Introduction to Bee Keeping

Whether you are considering bees as a hobby or as a home based business, these pages should get you started in your investigation of beekeeping.

We begin by covering the basics and later will cover more advanced strategies and knowledge.

Getting Started in Beekeeping

Most professional beekeepers began their business as a hobby. The business grew around them as they learned more, experienced the joys of keeping bees and re-invested any money they made from product sales back into their hives and bees.

Check out the beekeeper’s starter kits in the Country Store!

There is, in fact, a significant amount of money tied up in a beekeeping business, especially so if you are starting from scratch. Some of the best advice I ever received from a fellow beekeeper was to contact other beekeepers in my area. As a rule, these people are friendly and more than happy to share their experience and ideas with you. Bee Keeping in a Country Field

Most beekeepers absolutely love keeping bees and even if they’re in the business, they still consider it a passionate hobby and are eager to talk ‘bees’ with anyone who’ll listen.

You’ll want to start keeping notes as a beekeeper’s journal (nothing more than a blank book picked up at any discount store), so you can review the nuggets of knowledge you pick up from time to time.

Many beekeeper’s back field looks like the picture below, but it can be hard to guard if you live in bear country.

The next few paragraphs will introduce you to bees, collecting wild honey and raw honey combs. We begin however with setting the distinctions between the honey bee and the bumble bee.

A bee keeper's hive.

The Honey Bee

Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and love of order, their aptly sharing the labor, their public spiritedness, their thrift, their complex economies and their inordinate love of gain, seems as far removed from a condition of rude nature as does a walled city or a cathedral town.

Seldom eating their own honey combs.

The bee prefers legitimate to illegitimate business; she is never an outlaw until her proper sources of supply fail. A honey bee will not touch her honey combs as long as nectar-yielding flowers can be found; she always prefers to go to the fountainhead.

The Bumble Bee

Our native bee, on the other hand, “the burly, dozing bumblebee”, seems to be less civilized.

They live from hand to mouth.
They laze about in time of plenty, and starve in times of scarcity.
They live in rude nests or in a hole in the ground.
They build a few deep cells or sacks in which they store a little honey for their young, but as a worker in wax they are the most primitive.
Bumble-bees are hungry vagrants with no fixed place of abode. If they happen upon a ruined pile of honey combs they gorge themselves, then creep beneath the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark to pass the night, and renew the feast the following day.

The bumble bee is an insect we notice most often because they’re always lazing or ambling about. There are all sorts and sizes of them and they are dull and clumsy compared with the industrious honey bee.

Tame Honey Bees

The honey bee’s great ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. They are more than provident – never satisfied, they must have all they can get by hook or by crook. These bees come from the oldest country, Asia, and thrive best in the most fertile and long-settled lands and gardens.

Honey Bee Color

Some old-timers say they can distinguish a wild bee from a tame one just by the color – the wild bee they say, is lighter.