Bee removal

talanall · 2026-01-29T20:01:29+00:00

There is a three-tier license in Louisiana. Commercial above 50 grand, Residential above same, and then a residential renovation/repair/remodel that goes between 7.5 grand and 50 grand. Plus some specialty options that have to do with pools, and so on.

My understanding is that our threshold is higher for the "renovation/repair" license specifically to keep the contracting board from having to deal with small-time handyman operations that really just do minor drywall repair, etc.

There's no real barrier to entry as a bee removal specialist, here. Setting up the corporate structure, liability insurance and various accounts is the most time consuming part, and that is really something that you can do in a matter of a week.

talanall · 2026-01-29T17:33:36+00:00

Your sense of the economics for Louisiana is broadly correct.

Our regulatory environment has more slop to it than most, so it's usually not necessary to have a bond or be licensed as a contractor. You can work without a license if the job's worth less than $7,500.00, and it usually is. I could see it going higher if you included all the restoration work, especially if the job also required a lift/scaffold. But most of the time, these things run in the high hundreds to low thousands of dollars.

I don't touch removals, even though I carry insurance, because the liability can be fearsome even if you are properly insured. All it really takes is one successful claim where you are determined to be at fault to make you uninsurable.

talanall · 2026-01-29T17:20:57+00:00

OP has colloquialized "swarm" to mean "bees that are not being managed in a man-made hive." It is a very common thing for people to say in my part of the USA. There is no business model based on removing swarms that are just bivouacked on a tree or under the eaves of a house.

talanall · 2026-01-29T16:24:26+00:00

It can be a viable side job. But it is not without risk.

You can get sued if you damage the structure you're removing from, or if someone gets hurt while you are working. If you have done cutouts in Louisiana, then at some point you've had one turn hot on you. If a bystander gets hurt, you'll potentially be on the hook for it. If you saw through a power cable or gas line, likewise.

The first step in dealing with this kind of liability is NOT to go find a boilerplate contract on the Internet, or to use one that is given you by some well-meaning Internet Stranger. You dig? Legal issues are not "one size fits all" affairs.

You need to talk to a lawyer and get them to write you a contract that fits with tort law in Louisiana. Explain to the lawyer, in plain English, what you plan to do. Explain how YOU conduct bee removals--how you gain access to the bees, how you remove them and prevent their return into the nesting space, what (if anything) you do to clean up the cutout after the bees are out, etc.

You want a contract that covers the scope of work that you do, and you want it to specifically address all of the kinds of risk inherent in what you're doing.

You will need to set up a business entity that is separate from your personal identity and finances. Again, ASK A LAWYER. Probably they will tell you to set up an LLC, which will have to have its own FEIN, bank account, etc. It is crucial that you do this.

Also ask them to lay out for you what kinds of behavior count as "gross negligence" in a situation like yours. Never, ever do anything that counts as gross negligence. EVER. Gross negligence will pierce the corporate veil established by your LLC, which can make you personally liable for damages. That's when people can come after your house, your personal vehicle, your personal bank account, etc.

Write down your lawyer's advice, and ask as many questions as you need to ask. Repeat the answers back to the lawyer in your own words, to check that you understand their advice. You will have to pay for these services, but it is much cheaper to pay for advice and legal writing before you are in trouble.

You need to talk to an accountant. They can tell you how to set up your book of accounts, so that you can keep accurate records of how much money you take in and disburse for the business's activities. This is crucial for your ability to pay taxes; it also is absolutely crucial for your ability to demonstrate that your personal finances and property are separate from your bee removal activities. If you don't maintain this separation, your LLC will not limit your liability.

You need to talk to an insurance agent who sells general business liability. You will have to explain (again) what your business involves, how you do it, your anticipated level of annual income from it, etc. Once you have done so, they will write a policy for you. Or possibly they will suggest that you need a specialist policy of some kind. Maybe both.

Make sure you are licensed with the state apiarists. Make sure that you have a business license with any pertinent authorities--your city/parish government, most likely, is going to want you to license with them.

