Michael R.

Michael has about 15 years of practical beekeeping experience and manages roughly 60 colonies in the Red River Valley. His day-to-day work covers routine inspections, varroa monitoring, queen management, spring buildup, feeding decisions and getting colonies through a hard northern winter. He writes on varroa monitoring, common hive problems, queen failure and requeening, colony establishment, apiary hygiene and seasonal colony health. Because errors in colony health advice can affect neighbouring apiaries as well as your own bees, his articles carry an additional editorial review before publication. He has completed advanced beekeeping coursework and belongs to a local beekeepers association. His articles here are mostly on bee diseases, apiary biosecurity and sanitation, including foulbrood recognition, quarantining and disinfecting used equipment, and keeping disease records across several yards. His foulbrood, equipment-quarantine and laboratory-testing articles point readers to the North Dakota Department of Agriculture's apiary program for inspection and reporting. Nearly all of his articles are second-reviewed by Thomas B., and Michael is himself the second reviewer on most of Elena P.'s bee-biology articles, where he checks that the research-based explanation matches what beekeepers actually see in a working colony.