Beginning Beekeeping: Checking In

I have been worried because, although the bees have been building beautiful white comb since they moved in on May 20th, we have never spotted the queen, and I have never been able to identify clear evidence that she's there and laying eggs. Without a laying queen, the colony would die off in several weeks, since each bee only lives one to four months.

Last time we checked the hive, a week ago, we only saw stores of pollen, nectar, and white-capped honey, near the tops of the frames.

But Allen and I checked the bees this morning, and saw two different colors of capped comb - white near the tops of the frames, and tan near the bottoms - which means that the white is probably honey that they've capped for storage, and the tan is probably brood (larvae) that they've capped so it can develop. But we still weren't totally sure.

Beginning Beekeeping - Getting the Bees

Nothing (besides the veil) will be as damaging to my little effort to remove the "weird" stigma from backyard beekeeping as the fact that I ordered a three-pound box of bees via the US mail. It's only one way to acquire bees ... but it's a weird one.

So how else might you get bees? Well, you may have spotted a feral hive in a tree that you want to ... adopt. There's plenty of online advice for that, and ... good luck to you. Feral bees are likely to be well-adapted to your area. When bees are swarming, they have no hive to protect, making them pretty docile. Some beekeepers have pheromone-baited bee boxes placed around their neighborhoods, to lure feral bees.

Beginning Beekeeping - The Equipment

Backyard (or rooftop, or fire escape, or whatever) beekeeping seems to be picking up steam, but I still found it maddeningly difficult to find a good primer online. A good beekeeping book is crucial, but I also like to do free research online whenever I begin a project - even a big one - and a simple primer on the equipment you'll need would have been really helpful in estimating what sorts of costs I would incur.

So this post is just that. I'm going to go over the basic parts necessary to assembling a hive. In the next post, I'll discuss where to get the bees. Frankly, that's as far as I've gotten. My bees seem to like their new home; they've been busy building comb, and I'll continue to add bee-related posts as they develop their colony and I inevitably screw something up.

Beginning Beekeeping - An Introduction

We've got bees in our yard, yall. And we put them there on purpose.

We have a huge backyard, and I've always hated that we don't do anything with it besides put a party back there a few times a year. I've lobbied unsuccessfully for chickens for years. I've waged on-and-off campaigns for yard-dwelling goats and alpacas, but gained no ground against steadfastly anti-livestock Allen. I bake, I love sweets, I love food. Why not use our yard for something interesting and fun that makes food?

I've brought up beehives here and there, and Allen decided he kind of liked the idea. I researched and started making serious plans to start a hive in the yard. Six weeks after buying a book on beekeeping, we've got a hive with worker bees and a queen.