Keeping bees buzzing since 1949.
If you see a swarm and want a beekeeper to come remove them, please visit our Report A Honeybee Swarm page for more info on identifying and reporting swarms.
If you’d like to be notified to help capture swarms, visit our swarm catcher page and fill out the form to be added to the list!
Our monthly club meeting will be this Thursday. We eill have a plant exchange at 6:30pm and the normal meeting will begin at 7pm. We will have guest speaker Mike Church telling us all about hive splits, which will be helpful for the current swarm season.
Over the past decade Virginia’s beekeepers strongly supported the national colony loss and management surveys through the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP). Prior to this, beekeepers supported a statewide survey. Together the surveys provide over 20 years of annual data on winter honey bee colony losses. The surveys also provided valuable information regarding beekeepers’ management practices and factors that affected their colony health and survival. BIP is reducing their services and is not expected to conduct a colony loss-management survey this year. We will again rely on a statewide survey to gather information on winter colony losses and management practices. Access to an online survey is provided below. It should require only 3 to 5 minutes to complete.
Please take a few minutes to let us know how many honey bee colonies you had at the beginning and end of winter. If you have more than one apiary, complete a separate survey for each of your apiaries. Apiaries within 1/2 mile distance of each other should be combined as a single apiary for your responses. Distribution of the survey link to other beekeepers in Virginia is appreciated.
The URL for accessing the “Winter Honey Bee Colony Loss Survey”:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=qeUKYsFOoE-GQV2fOGxzCQRMmfE92mBPnStZV7RxBoNUNFYwRU05WDlRU0NKOVdZMEZGQUFIMzYwUS4u
Making a Spring split with a mated queen is a relatively simple, cost-effective, and efficient means of creating a new honey bee colony—especially for beginning beekeepers. In an effort to support our new beekeepers in making late Spring splits, we have put out requests to two local VSH (varroa sensitive hygiene) queen breeders to procure up to a dozen mated queens. Our club will front the money for the initial purchase and members will then buy the queens from the club. If you are a new beekeeper and interested in getting a queen, please contact Ron Stilwell at 804-839-1191 or stilwellronald@gmail.com to get on the reservation list. Availability is not guaranteed, but dependent on weather and successful queen mating. The cost of each queen will be between $40 and $50, depending on the type of queen produced by the breeder.