Becoming a Beekeeper  (I)

How to Start Raising Your Own Honey, Part 1
The Not-So-Sweet Side of Honeybees

The idea of sunny-warm, sweet, farm-fresh natural honey is hugely appealing! And it’s not that hard to do. But first, here are some considerations for before you jump in:

Am I willing to deal with the downside of honeybees?

Getting stung?
Heavy lifting?
Dealing with wild animals that are attracted to hives?
Managing my hives so as not to waste the resource they can be?

Bee Stings

If the stinging part has suddenly put you off, don’t give up just yet! There are methods for keeping your bees as friendly as possible. That doesn’t mean you’ll never get stung - in fact, there is a popular theory that being around bees without getting stung by them can cause a person to become allergic to their stings. The theory is that being exposed to the venom for several years (smell, skin contact) without giving your immune system the chance to adjust to it might cause a reaction. How much of that folk-tale is truth, I don’t know - but it makes the idea of stings a little more bearable!

Also, once you’ve had a certain number of stings (when you first start in the spring), you will swell up as your immune system gives the bee venom a big ol’ football tackle. After the “big swell” has been and gone, though, stings won’t bother you nearly as much for the rest of the season.

Heavy Lifting

You must be prepared to be very careful about how you lift the honey boxes. In a good year, a box of honey with nine or ten frames in it can weigh up to 100 pounds! And if it’s a strong hive, the bees can do that several times over! This means you will want to walk regularly (even an hour a day in ten-minute intervals will do the trick) and probably do some back-strengthening exercises as well. Otherwise you can very easily end up with what’s known as “beekeeper’s back.” This is because, as you lift the boxes off the hive, it’s very hard to avoid twisting even a small amount. You need to be aware that a strong back is not enough - my husband made that mistake, and has been paying for it ever since. A person has to be very careful about correct movements and just plain tiring out the muscles till strain can’t be avoided.

Wild Animals

Don’t panic! You will not be inundated with rampaging herds of predators on a nightly basis. It’s a once-in-awhile thing, and mostly preventable.

Where I live, the worst bee predators are raccoons and skunks. The coons are more likely to find their way into the shelter where we keep extra boxes. Then they’ll climb all the way to the ceiling and start pulling frames out and wrecking them to eat the wax and traces of honey. We come in the next morning and get really mad at the destruction. To prevent apoplexy, we try to stack the boxes evenly and keep a sheet of plywood on top.

Skunks will come up to the front of a hive at night, when all the bees are inside it, and scratch the box up a bit. The sleepy bees get riled and start “boiling” out the front. Then the skunk rolls them on the ground till they’re dead and eats them. We know hives that have been skunked by the angry hum they have the next morning and the scratch marks on the box and ground. The best strategy is to be willing to spend a few evenings in a location where you can get a shot at the bee yard without hitting the hives, and dispatch the critter. They’ll always come back, once they’ve found the food source.

Bears, however, are far worse. In bear country, it’s wise to be prepared to invest in some 5-strand electric fencing, if you’re keeping several hives. This is just a deterrent, to keep them from finding out that the hives taste good. Once they do find out, seasoned beekeepers tell me, no amount of voltage will stop them. They get in and lay it waste, knocking the hives over, smashing the equipment and generally destroying your whole bee yard. They like the grubs, actually, more than the honey. But I suspect they’re not real picky, as long as it seems like food.

Believe it or not, ants are a plague to honeybees. They’re too small for the bees to fight back. They can bite the bees until they’re dead and clean out the colony. The solution? Put the hives, bottom-board and all, up on a pallet. It seems to keep the ants from finding them in most cases.

Managing the Hives

Keeping bees on a small scale is not very time-consuming, relatively. One person can keep up to 400 hives, with help extracting the honey, if they’re doing it as a full-time (maybe plus a little bit) job. Much of that efficiency depends on good management, though. It’s important to be willing to go and talk to local beekeepers (a.k.a. apiarists) and find out what they think of their neighbours. That is to say, you find out from a guy pretty quickly what he likes about his own operation methods. But if you want to know what not to do, ask him about how the lady down the road operates her honey business. And if you want to know even more about his operation, go visit her too.

If you are going to keep a larger number of hives, be prepared to do what has to be done for them. If they aren’t properly taken care of, your honey operation will become a money pit quickly. Hives may die off, get diseased, or not produce what you’d like them to. We have seen some sad, completely preventable stuff in sloppy operations.

If that doesn’t scare you, then “stick with me!” - next time, it’s all about the upside.

On to Part II>>