Amitraz is the comfortable default across much of Europe as well. You slip in a strip, walk away, come back in a few weeks, and for now it mostly works. The trouble is that the very thing that makes it easy is what wears it out. A late-season trial published this year in Scientific Reports watched the amitraz-susceptible share of the mites fall from 0.52 to 0.22 in 63 days after treatment, which is how quickly selection moves once you lean on a single molecule. So when people talk about resistance as an American problem, I am no longer sure it stays over there.
The Americans are further down this road, and it is not pretty. USDA-ARS sampling across roughly 184,000 colonies found amitraz-resistance markers in nearly all the mites they tested, sitting alongside high Deformed Wing Virus and Acute Bee Paralysis Virus loads. That pairing is what stood behind the brutal commercial losses of the last two winters. When the mite stops dying and the viruses are already in the brood, a colony can come apart quietly, and by the time you notice, it is usually late.
So what still earns its place. Oxalic acid, if you get the timing right. A 2026 field trial put six or eight bi-weekly vaporisations at around 2 g a hive at 86 and 97 percent mite reduction, though the heavier schedule cost more workers, which is the trade you accept for that kind of knock-down. What the abstract will not tell you is that oxalic mostly reaches the mites riding on the bees, not the ones tucked under cappings, so it really pays off during a brood break or a naturally broodless window. There is a more hopeful thread further out, too. UC Davis researchers have paired amitraz with verapamil, a synergist that weakens the mite without harming the bee, and lifted amitraz’s killing power by about half, even on resistant mites. That might give the molecule a second life. It just will not be this summer.
For what it is worth, I sit a little outside this particular worry. I have been certified organic since 2023, so I rotate oxalic and formic and keep amitraz out of the cycle, which means I am watching the resistance story more than living it. That is a choice with its own costs, and I am not holding it up as the answer for everyone.
What I do see is a younger generation coming into beekeeping that wants to work more organically, and that means not taking the easy road where you slot in a strip and you are done. It asks more of you. You have to understand the biology of the bee and the biology of the mite. The extra apitechnical work will become the norm, if we want healthy bees and clean wax without chemical residue. Nature knows no shortcuts.
Either way, the same question is landing on anyone still reaching for a strip of Apivar this season. How long do you keep trusting a tool that is quietly losing its edge, and what are you ready to put in its place before it fails outright? I do not think one answer fits every apiary, and each of us decides for ourselves. The only thing I would gently warn against is waiting for the strip to disappoint you.
The amended EU Honey Directive (2024/1438) came fully into force on 14 June, after the member states wrote it into national law by last December. The real change is for blends. A jar mixed from several countries can no longer hide behind “blend of EU and non-EU honeys”, the old formula that told you next to nothing. Every country now has to be named in the main field of view, in descending order by share, each with its own percentage, give or take a five percent tolerance against the packer’s own records.
EU honey label, from 14 June 2026
Writing the origin on the jar
Blends have to name every country in descending order by share, each with its percentage.
From one country
Country of origin: Germany
A blend from several countries
Countries of origin: Ukraine 40%, Spain 28%, Argentina 19%, China 13%
More than four countries, short form where a member state allows it
Countries of origin: Ukraine 35%, Argentina 22%, Spain 12%, Mexico 11%, also Hungary and China
Small jar, under 30 grams
Countries of origin: UA 40%, ES 28%, AR 19%, CN 13%
Country names may shorten to two-letter codes.
Each percentage carries a 5% tolerance against the packer’s traceability records.
No longer allowed: Blend of EU and non-EU honeys
If you only ever jar your own single-origin honey, this is nearly a non-event, since the label just names your one country, the way it probably already does. The same rules also stop honey filtered hard enough to strip out its pollen from being sold as plain honey, which quietly favours those of us whose honey still carries its own. The weight falls on whoever buys in bulk to stretch a range or resell, where the label and the batch records now have to line up. It might be worth pulling a jar off your own shelf and reading it the way an inspector would, just to see where you stand.
