High on a rock wall near Bicorp, in the Valencia region of eastern Spain, a prehistoric artist painted a scene that still resonates with anyone who has ever climbed toward a wild bee nest chasing honey: a human figure, suspended…
Walk through a traditional Slovenian apiary and you won’t just see rows of identical hive boxes – you’ll see a gallery. On the front of each compartment in a traditional Slovenian horizontal beehive sits a small, hand-painted wooden panel, often…
Every closed-population breeding line and every carefully controlled genetic cross in modern queen breeding – including work like the New World Carniolan breeding program covered elsewhere on this site – depends on a technique that took three named researchers and…
In October 2006, Pennsylvania commercial beekeeper Dave Hackenberg opened hives in his Florida wintering yard and found something genuinely strange: colonies with a healthy queen, capped brood, and full honey stores, but almost no adult worker bees anywhere in or…
New Zealand’s honey industry today is internationally famous for one thing above all else: Manuka honey, a premium, scientifically studied variety that commands prices most other honey varieties can only dream of. But that modern success story has real, documented…
In December 1841, a young English clergyman departed Plymouth with beehives stowed in the ship’s hold, determined to establish honeybees in a country that had never had them before. William Charles Cotton, chaplain to the first Anglican Bishop of New…
Decades before Gregor Mendel’s pea-plant experiments laid the foundation for modern genetics, a Silesian priest and beekeeper made a discovery about honeybee reproduction so counterintuitive that it took years for the broader scientific community to fully accept it: unfertilized eggs,…
Every May 20th, beekeeping organizations, schools, and pollinator advocates around the world mark World Bee Day – a date chosen specifically because it is the birthday of Anton Janša, an 18th-century Slovenian beekeeper whom Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa personally appointed…
Beekeepers have known for well over a century that royal jelly, and royal jelly alone, turns a genetically ordinary female honeybee larva into a queen rather than a worker. What took far longer to pin down was why – which…