Bee Basics (Now With Pictures!)

A brief explanation of a backyard bee-keeping start up:

Things you will need:

A place for the bees to live.
Hives for the bees to live in.
Frames for the bees to build on.
Bees.
Food for the bees.
Basic Equipment.

Let's start with the first thing you need - a place on your property for the bees to live.

Location:

It's a good idea to have your hives someplace accessible by car or truck, (full honey supers are HEAVY), but not terrifically close to home. Domestic honeybees are gentle little creatures, but no one likes to be constantly jostled and if you've got pets or kids or an inability to restrain yourself from poking boxes, then do yourself a favor and situate your hive on the very edge of your property. Bees need water to survive, so choosing an area of your property near some source of water is a good idea, although obviously you do NOT want to put them next to your pool. If you have a pool and no other source of water on your property, placing a bird bath close to your hives and in between the hives and the pool will help prevent them from visiting your pool instead - but make sure you keep it full! You'll also need to put a bunch of rocks in the bird bath for the bees to land on and use as a drinking platform, otherwise you'll drown all your bees.

Bee hives, as a general rule, do best facing to the South, South-West, in either full sun or with some slight afternoon shade. It's a good idea to raise your hives up off the ground a bit to cut down on ants, (cinder blocks work well but they need to be extra long). It's also a good idea to keep a little space in between hives to prevent robbing and to make it easier to work the hives. You want the ground around your bee yard to be easily maintained because NO ONE wants to try and mow the grass right next to a hive - putting down a tarp or heavy mulch or pea stone etc is probably a good idea.

You don't HAVE to keep the bees on your property, either. Some farmers may be grateful to have you request the use of some neglected corner of their land for your hives, since the bees are super-beneficial to growing crops. Bees will travel up to 3 miles to find food, so your hives don't need to be RIGHT in the middle of the crops for the crops to benefit.

Hives:

Your bees need a home! It's a good idea before you choose a type of hive to join your local apiary society and check all the laws in your state regarding bee keeping - some states are very specific about the way you keep your bees. Because there are a number of very virulent diseases threatening the bees, most states have rules about the kinds of hives you can use. In my state it is necessary for all hives to be of the sort with removable frames, so they can be inspected regularly by a state inspector for American and European Foulbrood.

I found that since that's the case in the states, removable frame hives are pretty much all that is carried by the bee supply companies.

Within each category of hive type there are lots of little alterations you can make that basically depends entirely upon your experience and preference - for example many women prefer to work solely with medium supers or shallow supers because they are much lighter when full than deep supers or hive bodies. I was an idiot and bought a number of deep supers and having just lifted one the other day I'm here to tell you that I am, after all, a woman. Granted, I was lifting a full deep super, and a full medium super stacked on top of one another at the same time, but still. Ouch.

You can choose to work with 10 frame hives, or 8 frame hives...there's all sorts of little choices. I'll do a more in-depth post just on hive composition later on but to be brief, your basic living hive will be composed of the following:

*1 bottom board
*1 inner cover
*1 telescoping outer cover
*2 hive bodies/deep supers (it means the same thing) or a corresponding number of medium supers (there are 2 medium supers to each deep super, so your basic hive would then consist of FOUR medium supers instead of two deeps). I hope that was coherent. Basically your hive needs a certain amount of space just to live - and that space is either 2 deep supers/hive bodies OR four medium supers. Additional supers can be added to the hive for the purpose of collecting surplus honey for human consumption.
*The correct number of frames for your supers (between 8 and 10 depending on the equipment choice you made when ordering).
*If you intend to collect honey, then you will need additional supers and frames.

Note: A "super" or "hive body" is another word for a four sided hollow box. There's no bottom or top to the box, just four sides. These boxes are your bees' new home. You will buy frames for your supers, which hang down inside the hollow boxes and provide the bees with a base to build their honeycomb on. Supers can be stacked on top of one another to create a sort of bee high-rise apartment building as your colony grows and needs more space. The bottom board goes on the bottom of the bottom-most super, and the inner cover and outer cover go on top of the top-most super, and your bees can move freely from the bottom all the way through all the boxes to the top.

Frames:

Frames are the hanging foundation of your hive. They can be made of wood and wax, or of plastic. Pretend that a bee frame is exactly like a framed picture - you have the outer edge, or frame, and then inside the frame you have the picture. Well in bee hives, frames have the same two basic parts - the outer "frame" portion, with the top bar slightly longer so that it can hang on the inside edge of the supers, and the "foundation" which is like the picture. The foundation provides the bees with a starting point to build their comb, and so it comes pre-pressed into a honeycomb pattern. This helps your bees build even comb.

My frames are wood and my foundation is crimped-wire supported wax. Frames can also come in a variety of plastics. Every bee keeper has his or her preferred type of frame and I'm not going to get into the whys and wherefores of the arguments now. Generally speaking every super that you have for your hive will require 10 frames inside it. Deep supers/Hive bodies will require frames of the correct length for deep supers, and mediums will require medium frames, etc. The less empty space inside your hive, the less your bees are likely to build burr comb, which is, take my word for it, a total menace.