Britain’s lab-confirmed Defra figures jumped from 24 destroyed Asian hornet nests in 2024 to 161 in 2025, with 544 credible sightings behind them, and the first Welsh record turned up near Wrexham back in January. Continental Europe has lived with this hornet for a while, so for many of us it is not news, but that British curve is worth a glance because it shows how fast a few sightings become a settled population. By late summer the hornets start hawking at hive entrances, hovering and snatching foragers out of the air, and once you have seen it you never mistake it for anything else. If you are anywhere near the spreading edge, a few quiet minutes watching your own entrances around midday will teach you more than any leaflet.
Tropilaelaps mercedesae has now been confirmed in Russia and Georgia, it reproduces faster than Varroa, and Defra has already put out a Rapid Pest Risk Assessment. It is a notifiable pest. What makes it awkward is that it spends most of its life inside sealed brood, so the sugar roll that catches Varroa walks straight past it, and you have to open and uncap brood to find it at all. None of us on this side of the continent has to act on it today. But it is the kind of slow story that turns fast without much warning, and the quiet time to learn what the detection actually looks like is now, while nothing is riding on getting it right. If it ever does show up in your brood, it is one to report, not to deal with quietly on your own.
The FDA found that 4 percent of 102 honey samples last year were cut with undeclared sweeteners, and testing labs have already flagged a new syrup designed to slip past the current methods. The fakers keep pace with the chemists, which is a little demoralising if you let it be. The other side of it is that every one of these stories quietly raises the worth of honey a buyer can trace back to a named beekeeper and a particular stretch of ground. That kind of traceability is the one thing a bulk importer cannot copy, and most of us already have it without thinking about it. The only real question is whether we bother to say so on the jar.
If there is one quiet habit I would hold onto through all of this, it is simply knowing my mite numbers before the harvest. Everything I decide afterwards leans on that one figure, and the season has a way of punishing the years I guessed instead of counted.
]]>For beekeepers, warm and stable weather usually reads as good news. Flows tend to open, colonies settle, the season finds its rhythm. This year the heat dome arrives at a more complicated moment, after a spring that didn’t settle at all.
April 2026 was the seventh warmest and fourth sunniest April on record for the UK, with Kew Gardens hitting 26.6°C on April 8th. Colonies in western Britain and northern France built fast. Then Storm Dave crossed Scotland and northern England on April 4–5, bringing gusts up to 80–90 mph and late snow in the Highlands. Hard buildup, hard stop.
Eastern Europe had a different April: colder, closer to normal, slower to develop.
Mid-May brought another reversal. Severe Weather Europe documented a “multi-day Arctic intrusion that perfectly aligned with the traditional mid-May Ice Saints period”, arriving continent-wide around May 12–15. Several consecutive days of cold after a warm early May.
Six weeks, four distinct weather regimes. That sequence matters because colonies carry what the season gives them.
Western European colonies went through multiple expansion-and-stop cycles between early April and mid-May. Each cycle builds swarming pressure without discharging it. Colonies heading into the heat dome may be carrying more of that tension than is typical for late May, and the sudden arrival of warm stable weather tends to release it quickly.
The queen picture is also more fragmented than usual. The Ice Saints cold snap coincided with the mating window for queens emerging from late-April swarm preparations. A virgin queen has roughly 20–30 days from emergence to mate successfully. Four to seven days of cold in the first part of that window is a meaningful interruption. UK beekeeping forums reported higher-than-usual rates of poor-laying queens coming out of winter in 2026, so the season was already carrying some baseline queen quality uncertainty before the Ice Saints added another layer.
The warm week ahead will resolve some of these situations. The outcomes across European apiaries will be more varied than a more settled spring would produce.
Nectar secretion depends on more than sunshine and warm air. Soil moisture is a significant variable, when plants are under root-zone water stress, they reduce or stop nectar production regardless of how good the flying conditions look from outside the hive.
Climate Impact Company’s seasonal forecast from April 15, 2026 noted that soils in France and much of eastern Europe were already in drought condition before the heat dome developed, driven by a developing El Niño, the North Atlantic Warm Hole pattern, and a dry preceding period. The heat dome is arriving on ground that was already stressed in those regions.
The regional picture breaks apart from there.
