Beekeeping 101, Part 1

This past weekend I attended the first of a series of three of these classes. It was fairly basic, and the first part of the class focused on a lot of stuff I'd already read, but there was a lot of good information. For example, some of the wildlife you need to protect bees from? Bears (seemingly obvious, but they're actually after the brood chambers, not the honey), skunks, and raccoons. What?! Skunks and raccoons eat bees?! Yep. And what do the bees eat? Not pollen. Honey.

As most people know, the bees build pretty little beeswax and comb chambers, in which they store their honey. They also put little baby bees-to-be in them. Those are the brood chambers. For the first three days, the babies are just "eggs." They then develop into "larvae," and continue to develop for several more days. They are white and slimy and gross-looking at that point. I think the bees must get the gross-looking thing too, because at that point they put a little brown cap over the chamber the larvae is in, and it becomes known as a "capped larvae." This is the most important stage because this is when the wings and all of its other tiny little body parts develop. When it's all finished cooking, it breaks its way out of the chamber and is officially a bee! At that point, it gets to work on its first, but not last, job: being a nurse bee. The nurse bee cleans up its own little chamber, readying it for the queen to lay another egg there, then helps the other nurse bees to take care of the new eggs and larvae. When a new round of bees hatch, the previous round moves on to what will be their permanent jobs.

There are a handful of jobs in the hive, but most bees will either be workers (the girls) or drones (the boys). Workers, as you might guess, work. They make beeswax and honeycomb, collect the pollen, store it away, and make the honey. The drones fly to a certain place (probably the bee version of a bar) every morning, wait around for any girl bees to fly by needing to get fertilized, do the deed if the need arises, then fly back home that night. Hmmm ... sounds like a rough life, doesn't it? There are also a limited number of guards (they stand sentry and keep an eye on things to ensure the hive remains safe) and attendants (they meet every whim of the queen - feed her, clean her, groom her, ensure that she sleeps, and addresses any and every of her needs).

We also discussed the "must have" tools every beekeeper needs. These are: a hive and bees (duh), a veil (those wide brimmed hats with mesh hanging down to protect your face), a smoker (makes smoke from bark to calm the bees while you're getting into the hives), a hive tool (or several - these are like tiny, though much stronger, crowbars), and a bee brush or feather (to move the bees from where you don't want them without injuring them). That’s it apparently. That kind of surprised me. I figured you’d need all kinds of crap.

One of the most helpful parts of the discussion was about the different types of hives, which solidified the direction I'd been leaning. There is the Langstroth Hive and the Top Bar Hive. They each have benefits and drawbacks. The Langstroth Hive is the traditional, and most well known, hive. It looks like boxes stacked on top of each other. Frames hang inside these boxes, and the bees make their beeswax, honeycomb, and honey inside these frames. The boxes are super heavy and have to be moved about every time you want to access the hive, are very difficult to build yourself and a little expensive to purchase, and require quite a bit of equipment. But you get a lot more honey out of them.

The Top Bar Hives look like long houses with sides that slope in at the bottom. They have bars across the top, which hang along the top of the "house," and the bees build their honeycomb, and store their honey and brood chambers, hanging vertically from those top bars. They can be built by the average person at home for about $50.00, don't require any equipment other than the "must haves" discussed above, are lightweight, and don't have to be moved around to access the hive. You get less honey out of them, though.

After lots of thinking and discussion, I think we're going to go with a Top Bar Hive. We like the fact that we can build it (inexpensively!) ourselves, that the whole hive doesn't have to be moved around to access the hive (which means I can fiddle around with it even if C isn't home), and while we are super excited about getting honey, it isn't a top reason we are doing this. We are still debating about where to locate them, but we're thinking about somewhere near the back of the property as this places them away from people, will provide them with shade, and puts them right between two sources of water (the ditch behind the property and the irrigation pond in the middle of the yard).

So excited! Looking forward to the next class!