Beekeeping – Start Your Own Hive, Produce Your Own Local Raw Honey

I am one of those people that always saw a bee and headed right in the opposite direction. If I saw a swarm of them, like the swarm that happened to find our back yard over the weekend, I probably would have called my husband and hid inside until every last bee was gone. Bee stings aren’t fun for anybody, and having a non life-threatening allergic reaction to them makes it even more miserable to get stung. Thankfully, my kids don’t seem to have that allergy, but kids being stung are just about as miserable. I have learned, though, that bees may be some of the most misunderstood and unjustly villanized critters around.

A little over a year ago, my dislike for anything to do with bees, except for honey, began to change. My husband was given the opportunity to learn how to keep bees. My first thought was something along the lines of ‘Bees on our property? On purpose? Why?’ When he said the man he would get the box and knowledge from had collected twenty-five gallons of honey from eleven hives, he had my interest. As he learned and taught me more, I began to share his excitement. After he had helped fix some boxes and prepare the frames that the bees use to collect honey in for the year, he was given his own double brood box. We additionally bought one, and a little later than we anticipated in the year, we were able to bring our first bees home.

I learned a lot the first year. Bees really weren’t hard or troublesome to take care of. We put a stockade fence across one small corner of our back yard to keep the kids away from them. Because it’s stockade, the bees will fly over the wall and not drop lower in their normal flight pattern. They aren’t in our yard, except when they pollinate our garden. They don’t cause more stings. Mowing near them doesn’t even cause them to become agitated. Instead of being a problem, they are pollinating machines that help our garden and every other garden in a two mile radius. Our neighbor even took the time to comment on how well her garden was doing.

During my research on bees, I came across something interesting. Did you know there are places that give incentives for keeping bees? If we lived fifteen miles south, just across the Virginia border, we could have essentially had our bee start up paid for through a grant fund established in 2012. The grant will actually give up to $200 for purchasing normal beekeeping start up supplies like boxes, frames, reducers, and feeders! If you’re from Virginia, you can read more about that here.

How do you get started? First you should do your research. Is beekeeping legal in your town? What are the regulations? Is it something that is right for you? Also take the care of bees into consideration. Did you know many plants you can buy in stores are actually poisonous for bees? Now you know why there are never many bees in the amazing spread of flowers in the outdoor plant area. A great place to start learning about basic bee keeping is by having a mini bee library. Here are a couple of books you can consider:

Backyard Beekeeper – Revised and Updated, 3rd Edition: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden – New material includes: – … urban beekeeping – How to use top bar hives – This book is a great starter’s guide that is an easy read, and it contains recipes and how to instructions for things you can do with the wax.

The Beekeeper’s Handbook – Also a great starter book, this handbook has been continuously updated since the 1970’s. It’s a great way to figure out which beekeeping method would work best for you. It is also a great source of information about issues your hive may encounter, like bee mites.

Once you have read about beekeeping and have decided to take the next step, you’ll need a safe place for your bees and a little bit of gear. Our initial purchase was this Mann Lake HK110 10-Frame Traditional Basic Starter Kit. It contains the box and frames you need for your hive to establish, gloves and a veil to protect you, a smoker with an outer cage to protect you from getting burned, a hive tool for everything you will need to tend to your hive’s needs, and a book about bees.

Finally, you’ll need bees. We have two hives. One hive was purchased as a packaged “Nuc,” which is short for nucleus colony and means it contains worker bees and a queen. We purchased it from a local, reputable keeper, and it cost us $95. The bees came in a box, and the queen was in a little box inside the first box. That Nuc was a really neat lesson for our children. The bees initially ate the sugar around the queen in an attempt to kill her, as she was foreign to them and they treated her as an intruder. In the couple of days it took to get to her, and for her attendant bees trying to get her out, she began to smell like them. By the time they got to her, their objective had changed from wanting to kill her to wanting to rescue and protect her.

Our second hive was a random swarm that appeared in our yard. Our kids came in to tell us there were tons of bees outside. They had smelled residual honey in the box that was given to us, and they wanted in! After using some of the techniques that he learned from his friend, my husband was able to lure the bees into moving into the brood box. So far, the swarm appears to have decided to stay. We’ll be checking on them over the next few weeks to see if they’re making progress in their new home, and are hopeful that by next year we will be able to get honey from two hives instead of one!

For beekeeping questions you can search and find online forums. The people there tend to be very friendly and full of information. If you ask on this post, we would be happy to either answer from our experience or find an answer for you.