Western Atlantic Europe (UK, western France): Spring rainfall left soils in reasonable condition. A short warm spell benefits white clover, phacelia, late spring sources. If the heat dome breaks within a week, this region is probably looking at a genuine short-term flow.
Central and eastern France, eastern Europe: Heat on already-dry soil suppresses nectar rather than enhancing it. Acacia, where it’s relevant in southeastern and central Europe, needs warmth and adequate moisture for strong secretion. Warm and dry compresses the window and cuts yield.
Iberian Peninsula: 37–38°C on dry ground. Excellent flying conditions, very little to collect.
Whether the flow feels real this week will depend heavily on where you are and what the ground has been through since March.
The larger question is whether this heat dome is a temporary episode or the start of a sustained pattern.
Climate Impact Company projects continued drought intensification across western and central Europe through July and August 2026. June bringing anomalous warmth and dryness across most of the continent, July seeing drought deepening in western and central Europe, August described as “dangerous late summer heat and dryness across Central and East Europe.” The underlying drivers are a rapidly intensifying El Niño and the North Atlantic Warm Hole blocking Atlantic systems, reinforced by the self-amplifying effect of dry soils.
Linden in July is the main question. Linden is highly sensitive to soil moisture during bloom. The reference years for European beekeepers are 2003 and 2019: hot, dry summers in which linden flows failed or nearly failed across large areas. Whether 2026 follows that path is not certain. The seasonal forecast puts it in the frame.
A drought summer does something beyond suppressing flows. When mid-summer forage collapses, colonies don’t simply go quiet. Robbing increases. Bees drift more between apiaries. Varroa loads in late summer tend to climb faster without the moderating effect of a strong flow. Autumn ends up more critical than it would be in a normal year, not less.
Swarming activity in the coming week will say something about how much tension accumulated over the disrupted spring. More swarms than usual from colonies that seemed stable is probably the spring catching up with itself.
Nectar return in regions with dry soils will clarify how far the drought stress has already gone. Colonies working hard in good weather but with honey weights not moving is diagnostic information about what July might look like.
If the seasonal forecasts hold, the decisions that matter most this year are probably not the ones in front of us right now.
]]>The numbers make the point plainly. In 2023, more than 20,000 reports came through the UK’s Asian Hornet Watch app. Almost none were Asian hornets. Each one pulled response capacity from the National Bee Unit team that could have been locating an actual nest. In Ireland, only about 1% of NBDC submissions turn out to be the real species. The bottleneck is not the willingness to respond. It is usable reports.
Get the photo first, then report.
Asian hornets are smaller than European hornets. This catches people off guard. A queen reaches about 30mm; workers reach around 25mm. The body is nearly black, with a single yellow-orange stripe on the fourth abdominal segment. The legs have bright yellow tips, which is the origin of the alternative name “yellow-legged hornet.”
Three species cause most of the confusion: European hornets (bigger, yellow-brown striped abdomen, loud in flight), common wasps (much more yellow overall), and giant woodwasps (harmless, superficially similar in the air). A large, mostly dark insect that you cannot immediately place is worth photographing. One that is clearly yellow-striped is almost certainly something else.
The main route is the Asian Hornet Watch app, developed by UKCEH and commissioned by Defra, free for Android and iPhone. It sends your photo and GPS coordinates directly to the National Bee Unit.
Two alternatives exist if the app is not an option:
After a confirmed sighting, the NBU activates local Asian Hornet Teams: over 1,000 BBKA-trained beekeepers deployed across England and Wales to assist with nest location and monitoring. In 2025, spring trapping confirmed 22 individual hornets in the UK between January and early June.
If you find a suspected nest, stop there. Do not approach it, do not touch it. Note the location on your phone and report it. Nest removal is handled by trained teams, not by the person who found it.
Ireland uses a separate system. Report via invasives.ie, the recording portal run by the National Biodiversity Data Centre. The NBDC coordinates response alongside NPWS, the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
In 2025 Ireland went from theoretical concern to active response in the space of a few weeks. Two UCC students spotted a hornet at a Cork beer garden on July 31 and got a photo to the NBDC by August 7. By September 5, NPWS had located and removed the first nest ever found in Ireland, in a sycamore near Cork city hall. A second nest followed in Cobh. The first confirmed Northern Ireland sighting came in October: a hornet captured in Dundonald, Belfast on October 10, with evidence of a nest in the same area shortly after.
