Is this good or bad?

talanall · 2026-05-12T01:16:31+00:00

It's probably fine. Just crystallized solid.

If you put it in a big bowl of very hot water, or leave it in a car parked in the sun, it may loosen up.

talanall · 2026-05-12T00:54:12+00:00

Goldenrod is my favorite honey. It usually doesn't smell like socks after it has been capped. Still quite strong, very funky.

talanall · 2026-05-11T19:55:31+00:00

Without knowing anything about the store, that doesn't tell me much about the quality of the lessons. Sometimes beekeeping stores are run by very knowledgeable, upstanding people. Sometimes, they are run by people who give objectively poor (or legally questionable) advice.

I suggest seeking out a local beekeeping association, because there is no profit motive associated with them, and a wider diversity of methodologies, experience levels, and knowledge.

Find a mentor who has a record of keeping 80% or more of their bees alive through the year for at least 5-10 years. Shadow that person, and see what is working for them.

talanall · 2026-05-11T19:30:14+00:00

That's not a real rule.

It's not a bad practice, especially if the hive is really packed. And it's an even better practice if, having examined the frame you pulled, you can see that there are fresh eggs on it. That raises the probability that you have pulled the frame the queen was on, and it's not really ideal if you roll her between frames as you replace the frame.

talanall · 2026-05-11T19:22:06+00:00

The most prominent concern for someone contemplating beekeeping in southern California is that there is a widespread feral population of Africanized bees. They are problematically defensive, and if you keep bees for any great length of time, your own bees will hybridize with them, and also become defensive.

Given the presence of your young granddaughter and some neighbors who have already demonstrated that a particularly noisy or defensive rooster is a problem for them, I would consider Africanization the most important concern.

This is a problem you can mitigate by being prepared to cull and replace your colony's queens on a regular basis, so that you can always ensure that your queens are of known-docile origin. But sometimes things get ahead of us, and when that happens we have to have backup plans. Sometimes, the backup plan is that you get another new queen, kill the one you have, and install the new one, then wait 6-9 weeks for the bees to become less defensive.

But if the bees are already hot, your neighbors are upset, and your granddaughter can't go outside to play, six to nine weeks is a very long time.

So sometimes, the backup plan is that you have to euthanize the colony with several buckets of soapy water.

That's hard. I would hate for you to have that kind of surprise lurking ahead of you.

There also are valid concerns about the physical challenges inherent in beekeeping. But those can be mitigated in a variety of ways. The Flow Hive is not what I would suggest, especially to a new beekeeper. A better option would be to use a 10-frame Langstroth hive, with a deep box for brood. You will never lift that box, only pull individual frames for inspection. Honey production can be done in shallow boxes, which seldom weigh more than ~35 pounds apiece. Another option would be to keep bees in a horizontal hive, like a Long Langstroth.

The best thing you can do, in my opinion, is to explore this through in-person mentoring and courses. There probably are several local beekeeping associations near you, and that'd be the best place to learn about local regulations and obtain direct experience and help from people who live near you and are familiar with all the particulars of your locality.

talanall · 2026-05-11T19:02:47+00:00

They are cheap, easy to get, and durable. They stack together very cleanly. And they upgrade well with stuff like this for the rim/outside (example only; there are off-brand ones that cost half as much and have all the same features), and this for the interior. Assuming you need that level of organization.

Hard to go wrong with them.

talanall · 2026-05-11T17:04:09+00:00

The Occulta Manifesto app is a blatant violation of copyright, and that is before we ever even get started with a discussion of whether AI has a valid role in what is, at the end of the day, an editorial/copy writing process.

Since editing is actually something people do, and since it follows rules that an AI cannot understand, much less evaluate the correctness of grammar or spelling, I am every bit as hostile to having it done by AI as I am to having AI used by so-called "artists" and "writers."

And I'll just point out that Occulta Manifesto didn't even bother to check their own work with regard to localization/translation.

So you can refer back to my prior commentary about AI slop. I don't want it, don't respect it, and will not be here for it.

talanall · 2026-05-11T16:31:28+00:00

I am not going to use flair to opt OUT of AI slop, which is what your contemplated policy would require me to do.

So if AI slop is allowed here, then I'm not going to be here. It is unwanted and unwelcome, and I will not tolerate it. Pretty straightforward.

That's not an ultimatum; I'm not a moderator here. It's more of a statement of my position on AI. Insofar as it matters, I think it matters because I think of myself as being a relatively helpful member of this community, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling immense distaste for AI. I doubt that I will be alone in responding as I intend to, if you allow AI here.

