Female varroa mite under a dissecting microscope.

Author: Heather Broccard-Bell, Ph.D., Honey Bee Health Researcher. Featured photo credit: H. Broccard-Bell.

Know Thy Enemy (Part 2): Inbreeding & Varroa Mites

NERD ALERT: Our blog series on Understanding Varroa is meant to give those that are interested an understanding of what is currently known about varroa mites. At times, this means we’ll be taking detours into some deeper scientific topics. I recognize this will not be everyone’s cup of tea! Don’t worry – we’ll be getting back to some more practical posts soon. In the meantime, you can always check out our previous posts on topics like feeding, wrapping, etc.

Female Varroa destructor under a dissecting microscope.

Author: Heather Broccard-Bell, Ph.D., Honey Bee Health Researcher. Featured photo credit: H. Broccard-Bell.

Know Thy Enemy: Understanding Varroa

In the ongoing quest to improve the health, happiness, and productivity of our honey bee colonies, protection from varroa mites remains a top priority. Key to developing effective varroa control strategies is understanding how and why varroa do what they do. Admittedly, the current picture is incomplete—but we are making progress with scientists making new discoveries all the time. In this series of blog posts, I will go through what is currently known about varroa behaviour and biology, and how we can use that to improve varroa control strategies. My goal is to provide you with up-to-date information and share some lesser-known tidbits about varroa to help you best manage your colonies.

Author: Heather Broccard-Bell, Ph.D., Honey Bee Health Researcher

It’s that time of year again. In many areas, temperatures have started to dip below freezing at night, and the first snowflakes have begun to fall. If you’re in the prairies, you’re almost certainly well past these preliminary stages of winter. But before you hunker down with a book in front of your fireplace, you need to ensure that your bees are ready for the season!

Author: Heather Broccard-Bell, Ph.D., Honey Bee Health Researcher

Feeding is one of those controversial honey bee topics that might best be avoided in polite company. A lot of different beekeepers have a lot of different (often extremely passionate) opinions. Some of those differences come down to living in different areas of the world. Others are personal preferences and simply what has worked (or at least what hasn’t not worked) in the past.

The goal of this post is not so much to tell you exactly what you should or should not be doing. Rather, it is to give you an appreciation of why you might (or might not) need to feed your honey bees, and to provide you with some general guidelines.

Author: Heather Broccard-Bell, Ph.D., Honey Bee Health Researcher

Humans have been gathering honey from honey bees in one form or another for millennia. For most of that time, “management” was as simple as harvesting honey from wild bee colonies wherever they could be found. Apiculture has been transformed over the last couple of centuries by advances in technology. The invention of modular hive systems and moveable frames has greatly improved productivity, mobility, and the welfare of the bees themselves. Ultimately, most of this has been done in the service of one goal: to produce honey.

Now that we’re well into fall honey season (at least in Ontario, Canada), it seems like an opportune time to discuss some of the main considerations of modern honey harvesting. I realize that beekeepers around the world deal with many types of hives these days, but I am going to focus on the most common in North America: the 10-frame Langstroth.

Author: Heather Broccard-Bell, Ph.D., Honey Bee Health Researcher

It’s safe to say that how honey bees experience the world is quite different from how humans experience the world. While we will always be influenced by our specific sensory systems, we can aim to better understand the honey bee by studying their senses. Knowing more about what the world is like for honey bees can help us to decipher their remarkable behaviour.

In our last blog, we took an in-depth look at how the honey bee uses its unique visual capabilities for navigation, foraging, and more. Like us, bees rely heavily on their vision, but what about the other senses? We’ll now explore beyond sight to further grasp what the world is like from the honey bee’s perspective.