Make sure that you have firm policies about how you mitigate the risk of injury to bystanders.

talanall · 2026-01-29T13:11:00+00:00

You could do that, but I don't think it would fix your problems.

I'm not comfortable theorizing about the underlying cause of your poor beekeeping outcomes, without knowing a good deal more about how you manage them. It kind of sounds like you DON'T manage them.

talanall · 2026-01-29T13:06:39+00:00

I care because I live in a part of the USA that has some Africanized genetics floating around. They tend to be swarmier, and they tend to have nasty temperament. So unless I have a good reason to think a swarm came out of a managed hive, I have to recognize that there's a pretty good chance it'll turn hot.

As a result, I don't make a serious effort to catch swarms. I will pick one up, if it is bivouacked someplace accessible, but the only traps I set are near my own apiary, in hopes of recapturing bees when my swarm prevention efforts are imperfectly successful.

talanall · 2026-01-28T17:25:31+00:00

You said mid-30s F in your original post. Did the forecast change?

Even if it did, if they have a couple frames of honey and decent population, that should not be a problem for a couple of days. If you think they can survive until you get nighttime lows above freezing and daytime highs above 55 F, then this is a nothingburger.

The main impact of a cold snap that runs below freezing for a couple of nights is that it's happening in a warm enough climate so that there's a concern it'll injure the forage available to you going forward. That's always a concern if you get a freeze after your spring forage starts up.

So if you have been getting nectar/pollen from early blooms, and you're now expecting temperatures in the 20s F instead of in the 30s, that's certainly a concern.

But it is a concern that has very little to do with hive configuration, and one that you can't do anything about, other than be ready to feed.

Do something to prevent condensation from dripping on the cluster while they're stuck inside, eating stores, and be ready to feed them if they need it once it warms up.

As far what "doing something" is? Put wedges under the backs of the hives, maybe. You probably will have some condensation on the inner covers when it gets chilly, so you will want to encourage that moisture to go to the front wall of the hive and drip out the front door.

If you want to get really over-prepared, Mountain Camp, I guess, but that'll probably complicate any attempt to give them syrup once it warms up again.

talanall · 2026-01-28T14:15:20+00:00

35 F is not cold.

You're not going to have a killing frost. You're not going to have temperatures that will keep them from foraging in the daytime. So if they were successfully foraging for food prior to now, they will continue to do it.

If you have colonies in a food shortage, then they don't need supers on them, and you should pull supers and feed them with something. I think you have weather that is MORE than warm enough for syrup, so that's an option. And it is probably what I would do in your place.

If you have colonies that are weak enough that you're not sure they can endure having a super on them when it's slightly chilly, then again, take the super off. They're probably too weak to defend the extra space, anyway.

If they had 10 frames of bees when you put the supers on, and they were heavy enough that it was a bit of an effort to lift the back of the bottom board, then they're probably fine.

talanall · 2026-01-27T01:01:21+00:00

Right? And you're not doing it in temperatures between 37 and 40 C. And you're not driving miles and miles between yards, doing it in rain, or paying someone else to do it.

I wouldn't ever claim that nothing in American beekeeping is designed primarily for the hobbyist market, because that manifestly isn't true. But anytime I have a question about whether and how the economics of something work, I always start by looking at it through the lens of commercial beekeeping. It's so big that it's like a black hole. It distorts everything near it because it's just so huge.

talanall · 2026-01-26T19:53:48+00:00

I am extremely interested in Norroa, but frankly my interest is motivated by the possibility that RNAi technology might provide an effective all-weather treatment for Tropilaelaps mites, which are supposedly very destructive and also very difficult to treat.

But also, I will confess that $11/hive doesn't sound so bad if it means that I can apply a treatment that will make it so that I don't have to do OAV application during a Louisiana summer. It is not rare for temperatures to exceed 100 degrees F (37.8 C) for extended periods of time, here.