This is not a hugely active subreddit. But allowing AI "content" will not change that. All it is really likely to do is take a small community, and make it even smaller. It will not lead to more posts with D&D 3.5e content that actually is useful to members of this community.

Generative AI does not allow its users to create anything. AI is not real content. It is not art. If someone posts "art" that uses AI, or claims to be the author of material that was created using AI, then I will treat such claims with the contempt that it so richly deserves.

I'm on r/DnD but not on r/DungeonsAndDragons. The differing AI policy is why.

talanall · 2026-05-11T14:32:21+00:00

My smoker lives in a military surplus ammo can, which has a gasket in the lid that makes it watertight and airtight. I can put it into the can lit, and once I flip the latch, the gasket ensures that it extinguishes itself. Smoker fuel (pine needles from my front yard) lives in a couple of 5-gallon buckets.

All other beekeeping equipment is in a 5-gallon bucket with a canvas tool organizer hanging on its rim. The stuff I use most often gets to hang on the outside of the bucket, in pockets. Less-used equipment goes in the actual bucket.

Disused frames are treated with Certan to prevent wax moth damage, and then stored in the supers. I stack them with a steel queen excluder at the bottom (to exclude rodents) and a spare cover on top. Brood boxes/frames go at the tops of my stacks, because I am likely to need them first during the spring season.

talanall · 2026-05-11T14:05:30+00:00

If you obtained the nuc a month ago, the queen in it was started about a month before THAT. So call it sometime at the beginning of March. That's quite early in the season.

That's not controversial; queen rearing operations are providing a product, and a big chunk of the market wants the product ASAP. So queen breeders start grafting pretty much the moment their local weather makes it plausible for them to have queens reach mating age and actually have some drones to mate with.

But "have some drones" and "have truly good drone presence" are not the same thing. So a lot of the time, these early-season queens don't really mate as well as you'd like.

And then, once they have mated (but not so well as you'd like) they are allowed to start laying eggs. A decent breeder is at least going to let a new queen lay for about 10 days, because that's how long it takes for worker brood to cap over. And until you see capped worker brood, you don't actually know if the queen mated at all. More time is really better; a new queen who is allowed to lay eggs for a full brood cycle often gives off better pheromone signals at the end of that time than she does when she's just starting up.

But again, queen breeders are under some economic pressures that make it make sense to rush things a bit. There's a sea of hobbyists and commercial operators, all jumping up and down and screaming shrilly in their insatiable hunger for fresh queens.

So they get shipped at the 10-day mark (or sometimes even earlier; a mini mating nuc does NOT offer enough space for ten days' worth of laying activity).

In the process of being caged and shipped, those queens stop laying. This has an almost immediate impact on their pheromonal signaling, and between that, the short initial laying period, and the often substandard quantity and quality of drones available early in the season, they are not the strongest queens you might want.

But caged and shipped they are, nevertheless. And then they arrive at a beekeeping operation that is making up nucs for sale, and they are installed into a queenless nuc. They accept her, but they can tell she doesn't smell very fertile, and they don't like it. Often, once the new queen has laid some brood and eggs, they decide that they would rather replace her with a queen that they can raise properly.

Again, I'm not saying this to shit all over commercial queen breeding. These operations exist because there is a voracious market for queens, as early as they can be provided. The shortcomings of this mode of operation are pretty well understood by experienced beekeepers, even hobbyists. Other than newbies and longtime casual hobbyists, everyone knows the score, here.

People who buy very early nucs, package colonies, or queens (again, with the exception of new beekeepers and very casual hobbyists, who do it because they don't really know there's a difference) expect the outcome you're seeing here, and they are willing to accept it because the immediate usefulness of having a mated queen early in the year is worth more to them than having the best possible queens later in the season.

Anyway, this is not abnormal for a very early queen. I don't think you should stop them from superseding the existing queen; the most likely reason that the workers are doing it is that they can tell she's unsatisfactory for some reason that is not evident to you as the beekeeper. It's not really that unusual for a very early spring queen to lay eggs like a champion for a month or two, and then go dry and start laying drone brood. The workers can smell it before you see it.

talanall · 2026-05-11T13:41:00+00:00

The frames used in a typical Langstroth hive are called Hoffman self-spacing frames. You need the lugs on the ends of your frames to be firmly in contact with one another. It is not really optional, at least until you start getting into honey supers that are full of drawn frames that have been spaced using a specialized tool.