Make a note though that most wood and wax frame and foundation takes a significant amount of construction to put together - the wood frames come in four pieces and must be nailed and glued together before you can insert the wax foundation into it and use it in your hive.

Once you have your hives and your frames set up in location and ready to go you should purchase your bees!

Bees:

There are a few different kinds of honeybees used and sold in the United States. The Italian Honey Bee is the most prevalent as far as sales catalogs are concerned, but the Carniolan is gaining popularity. I've currently got Italians but when it is time for me to requeen I'll probably get Carniolans. This is because bee-keepers have found that specially bred Carniolan queens produce workers that are more resistant to the varroa mites than Italians - they're often called "Hygienic Bees" for this reason.

Once you've chosen the TYPE of bee you'd like to purchase, you need to find a supplier. There are three main ways of starting up a hive. You can find or be offered a swarm, you can buy a package of bees from a catalog, or you can buy a nuc of bees from a catalog or bee-breeder. Briefly, here are the differences:

1. Swarm: Usually a colony of bees will swarm in the spring if they feel crowded. The worker bees will prepare a queen cell within a hive, and start feeding a larva royal jelly, which will ensure that the larva develops as a queen instead of as a worker. When the new queen has hatched, the old queen and a significant number of her existing worker bees will leave the hive to the newly hatched queen and go seek a new home. Bee keepers will usually do everything in their power to prevent a swarm because it weakens the hive and cuts down on honey production that year, but when they happen there's nothing for it but to collect the swarm and create a new hive. Most backyard bee keepers have a number of hives that they are comfortable with, and don't want to expand beyond that number, so they'll give swarms away to new bee keepers and existing bee keepers. If you decide to become a bee keeper, try and meet other local bee keepers and let them know that if they have a swarm that needs a home, you're interested!

2. Packaged Bees: Bees are sold in packages by weight - each package weighs about 3 lbs and will therefore include about 11,000 bees and a queen. The package arrives through the postal service (and boy do the postmasters HATE them!) and look like thin wood and wire shoeboxes. Inside the package is a feeding can with sugar water in it, and a small wood and wire cage within the main cage that contains the queen and her attendants.

I'm not going to get into how to hive a package of bees in this post, but let me tell you - it was an adventure.

You can buy packaged bees from almost every main bee catalog supplier - Kelley Bee Company, Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, Dadant & Sons, etc.

3. Nucs: A Nuc, or Nucleus, is a hive in miniature. It contains a queen, a number of workers, and about five full frames of food and brood, (bee eggs, bee larvae, bee pupae). It is very definitely the best, and easiest, way to get started with a hive. The fact that the nuc comes with five full frames gives your new bees a leg up - they can start collecting food much sooner than packaged bees or a swarm because they will have less comb to build out first.

Bees that are building comb out, (either for brood or for honey collection), MUST be fed because they are too busy 'decorating' their new home to forage.

Food:

No matter by what method you collected your bees, if you have new foundation in your hive, (and unless someone gives you a LOT of built comb from their own hives you WILL have new foundation in your hives), then your bees will need to be fed until they've finished building out their foundation. Bees need three types of nourishment to survive; water, pollen and nectar.

You can provide your bees with nectar in the form of sugar water or bee candy. Click on the link for a recipe. Usually this provides them with enough energy, but if you'd like to give them pollen also you can buy it from many catalogs. Sprinkling it around on top of your inner cover works. To feed the sugar water you'll need a feeder of some sort. A can or jar with small holes punched in the lid and placed upside down on top of the hand hole in the inner cover works just fine. To keep other creatures away from it and help maintain the correct temperature in the hive, place an empty super on top and put the outer cover over it all. Just check it frequently because you'll be surprised how quickly the bees drink it, and make sure your bees haven't started to build out comb inside the empty super!

The first year your bees are in action it's a good idea to feed them throughout the spring, summer and fall, to give them the best support you can for their first winter.

You can also feed your bees sugar-water in a division board feeder. These hang inside one of your supers just like a frame. Make sure it comes with floats or that you put a bunch of sticks inside it otherwise your bees will drown.

Basic Equipment:

The things you cannot live without while bee keeping are: some form of protective clothing, (and for the record I vastly prefer the English self-supported bee veil to the round veil/hat combo), a hive tool to help pry apart supers and lift up frames, a smoker to calm your bees before you work with them, smoker fuel - (pine needles work just fine), a bee brush comes in handy although blowing on them makes them move away also, something to light your smoker with is super important, and the most important and final ingredient - nerves of steel.

Hive Tool and Bee Brush at the Ready...

Ladies, take note: when husband-hunting, try to find one that will let you gussy him up in a bee-keeper's cover-all and then assist you with your bee keeping duties, despite a paralyzing fear of, and I quote, "being stung on the balls." Yeah, Sandy was NOT impressed with the vent openings on the side of the cover-all...

P.S. bwahahahahahahaha! hahahahahahahaha! haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

As TMBG would say... "S.E.X.X.Y."