Articles

Managing Hives to Minimise Damage from Small Hive Beetle

This past season has seen a large increase in the numbers of Small hive beetle (Shb) observed within beehives in many areas. There have been many reports of Shb forcing colonies to abscond and the hives taken over and slimed out. This has...

13 Apr 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Thinking Outside The Box: World Leading Autonomus Beehive

Articles

“We go out to the fields, and we see those white wooden boxes, the current beehives, and we tend to romanticise them, and we think they are the natural habitat of the bee - they’re not, they are man-made”, said Saar Safra, CEO of BeeWise

11 Apr 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Tasting Leatherwood Honey & Celebrating Tasmanian Beekeeper

Articles

The busiest time of the year for Honey Sommeliers can often be in the Winter months. While beekeepers and their bees have packed down for the cooler months, attention switches to updating honey tasting notes for recent months’ harvests, attending...

06 Apr 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

A Closer Look - Tropilaelaps Mites

Articles

Varroa (left) & Tropilaelaps (right) A potential future threat of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) in North America are the parasitic mites in the genus Tropilaelaps which are currently confined to Asia and bordering areas. These mites are...

04 Apr 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Handy Hints for Extracting Honey for Beginners

Articles

Congratulations, you have successfully taken off supers of capped honey from your bees, and it is time to do your first extraction. Set up your uncapping devices be they electric, hot water, steam-heated knives, or other ‘cold’ uncapping...

30 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Minimising Honey Bee Impacts on Nesting Boxes and Hollows

Articles

Introduction: Swarming Honey Bees and Nesting Boxes and Hollows European honey bees swarm as a natural reproductive process. They also swarm if their hive is overcrowded, as often happens when the onset of warmer spring weather from August until...

28 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Recent Research The State of Our Industry Regarding Varroa Management and What can we do About it?

Articles

The EPA must take into account the risk to the applicator involved with the application of any pesticide. But unlike a farmer who can spray a product onto their crop from the safety of the cab of an air-conditioned tractor, the beekeeper must apply...

28 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Keeping Hives Healthy to Handle Varroa

Articles

In the months after the initial Varroa detection in June 2022, I proposed heading over the ditch to New Zealand that October to look at their Varroa Spring management practices. Whilst the idea had merit, it was definitely not the right time to go...

23 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

A Closer Look - Impact of Fungicides on Honeybees

Articles

Almond growers face constant challenges to crop productivity owing to pests and pathogens, which are often controlled with a multitude of agrochemicals. There is growing evidence that insecticides and acaricides (miticides) are not the only...

21 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

For New Beekeepers!

Articles

Ed. Note: this is a new section for The ABK. Bob Gulliford (Editor February, 1991 ñ December, 2007) did include a section in The ABK titled Beginning in Bees, but with the surge in interest beekeeping, I as Editor have decided to try and include...

16 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Study Finds Honeybee Venom Rapidly Kills Aggressive Breast Cancer Cells

Articles

Venom from honeybees has been found to rapidly kill aggressive and hard-to-treat breast cancer cells, according to potentially ground-breaking new Australian research. The study also found when the venom’s main component was combined with existing...

14 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Butt Snorkles and Bug Chowder

Articles

Do I have your attention? We will get to the butt snorkels, but first, we need a primer in insect respiration... How do insects breathe? Like us, insects breathe oxygen, and their respiratory system is required to deliver sufficient oxygen to...

09 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Swapping in Honey Bees

Articles

In this concluding Part IV of ‘Swarming in Honey Bees’, we examine less conventional control measures that, once mastered, present opportunities to further turn the swarming impulse to good advantage. We start here where we left off in Part III...

07 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

Propolis is a Sticky Subject

Articles

Even with this modern guidance, I was still not at all sure how the bees decide on which plants they should collect the resins from, nor how they recruit foragers to the task. In fact, it was not clear even in Winston’s graphic account, whether the...

02 Mar 2024

By The ABK Team

Articles

‘Plan Bee’ to deliver A+ breeding tech to honey bee industry

Articles

In a first for Australian honey bee breeding programs, a national genetic improvement program is underway to protect the beekeeping, horticulture and broadacre industries dependent on superior honey bee performance. Supported by AgriFutures...

29 Feb 2024

By The ABK Team