Four Seasons Apiaries

04/01/2026

I'm thinking of raising some mated queens to sell this June/July. Interested?

02/11/2026

Attended the Midwest HoneyBee Expo last weekend! Had a lot of great conversations with beekeepers. I overhauled the website for my app. Check it out!

HiveScribe – Capture in chaos. Return with context.

11/13/2025

I've been talking with Michael from Technically Beekeeping for the last year+. He's inventing a safer, convenient smoker. Check out the Kickstarter campaign he launched yesterday!

The World's SAFEST and EASIEST Bee Smoker!

11/08/2025

Got out my old branding iron again.

Dirt and brick rocket stove used to heat a branding iron to leave my mark on a deep Langstroth hive body.

10/25/2025

This fall I prototyped a small filming device for my bees. Getting a sample of nurse bees to walk out of a box across a glass surface so I can take their picture is not as easy as it sounds.

I'm starting to process the video and getting images like this.
This winter I'm working on creating a computer vision pipeline to detect, count, and estimate the varroa mite infestation level in a hive.

03/27/2025

A lot has been on my mind lately. I've put quite a few irons in the fire. Maybe too many.

- I've got 6 hives pulling through winter. It's not a lot. But it'll be plenty to do a round of queens and splits and also make a little honey. Message me if you would be interested in cells!

- I've been far more active on Discord Beekeeping channels. Including one about hive sensors and beekeeping technology.

- I've signed up to give 3 talks now about the intersection of beekeeping and technology. One audience is to tech people, one is to beekeepers, and the other is to bee researchers.

- I'm developing an Android app that I am planning to alpha test this summer and hopefully release for the 2026 season. I am creating a system that avoids contacting your phone's screen but can manage the chaos that ensues when you scale up to managing multiple bee yards like I did.

And then all the non-beekeeping things in my life... O_o

Sorry, AI video for clicks/views. It's got some quirks, but dang... it's scary good.

01/31/2025

This paper is getting some press, which is awesome because it's a very cool project.
They put little QR codes on bees (like gluing number discs on queens) then had a Raspberry Pi camera monitoring the hive entrance to get data on foraging trip lengths.

A couple cool things:
Bees only go out for a few minutes meaning they forage mostly close to the hive.

Workers live longer than 6 weeks?! Maybe more like 8 weeks. This has some implications when selecting breeder queens if you're assessing colonies and the old genetics haven't fully switched over yet.

Honey bee foraging is a complex behavior because it involves tens of thousands of organisms making decisions about where to collect pollen and nectar based on the quality of resources and the distance to flowers. Studying this aspect of their biology is possible through direct observations but the l...

01/30/2025

45F at the end of January?!

11/17/2024

Getting super scientific here.
I set up 4 hives with lightbulbs in them (no bees).
The bulbs provide a 14W heat source. The black cords are temperature probes that are logged on an Arduino.

From left to right:
A "well-wrapped" hive with 4.5 inches of pink foam (R-22) on top,
An unwrapped hive.
A poorly wrapped hive with 1.5" of pink foam (R7.5) on top.
A well wrapped hive with 1.5" of pink foam on top.

Preliminary results are showing not much difference between all 3 wrapped hives?! It didn't get very cold though by the time the logger battery died. :/

More to come...

08/14/2024

Honey crop 2024

07/31/2024

Bear attack? Nope, apparently this is just how messy I work especially in a yard that expanded rapidly this year. I might need to clear out some of those shrubs.