For Northern Ireland specifically, report via the DAERA Asian Hornet Watch app or the CEDaR invasive species online recording.
The Cork sequence is worth noting for one reason. The students used a phone camera at a beer garden table. That photo triggered a national response that removed a nest before it could produce overwintering queens. Photo quality was not the issue. Speed and submission to the right place were the whole thing.
There is no single EU-wide reporting system. Every country runs its own, which is both practical and a genuine gap in coordinated monitoring.
Belgium has the most developed setup. VespaWatch.be covers Flanders with a dedicated form, real-time nest map, and free eradication from May onwards for eligible locations. Wallonia uses biodiversite.wallonie.be. Brussels and all Belgian regions are also covered by vespa-alert.be, which includes decision trees for what happens after you report, depending on whether the nest is on public or private land.
France has no single national platform. SignalNids.fr covers many regions. Beyond that, reporting routes run through departmental councils and local beekeeping associations, which reflects the fact that Asian hornets have been established in France since 2004 and the response has largely become local infrastructure.
For countries where Asian hornets are newly arriving, including Austria, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, iNaturalist is the practical fallback. Reports feed into GBIF and reach national monitoring teams. It is not as fast as a dedicated national app, but it works and the data is publicly useful.
Realistically, no one expects an individual beekeeper to navigate a foreign reporting system. The gap is at the institutional level. National monitoring organizations should be feeding confirmed sightings into a shared EU database automatically, rather than each country accumulating data in isolation. This matters most for countries where the hornet has not yet arrived officially. Slovenia is one of them. Awareness of what is coming still needs to catch up with how close it already is. The BeeTIME Asian Hornet Tracker exists partly for this reason: to show beekeepers in central and eastern Europe how the species is moving and how little buffer remains. A live map of confirmed sightings does more for urgency than any press release.
Photo first. Location second. GPS from an app is ideal; a street address or a nearby landmark works. Time and date matter because response slows for retrospective reports, though they are still accepted and still useful for tracking.
Beyond the basics, one thing helps responders prioritize: specify what you saw. A single hornet near a hive entrance, multiple hornets hawking at a colony, and a suspected nest location all trigger different responses. Flag it explicitly rather than leaving the assessor to infer from context.
One thing to avoid: posting to social media before reporting through official channels. The NBDC noted during the Cork situation that unconfirmed social media reports created confusion and pulled staff time away from field response.
The Cork nest in 2025 was found by two people with no beekeeping background, using a phone camera. One correct report removed a colony before it could produce queens.
A colony that overwinters can release between 50 and 500 mated queens the following spring. Each one can found a new nest. The reporting system works when people use it correctly. The identification step is where it breaks down most often, which is why the photo comes before anything else.
]]>Last week we covered Norroa’s first field trial data. This week, a mite worse than varroa is closing in on Europe’s eastern border, Australia confirms synthetic miticide resistance is no longer theoretical, and a California study adds hard data to the “buy local queens” argument.
The European Beekeepers’ Association (EBA) has called on the European Commission to immediately exclude Turkey, Ukraine, and Russia from the list of third countries authorized to export live bees into the EU. Tropilaelaps spp., a parasitic mite that reproduces faster and causes more severe colony losses than varroa, has been detected in Georgia and the Russian regions of Krasnodar and Rostov, within reach of Ukraine’s eastern border. EBA published the statement on 3 May 2026.
We covered Tropilaelaps geography briefly last week. What changed is the political escalation: the EBA is now formally demanding an emergency import suspension, and Moldova’s national beekeeping association (ANARM) has notified its food safety agency and agriculture ministry of the threat. In Kazakhstan, some regions have reported up to 80% colony losses linked to uncontrolled bee imports from Uzbekistan. Canada is pushing for a parallel ban on non-North American bee imports.
