If you are starting down the journey of beekeeping, much like gardening or any other hobby or career

path or avocation, whatever, there are some like critical mistakes you can make that will

hamper your journey and you know when you're dealing with bees the last thing you want

to do is something that just kills a bunch of bees. So Hillary Kerney, back on the show,

founder, girl next door, honey, author of Queen Spotting, little book of bees, and a fellow

Sandy Aigen, when you started out Hillary, did you have any of these catastrophic beekeeping

mistakes?

Yeah, but I also have the privilege of seeing a lot of them now because I'm working with

so many beginners. So I see a lot of the same mistakes over and over again and then I've

seen some pretty bad ones. For me, my first mistake that I made was that I didn't know how

to recognize when I'd lost the queen. So I think a lot of people think like when the

queen dies that the colony just like collapses or it's like really obvious, you know, like

it's like a sci-fi movie where like when the queen dies the whole hive drops dead.

Like turns into dust or something?

Yeah, but that's not what happens because they actually keep working and keep making

honey. But it's slowly, slowly declines. They become kind of like lazier and like they

don't work as much or they're kind of slow and disorganized. And then eventually things

like collapse because there's no new bees to replace. So like the queen's job is to lay

eggs. And if she's not there every day, bees are dying of old age and not being replaced.

So the colony starts getting smaller and smaller until there's just not enough bees to do all

the daily casts and it just kind of falls apart. But I didn't know. So I was like looking

at the hive and I'm like, yeah, there's bees. Yeah, they're they're building come. I can

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