The Beekeeping Glossary

Every beekeeping term you're likely to meet, defined in plain English. The compact version lives in Beekeeping Terminology.

Apiary: Your bee yard — where the hives live.
Apis mellifera: The western honeybee — the species European colonists carried around the world and beekeepers keep today.
Bearding: Bees hanging outside the hive on hot nights, like a beard. Ventilation behavior, not disease.
Brood: Eggs, larvae, and pupae — the colony's young. A "brood nest" is the laying area.
Cappings: Wax lids sealing ripe honey or mature brood. Capped honey is ready to harvest.
Caste: The three adult forms: queen, worker, drone.
Cluster: Bees huddling to keep warm; the winter cluster consumes honey and shivers for heat.
Drawn comb: Wax cells bees built out themselves — far more attractive to bees than bare foundation.
Drones: Male honeybees, raised to mate with queens and politely expelled each autumn.
Foundation: Wax or plastic sheets embossed with cell outlines that guide comb building.
Hive tool: Flat pry bar with a hook — separates boxes, lifts frames, scrapes propolis.
Nuc (nucleus): A starter colony on 3–5 frames with bees, brood, stores, and a queen.
Package: Loose bees in a screened box (often 3 lb) with a caged queen.
Propolis: "Bee glue" — plant resins used to seal gaps; also collected as a folk remedy.
Queen excluder: Grating that lets workers through but keeps the queen out of honey supers.
Requeen: Replace the queen for vigor, gentleness, or disease resistance — a standard yearly practice.
Royal jelly: Protein-rich secretion fed to all larvae, and exclusively to queen larvae.
Smoker: Bellows device puffing cool smoke to mask alarm pheromones.
Split: Dividing one strong colony into two to grow the apiary and prevent swarms.
Super: A box above the brood nest, usually dedicated to honey.
Swarms: A new colony formed when half the bees leave with the old queen.
Varroa mite: The parasitic mite (Varroa destructor) that is the top killer of honeybee colonies.
Waggle dance: Figure-eight dance encoding the direction and distance of food sources.
Winter cluster: The tight ball of bees that keeps the colony alive through winter.
Worker: The (normally sterile) female bee performing all colony work.