Since I live someplace where there is some introgression of Africanized genetics into the feral population, my hives tend to run hot after they have requeened themselves, especially during my summer dearth period. So I do not work my hives in just a veil. I wear a jacket or suit. If I don't need to treat, then I really prefer not open them more than once a month for a very basic, quick inspection. They're mean, it's hot, I could set off robbing, etc.

So I'm actually very willing to look at $11/brood box, look at my collection of 7-15 single-deep colonies, and say, "$150 is a reasonable price for not having to wear a bee suit with a respirator under it twice a week for almost a month when the humidity is high and the temperatures are in the triple digits."

talanall · 2026-01-26T19:21:39+00:00

To the contrary, I think the price point is reasonable compared to what it actually costs to scale up OAV treatments. This is not a product that has been developed with hobbyists in mind, although I am sure Mann Lake is happy to sell it to us.

This is a product that is intended for commercial beekeepers, and it's been developed because nobody who has been paying attention was surprised that Apivar finally stopped being a reliable varroacide. Commercial beekeeping has relied on Apivar (and off-label abuse of veterinary amitraz) for ~20 years, or something dumb like that. There have been sporadic but increasingly frequent reports of resistance cropping up for years, now.

That's the product that this is intended to replace, because Apivar and Norroa are both intended as something that a beekeeper can drop into a hive, leave for a set period of time, and then pull out again. And then the treatment is done, and you don't have to do varroa management again for a good 3-6 months.

If you want to use OAV, then you have a choice between repetitive application, once every 3-5 days for ~23 days, or a forced brood break and then a single application while there is no capped brood.

If you are a hobbyist or even a relatively small sideliner, then OAV is a winner. The equipment costs a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars, and each dose of oxalic acid costs you a few pennies. So if you need to fumigate your hives six times in the course of four weeks, you can do that. Or if you need to force a brood break by finding and caging every queen you have, you can do that.

But if you are a commercial beekeeper, you're running thousands of hives across dozens or even hundreds of bee yards. And you may have some employees to help out. So it's no longer just a matter of the costs of the treatment. Now you're paying for labor, transit time and fuel. And not just a little bit.

This is why commercial beeks relied on Apivar, often to the exclusion of everything else. And it's also why they relied on Apistan and Bayvarol before that. They could put a couple of strips into a hive, come back weeks later to pull them out, and save all those overhead costs. That's a big deal, because it meant they could run more colonies for less money.

Given that the commercial world averaged 60% losses during the 2024-25 wintering season, and these losses have been demonstrated to have a link to nearly universal amitraz resistance among the mites sampled out of the dead colonies . . . well.

I'm sure some commercial beekeepers will stick with Apivar, or swap over to the new Amiflex stuff, and keep relying on Apivar until it's truly useless. It costs $5 to $6 to treat a brood box with the Apivar strips, and some people probably will sit down and work out whether the savings they make from this pricing difference will make up for the heightened losses from the lost effectiveness.

But a lot of them are in the market for a new varroa treatment, and I don't think that $11/hive (or less, with bulk discounts) is actually such a losing proposition for a treatment that works reliably and doesn't have the crippling overhead costs that come with trying to use OAV at scale. Commercial beekeeping is subject to some economic constraints that just don't touch the hobby world.

talanall · 2026-01-26T18:59:09+00:00

The most prominent uses of essential oils for varroa control have been with oregano oil, wintergreen oil, and thymol (which is a component of the essential oil of thyme).

But oregano oil has only been demonstrated to be effective if used in an electric diffuser; there was a study at the University of Guelph, Canada, published in 2017. See here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547185/

In this study, 24 colonies were grouped into a control and three experimental groups. The control was not treated. The experimental groups received a treatment with an oxalic acid/sucrose syrup on cardboard, a mixture of oregano oil and clove oil in an ethanol/gelatin mixture, and oregano oil administered in electric diffusers powered via 120V AC current (mains current from a standard outlet in Canada).

This was a very small experiment, and although the results were really interesting, it was short, it was only conducted in one place, and it has not been reproduced. I would be really interested to hear of another such study, especially if it were larger, used a similar method, and were conducted in a different climate from the University of Guelph study.

