Becvar's Honey Farm

04/29/2026

This is a picture of my son John working our hives in Baldwin City, KS in the 1990’s. His aunt Terri Leyba took this twilight photo. This was a year or two before we moved to Iowa.

12/12/2025

Zenning my way into my fortieth year 🎄🩷

Stop by tonight for a slice of cake, the most adorable macarons and cocktails 🍸 served up by Amy and Sue 🎉

09/13/2025

While out feeding and do mite treatments with the bees I found a bunch of this blooming in the woods around Indianola and the honey bees were on nearly every plant! Boy they were going for broke. Every hive is bringing in nectar and tons of pollen here today!

09/03/2025

A lot of good advice from this young gal.

Since I started keeping bees 13 years ago, I've learned a thing or two about what it means to be a beekeeper and what NOT to do. Oh, the mistakes I've made! ...

08/30/2025

I’m fighting the hard fight this year! Damn there are so many Small Hive Beetles this year! They are really causing me problems this year. I know I’ve lost at least 16 hives primarily from Carpenters ants and the Small Hive Beetles. I’ve got baited beetle barns in the hives, Heavy duty Brawny towels in the hives, peppermint swabs and murder sauce in them too. I closed out three of my bee yards because of the pest level this year. Brought back some pallets of dead bee hives home to clean out since the wax moths are just about as bad. I even had a strong queen rite hive move up to the very top super and they let the wax moths have the bottom two boxes. Not to mention all the hives were very strong just last week and I thought we were doing ok. Man this is just a frustrating bee keeping year for me. It’s my worst in keeping bees for 30 years….🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

08/19/2025

I had a swarm of bees that moved into one of my empty nucs that was sitting on my flat bed truck yesterday afternoon. So I’m just going give them a new home and some extra brood and feed and they ought to be fine. I also had a swarm show up over the past couple days and occupied a vacant eight frame hive in my back yard. I only wish they did it earlier in the year.

08/17/2025

I’m in the process of catching a large swarm of bees out by my bee yard this morning. I know there were two queens in the swarm. I found the bees trying to ball and kill the queens so there might have been as many as three queens in this swarm. The queens were of Italian heritage. Pretty Cordovan colors.

07/28/2025

One of my biggest and strongest hives was toppled by the strong winds and
Rain storm that hit us this early morning.