The Bee BenchThe Alleman Apiary

The Bee Bench

A workbench of free beekeeping calculators — the arithmetic you'd otherwise do on the tailgate. Mix syrup, read a mite wash, dose oxalic acid, count out a split, figure your honey crop. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and it all works on a phone with one bar of signal.

Browse the tools Open the Hive Simulator

The tools

Feeding

1:1 or 2:1 by weight or volume. Tells you the sugar and water for any batch size, and what it weighs.

Overwinter Feed

How many pounds of stores your colony needs for winter, what it's short, and the syrup to make up the gap.

Pollen Patty Scaler

Scale a protein-sub recipe to any number of patties, at any patty weight.

Mites & treatments

Varroa Season Plan

A dated mite plan for your whole year — when to wash, the threshold that month, when to treat and with what.

Varroa Mite Check

Turn an alcohol wash or sugar roll into mites per 100 bees, with the seasonal treatment threshold.

Oxalic Acid Dosing

Dribble and vaporizer amounts off the Api-Bioxal label, scaled to your seams and boxes.

Treatment Picker

Enter the temperature, whether brood is present and whether supers are on — see what you can legally use today.

Varroa Reproduction Timeline

The foundress mite's reproductive clock, hour by hour — and why drone brood produces more mites than worker brood.

The colony

Colony Strength

Frames of bees to a population, then a straight answer on splitting, supering and whether it can winter.

Queens & splits

Brood Cycle & Queen Dial

Development days for queen, worker and drone, and a dial that turns any start date into every milestone.

Split & Queen Timeline

Walk-away split, post-swarm, purchased cell or graft — every date from the calendar, laid out.

Queen Marking Color

What color to mark her this year, and how old the queen in that hive actually is.

Honey

Honey Yield & Jars

Frames and supers to pounds, gallons, jar counts and what the crop is worth.

Refractometer reading to water content — and whether it will ferment on the shelf.

Net-weight lines in ounces and grams, plus the required pieces of a honey label.

Beeswax & Products

Rendering yield from cappings or comb, then the lip balms, salves and candles that wax makes.

What a jar really costs you once the jar, lid, label and your time are in — and what to charge.

Beekeeping Costs

Startup and running costs on real 2026 vendor prices, and what the honey pays back.

Mead Calculator

Honey needed for a target alcohol level, dry through dessert-sweet.

The season

First-Year Plan

Dated steps from install day to your first spring, for a package or a nuc. The eight moments that actually matter.

Nectar Flow Calendar

What's blooming when in south-central Pennsylvania, the two real flows, and when the dearth hits.

Hive Weight Tracker

Log the scale and read the flow start and stop, catch a dearth, and check winter stores without opening the hive.

How much land your bees work, how many hives it carries, and how far apart to set your yards. Optional map.

Reference

Inspection Checklist

What to look at, in the order you'd look at it. Tick it off on your phone or print it for the clipboard.

Disease & Pest ID

Search by what you're seeing on the frame. Ten things most likely to be wrong, and what to do about each.

Beekeeping Calendar

Month by month — what the colony is doing, and what that means you should be doing.

Quick Reference Chart

Bee space, brood temperatures, development times, frame weights. The numbers you keep looking up.

What people actually mean when they say it. Searchable, in plain English.

More from The Alleman Apiary

Run a colony through a whole season a day at a time — brood, honey, mites, disease, treatments and real weather.

Bee-Sim: Learn & Play

Read the frame, breed queens, save a struggling hive, build an apiary. The hands-on version.

A word on all of this. These are working aids, not a substitute for the label on the jug or your state's rules. Pesticide labels are the law — always mix, dose and apply to the label of the product actually in your hand. Nothing here is veterinary or regulatory advice.