Beekeeping Tips for Beginners
Make Sure You Use Enough Smoke
For some reason, beginning beekeepers seem to get a little shy with their smoker. If you want to calm your bees, you need to get two to three full puffs of smoke into the entrance before working the colony. Then use a little more after you open the lid or separate the boxes. If you don’t smoke the bees enough before opening the lid, you will find that no amount of smoke will calm them down later!
When Your Colony Contains More Than One Hive Body, Inspect It From The Middle
When you have two hive bodies stacked, all the action is going to be in the middle of the two boxes, not under the lid. Most beginners inspect a two-deep colony by lifting the lid and peeking in. With two hive bodies, however, all that you are going to see in this scenario is honey. You will learn nothing about the colony’s health. Experienced beekeepers inspect a two-deep colony by separating the two boxes and inspecting the brood area between the two boxes, not the honey under the lid.
Don’t Be Afraid
You must not be afraid! The bees respond to nervous movements by the beekeeper by getting nervous themselves. You have to force yourself to not be afraid of the bees (or at least pretend not to be afraid) in order to be a good beekeeper. We see beginning beekeepers that routinely put off critical inspections or other activities, because they are afraid of opening the colony and getting stung. You have to get over this or your bees will suffer.
Don’t Wait Too Long Without A Queen
Get into the habit of looking for young brood and eggs whenever you inspect your colony. If you see evidence that your colony is without a queen, you need to act as quickly as possible to secure a replacement queen. Otherwise, you will either lose the entire colony or end up with a colony of laying workers, which is very difficult to deal with.
Don’t Miss The Mite Treatment Window
If you are planning to treat your bees for mites, do not wait until late fall. By late fall, the mites have typically already done their damage and the bees are too weak to tolerate a treatment. Your treatment will have the best effect in late summer, when both the bee and mite populations are at their highest.
Two Beehives Can Be Easier (And More Cost Effective In The Long Run) Than One
Keeping in mind that even the best beekeepers routinely lose up to 20-30% of their colonies each year, it is easy to see that with one colony you are facing pretty significant odds that over a year or two you could easily be wiped out – even if you do everything right. Having a second colony will reduce your chances of losing everything at once. Plus, having the second colony (with the same equipment setup) enables you to leverage the health of one to build up the other, to replace a failing colony with stock from the strong one, or to share equipment as needed. You will find it easier to survive the long run with a second beehive.
Think Twice About Unusual Colony Setups
Many beginning beekeepers dive into beekeeping with unusual, non-standardized, or homemade equipment setups. This can cause problems down the road when you wish to add or subtract space, or leverage equipment from one colony to another. The basic Langstroth hive is tried and true. Beginning beekeeping is hard enough without fighting with unusual equipment.
Weather And Bees: Know The Current And Upcoming Weather Conditions
The best times to work with your bees are on comfortable, sunny days. Bees tend to get irritable in cloudy or less than ideal weather, probably because the flowers stop producing nectar.
Living comfortably indoors all the time, we tend to forget that climate control isn’t so easy when you’re living outdoors in a wooden box! Bees are sensitive to cold, especially when their populations drop in winter. If the daytime highs are less then 65 degrees, it is likely going to do the bees more harm than good if you open them for any significant amount of time. It is also not a good idea to feed syrup when the upcoming forecast calls for low temperatures in the 40’s or cooler. The unfinished syrup will cool over night and chill the hive (think camping next to a cold lake). Plus, the bees need to fan the syrup to process it into honey. This lowers the hive temperature even more.
Hot temperatures are less of a problem, though you should at all times be careful to keep open frames of brood out of the direct sunlight. And, always ensure that there is a reliable, clean water source nearby, especially in the hot summer months.
Make Sure You Study Beekeeping
Reading a few books, accessing Bee Source at www.beesource.com for questions, and watching free beekeeping videos on YouTube, will go a long way toward building your confidence as a beekeeper.