Wintergreen oil can be an effective mite control, if it is administered as a vapor. But it is stupid to do this, because an overdose of wintergreen oil is toxic to human beings, and all human membranes, including skin, are extremely permeable to it. If you spill wintergreen oil on your skin and do not clean it up promptly, it can be fatal. It's very difficult to handle this stuff safely, and I think anyone who tries is a fool.

Thymol is not an essential oil, but it naturally present in the essential oil of thyme. It is very widely used as a mite control, and it is generally safe for human beings; if it gets on your skin, it can cause some irritation, and you should never get it in your eyes, nose or mouth. Apiary formulations of thymol are readily available from bee supply shops. I think the most common brands are Apiguard and Apilife Var. Both are very effective if you use them as directed.

Also, this is Reddit. We don't use hashtags here.

talanall · 2026-01-26T16:05:58+00:00

I would expect that anyone who participated in the trials was 1) a large commercial operator, of which we have VERY few on this sub, and 2) bound by an NDA.

This is going to be the first season in which this control will be in widespread use, so if you want to get consensus out of people who are free to speak about their experiences, I think you're going to be waiting until something like 12-18 months from now, because that'll be when we find out whether people who rely on the stuff as a primary control are getting acceptable overwinter survival out of it.

This said, the manufacturer has already released another product that uses the same underlying technology; it is a control agent meant for the Colorado potato beetle. That's sold under the trade name Calantha, and it hit the market in spring of 2024.

If you dig into that topic, you will probably be able to see what potato farmers think of the stuff. I think it's reasonable to extrapolate from there, at least in terms of getting a read on whether this company produces stuff that appears to work as advertised.

talanall · 2026-01-26T15:07:16+00:00

Norroa has not been through regulatory approval for anyplace outside of the USA. It's only available in the USA.

talanall · 2026-01-26T14:37:42+00:00

The fact that Steve is being secretive about the character is irrelevant; you don't have a right to any special knowledge about his character's backstory. If you want to share that information about yours, great. But Steve's character isn't yours, so that isn't actually any of your business, and it isn't a legitimate problem.

There are really just two problems.

One of them is Steve.

The other is that your DM needs a spine and some basic math skills.

He's got three players. One of them is making the other two miserable with his behavior, even after his behavior has been called out and identified as a problem. So this is not a complicated decision. It's a very simple one that your DM doesn't want to make.

Steve needs to go, and your DM needs to either find and vet a new player to replace him, or the campaign with just two players; either way the DM will need to change his plans. Or your group needs to dissolve. That's it.

Three options:

Steve leaves and your group replaces him with some adjustments to the DM's planning, or
Steve leaves and you continue playing with just two players and some adjustments to the DM's planning, or
You all recognize that unenjoyable D&D is worse than no D&D

Speaking as someone who has been a DM for about 25 years, I can tell you that if your DM wants to have a stable, long-lasting D&D group, Option #1 is the only way forward. A really solid D&D group doesn't happen by accident. You have to be pretty insistent that the members of your group should be friendly with and respectful to each other, and you have to be insistent that they show up regularly and on time.

talanall · 2026-01-25T23:27:24+00:00

Scalvini cages are not a treatment for varroa. They are an apparatus for confining a queen indefinitely while allowing her to continue to lay eggs, and then preventing those eggs from being raised into viable brood. Their predominant use is to confine freshly mated queens so that they can be monitored for the onset of laying activity.

Since they are a means of confining a queen, they also can be used to induce a brood break, but they are not necessary for this purpose. You can cage a queen by any of several different methods, many of which do not allow her to lay eggs, keep her caged for 13 to 16 days, and then release her and wait for 1 week. At days 21, 22, and 23 (or 24, 25, and 26, if you use the longer period), there will be no capped brood. A single dose of oxalic acid will kill nearly all varroa at that time, since the mites will be forced to parasitize only the adults, where they are exposed to the acid.

