Recent Innovations in Hive Design
Explore the world of Hive hive design innovations with our expert review. Get insights into the newest designs, trends, and how they can transform your environment.
Elena P.
Elena has a background in biology and about 8 years of beekeeping experience, keeping around 20 colonies in eastern North Dakota. Her interests are honey bee behaviour, colony biology, pollination, reproduction, communication and the relationship between colonies and the landscape around them. She writes on bee biology, queen and worker roles, reproduction, communication, pollination, bee-friendly planting and colony development. She is also one of the fact checkers here: biological claims and scientific explanations are reviewed by her before publication. She belongs to a regional beekeeping association. Her articles here are mostly on bee biology, foraging, queens, pollination and colony establishment, which is where questions about why a colony behaves the way it does tend to land. Most of her own articles are second-reviewed by Michael R., and she is in turn the second reviewer on most of Sofia T.'s honey and equipment articles, where her job is to check the science behind what those articles say about honey quality, beeswax and bee behaviour.
How Bees Use Pheromones to Communicate: Complete Guide
How honey bees produce and use pheromones, from the queen's cohesion-holding signal to the alarm call that triggers colony defense.
How Honey Bees Collect and Carry Pollen: Full Process
Pollen collection runs on static charge and a leg-driven packing mechanism, not just brute effort — here is how the corbicula works and how much pollen a colony really brings home.
Bee Grooming Behavior: How and Why Bees Groom Each Other
Bees groom themselves and each other constantly, and in some stock that same grooming reflex physically disables Varroa mites — here is how autogrooming, allogrooming, and mite-biting actually differ.
How Bees Use Alarm Signals to Warn the Colony
Honey bees warn each other of danger through a specific chemical released at the sting, not a general 'threat' cue — here is what the alarm pheromone actually does, how it differs from the vibrational stop signal, and what it means at the hive.
Bee Venom: What Beekeepers Need to Know About Stings
What bee venom actually is, what apitherapy research does and does not support, and the sting-reaction warning signs every beekeeper should know.
Is Beekeeping Sustainable? What the Evidence Shows
Is beekeeping sustainable? Yes at the right hive density and with colonies kept alive. What the research shows on U.S. colony losses, wild bee competition, disease spillover and hive density.
Honeybee Interaction with Pesticides
Neonicotinoid pesticides can measurably impair a honeybee’s navigation and foraging ability at concentrations far below what would kill her outright – a sublethal effect that’s proven harder for regulators to account for than acute die-offs. That gap between “not immediately…
Honeybee Evolution and History
Genetic research in recent years has traced the honeybee’s origin to the Middle East or northeastern Africa, unsettling decades of assumptions that had placed it in Asia instead. Even a species as thoroughly studied as Apis mellifera still has real…