Green Beekeeping
Beekeeping can be an inexpensive hobby or a profitable business, depending on your goals and where you live. How much time you spend on your bee colonies will depend on how many you have, what your reasons for doing it are, and how much time and money you want to invest.
A new hive will cost about 150 dollars, depending on where you live and what is available. With the vast dying off happening with bee colonies the last few years, it is very important that as many people as possible get involved with beekeeping in some way.
Using green beekeeping practices isn’t always in vogue, but it’s better for the environment and it’s better for the bees. Although there is a lot of disagreement among beekeepers about the topic with beekeepers blaming treatment-free keepers for colony collapse, there is no evidence that this is true.
What Are Green Beekeeping Practices?
Green beekeeping means that you don’t use artificial means to take care of your bees without a good reason. You ensure they have a good supply of organic flowering plants that haven’t been ruined with dangerous pesticides, and you’re careful not to introduce bacteria to their environment.
Let Them Eat Honey
The way you do this is you don’t use all their honey for your harvest. Instead, you leave enough honey so that the bees can live through the winter. You can even freeze some of the frames in case of an emergency. But, leaving the honey bees with their own stores that they produce in the fall is the best way to do it.
Let Them Die
Additionally, instead of trying to save poorly performing hives with fake food, it’s probably better to kill off the queen and introduce the hive to a new queen. This will make the colony stronger and healthier in the long run, because you don’t keep weak hives alive artificially.
Start with Two Colonies
Beginning your beekeeping enterprise with two colonies is a good green practice; you’ll be able to learn faster since no two colonies are the same.
Depending on where you got your bees – whether from a package, nucleus (nuc), or swarm – one hive might be stronger than another. And having two can help you keep the strongest, thus building a much stronger eco-system of colonies.
Start New Hives in the Spring
New hives should be started in the spring during the heaviest blooming time, because that is when the most nutrition is available. Leave enough honey for all your hives all the time, so that you don’t have to feed them anything that’s bad for them. Feeding healthy bees sugar water is not good nutrition and will produce poor quality honey, leading to more serious problems as time moves on.
Buy Bees That Are Native to Your Area
When you buy bees, buy them from local producers rather than through the mail from a long distance. Locally produced nucs will be healthier and more accustomed to the environment. Some of the behavior of bees is bred into them from the DNA memory of the bees that came before them. Stick to hives from home.
Smaller Honey Harvests Are Best
It’s better to have a smaller harvest to keep your bees well fed than it is to harvest everything and feed them junk food to keep them going. All that happens when you do the latter is that your bees will produce weaker and weaker offspring due to the low nutrition.
Give Them Space
The other tip that you should consider is not allowing the population of any of your hives to get too high. Always ensure that they have plenty of room. Also, ensure that you keep your hives clean from dead bees to avoid any type of infestation.
Even though providing the habitat for honey bees is artificial, the closer you can stay to nature in terms of how you care for your bees, the better for the bees, the environment, and your honey harvest. That’s why it’s so important to learn all that you can about bee behavior in addition to problems that can happen.
Why Beekeeping Helps the Environment
Honey bees are the most important pollinators that exist in our environment. Unfortunately, disease, pesticides, and other factors have caused the honey bee population to plummet the last few years. When you become a beekeeper, you become part of this important environmental circle of life. Helping pollinators become more abundant is essential to our eco-system.
Without bees, we won’t have fresh food from the garden anymore. We’ll have no more honey (obviously), no more almonds, apples, avocados, cashews, blueberries, grapes, peaches, peppers, strawberries, tangerines, walnuts, watermelons… And about 100 more flowering plants will be gone, including your morning cup of coffee.
So if honey bees were to become extinct, we would lose many species of plants that rely on them. That would end up affecting the animal population that eats these plants and makes their habitats with these plants. It would be devastating to our entire ecosystem and some believe it would lead to the literal collapse of our planet.
Therefore, if you have any land you’re not using and even if you don’t want to be a beekeeper, you might consider allowing other green beekeepers to use it for their hives. This will help replenish nature with more honey bees that can be pollinators for all our flowering plants that need them.
What Beekeeping Involves
As a beekeeper, you essentially manage your bees. Some beekeepers focus on renting out their bees to farmers to pollinate their growth, while others focus on producing honey for sale. Some do both. It depends on the beekeeper’s goals and ideas about beekeeping.