The practical risk for European hobby beekeepers is specific. Early May is peak queen and package buying season. EBA explicitly names online queen purchases from third-country sellers and informal “bus-route” imports as risk channels. Current EU import conditions do not include Tropilaelaps-specific controls. If you are buying queens from outside your country, you are relying entirely on the exporter’s honesty and the source country’s inspection capacity.
Tropilaelaps cannot survive long without brood. Unlike varroa, which can feed on adult bees for months, Tropilaelaps adults die within days without access to bee larvae. That biological constraint limits spread through adult-bee-only shipments. But queen cages with attendant bees from infested areas carry real risk, and any package with brood comb is a direct pathway.
The EBA’s call for a ban is the right move. The worst outcome would be a repeat of varroa’s arrival in Europe. Nobody was prepared, beekeepers were ashamed to admit their colonies were infested, and every unregulated chemical imaginable ended up in hives. We cannot afford that again with a parasite that is faster and more destructive.
Slovenia offers one example of how geographic protection works. Because the country is the native homeland of the Carniolan bee (Apis mellifera carnica), the Livestock Breeding Act (2002, Article 70) prohibits the breeding and trade of genetic material from other honeybee subspecies on Slovenian territory. This was secured as a condition during EU accession negotiations. It is not just breed pride. It is a legal barrier that also limits the import pathways through which exotic parasites travel. Compared to countries with open queen markets, Slovenian beekeepers can be somewhat calmer. But nature does not respect legislation or national borders. Monitoring matters more than laws on paper. Follow your national beekeeping organization’s updates. Stay in contact with your local beekeeping association. If Tropilaelaps reaches the EU, the first reports will come from people checking their hives, not from a press release.
If you are buying queens or packages in Europe this week, know exactly where they come from. Ask the breeder for the country of origin of the mother queen and whether colonies have been inspected for Tropilaelaps. If the answer is vague, find another breeder. Domestic, locally adapted queens remain the lowest-risk option. Canada is moving toward similar restrictions, and the mite’s westward trajectory makes this a global watch item.
Australia’s varroa story just got worse. Biosecurity Queensland confirmed that varroa populations in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales now carry resistance markers against both pyrethroids (L925I and L925M mutations) and amitraz (Y215H mutation). The Australian Honey Bee Industry Council (AHBIC) published a biosecurity update on 29 April 2026 warning that resistance is “no longer considered geographically confined” and that beekeepers are experiencing “complete failure of treatments” with Bayvarol, Apistan, Apivar, and Apitraz.
This matters beyond Australia. Genetic testing shows the resistant mite population carries virus profiles most similar to North American and Belgian samples, suggesting a separate introduction from the original 2022 incursion. The 2022 mites had no resistance markers. These new ones arrived pre-equipped.
For European and North American beekeepers using synthetic strips as their primary varroa control: this is the trajectory. Monotherapy with amitraz or pyrethroids selects for resistance. Australia learned it in four years. AHBIC now explicitly recommends rotating with formic acid, oxalic acid, and thymol.
If you rely on a single synthetic miticide, start planning your rotation now. Mid-treatment alcohol washes (at weeks 3-4 for pyrethroids, weeks 5-6 for amitraz) detect treatment failure before you lose colonies. If you are already on organic acids, you are on the right side of this curve.
A four-year UC Riverside study published in Scientific Reports (Chong-Echavez & Baer, 2026) tracked 236 colonies in Southern California from 2019 to 2022. Colonies headed by locally raised hybrid queens averaged 1.26 mites per 100 bees, compared to 4.83 for commercial queens: a 68% reduction. The local hybrids were five times less likely to exceed the 3-mite treatment threshold.
Mite resistance showed up at the larval stage. In lab tests, varroa were less attracted to hybrid larvae at seven days old, the stage when mites normally invade brood cells. The researchers think the mechanism is genetic, not a behavioral trait adult workers learn. These bees are not a commercial breed. They are a feral hybrid with ancestry from African, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Western European lineages.
