Glossary of common Beekeeping terms. Its an ongoing list of terms as well as updates of Beek slang.
| Apiary | A place where bees are kept, a bee yard. | |
| Apiarist | A person who raises and maintains bees, for their honey, pollen, or pollination services. | |
| Apiculture | The raising and care of bees for commercial or agricultural purposes. | |
| Beekeeper | An apiarist. | |
| Beeswax | A high melting point wax secreted by worker honey bees, and used to construct their honeycomb | |
| Beeswax | Bee larvae and pupae, especially after the workers cap over the last larval stage when it is then called capped brood. | |
| Colony | A family of bees, consisting of a queen mother and daughter workers, together with larvae and brood, and sometimes drones, living in a hive or natural cavity. | |
| Comb honey colonies | Colonies managed by the beekeeper to produce honey for sale in the comb as a final product, in contrast to extracted (liquid) honey. | |
| Demarree | A method for the prevention of swarming involving the vertical, temporary separation of brood and the queen within the hive, thereby relieving congestion and reducing the stimulus to produce new queens. | |
| Drone | A male bee, whose function is to fertilize virgin queens. | |
| Dross | Bits of wax and other trash that fall to the bottom of the hive, including wax moth feces, usually removed promptly by the bees if they have access to it. | |
| Excluder, Queen Excluder | A wire or plastic grid with spacing large enough for worker bees to pass through, but too small for the queen to pass. Used to keep the queen from walking up to and laying eggs in the honey supers, for ease of harvest. | |
| Feeder Jar | Typically a gallon jar with a few 1 mm sized holes in the lid, upended and resting on the frames to allow bees to suck the syrup out. | |
| Formic or Thymol Wafers | Two labeled treatments for infestations of the external mite Varroa destructans, an often lethal parasite of the honey bee. They are supplied in porous wafers which release the ingredients slowly within the hive to kill the pests, but not harm the bees | |
| Frame | A rectangular wooden support containing honeycomb, usually 10 to each box, which can be easily removed and exchanged without damaging the bees or the comb. | |
| Grease Patties | Hamburger sized patties made of granulated sugar and hardened vegetable oil, used as a treatment for infestations the honey bee tracheal mite. | |
| Hive | A place that bees live, commonly stackable wooden boxes of precise dimensions, invented near Philadelphia by Langstroth in 1851. It typically consists of a bottom board, brood boxes and honey supers containing frames of honeycomb, inner cover, and outer cover. | |
| Honey | A thick, complex sugar solution, made by honey bees from naturally collected plant nectars by evaporation and breaking down compound sugars (sucrose) to simple sugars (primarily fructose and glucose), and eaten by bees as their principle energy source over the winter. | |
| Honeybee or Honey Bee | An insect of the genus Apis, that collect nectar to make honey, make combs of beewax, and feed on pollen, and specifically Apis mellifera. | |
| Honeycomb | The structure made from beeswax by honey bees, consisting of two layers of hexagonal cells open on the face, used by the colony for raising brood and storage of pollen, nectar, and honey. | |
| Mite | Primarily refers to two arachnid parasites of the honey bee, Varroa destructans and Aracapsis woodeyii. | |
| Nectar | A sugary secretion, primarily 25-50% sucrose, from the nectaries of plants, collected by honey bees and converted by them into honey. | |
| Nectar Flow | A period of time when nectar is actively secreted by flowers and is available to and consumed by bees and other pollinators. A honey bee nectar flow is one that is utilized by the honey bee, Apis mellifera. | |
| Pollination | The act of transferring pollen to the ovules of flowers; the business of supplying rental hives of honey bees to enhance pollination of agricultural crops. | |
| Pollen | The male gamete of flowering plants, produced by the anthers, which is tranfered either by wind or by pollinators to the ovule, to effect fertilization and fruit/seed production. To attract pollinators, the pollen is an enriched source of protein and nutrients, and is used by bees as the protein source in raising new bees. | |
| Pollen Patties | Patties made from pollen and/or yeast and/or soy protein flour, and honey, that are fed to the bees early in the spring as protein source to augment natural pollen. | |
| Pollen Trap | A device used for harvesting pollen from honey bees as they enter the hive, usually by directing them through small openings which knocks some of the pollen off of their corbicula (pollen basket). | |
| Propolis | A sticky, resinous material ranging from gray through red and brown, collected by bees from plants, and used as an adhesive filler in weatherproofing, repairing and maintaining the hive. Bee glue. | |
| Queen | A fully developed, fertile, femaie insect whose predominant task is to produce fertile eggs. | |
| Super | A hive box, with no top or bottom, containing frames of honeycomb, specifically those on the upper portion of the hive used by the bees for honey storage. | |
| Swarm | The act or process of colony reproduction, whereby the older queen and about half of the bees leave the old hive to start a new colony; n. The group of bees and queen in transit to a new hive location. | |
| Syrup | A solution of sucrose (granulated sugar) in water used for feeding bees to augment their honey stores, or to simulate a nectar flow to encourage brood rearing | |
| Varroa | The parasitic mite Varroa destructans of the honey bee | |
| Wax Moth | One of several species of moths that infest honey bee hives, whose larvae (wax worms) feed on the old honeycomb and cocoons. | |
| Worker | An incompletely developed femaie insect, infertile, whose predominant task is to maintain the colony |