American Bee Journal

Grooming is an important varroa-resistance trait, and new research might make it easier to select in breeding programs According to the Centers for Disease Control, every year over 400,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease — a serious illness, caused by bacteria transmitted by ticks. Tick season is in full swing, and there are few things more disconcerting than idly…

This may be the last ABJ article I ever write. Why? I have a premonition that an article about English in a beekeeping journal won’t go over well with the readership. It might be a fireable offense, like writing about icing cupcakes in a wrestling rag. Nevertheless, I’m not easily deterred. Humans communicate through language. We learn, discuss, and teach…

The destructive drama began this spring when I arrived at one of my more secluded apiaries. For reference, the apiary appeared as shown in Figure 1 a couple of years earlier when the apiary had only three two-foot long top-bar hives on two elevated hive stands. Figure 2 (left) shows the view from where I back the bee truck into…

Since my lab currently conducts pesticide risk assessments for bees, I sometimes hear feedback along the lines of, “Scott, it seems like you’re always focusing on the problems instead of finding solutions.” While I’m certainly sympathetic to this criticism, I would argue we first need to understand if (or when) there’s a problem before coming up with a solution. But…

In the previous article, we studied the rare Phelps hive from the early 1850s to learn about hive development. We saw the Phelps hive as a complete miniature hive, a full-size outer case, and even the book Phelps wrote. Mostly we will lose this exotic luxury of having both a complete hive and book by the beekeeper from over a…

Everyone’s getting vaccinated … Do honey bees run vaccination programs, too? As I write this, 40% of people in the U.S. have received at least their first dose of the COVID vaccine and 26% are fully vaccinated. That corresponds to 133 million people receiving one dose and 86 million people being fully vaccinated. Wow, talk about an impressive mass-vaccination program!…

It’s not surprising that beekeepers are often in favor of invasive plants that “normal people” find objectionable. After all, honey bees are themselves invasive. Once they landed in North America via the Jamestown colony, honey bees lost no time distributing themselves across the continent. They engulfed the wildlands in a fashion that defines invasive, thriving not only where you put…

Automated tracking technologies allow researchers to monitor behaviors of all the honey bees in a hive simultaneously Companies are getting better and better at targeted advertising. Every day, sophisticated computer algorithms track our online activity and location data in an effort to feed us ads that are more likely to stick. Although nobody is actually watching us, it can feel…