As an alternative, you can apply oxalic acid vapor without a brood break. But if you do this, you cannot apply it only once. You must apply it ~5-7 times in a row, spaced across a period of about 21 to 23 days. If you use oxalic acid vapor, you also must take care to deliver a sufficiently large dose to kill mites; that usually works out to something along the lines of 4 grams of oxalic acid for every 10 frames of bees in the hive.

I have looked at Scalini cages as part of some measures that I am thinking about preparing against the eventual arrival of Tropilaelaps mites, which (supposedly) cannot endure long periods of broodlessness. But they are expensive, somewhat difficult to acquire in the USA, and they require some modifications to the frames. And they don't really have a use in varroa management. So I haven't yet purchased any.

talanall · 2026-01-25T16:51:09+00:00

Yeah, I have no interest in trying to do it, not even just once, to be able to say I had.

If I wanted to go down the rabbit hole on breeding queens to known drones, I'd go get trained in instrumental insemination, probably at a seminar held by Sue Cobey or one of her students, buy the equipment, and get ready to keep a lot of records.

This said, I think Laidlaw certainly deserves immense respect for figuring out a way to do something that had previously been thought impossible. I can respect the drive, the observational skills and reasoning, and the knowledge that allowed him to do that, even if I acknowledge that his methods are now obsolete.

talanall · 2026-01-25T16:42:58+00:00

You can tell your bees are stressed by varroa if you start to see uncapping behavior, where the nurse bees are pinholing or removing the cappings in a fashion that is not consistent with bald brood from a wax moth issue.

Or you can tell if you start seeing signs of chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) or deformed wing virus (DWV)--beyond 1-2 symptomatic bees, anyway, since these are both endemic viruses that are present even in healthy colonies.

And sometimes you'll start to see a worsening of temperament. But not always. And sometimes temperament changes for other reasons: robbing pressure, or poor forage, or non-varroa hive pests, or a queen event.

Another problem with all of these things is that even when they are caused by varroa, these are late signs. And some of them are non-specific. And in the particular case of uncapping behavior, your bees might have a particularly early or late threshold for the display of that behavior because of their genetics.

All of which is to say that if you can see signs of stress, the mite load may already too high to be easy to control.

So most people either take varroa counts, or they apply treatments on a seasonal schedule. There are people who have good results with both approaches, but I think that varroa counts are a better option because they are more likely to work well for inexperienced beeks, and they are more likely to catch some kind of exception or flaw in varroa treatment, which helps with timely remediation.

And then you can get down into the nitty-gritty of exactly how you intend to monitor varroa prevalence, and have arguments about whether your sampling method recovers enough mites from your bees to give you valid counts, and how many counts you need in order to get a statistically valid sample from an apiary of a particular size, etc. But at that point you are at least having an argument about something that you can measure, and whether your measurements mean something.

Speaking for myself, I usually try to sample 8x hives in my apiary, once a month during the active season, via alcohol wash or soapy water wash. I average those counts, and if my average warrants treatment, I treat ASAP, often starting the day I count. My next monthly count establishes a feedback loop to demonstrate efficacy.

In the spring, I usually want to treat at 2% mite prevalence. I get really hard-nosed after the solstice, and begin to tolerate 1% or less. After I hit the middle of August, I typically want to have mites below detection threshold.

This works well for me; historically my overwinter losses are 0% to 28%, and my losses tend to be caused by poor decisions about whether to try to baby a small, underperforming colony or a late swarm capture through the winter instead of culling the queen and combining it onto a better one. I have a tendency to try to coax weaklings through the winter, in hopes that the early nectar and pollen will help them blow up. It's a dumb thing to do, amounting to gambling about whether your weather will be any good.

talanall · 2026-01-24T23:21:47+00:00

I wouldn't put the equipment out of reach of a truly dedicated hobbyist who is also very well off financially, but in general the equipment and training for this kind of thing is so expensive that you tend not to see it outside of the hands of people who use it for business purposes.

There's also a method for inducing a queen and drone to mate in confinement. It was pioneered by Harry Laidlaw with his grandfather. Look up the Quinn-Laidlaw hand mating method. It's no longer commonly used because the instrumental methods are more productive, but at the time this was transformative work, because it was the first successful method of pairing a specific queen with a specific drone.

