Who writes and reviews

Articles are written and reviewed by the five beekeepers listed on our team page. Between them they keep bees in eastern and southeastern North Dakota, the Red River Valley and western Minnesota. Team members publish under their first name and last initial, together with their years of experience, region, apiary size and the topics they cover; they have chosen not to publish photographs or personal social media accounts.

Two people on every signed article

An article carries a person’s byline only after that person has checked it and taken responsibility for it. Every article published under an individual’s name also has a second member of the team as its reviewer, and the reviewer is never the author. The reviewer is named at the top of the article.

Reviewers are matched to what they know best. The usual pairings are:

Articles that have not been through this review carry the site byline, “BeeKeepersRealm Editorial Team”, instead of a person’s name. Many of the site’s older articles are in that group. When one of them is reviewed, it is republished under the name of the person who has taken responsibility for it.

How we use AI tools

We use AI tools to help research, draft and structure articles. A draft is a starting point: a person reads it, checks its claims against sources, and cuts or corrects anything that does not hold up before it is published. That is the standard for what we publish now. Some older articles published under the site byline did not get that level of checking, and we have been finding and fixing errors in them, such as photographs that did not match the text and editing notes left in headings. That is why those articles are being re-reviewed one at a time rather than left as they are.

Sources

Where a claim depends on evidence, we link to the source so you can check it yourself. We prefer primary and official sources: peer-reviewed research, university extension services, and government bodies such as the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and Agricultural Marketing Service and the North Dakota Department of Agriculture’s apiary program. Where an article relies instead on an experienced beekeeper’s published writing or on an equipment maker’s documentation, we link that as well, so you can judge how much weight to give it.

We do not make up statistics, studies or quotations. If we cannot find a source for a figure, the figure comes out. Quotations in reviewed articles are attributed to a named person and a named source.

Regional perspective

We keep bees on the northern plains, where the season is short and the winter is long, and our timing advice is written from that perspective. Beekeeping advice is local: dates, thresholds and treatment timing that suit North Dakota can be wrong somewhere milder. Where an article’s advice depends on climate or on state rules, treat it as a starting point and check it against your local extension service, your state apiary program and your local beekeeping association.

Colony health and treatments

Our disease and treatment articles explain how to recognise problems and what the options are. They are not a diagnosis. If you suspect a serious brood disease such as American foulbrood, contact your state apiary program. For any treatment, the product label and your local regulations take precedence over anything written here.

Images

When we use someone else’s photograph in a reviewed article, our practice is to use one licensed for reuse, usually under a Creative Commons licence through Wikimedia Commons, and to credit the photographer and the licence in the caption.

Dates

An article shows a “Last Updated” date when its content has been revised. Technical fixes, such as repairing a broken link or tidying formatting, do not change that date.

Advertising and independence

The site is funded by display advertising, which is labelled and kept separate from the articles. We do not currently publish sponsored articles or paid product recommendations. If that changes, the page concerned will say so clearly.

Corrections

If you find an error, tell us and include the page address and what you think is wrong. We check the report against the sources. If we got it wrong, we correct the article and add a note to the page saying what changed. Small fixes such as typos are corrected without a note.

This policy was last revised in September 2026. See also: About BeeKeepersRealm and Our Team.