colony survival. However, there are some factors that you can control to keep colony losses as low as possible. First of all, you have to know about the causes for colonies…
I often get the question “what do you do with the bees in winter?”. People assume that I have a half-year vacation every year – you don’t see bees when it’s cold, right? But actually, winter is a crucial phase of the bee year. Honey bees aren’t as inactive as it may seem from the…
In the past years, I’ve often thought that many problems would at least be smaller if people had more knowledge, more education. I don’t mean years at school. It’s more the capacity of critical thinking, of common sense that I miss. Or recognizing that things are a little bit more complex than the black or…
When it comes to varroa treatments, there’s apparently a gap between theory and practice. A sentence I often hear: “When will scientists finally find something against varroa mites?”. It seems that the available products aren’t seen as “something against the mite”. I always thought that this was because of the belief that there should be…
Oxalic acid treatments against varroa mites are both efficient against the parasite as well safe for the bee colonies. Efficiency and safety – those are the most important criteria for a bee health product. Or for any drug in veterinary of human use, for that matter. Oxalic acid was used in Asia and Eastern Europe…
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