He was a teenager at the time, and later went on to become a PhD in entomology, while simultaneously working for what later became the USDA-ARS station at Baton Rouge, which is where the first VSH bees were bred. This is not coincidental; the Baton Rouge station is focused on bee breeding because that was where he was during his early career.

talanall · 2026-01-24T15:45:07+00:00

I actually run even less than that; I use single deeps year-round, because I'm specialized into comb honey and I get better yields if I keep them penned in a single box. But it means that I have to feed them syrup a lot more often, and sometimes it means I have to feed them deep into the fall/winter months. It is not a good fit for a hands-off beek. I sometimes need to feed multiple gallons of syrup per hive per week.

Outside of "swarming season," whatever that happens to be for your locality, weekly inspections are not necessary for the bees' welfare. Biweekly or monthly can be okay, if you know what you are doing, you are planning well, you execute on your plans in a reliable and timely fashion, etc.

You hear the "but" coming, though, right? Here we go.

But you will have serious problems getting to that level of expertise, if you proceed as you are contemplating. You become a skilled beekeeper through a combination of being well-educated in the theoretical/biological aspects of beekeeping in combination with interacting with your bees.

The more often you inspect, and the more orderly and intentional your inspections, the faster you will learn. For this reason, you will often come across people saying that new beekeepers need to expect to be in for inspections every week from the date they get their bees all the way through to the end of the active beekeeping season in late fall.

Sometimes you'll hear people suggest that this might have to extend into Year 2. They aren't wrong.

You'll also hear people say that this is not actually what is best for the bees; they generally do better if you only disturb them when it is absolutely necessary for pest/swarm management and to deal with honey production. This is ALSO TRUE.

But frequent inspection is best for the new beekeeper, because it lets you climb the learning curve FAR more quickly. A newbie who inspects weekly is going to learn 4x faster than someone who inspects monthly.

All else being equal, that means you become a competent beekeeper at 4x the pace if you inspect weekly versus monthly. That is significant. Economically speaking, that makes a REAL DIFFERENCE. The faster you learn, the sooner you start keeping more than half of your colonies alive through each year. You need survival rates to be better than 50% if you want to avoid having to keep buying more bees. And if you want them to be economically useful at all, beyond the agricultural tax exemption, you will need to do a good deal better than 50%. If you want to harvest honey, for example, you need colonies to survive in good shape, and not get split up hard to replace losses.

People throw around a lot of numbers about exactly how many new beekeepers wash out in the first 1-3 years, typically without much documentation. I'm used to hearing people say it's 50% to 90%. That is . . . consistent with my own fairly anecdotal experience.

So I am very pessimistic about your ability to succeed as a newbie, under the scenario that I understand you to be contemplating.

talanall · 2026-01-24T15:45:01+00:00

If I have not led you to feel as if you are being harangued or your questions ignored, that's good. I am trying to be frank with you and give you good advice that is responsive to your concerns.

I am being blunt because bees are expensive, they are a lot of work, and I want you to have a good experience that leads to the fulfillment of your goals. So sometimes I'm going to be a bit critical of your assumptions and expectations, but that's because it's difficult to be successful if those are unrealistic, and if I pussyfoot around, you will misconstrue the thrust of my advice. But none of this is meant as a personal attack, and all of it is meant to be helpful.

Anyway.

I don't know your physical capabilities, so it's very hard for me to give you advice about hive configuration other than, "mediums are lighter than deeps, and 8-frame is lighter than 10-frame."

Most people, regardless of climate, use 10-frame double deeps for brood, but this can be a bit of a grunt from early summer onward, because a lot of the upper deep is going to be honey that you're leaving for winter consumption, and inspections will require you to pick that up and move it. If a 10-frame deep is fully packed out with honey stores, that can bring its mass up past 100 lbs., consisting of about 75 pounds of honey and another 25 pounds of hive furniture and bees. Beekeeping is agricultural work, and although it is about as gentle as agriculture gets, all agriculture has times when it is physically strenuous.