This is not a call to go catch feral bees. These Southern California hybrids carry Africanized genetics unsuitable for most managed apiaries. The practical takeaway: locally adapted queens, raised from survivor stock in your region, consistently outperform imported commercial queens on mite metrics. The Carniolan bees that Slovenian beekeepers have selected for generations are a parallel example. Local genetics plus selection pressure produces bees that handle local parasites better than anything shipped from a catalog.
If you are making requeening or split decisions this month, ask your breeder whether their stock undergoes mite-load testing. That single question tells you more than any marketing claim.
The UK’s National Bee Unit confirmed the first credible 2026 sighting of a yellow-legged Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, on 26 February. Last week we covered Guernsey’s early queen captures. The Doncaster sighting puts the 2026 front line inland and further north than most previous UK detections.
The 2025 numbers tell the scale: 544 credible sightings, 163 nests destroyed, up from 24 nests in 2024. NBU spring surveillance captured 20 queens, four confirmed as offspring of nests destroyed in 2024. Overwintered queens are establishing new colonies.
For beekeepers in the UK and across the Channel coast of northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands: the spring queen trapping window is open now and closes by mid-June. Every founding queen caught in May is a nest prevented in August. Deploy traps with a sugar-beer-white wine bait, check weekly, and report suspect sightings via the Asian Hornet Watch app.
First full week of May. Supers on, swarms in the air, queens being ordered. Before you finalize any purchase this week, check the source country. That is the single highest-value action you can take right now.
]]>This week: the first peer-reviewed field trial data on Norroa, the RNAi-based varroa treatment that got EPA registration last September. Also: EU honey labelling rules kick in June 14, Asian hornet queens are showing up earlier than ever in the Channel Islands, and Tropilaelaps is creeping toward Europe’s eastern border.
A University of Florida study published in Frontiers in Insect Science (February 2026) tested Norroa across two field trials (36 colonies each) in Florida: one during nectar flow, one during dearth. During flow, treated colonies held mite loads at or below 2.31 mites per 100 bees for twelve weeks while controls climbed significantly higher. During dearth (starting loads of 4.56 per 100 bees), treated colonies still fared better, but the difference was not statistically significant.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is fundamentally different from every varroa treatment currently available. The active ingredient, vadescana, is a dsRNA molecule. That means it silences a specific gene in the mite. The target is calmodulin, a protein that regulates calcium signaling in cells. Without functioning calmodulin, the mite cannot develop eggs normally. The adult mite stays alive. It enters the brood cell as usual. But when it tries to reproduce, the offspring either fail to develop or never hatch. Population growth stalls because there is no new generation replacing the old one. This is not a mite killer. It is a reproduction blocker.
In lab assays, foundress mites exposed to vadescana produced no viable offspring. A second independent trial in New Zealand (160 colonies, published March 2026) confirmed efficacy at both high and low dosage concentrations.
The caveats matter. Norroa maintains low mite populations rather than knocking down high ones. Open brood must be present, nectar flow should be minimal (too much dilutes the active ingredient), and honey supers need to come off. The Apiarist’s review summarized it well: you need brood but not too much nectar, low mite loads but not zero, and no supers.
Price is another factor. At roughly $44 per double-deep colony, it is significantly more expensive than oxalic acid or formic acid treatments. The EPA registration is time-limited to three years, which means re-evaluation is built in. For now, Norroa is available only in the US. The European Beekeeping Association has asked its Bee Health Committee to pursue EU registration, but no timeline exists.
There is a reason Norroa has only a limited, three-year registration. We do not know what vadescana does to other insects or to the bee gut microbiome over multiple seasons. Nobody does yet. The price is hard to justify for a hobby operation: $44 per colony for something that does not kill mites, only stops them from reproducing. Adult varroa stay alive, still feeding on your bees. And if you miss the narrow application window, that money is wasted completely.
In my climate, the one realistic slot would be right after the main flow: supers off, solid brood still in the box. That could work. But I doubt vadescana would pass EU organic certification (Regulation 2018/848). We are limited to oxalic acid, formic acid, thymol, and lactic acid. So even if Norroa reaches Europe, organic beekeepers would be watching from the sideline.