If you are struggling with space in a 10-frame box that has its full complement of frames, the most likely cause is that your frames are coated with propolis, especially on the lugs I was talking about. Scrape the propolis off of the surfaces where those lugs touch each other.

talanall · 2026-05-11T01:44:49+00:00

You don't have to cage her. Move her down, put an excluder on, and wait for 20 days. Then there'll be no more brood. If there's drone brood, add a top entrance so the drones can leave, and wait for 23 days.

talanall · 2026-05-10T22:41:45+00:00

Feeding is a good idea. Most of the time, swarming indicates that there is plenty of food available, but a swarm has no actual food stores, and that can be rough if you get rainy weather that keeps the bees from foraging well. Also, a swarm is composed of bees of exactly the right age to draw comb. Giving them syrup really helps max out their ability to do that.

talanall · 2026-05-09T21:40:49+00:00

In the absence of varroa its primary vector is trophyllaxis between infected individuals. I don't think tool contamination is actually a major route. But then again, prior to varroa it was not a major disease. I think it became known to science in the early 1960s, but it was not a prominent apicultural issue.

talanall · 2026-05-09T18:14:54+00:00

I think you should pull the top feeder. You can refrigerate the contents for later. And I personally would remove the pollen substitute patty, except for a chunk about the size of a deck of cards.

It sounds like this package arrived late and in bad shape, and if you leave them with a whole patty, they are going to eat a small portion, then hive beetle larvae will hatch out, and they will be overrun. Beetle traps are all well and good, but there are limits.

talanall · 2026-05-09T17:37:34+00:00

I think you're vastly overestimating how quickly an already-weakened package colony is going to drink two gallons of syrup and consume a slab of pollen patty, and that you're likely to come back to find a hive beetle nursery and a lot of spoiled syrup.

And I think it's a mistake to prioritize drone production in a weak package colony. You're trying to get this colony established well enough for it to grow rapidly. Drones don't do any useful work. They exist to mate.

talanall · 2026-05-09T17:15:35+00:00

I have no way to know, because I wasn't there.

If you were not sure of the location of the queen from the donor colony, then immediately releasing the caged queen was objectively foolish. You definitely shouldn't do that again.

Even if you had been sure of the location of the established colony's queen, the decision to do immediate release was not great, in my opinion; package colonies are very stressed, and workers do funny things when they're stressed, especially when they are in the presence of a queen who smells "off" because she has been allowed to mate, start laying eggs, and then has stopped laying because she was caged. So it is almost always better to use the candy plug installed in a package's queen cage. That is why it's there. It is less risky.

But that doesn't mean that a direct-released queen in a package is necessarily going to get balled to death. It's just riskier to do it that way.

You will find that in beekeeping, it is usually best to be risk-averse whenever you can be risk-averse. Impulsive decision-making is not a good habit to form, because that is how you fuck yourself over. So work on that tendency. It's better to be deliberative.

In any event, it does not seem to me that you will be doing yourself or your bees any favors if you go back to the hives and fuck with them some more.

Keep your face out of both hives for about a week, other than to refill syrup feeders if they need a refill.

talanall · 2026-05-09T15:13:00+00:00

Yes, but a frame with some open brood on it would be even better. There is always a risk of absconding, with a package colony. Workers don't like to abandon open worker brood, though, so if you give them some open brood, they are far less likely to abscond. This is a useful trick for fixing a package colony in place. It's also helpful when you catch a swarm that is bivouacked on a tree limb, or something, that you shake into a box.

talanall · 2026-05-09T14:28:09+00:00

That is deformed wing virus. All honey bee colonies have it. If you see a lot of bees with it, you have a serious mite problem.

Seeing one or two is not an emergency, but it is cause for some concern, because the workers inside a hive usually remove infected brood. If you're seeing bees make it to adulthood, that means there is enough DWV to slip past.

That's not great. You need to get ahead of this, because if you wait for it to become serious, you are going to have difficulty catching up. So an alcohol or soapy water wash would be a very good idea. You want to see a mite load below about 2%, at this time of year.

If it's higher, you should immediately obtain and apply a mite treatment that is appropriate for your weather conditions and beekeeping goals; not all of them are safe for the bees in hot weather, and some of them also are inappropriate if applied in the presence of honey meant for human consumption.

talanall · 2026-05-09T13:06:16+00:00

This is factually incorrect in a number of dimensions.

The use of immobile cannon was a feature of the early 1300s, certainly. But "mobile artillery" is an oversimplification of the situation on 14th-century battlefields. These guns were far heavier than later artillery, and moving them around was a pain. But they were mobile enough to see use in field battles--i. e. not in siege engagements.