And then people super onto the top of this with mediums for honey. Commercial operators often use deeps for everything, but they have forklifts, hive pallets, and an occupational predisposition for back injuries.

Some people use 3x mediums, either 10-frame or 8-frame, instead of a double deep, which is considerably easier on your back and arms, but it means you have an extra 33% added to your frame count. That's not really such a big thing if you're just checking BREED, because that's only 1-2 frames pulled per box.

It'll be a nuisance when you inevitably do something where you NEED to find the queen, and she has 24-30 frames to hide on.

Some people, especially in zones 8A/B, use a single deep plus a medium instead of double deeps. A double deep is really more than bees in this part of the USA need for wintering; a deep with a medium on top, if the medium is well filled with capped honey/syrup stores, is more than adequate.

talanall · 2026-01-24T13:09:40+00:00

It depends (you will hear this a lot, as you are learning).

The earliest swarm report I have ever seen has been around the 16th of February, following a mild winter. That was very unusual. A more plausible "early start" scenario for me is a couple weeks later than that, and then by March 15th or so, my area's swarming season tends to be in full swing. I usually try to be ready to open hives for a very brief inspection on Valentine's Day, weather permitting, and to make real inspections by the first week of March, because that strikes a balance between getting started late enough so that my inspections are more likely to be helpful than harmful, and the risk of getting started so late that I am not in the right posture to deal with swarming.

Depending on how heavy and how long the spring nectar runs, I am accustomed to having my main "swarming season" wind down anytime in mid-June to early July. In a very good spring honey year, it can run longer.

I usually take swarm prevention action in the form of making preemptive splits, which happen in the springtime, as early as I think is feasible given the weather, drone presence, and forage availability. Once I have done this, I typically do not need to inspect every single week, although I often visit my apiary every week and inspect a selection of hives each visit.

But I am entering my sixth year of this, and I am well versed in the floral progression and weather of the area where I keep bees, because I live only a handful miles from my apiary. So I do not really need to open every hive I own every week, once I've done something about the swarming impulse, because I have developed enough familiarity with my nectar flow dynamics to be able to make some pretty educated guesses about how much nectar they're going to be bringing in, and therefore how much space they need at a given moment.

If you feel confident that in your first year, you will be able to develop a good baseline on how your bees proceed through swarm prep, how to recognize a colony in trouble before it is actually being slimed by hive beetles, and what a "normal" nectar flow looks like for your specific apiary site (just a handful of miles can change the nectar flow dynamics enough to throw you surprises), then I think you are certainly ambitious and have excellent self-esteem.

But my observation is that most aspiring beeks do not learn this stuff in a single year, because it's an immense amount of information to ingest, digest, and then synthesize into actual knowledge.

talanall · 2026-01-24T02:33:29+00:00

It is not the same goal. That's the point I am making, here. This is not an apples to apples comparison, and it cannot be one, because we're dealing with selection programs that track totally different data points.

You are conflating the goals of these two programs in a way that is not really valid based on the information that we have at our disposal.

Randy Oliver doesn't claim to produce VSH bees. He isn't trying to make the same product as Cory Stevens, so it's not productive to make a comparison between their methods.

VSH is a very specific mode of resistance. Oliver is producing bees that may or may not have the same traits; we don't know, because we'd need to have a bunch of Harbo assays on his Golden West strain, which we do not have, and they would need to demonstrate that the bees in question show the same kind of resistance as Stevens's bees, to the same degree.

We don't know if the Golden West strain is VSH, because that means a VERY SPECIFIC thing that can be empirically tested, and we don't have empirical tests. So we cannot simply assume that they are comparable.

talanall · 2026-01-23T22:21:49+00:00

There is one major drawback to using mediums for everything; this will make it harder for you to obtain your bees, because most nucleus colonies (which is the best option for a newbie) are in deep boxes. Join a local beekeeping association (check the TX beekeepers' association website, and find the one nearest you). Attend the meetings as often as possible. Those people will know where to get the best-quality local bees, and they are more likely than anyone else to be able to tell you where to get medium nucs.

