Beekeeping: Home

• In the course of her lifetime, a worker bee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.


• To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers.


• A productive hive can make and store up to two pounds of honey a day. Thirty-five pounds of honey provides enough energy for a small colony to survive the winter.


• Theoretically, the energy in one ounce of honey would provide one bee with enough energy to fly around the world.


• Most researchers believe the honeybee originated in Africa. The first European colonists introduced Apis mellifera, the common honeybee, to the Americas. Native Americans referred to the bees as "White Man's Fly." Today honeybees can be found all over the world.


• Bees have five eyes. The three ocelli are simple eyes that discern light intensity, while each of the two large compound eyes contains about 6,900 facets and is well suited for detecting movement. While bees cannot recognize the color red, they do see ultraviolet colors.

To read the following E-Books, go to the E-Books database link on the Library's database page (scroll down), click on E-Books, then search by the keyword: Beekeeping, or search by book title.

• Honey Bee Viral Prevalence Map This link opens in a new window

  See help text

  Honey bee viruses have been widely surveyed and sampled for through the USDA APHIS Honey Bee Survey, BIP Tech Team samples, Emergency Response Kits, and other samples processed through joint co-operations through the University of Maryland bee lab. To share the results of these surveys through an openly accessible visualization, we have released a dynamically explorable map...

  Jan 9, 2018
• SolutionBee delivers new NFC-enabled hive monitoring product This link opens in a new window

  See help text

  SolutionBee, widely known within the beekeeping community for its HM-20 Hive Monitor introduced several years ago, has now made its next generation Hive Monitor product, the HM-5 available.   The form factor and functionality of the new HM-5 is very similar to the earlier HM-20.  It collects both the weight, external temperature and humidity every 15...

  Jan 3, 2018
• Wintering Sheds: Why are more North American beekeepers overwintering their bees in cold storage? This link opens in a new window

  See help text

  More and more US beekeepers are starting to place their bees in sheds for the fall, for indoor wintering. While beekeepers in Canada have done this for decades, the popularity of the practice in the US is more recent. Beekeepers began by using structures already built for onion and potato storage in Idaho to house...

  Dec 5, 2017
• What’s in a name? This link opens in a new window

  See help text

  Naming yards isn’t complicated but it’s an important aspect of managing a large commercial operation in order to facilitate communication between staff. Many states require apiary sites to be registered which requires filing paperwork that names the yard in addition to providing some basic information about location (latitude, longitude or nearest intersection), property ownership, and...

  Dec 1, 2017
• A time of Thanks and Giving – 2017 This link opens in a new window

  See help text

  IT IS GIVING TUESDAY! The Bee Informed Partnership’s – our friends call us BIP – mission is to help beekeepers keep colonies alive using real world data.  We have come a long way in the last 5 years, and we couldn’t have done it without beekeeper participation.  But running BIP costs money, and while we...

  Nov 28, 2017

The McCarthy Library has several databases available.  Simply log-in using your WebAdvisor username and password for remote access.

Apiculture Newsletter from UC Davis' Dept. of Entomology