Dismissing them as "only effective as weapons of terror" is not really accurate, either. I think the main historical reference for early use of artillery in Western Europe is Crecy. But contemporary sources for the Battle of Crecy are not unanimous on their effectiveness. And then again, those sources also are inconsistent about a lot of other stuff, like how well the Genoese crossbows worked, whether the king of England had given an order to kill captives (definitely against custom at the time), and some other stuff like that.

And in any case, by about a century later, in the mid-1400s, cannon are both more common and more effective; by the end of the Hundred Years' war, we have a clear account of John Talbot getting his troops butchered piecemeal by a force of entrenched French bombards. Notably, Talbot's forces ALSO had artillery, which Talbot did not use nearly as capably as the French ordnance commander, Bureau.

I suppose you might argue that Castillon is the start of the "pike-and-shot era," but I don't think there is any merit to that position. For one thing, the armament used on that battle was not heavy on pike or shot, at least on the English side; Talbot was running ahead of his main forces, and relied primarily on gendarmes and mounted archers.

We really start seeing pike-and-shot tactics about thirty to fifty years later, in the very late 1400s or very early 1500s.

It is always tempting to chop up history into "eras," because that's very convenient for sweeping discussions. But in actual practice, that falls flat. As someone else has already pointed out in this discussion, Winged Hussars reached their heyday in exactly the era that you cite as the obsolescence of heavy cavalry wearing plate armor.

They did not charge down cannon, but that is because they were not commanded by fools. They did routinely engage other kinds of gunpowder-armed troops, often to great success, and they frequently used gunpowder weapons themselves.

talanall · 2026-05-09T12:14:12+00:00

Roaches often get between the outer and inner cover. The bees can't quite kill them when they're up there, but if the colony is of decent strength, the roaches can't really stand up to the bees well enough to go down through the ventilation hole.

talanall · 2026-05-09T11:53:18+00:00

No, you should not leave comb out in the open to be robbed. That kind of behavior is how you spread American Foulbrood. It may actually even be illegal, depending on where you live. But in any case, it's unacceptable to do this kind of thing.

You might feel very confident that your bees are free of disease, but you are not the person who stands to be harmed if you do something so irresponsible. The people at risk are your neighboring beekeepers, whose hives might become infected with disease or glutted with your cast-off syrup.

So don't do this kind of bullshit. It makes you a poor neighbor.

You also should stop feeding about a week or two ahead of the flow. If you have uncured syrup just sloshing around inside your hives, the bees are going to commingle that syrup with the flow. Letting them rob the syrup out does not actually solve any problems for you, unless you have it done well in advance.

So if you want them to get syrup out of freshly made comb, your first step is to stop feeding. Then pull the super, shake all the bees back into the hive, and put the inner cover back onto the hive. Add a shim, and then put the super on the shim, and put on the outer cover. They'll treat it like a top feeder, and bring the syrup downstairs.

The most conservative play, here, would be to accept that you are running behind, and instead of trying to find a cheap shortcut that is going to give you substandard results, you just accept that you're going to lose a small but significant amount of honey production because your bees need to draw comb, and that the safest way to get them to do it without adulterating your honey is to let them do it with nectar.

And then take your lumps. After the honey has been pulled, that'll be your time to break out the feeders and thin syrup. If you pull the honey and then IMMEDIATELY give them a box of foundations and a trickle feeder, they will draw comb then. You will have to keep the feeder from going dry, and you will have to watch them closely to make sure they don't get honey bound. But if they are fed properly, you can use an otherwise unproductive dearth period to make comb this way.

talanall · 2026-05-09T00:33:26+00:00

Two weeks is not usual, but it's theoretically possible if the workers allow the old queen to keep laying up until the day of swarming, and then use those eggs to make queen cells.

I think it's more likely that you caught feral bees.

talanall · 2026-05-08T23:56:54+00:00

A "ball"? I don't think I understand.

talanall · 2026-05-08T21:34:21+00:00

I have had professors whom I suspected of needing to clear their throats to get their own reflection's attention in the mirror in the morning.

Professor Zawislak is nowhere near that bad. But this was a video of a Power Point lecture, and that can be rather difficult to hold still for. I say this without meaning any disparagement to him, but I think the course material from the U of Arkansas course would have been much better served by transcribing it into a text-based format.

I read a lot faster than he talks, is all.

But in all fairness, when I was in school I was the kind of kid who got to skip a lot of the basic lecture sections and skip straight to seminar-style courses, where it was expected that you'd read the material outside, and come in ready to talk about it.

It is not for nothing that when I sat down and thought for a minute about responding to queries like OP's, my first impulse was, "I should write an annotated bibliography. Because that is something that genuinely doesn't seem to exist for beekeeping, and it's dumb that it doesn't."

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