We keep seven Langstroth hives at our home, on 2.2 acres. Our property has 61 organic fruit trees, many berries and about 3,000 sq ft of vegetables, which we mostly donate to the local charity of our choice. Of our seven hives, only three survived...
When I was a child my grandfather raised bees on the family vineyard in the South of France. After World War II, we began to use pesticides on our vines and by the mid 1970s my grandfather, who was a physician, could see the toll...
Don cooking hard candy for his bees. A completed brick is in the foreground and a wooden candy form is behind the brick.Feeding honeybees seems like a safe topic, innocent, nothing to get too excited about. And yet, the controversy rages! Various beekeepers have widely...
The Oregon Legislative hearing on Bee Health and Pesticide Use on November 21 was an important milestone. Lawmakers heard from a number of panelists that pesticides are harming bees.The day started with Beyond Toxics delivering nearly 12,000 signatures to Katy Coba, the Director of the...
This year may turn out to be the worst for honey bee die-offs ever. The news out of California is very disturbing, with fifty percent projections for overwinter losses possibly turning out to be low. The official numbers haven't yet been released.In contrast to other...
It was late September, and my husband and I were just getting back from a cross country trip with our two small kids. We were tired and rumpled and relieved to be home. The breeze coming off the ocean and the sight of our yard,...
This summer, I did a project for my Girl Scout Gold award focused on the importance of bees and bats and what we can do to help them. I chose these two creatures because they are both facing serious threats to their survival, are very...
I am a third generation backyard gardener. It was in my father’s and my grandmother’s gardens that I learned to love many insects, most especially bees. Bees, my grandma said, were our partners in the garden. Without bees, the big apple tree outside her back...
Beekeepers frequently refer to their bees as their “girls” because all the worker bees are female. Hobby beekeepers, like myself, find it convenient to give them another name identifying a particular hive. I use the street or town from which I got the bees. My...