What to do: US beekeepers: Norroa fits best as a maintenance tool applied after the main flow when mite loads are low, and supers are off. It does not replace a knockdown treatment. European beekeepers: nothing to act on yet, but worth tracking as the first genuinely new varroa mode of action in decades.
The revised EU Honey Directive (2024/1438) becomes enforceable on June 14, 2026. The biggest change: honey blends must now list all countries of origin in descending order, with the percentage share of each. The old vague labels (“blend of EU and non-EU honeys”) are gone. The directive also mandates a harmonized traceability system to track honey from harvest to retail, and the Commission’s Honey Platform (90 experts) is developing methods to detect sugar adulteration.
For small-scale producers selling locally, the practical impact is limited: you already know your honey’s origin. But if you sell at markets, shops, or online, check your labels now. National transposition varies by member state, so verify your country’s requirements by mid-June. The real benefit is upstream: these rules target the roughly 46% of imported honey samples found to be adulterated in EU testing.
This directive was pushed forward in part by Slovenian beekeepers, who have dealt with a flood of cheap, poorly labelled imports for years. In Slovenia, roughly 80% of beekeepers are hobby-scale, and local awareness of where honey comes from is what keeps us viable. When consumers understand that the jar on the shelf has a name, a location, and the shortest possible path from harvest to table, they support local beekeepers instead of anonymous blends.
What to do this week: If you sell honey in the EU, review your labels against Directive 2024/1438 requirements before June 14. If you sell single-origin honey from your own apiary, your compliance burden is minimal, but make sure your labels explicitly state the country of origin.
Guernsey’s spring queen-trapping program deployed roughly 260 traps in early April. Two queens were captured before the official season started, the earliest on record since the first Asian hornet arrived in 2017. A nest found in January at St Saviour’s Reservoir confirms that overwintering queens were active well ahead of schedule. Since 2017, the island has captured 157 queens and destroyed 62 nests.
The pattern matters for mainland Europe: Guernsey’s hornets arrive on easterly winds from France. Earlier emergence means the trapping window shifts earlier too.
Confirmed sightings across Europe, by year and country: Asian Hornet Tracker.
What to do this week: If you are in western or southern Europe, your spring queen traps should already be active. If they are not out yet, deploy them now. Bait with a sugar-beer mix and check traps weekly. Early interception of founding queens is the single most effective population control measure.
ANSES (the EU Reference Laboratory for Bee Health) updated its geographical spread report confirming Tropilaelaps mercedesae in Russia’s Krasnodar and Rostov regions (present since 2021), in Georgia’s Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti region, and suspected in Belarus and Crimea. The mite’s original host is the giant Asian honeybee (Apis dorsata), but it has jumped to Apis mellifera and is now spreading westward along trade and migratory routes.
Most introductions were never officially reported to WOAH, which means the actual spread is likely wider than the confirmed map. Tropilaelaps reproduces faster than varroa and may cause more severe colony damage.
No reason to panic, but every reason to prepare. When varroa arrived in Europe, nobody was ready. Tropilaelaps mercedesae may be worse. Slovenia sits on a Balkan trade corridor, and I have not seen serious preparedness discussions in local beekeeping associations yet. The one thing to get familiar with now is brood interruption: Tropilaelaps depends entirely on brood to survive (it cannot feed on adult bees the way varroa does). Knowing how to manage a controlled brood break will matter if this mite reaches central Europe.
What to do: If you are in central or eastern Europe, do not purchase bees, queens, or used equipment from outside the EU without verified health certificates. Learn what Tropilaelaps looks like on brood: smaller than varroa, light brown, moves fast across the comb.
The UK’s National Bee Unit leaflet (2026 edition) has clear identification photos. Download it now.
If your colonies have brood on 80% of frames, they need space. Super up or split. The colony will not wait for your schedule.
]]>A UC Riverside study published in Scientific Reports tracked 236 colonies over three years (2019-2022). Feral hybrid bees in Southern California, a genetic mix of African, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Western European lineages, consistently kept varroa populations well below treatment thresholds. Colonies headed by locally raised hybrid queens were more than five times less likely to need chemical intervention compared to commercial stock.
