To attract bees to your beehive, use scents they love like beeswax, propolis, and lemongrass essential oil**, mimicking a naturally established home; incorporate old brood comb or frames for familiarity; ensure the hive is in a suitable, visible location, ideally elevated and facing southeast; and add a small amount of sugar water or honey near the entrance as a temporary food source, while also planting bee-friendly flowers nearby to provide forage.
The "3 feet, 3 miles rule" is a beekeeping guideline for moving hives: move them less than 3 feet (so they find the new spot easily using landmarks and scent) or more than 3 miles (so they're forced to reorient to a completely new landscape). Moving them an intermediate distance (e.g., 50 feet to 2 miles) confuses forager bees, causing them to return to the old, empty location and get lost.
It's best to grow a variety of plants with flowers in a range of colors that bloom from spring through autumn – the showier, the better. As you're selecting flowers, remember that bees are highly attracted to white, yellow, and shades of purple and blue.
Soda Bottle Bee Trap
Cut off the top third of the soda bottle. Fill the bottom part of the bottle with sugar water or sweet juice. This mixture will attract the bees.
Follow these October beekeeping tips to keep your bees safe and healthy and make the most of the fall season.
While Doug Somerville, a technical specialist in honeybees with New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, notes that “bees are twice as attracted to sugar syrup than they are to honey5,” there are also myriad less-than-desirable consequences to making carpenter bee traps out of sugar water.
The 7/10 rule in beekeeping is a guideline for when to add a new box (super) to a hive, suggesting you add it when bees have built comb, brood, or stored honey on 7 out of 10 frames in the current box, indicating they need more space and preventing congestion, which can lead to swarming. This proactive expansion supports the colony's growth, reduces stress, and maintains natural hive behavior, but it's also important to consider factors like time of year and overall hive health, not just frame count.
Leave some wild spaces, unmowed grass, bare soil patches, and holes in the mud – all perfect for providing native bees with nesting spots. Cut out pesticides and keep a variety of flowering plants around all year long to keep them happily fed.
Think all bees look alike? Well we don't all look alike to them, according to a new study that shows honeybees, who have 0.01% of the neurons that humans do, can recognize and remember individual human faces.
It's best to move well before dawn when all of the bees are in the hive. If you move them at dusk and something goes wrong, it will only get darker and worse. Use a smoker to urge any bees outside the entry back inside the hive.
Bees and Floral Scents
Bees are primarily drawn to flowers due to their need for nectar and pollen. The sweet and floral scents emitted by blossoms are a signal to bees that a food source is nearby. Perfumes with similar floral compositions can inadvertently attract bees.
Swarms of honeybees will be out looking for a home from May to early July. It could be in a chimney or the roof of a house, or it could be in your bait hive! Try setting up a bait hive in each apiary, or near a feral colony, in hole in a tree, or in the roof of a house, with permission from the landowner.
To attract the swarm: Start by staking some old honeycomb inside the hive, ideally to the base. Then, drop the lemongrass oil on your cotton bud or pastry brush. Simply rub the oiled cotton bud or pastry bush around the entrance to your hive.
Having a colorful dot on the back of her thorax can make it easier to locate and identify your queen. The other reason to have a marked queen is that you know that a particular queen present in the hive is exactly the same one as before — and not her daughter.
I have an incredibly full 2-deep 10-frame colony and I would be curious to get a guestimate on how many bees are in the colony. Thank you! A full frame of bees can hold 3,000 bees. Times 20, that would be 60,000.
Varroa Mites are the #1 enemy of honey bee and beekeepers around the world. These external parasites feed on the blood of adult honey bees, and reproduce on honey bee pupae. They can considerably weaken individual bees, and often vector viruses and other pathogens between bees.
Place a feeder filled with sugar water close to the hive entrance to attract bees quickly. Utilize a shallow dish or a specialized bee feeder to reduce the risk of drowning. Monitor the feeder regularly, maintaining adequate sugar water levels for easy access.
Attracting Swarms: Lemongrass oil is known for its ability to mimic the pheromones of a queen bee. Beekeepers often use it in bait hives or swarm traps to lure wild swarms or capture swarms from their own colonies.
Varroa destructor, the Varroa mite, is a parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on honey bees. These mites are currently the greatest threat to beekeepers and their colonies; varroa is the most serious pest of honey bees, inflicting more damage and higher economic costs than all other apicultural diseases.
The best time to start a beehive is in the spring. This is when bees are just starting to get busy. You want to start them up as soon as the weather warms up so that they will have plenty of time to build up a strong hive.
Honey bees keep the inside temperature of the winter cluster at about 95 degrees by exercising muscles and expending energy. A bee dies when its body temperature is 41 degrees. At 41 degrees the bee is not able to operate or flex its shivering muscles to stay warm.