#beekeeping basics

I just started taking the beekeeping class myself to answer this exact question lol. Some veeery basics that I learned:

Beekeeping Associations exist and if you can find your local one that will help a lot. They have honey extraction equipment you can rent when it is time for that.

ORDER BEES IN JANUARY TO GET THEM FOR SPRING. I plan to do this myself hopefully next year.

There are different ways to get a hive, but the most common is a "nuke" which is a split off of a hive with some honey, pollen, eggs, drones (flightless males), and workers. They can come with or without a Queen. If no Queen, make sure to check on your hive a lil after the dormancy period to see if they raised a new one. If not, you may need to buy a Queen.

There are different homes you can have for your bees, but it is recommended to let them build their own comb and use a centrifuge to spin the honey out. This lets them not make the comb from scratch every time.

For the typical stacking box type hives, the bottom box will hold the "brood" or the eggs. To make sure you don't have to worry about picking out your Queen during harvesting, you should put a Queen excluder above the bottom 1-2 boxes. This will keep her from laying in the honey area.

You will want a couple "supers" over the brood box for them to fill with honey. Make sure the bees always have room to expand so they constantly keep making honey, but don't put all the boxes on at once or they can't keep it warm at night.

This is one of the videos in the series from the class I am taking. Covid messed up our in person stuff, but they have been posting some resources on Youtube !

https://youtu.be/GiEQchUQyuo

New series of books coming to beekeeping: The Mentor Series

When it comes to how-to books, I’m a BIG fan. Especially when they’re beekeeping books, and there’s plenty of them. I have bought quite a few books on Beekeeping, and checked out several from the library. And just like everything in life, there’s some good ones and some not-so-good ones. It’s redundant to find book after book with the same BASICinformation on hive tools, hive beetle, etc. So as…

Honey bees up close: Macro Photography

I have never considered photography as a thing for me. When it comes to artwork, I usually prefer mediums like graphite, oil paint, or even watercolor. And though I still like all of those things, I’m finding that my love for honey bees and honey bee forage plants have combined to make a superpower: Honey bee Macro photography! Which pretty much means really close up pictures of wee little bees.

Why you should NOT feed pollen supplements in Winter 🥶

As Keepers of the bees, we have the inherit instinct to take care of our ‘girls.’ Winter time is possibly the time that many of us worry about them the most. And this totally makes sense; we haven’t popped a hive cover in weeks or even months, we don’t know how fast they’re consuming their winter stores and we worry whether they will have enough. It can be more than a little nerve-racking. The…

Paint your Beehives with the Best, non-toxic paint

When I was in commercial beekeeping, each year brought with it the chores of building new hive bodies and honey supers. I watched as each new box was dipped in a copper solution mixed with paint thinner. After the boxes were drip-dry, each one had to be painted with an outdoor latex-based paint on the exterior. The copper preserved the wood and kept termites at bay while the latex paint protected…

How to One-Up your Beekeeping Game

One thing I believe that all beekeepers can agree on is the excitement we feel when the spring season begins. We love to see that our little bees are ‘waking up’ and venturing out after so many months. OH! And they’re bringing in pollen! Where did they get that from? Is it not too cold still? Those little girls never cease to amaze us. Well, wherever it came from it makes us happy because spring…