Beekeeping is magical and mysterious – and a science. Although it is dramatized in movies as something lovely and beautiful (which it is!), it is also a lot of work. I squirmed when a major women’s magazine made it seem like beekeeping was pretty much just buying some gear, bees, and boxes, and voila! – you are a beekeeper and supporting the pollinator movement. So, although you may already be a beekeeper, or perhaps you are prepping for your first hive in 2021, these are six things I wish I had known before I adopted my first hive from a friend, not really knowing what all I was getting in to.Six Things to Know About Beekeeping
1) You will have to requeen. Interpretation: you may have to kill your queen. It’s squishy the first time but once you realize a $40 queen can make or break your season, and your girls are relying on those next generations for help, the current queen gets to be replaced.
2)You are on Pest Control. Bees need monitoring and pest management of the mite. You may have to kill 300 or so bees at least once a season if not more to measure your mite population. It’s hard to do visually. Yes, you can try the powdered sugar shake method or check your sticky boards for mites dropping down, but the alcohol method is the tried and true method to get the best estimate of mite infestation. Mites are like fleas on your pet in the South. They are coming it’s just a matter of time. Everyone knows how fun it is to have a pet that is madly infested with fleas. The problem with mites, like fleas, they do come back. Be the best Pest Control.
3) Beekeeping can be an expensive hobby – hence, there are so many different tools and homemade ways to do things. There is more to beekeeping than a suit, gloves, a package of bees, two hive boxes, bottom board, screen, inner and outer covers to purchases. There are honey supers and frames, tools, pest management products, sugar (lots of sugar if you aren’t in the South), extractor if you can’t borrow one locally, a heat knife, a nuc box for future splitting, more boxes, sticky boards, and more. Did I mention books and classes? A place to store all this stuff? A freezer to store used frames and kill anything that might have infiltrated the comb? A pollinator garden to help feed your bees and the environment?
4) It’s hot in the suit. Unless you are going commando under your suit, and sometimes that doesn’t work, it’s hot. Just be prepared to sweat and shower after a good hive check in the heat of the summer.
5) Beekeeping is really most like animal husbandry and primarily about space management. We need generations of bees to sustain the hive. Visual inspections are a must. Planning that three-week vacation in June? Maybe rethink that one if you are without a backup beekeeper to be on call or just to do a drive-by check. Do you have someone a neighbor can call if your hive swarms into their soffit? (Check. Been there. Done that.)
6)You will fall in love with your bees. It’s all worth it at happy hour when you are on the deck watching them work like a fine-tuned airport. Or when you get your first honey harvest and it looks like gold. And when you see a bee in your flower bed and she looks at you – and you just know she knows who you are.
