Beekeeping for Beginners

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Honeybee collecting honey and pollen on phacelia tanacetifolia flower. iStockphoto.com/proxyminder

Labor costs can eat up meager earnings on the farm, but imagine the benefit of signing up thousands of workers who will literally pay for the privilege of pollinating your crops. I’m not talking about the latest scheme for taking advantage of your fellow humans, I’m talking about creating a hive of activity at your place with bees. Given the right environment, bees will work hard to add to your bottom line with increased yields – and if you treat them right, they’ll pay you rent in the form of sweet, delicious, healthful honey and wax, which you can easily convert to cold cash.

Beekeeping may be the best small-farm business you’ve never considered. Read on for 10 compelling reasons to recruit a buzzing labor force to your farm.

Some farming activities need large amounts of physical strength for heavy lifting, or endurance for long, strenuous hours of activity, but beekeeping is different and democratic. It can be accomplished by men or women. Youngsters, under adult supervision, make excellent beekeepers. Seniors find that beekeeping makes an excellent hobby. The most physically demanding part of beekeeping is lifting honey-filled supers (the boxes that hold the frames on which the bees build the honeycombs) from the hive.

Beekeeping is an activity that can be enjoyed anywhere in the United States. Hives can be kept in the cold Northern states, the desert, and in the hot and humid South. A local beekeeping group can be an invaluable resource for assessing specific regional strategies for beekeeping. If you live where there are flowering plants, shrubs or trees, you can keep bees. You can find hives in the city as well as the country. Country beekeepers, however, enjoy fewer
restrictions. City dwellers will want to check local ordinances regarding rules or restrictions for beekeeping.

Bees do not require daily feeding, watering or milking like many kinds of livestock. They generally need supplemental feeding in the spring and fall, which requires checking food reserves in the hives every few days. During the summer, you might check your bees every week or so for health of the colony, condition of the hive, and progress of honey production. Late summer or fall involves removing surplus honey from the hive, which can generally be done in a day if you only have one or two hives. Winter involves no work for the beekeeper. It is a time to read up on the latest beekeeping information and make plans for next year’s honey crop. The practice can easily be done with other daily farm chores or with a full-time job away from the farm.