But in any case, they keep their bees healthy, prepare colonies for production, and replace the queen bee when needed. If they produce honey, they need to follow local food safety guidelines for harvesting and processing the honey.
In the spring, beekeepers get their bees ready for the honey-producing time by ensuring that their bees are healthy and parasite free, as well as ensuring that the queen is healthy enough to produce eggs.
Then during the summer months, if they have chosen to harvest the honey, they add and remove honeycomb boxes to ensure that the bees have enough space to produce at their optimum level.
Eventually, the beekeepers also harvest the honey. They use a smoking device to tame the bees and wear protective clothing to remove the combs from the hives, replacing them with empty space for the bees to create more honey.
In natural and green beekeeping, you don’t take all the honey. You leave some for the bees to use for food instead of giving them artificial food choices.
Some beekeepers also become consultants and help remove swarms where they’re not wanted, saving the bees from being killed. In addition, there are some beekeepers who keep hives for renting as pollinators for farmers.
This is a great way to use hives and to help ensure they have plenty of food. Make sure that you know what type of farmer you’re working with to ensure you don’t accidentally let your bees eat poor quality nectar.
A large percentage of beekeepers are hobbyist, while some do it for a full-fledged business. The average beekeepers (also known as apiculturists, apiarists and honey farmers) make about 70 thousand dollars a year and usually need to travel a lot to the various locations of their hives.
If you want to earn money, you’ll make more if you live in a climate that gets colder. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy beekeeping, earn a little money on the side, and contribute to our natural ecosystem, no matter where you live in America.
Would Beekeeping Work for You?
Some people have romantic notions about being a beekeeper. They think that they just have a few hives and the honey appears magically. But you must care for your bees, keep the right flowering plants around for them to pollinate, and watch for common diseases that can wipe out bees overnight. Plus, you must try to avoid using the wrong pesticides or falling for the need to use a lot of antibiotics and other artificial means to care for the bees.
In some areas of the country, beekeeping is more for the process of keeping pollinators around so that plants can grow than for the collection of honey. For example, if you live in a hot climate, you might not get as much honey as if you lived in a cooler climate. So, you should do it for the right reasons depending on where you live.
Before you start beekeeping, look at the following questions and answer them honestly.
Do You Enjoy Being Outdoors?
Not everyone likes being outdoors. Beekeepers need to like the outdoors because they may need to go outside a lot for gardening, as well as ensuring that their bees are safe. Plus, if someone in your area has a swarm that needs to be taken care of without killing the bees, you must be willing to do it.
Do You Like Gardening?
As you will have gathered, to have a healthy bee colony you need to provide food to them in the form of flowering plants. Cultivating specific plants can also affect how the honey looks and tastes, so there is a lot of fun in deciding what type of plants you want to use for your honey bees. If nurturing plants seems like something you’d like to do, you may love being a beekeeper too.
Do You Like to Be Challenged?
Beekeeping isn’t as simple as just getting a hive and you’re done. It’s a science that you’ll need to learn over time to keep your bees healthy and safe – and if you wish, produce honey for use and sale without starving your bees.
Do You Have Allergies?
If you are allergic to bees, it is not recommended that you try to keep honey bees. What you can do instead if you want to help the environment is allow other beekeepers to keep some hives on your land away from your primary residence or places you tend to use. That way, you’re helping improve the quality and quantity of the honey bee population without having to do it yourself. Typically, if the bees do produce enough honey, you’ll be given some of it as your fee for providing some of your land for the bee colonies.
Is Your Climate Right for Honey Bees?
Honey bees can thrive in many climates, and you can have honey bees in every single state in the US. In fact, surprisingly the biggest producer of honey is North Dakota. Even though honey bees thrive best in forested and tropical areas, they can generally thrive in any environment that has a lot of flowering plants. They will produce more honey in colder climates because they need to build bigger and more insulated nests to protect the queen in the wintertime.
So, you can have honey bees anywhere but you may not get as much honey production in warmer climates as you will in colder, more temperate climates.
Legal Considerations Surrounding Beekeeping
There are federal and state laws that regulate the importation of bees due to disease. Each state is different, so you should look up the laws within your own state.