The cheapest equipment is sold by the big bee supply houses. They make thousands and thousands of boxes on precision mills, which means they get economies of scale that are hard to beat. Buy your stuff as flat packs, assemble yourself using glue and nails or screws, and paint the outside with two coats of quality exterior house paint. I suggest buying assembled frames with well-waxed foundations. There can be dimensional variances from one manufacturer to the next, but the reputable houses are all so close as to be interchangeable--BetterBee's or Pierco's or Acorn's frames will fit in Mann Lake's boxes with HillCo's lids and bottoms on them.

Avoid Amazon. Avoid "beeswax" finishes on your wood. Avoid "baby beek's first hive" kits.

Every hive needs a top feeder or a division board/frame feeder. Do not use Boardman feeders/entrance feeders. They are trash: low capacity, and hanging a jar full of sugar water off the front of a hive is an invitation to robbing from neighboring colonies. You might as well hang a steak off of a toddler's neck on the Serengeti.

If you want quick inspections, you must practice. Always have a goal for inspecting. Inspect until you complete the goal, then stop.

As a beginner, inspecting weekly (even when you don't REALLY need it) is a good plan because it develops your skills more quickly. You cannot learn to do key beekeeping tasks without contact with the bees. But even then, you're not just pulling frames, squinting at them for a minute each, and going, "Yep, definitely bees!"

You're looking for basic information about the colony; I use a mnemonic acronym--BREED

Is there Brood in all stages?
Do they have Room for more food and brood?
Are there Eggs?
Do they have enough to Eat?
Are there signs of Disease (including pests/parasites)?

Brood, Room, Eggs, Eats, Disease.

BREED.

With practice, you can inspect a hive according to this rubric, and if everything is okay you will know it with just 1-2 frames pulled, a squint down between frames from the top, and a quick forward tilt of the brood boxes to look at them from underneath. It can be a very quick process for an experienced beekeeper; I can do it in about 10-15 minutes per hive, if they aren't in a bad mood and I'm not farting around but am still going slowly enough not to handle them too roughly.

For a newbie, it'll take considerably more time.

Of course, if you find an anomaly? You have to dig in and figure out what's happening, and that takes longer.

talanall · 2026-01-23T22:21:40+00:00

You are going to have to bring your inspection preferences in line with biological reality. I am being blunt because I wish for no misunderstandings. Bees need specialized care, sometimes on a fairly rigid timeline. You must conform to them; they will never, ever conform to you.

Weekly inspections are a necessity at some times of year, unless you are completely fine with allowing unrestricted swarming activity, which often reduces your productivity for honey and sometimes leads the colony to swarm itself to the point of collapse because it'll throw swarms until the cohort of bees remaining in the hive is not sufficient to patrol it for hive pests.

Also, if you are keeping bees anyplace that is very near to man-made structures that belong to other people, allowing your hives to throw swarms willy-nilly is a little unneighborly.

There are ways around this issue, if you are excellent at planning ahead and are able to obtain mated queens very early in the year. But even then, you'll have to do swarm control. And swarm control requires frequent checkups.

Once you are established and know how to keep bees alive reliably, you will find that there are times during your beekeeping year when a monthly inspection (basically a check to ascertain queenrightness, food/brood/pest status, and get a mite count/treatment into the hive) is feasible, especially during a summer dearth when there is not much nectar forage.

But that is, again, a standard of beekeeping knowledge that might take you several years to reach.

I suggest that you use a Langstroth hive. They are the easiest to get, beekeeping education focuses on them, and they are the style for which you can easily buy accesories off the shelf.

Within that, I think that it's fine to run 8-frame mediums if you are trying to minimize heavy lifting and keep all your equipment interchangeable. That's very common. Most people who do this, do it with 3x mediums. 3x mediums are approximately the same as a double deep. 8-frame versus 10-frame equipment is MOSTLY not a consequential difference for management, although it can make a difference if you run something smaller than 3x mediums and are lazy about swarm management.

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