The most interesting part is what happened at the larval stage. Mites showed measurably less interest in hybrid larvae around day seven, when brood is normally most vulnerable. That suggests resistance may be baked into the genetics rather than explained by adult grooming or hygienic behavior alone.
These bees are not from any breeding program. They come from feral colonies living in trees.
We keep chasing a single fix in breeding programs, but this study shows the genetic mix behind natural resistance holds up better than anything we’ve tried to isolate. In Slovenia, we pride ourselves on our local Carniolan bees, but we should also pay more attention to the survivors in the wild and to selective breeding.
The fact that mites lose interest in larvae at day seven is a bigger deal than it might sound. It suggests resistance isn’t just about hygienic behavior, it might be tied to how larvae develop, not just how adult bees respond. Also, it makes me wonder how many local survivor colonies we ignore simply because they don’t fit the “perfect commercial profile”.
The UC Riverside varroa resistance study will likely get picked up across beekeeping media this week. Worth tracking whether the research team publishes data on which specific genetic markers are involved. That determines whether this stays an interesting finding or becomes something queen breeders can actually work with.
A Reddit r/Beekeeping post from April 18 reported swarm activity arriving well ahead of schedule after a brief warm spell. The discussion pulled in reports from multiple regions. The pattern is: fluctuating spring weather, a warm snap, bees respond, the beekeeper’s calendar does not. If you planned your first split for May, your colonies may have already made that decision without asking.
This is a classic spring trap. Beekeepers often plan their work based on last year’s routine, but nature doesn’t follow a calendar. In my experience, everything shifts around March 15. The quick jump in day length and the first big flush of willow pollen kick the colony into gear.
If the weather is warm, the expansion happens much faster than you expect. Don’t wait for May. If you see brood on 80% of your frames during inspection, that’s your cue to super up right away.
A study published April 16 in Apidologie examined organic tomato farms in Brazil where managed stingless bee hives were introduced alongside wild pollinator populations. The managed bees never visited tomato flowers. Not once. DNA analysis of pollen from their hives confirmed they foraged exclusively on non-crop plants instead.
Meanwhile, wild bees (60 species documented, including various native sweat bees and mining bees) provided all measurable pollination benefits. The key factor was habitat diversity: farmers who maintained non-crop flowering plants along field margins and between rows supported far richer wild pollinator communities.
More managed hives didn’t help. More habitat did. So as I see it, we keep throwing managed bees at the pollination problem when wild species would do the job, if we just gave them somewhere to live.
A Canadian Press report profiles Toronto’s growing urban re-wilding effort. Residents are replacing invasive plants with native species along laneways, beside churches, in local parks. The focus is on plants with deep co-evolutionary ties to local pollinators: milkweed for monarchs, cup plants for overwintering habitat, native grasses for structure. The efforts are backed by municipal PollinateTO grants and the David Suzuki Foundation’s Butterflyway project.
I’m a huge fan of native plants because native plants are native for a reason.
UC Santa Barbara is working to digitize its entomological bee collections, converting physical specimens into high-resolution digital records for AI-driven species identification and population tracking. This is part of a broader push across natural history museums to preserve biodiversity data. For beekeepers, not immediately actionable. But if you are following how AI tools might eventually assist with field-level species identification, this is the foundation being built right now.
Beyond Pesticides published its annual Earth Day advocacy brief, listing specific action items for pesticide reform and pollinator protection. Separately, NPR reported friction within the MAHA movement over the pace of regulatory rollback on environmental protections. For anyone tracking US neonicotinoid policy: EPA re-registration decisions and enforcement priorities remain politically contested. The direction is unclear.
The EU is in a slightly better spot. The Pollinator Monitoring Scheme should become mandatory by December 2026, while US policy seems to be going the other way.
However, on paper, the EU looks much safer for bees due to the European Food Safety Authority’s scientific input. But paper doesn’t always match the field. The real decisions happen at the member state level, where lobbying often overrides science.
We see this with Neonicotinoids. They are restricted across the EU, yet countries like France or Romania constantly issue “temporary exemptions.” So you end up with strict rules in Brussels and plenty of loopholes out in the sunflower fields.
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