But for the most part, it’s just about keeping diseases controlled so that we can keep the honey bee population healthy. Most states have a registration process for your honey bee colonies.
A simple search for your state honey bee registration is likely to produce results for your local honey bee association, plus links to forms to register your colonies. It’s usually not very expensive to register your bee colonies, but it is a necessity if it’s the law of your state. Doing so can help cut down on bee diseases and give you access to a lot of information, help, and warnings of issues.
Supplies You Need
To become a beekeeper, you really don’t need that much equipment. It’s all pretty standard. But, there is an investment. You want to be safe, keep your bees healthy, and use the right equipment for the job.
Some people have developed their own homemade tools, but you don’t need to do that; you can buy tools that are already tried and tested.
- Hives – You can buy hives of all types. Before you buy a hive, consider how large of a hive you can handle. If you aren’t strong, you will want to buy smaller hives. If you’re strong and can pick up a lot of weight or afford tools to help you, then you can get a larger hive. Plus, there are top bar hives which you don’t need to lift. You also need to know whether you just want to support pollination or if you want to produce honey.
- Bees – When you buy bees you really buy a “nuc”, which is a nucleus colony or a starter hive of bees that consists of five frames. When you get it home, you remove the empty frames from your hive and add those. You can also get free bees by attracting them to a hive using lemon grass oil.
- Hive Tool – This is a hook device that you use to lift the frames. It has a flat side that is used to scrape off wax and propolis that gets on the frames and hive walls. Some people open their hives with screwdrivers, but it’s always nice to have the right tool so you avoid harming bees or yourself.
- Smoker – When you want to calm honey bees, you’ll use a smoker. A smoker does what it sounds like; it generates smoke. When you put smoke near bees, it turns off their internal pheromone alarms and interrupts their defenses so that you can move them or collect honey. Some people think smokers are used to control swarms but this is not accurate, as honey bees that are swarming aren’t really as interested in attacking as one might think. Honey bees only attack when protecting something.
- Protective Gear – You’ll need a bee suit, which is a jacket with a hat veil and gloves. This will keep you from being stung due to a bee getting caught someplace and getting scared. Honey bees don’t typically attack and sting in high numbers, but you must be protected always. It keeps your bees safe and healthy, and avoids painful situations that can arise.
- Bee Brush – When you need to remove bees from a surface, a bee brush is the tool of choice; it’s long and soft so that you can gently remove bees off your honeycombs without damaging anything. But it’s also firm enough that it can remove bees from frames and other equipment without harming the bees.
- Feeders – You’ll need different types of honey bee feeders depending upon your goal. You can get entrance feeders which are inserted via a tray into the entrance of the hive without bothering them or going into the hive. There are also open air feeders which are not preferred methods of feeding honey bees; other wildlife will use them, which can transmit disease. Many beekeepers swear by the baggie feeders, which is just a zip-locked bag filled with food placed in a space and cut open so the bees can get to it.
- Bee Food – There is a lot of different thoughts about bee food. Some people just use Karo syrup but others like to use more natural options. Even though bees forage for nectar, pollen, propolis and water, you may want to feed your honey bees if they don’t have enough food. But, you may want to avoid feeding them poor nutrition such as corn syrup and fake substitutes and instead ensure that they have enough honey by not harvesting it all.
- Lemon Grass Oil – This oil acts as a pheromone to attract swarms to hives. It’s one way to bait and attract honey bees to make your hives their home. Most people purchase hives but if you know that you have swarms on your property, this is a good way to get bees to your hives without spending a lot of money. However, you may have to find a queen.
- Strainers – When collecting the honey, dead bees, wax and other debris can get into the honey. Therefore, it’s best to strain it so that it looks clear and beautiful instead of looking as if it has trash in it. There are stainless strainers, nylon strainers, and various types of strainers that you can get. It depends on your goals, and sometimes the local laws if you’re going to sell the honey. It also depends on whether you’re harvesting on a large or small scale.
There is a lot more equipment you can get for your beekeeping enterprise, but these are the basics that you’ll need to get started. The most important thing to do is read about green beekeeping practices, and make sure that anyone you talk to about it is also wanting to use green beekeeping practices.
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