Little Apiary on the Prairie

10/15/2026

To our MN friends, Payne Family Orchard is a wonderful place to get apples and fantastic pumpkins!!

The farm stand is open!!!

We have fresh picked Red Regent and Haralson apples, pumpkins, and seeds.

3060 107th Ave SW, Montevideo (across from the silo)

10/06/2026

Help us pick the new look for our website. It takes one tap.

Photo 1 is Option A: warm and rustic (greens)
Photo 2 is Option B: clean and modern (grays)

To vote, react to this post. Like = A. Love = B.

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2027 bee pre-orders are open now, with 97 pickup locations across 10 states. Delivery is planned for April 2027, and those dates are tentative.

Ways to get more votes

10/01/2026

Scientists just found out Varroa mites don't reproduce the way every beekeeping textbook says. 🐝
For decades, the accepted story was that male Varroa are haploid, with half their mother's genes. A new study in Nature Communications tested it directly by tracking three generations of mites. What they found:
▪️ Male mites carry both copies of their mother's genome. They're effectively clones of her.
▪️ Those sons pass either copy on to their daughters, about 50/50.
▪️ Their modeling suggests this lets mite populations hold onto genetic diversity better than the old model predicted, even with constant sib-mating inside the cell.
That helps explain something every beekeeper has watched happen: a parasite that goes through brutal bottlenecks every time it moves hives, and still adapts fast.
What does it mean for your bees? Nothing changes this season, and the study didn't test any treatments. But the authors point out that predictions about miticide resistance and breeding for tolerance have assumed the old model. Our read is that it's another reason to keep doing the basics:
✅ Count mites before and after every treatment
✅ Rotate modes of action
✅ Follow label dose and timing
✅ Keep selecting for mite-resistant, hygienic stock
(The authors also note an unresolved conflict with older studies, so this is early science, not the last word.)
📄 Read the full paper (open access): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-77125-8
Reserve your 2027 bees at littleapiaryontheprairie.com or call 701-809-0153.

09/26/2026

You've weighed the stack. You've got the insulation on. The moisture plan is sorted. There's one more entrance to deal with — and it's the one at the bottom, the one that stays open all winter.

Late September is when field mice start scouting for winter shelter, and a beehive checks every box for them: warm, dry, full of comb, and guarded by bees that are about to slow way down and stop patrolling. Once a mouse is in, a winter cluster isn't in a position to evict it. What comes out in spring can be a box of chewed comb and nesting debris instead of a colony.

The fix is old and simple: reduce the entrance to roughly 3/8 inch — enough room for a bee, not enough for a mouse — and use metal over wood if you can, since a determined mouse will just chew through a wooden reducer. Don't seal it shut, though. Bees still need airflow and still take cleansing flights on warm winter days.

It's a five-minute job that's easy to forget until it's too late to fix. Full overwintering system — weight, structure, moisture, and now the entrance — is on the blog. We're always happy to help, even if you didn't get your bees from us. Call or text 701-809-0153.

How we overwinter colonies in four-high five-frame stacks: 20 frames, 15 resource and 5 nest, 200 lbs by Halloween, insulated and facing south.

08/26/2026

🎉 Facebook recognized us for starting engaging conversations and producing inspiring content among my audience and peers! We're always happy to help share our knowledge and experience!

08/18/2026

What's your mite count? How are you treating?

08/15/2026

Here's a rule that doesn't require a scale, a spreadsheet, or a single record: get your hands under the hive on Halloween and lift.

If it doesn't feel like it's bolted to the ground, you've got a problem — and about a week to fix it with frames instead of syrup.

October 31 isn't an arbitrary date. By the end of October, nights are cold enough that bees can't take syrup and cure it down to something they can cap. Brood rearing has wound down. The cluster is forming for real. A colony that's light on Halloween is light for the winter, because everything you do after that is being done to a colony that's already committed.

We target right around 200 pounds total going into winter — hive, frames, bees, and stores. That's more than most people put on, and it's on purpose. The scenario that kills bees up here isn't January. It's a long winter with a late spring. Bees that run short in March die within sight of the dandelions.

And hitting that number is a summer and early-fall job, not an October one. By the time we're breaking colonies down for winter configuration, the feeding is finished. Anything still short gets made up with capped frames — a topic of its own (that's Part 3 of the series).

Part 1 — why we winter in tall, narrow stacks instead of wide boxes — is up now: https://www.littleapiaryontheprairie.com/blogs/news/why-we-winter-bees-in-a-chimney

(701) 809-0153 if you want to talk it through. Happy to help, even if you didn't get your bees from us.

How we overwinter colonies in four-high five-frame stacks: 20 frames, 15 resource and 5 nest, 200 lbs by Halloween, insulated and facing south.

08/13/2026

2027 bee reservations are open.

Every spring the bees run out before the demand does, so we're opening the list early this year. Package bees, nucleus colonies, and queens — the same Carniolan and Italian stock we've always raised, bred for long northern winters — now with 97 pickup stops across nine states.

New for 2027: we're adding stops in eastern Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. If you've been waiting for us to come your way, this might be the year.

Full pickup schedule and reservation details are at littleapiaryontheprairie.com.

We're always happy to help, even if you didn't get your bees from us.

08/11/2026

A lot of winter dead-outs didn't starve. They starved with honey still in the box.

Pull the frames on an April dead-out and you'll often find capped honey against both outside walls and a dead cluster in the middle. That colony didn't run out of groceries. It ran out of reachable groceries.

Here's the mechanism: in a hard cold snap, a winter cluster eats the honey directly above it and works upward. What it will not do is break cluster and travel sideways across cold comb — even to food eighteen inches away. It'll sit there and starve.

A ten-frame box is a wide, shallow cavity. It asks the cluster to do the one thing it won't do.

So every October we take our double-deep colonies apart and rebuild them as tall, narrow stacks: four five-frame boxes high. Same twenty frames. Same bees. Different shape. Fifteen frames of food, five of nest, with the nest at the bottom — so the colony spends the whole winter eating straight up through the pantry with no lateral moves and no dead ends.

None of this is new. Northern beekeepers have wintered small, narrow cavities for a century in a dozen configurations. This is just where we landed for our winters, and it's the single biggest reason our spring numbers look the way they do.

Part 1 of the full overwintering series is up on the site — the 15/5 ratio, the 200-lb Halloween rule, and how we insulate the row. Link in comments.

Questions? Call or text (701) 809-0153. We're always happy to help, even if you didn't get your bees from us.

05/17/2026

This nuc unfortunately didn't fair well in transit. It over heated, most of the bees cooked and then when we hit temps below freezing there wasn't enough mass to keep the brood warm and it was chilled. In short, it wasn't a quality nuc after all that.

However, it's still a great example to share. You can see that even though there aren’t a ton of bees, and they are queenless, they are going to town opening cells and cleaning up. They are removing all of the dead brood and preparing for new eggs. It's in their DNA to do that.

This is the hygienic behavior we select for in our breeders. This is the quality genetics you should expect.