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Beekeeping Books
Howland Blackiston
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Published:
September 1, 2020

Beekeeping For Dummies

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Overview

The single best and most comprehensive guide for prospective, new and experienced hobbyist beekeepers

Beekeeping For Dummies, 5th Edition, is one of the most popular titles in the For Dummies series available today. Including the latest information regarding every aspect of backyard beekeeping and honey production, this book describes how to get started, how to care for and safely handle bees, and how to maintain healthy and productive colonies.

This book is loaded with up-to-date, practical examples and helpful illustrations of proven techniques and strategies for both new and seasoned hobbyist beekeepers. Some of the updates for this brand-new edition include:

  • New information regarding the critical role that nutrition plays in the health and productivity of your bees
  • News about the latest beekeeping products, medications, and all-natural remedies
  • Information regarding dozens of helpful beekeeping resources
  • Redeemable coupons from beekeeping suppliers that save the reader money

Beekeeping For Dummies embodies the straightforward and simple approach made famous by the For Dummies series. Each and every reader will benefit from its accessible and approachable take on beekeeping.

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About The Author

Howland Blackiston has been keeping bees for almost 40 years. He has appeared as an expert on CNBC, CNN, NPR, The Discovery Channel, Sirius Satellite Radio, and other broadcast outlets, and has written numerous articles on beekeeping. Howland has been a keynote speaker at conferences in more than 40 countries.

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CHEAT SHEET

What to do during your spring, autumn, and routine beekeeping inspections varies. The spring inspection starts or revives your bee colony, the autumn inspection prepares your beehive for the cold weather (assuming it gets cold in your area), and your routine beekeeping inspections help maintain a healthy and productive hive.
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Typically, beekeepers are able to harvest 40 or more pounds of honey from each of their hives. That’s a lot of honey. Unless you eat a whole lot of toast, you may want to consider other ways to use your copious crop. Honey is not only wholesome, delicious, sweet, and fat-free, but it’s also incredibly versatile.
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Not surprisingly, most new beekeepers face the same bewildering situations and ask identical questions. Following are some of the most frequently asked questions about bee behavior. They may solve a riddle or two for you as you embark on the wonderful adventure of backyard beekeeping. Look over these questions and answers.
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In recent years, because of all the problems that bees have been facing, it has become prudent to take a fresh look at historical approaches to caring for and medicating your bees.Are treatments being overused? Probably. Are less-experienced beekeepers simply misusing these products to the detriment of our bees?
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What to do during your spring, autumn, and routine beekeeping inspections varies. The spring inspection starts or revives your bee colony, the autumn inspection prepares your beehive for the cold weather (assuming it gets cold in your area), and your routine beekeeping inspections help maintain a healthy and productive hive.
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Honey bees keep their hive clean and sterile. If a bee dies, the others remove it immediately. If a larva or pupa dies, out it goes. Bees keep a tidy house.During the early spring, when weather can be unstable, a cold snap can chill and kill some of the developing brood. When this happens, the bees dutifully remove the little corpses and drag them out of the hive.
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As a beekeeper, you may want to sell your honey. And you may want to give some advanced thought to the branding you’ll put on it. Selling your honey can create a sweet little supplement to your regular income. After all, a hundred or more bottles of honey may accommodate more toast than your family can eat! Creating an attractive label for your honey An attractive label can greatly enhance the appearance and salability of your honey.
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An elevated hive stand is exactly what it sounds like: an item you use to hold a beehive off the ground. Many beekeepers put all of their hives on this kind of stand.The figure shows plans to help you build your own elevated hive stand. The dimensions of this stand are ideal for a Langstroth hive (eight or ten frames), a Warre hivé, or to hold a couple of five‐frame nuc (nucleus colony) hives.
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It’s better to go into the winter with strong bee colonies; they have a far better chance of making it through the stressful cold months than do weak ones. If you have a weak hive, you can combine it with a stronger colony. If you have two weak hives, you can combine them to create a robust colony.But you can’t just dump the bees from one hive into another.
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A number of products and techniques are available that help reduce or even eliminate Varroa mites populations. This mite, which looks a lot like a tick, is about the size of a pinhead and is visible to the naked eye. The adult female Varroa attaches herself to a bee and feeds on its blood (hemolymph fluid). In recent years, it is a generally accepted practice not to medicate your bees unless you know it is necessary.
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You can create a second colony from your existing colony. You don’t even have to order another package of bees. Free bees! Ah, but here’s the dilemma: You’ll need a new queen for your new colony. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to order a new queen. You can let the bees make their own; however, ordering a new queen is simply faster and more foolproof.
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Clearly, a beekeeper’s calendar of activities will be different in Vermont than in Texas. And the corresponding dates and activities can vary depending upon actual weather conditions, elevation, and so on. Consider this tool a “sanity check” as you and your bees progress through the seasons.Zone A: Short summers and long, cold winters.
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If your colony loses its queen and is unable to raise a new queen, a strange situation can arise. Without the “queen substance” wafting its way through the hive, there is no pheromone to inhibit the development of the worker bees’ reproductive organs.In time, young laying workers’ ovaries begin to produce eggs.
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Robbing is a situation in which a beehive is attacked by invaders from other hives. The invasion is serious for a bee colony for a number of reasons: A hive defending itself against robbing will fight to the death. This battle can result in the loss of many little lives and even destroy an entire colony. Tragedy!
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When you extract honey from hives, the cappings that you slice off represent your major wax harvest for the year. You'll probably get 1 or 2 pounds of wax for every 100 pounds of honey that you harvest. If you have a Top Bar hive and are using a honey press, you will have an even greater bounty of beeswax.This wax can be cleaned and melted down for all kinds of uses.
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During summer months, about 60,000 or more bees reside in a healthy hive. And while you may think all of those insects look exactly alike, the population actually includes two different female castes (the queen and the workers) and the male bees (drones). Each type has its own characteristics, roles, and responsibilities.
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Everyone knows about at least one part of the honey bee’s anatomy: its stinger. But you’ll get more out of beekeeping if you understand a little bit about the other various body parts that make up the honey bee. Honey bee's skeleton Like all insects, the honey bee’s “skeleton” is on the outside. This arrangement is called an exoskeleton.
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If your bees swarm and you can see where they landed, you can capture them and start a new hive. You may even be lucky enough to get a call from a friend or neighbor who has spotted a wild swarm in his yard; beekeepers are often called to come capture swarms. You can introduce your swarm into a new hive in the following manner: Decide where you want to locate your new colony.
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What goes on in a beehive during winter? For the most part, the queen is kept warm surrounded by thousands of her workers, collectively referred to as a winter cluster.The winter cluster first appears in the brood chamber when ambient temperatures reach 54 to 57 degrees Fahrenheit. When cold weather arrives, the cluster forms in the center of the two hive bodies.
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Generally speaking, beekeepers harvest their honey at the conclusion of a substantial nectar flow and when the beehive is filled with cured and capped honey. Conditions and circumstances vary greatly across the country. First-year beekeepers are lucky if they get a small harvest of honey by late summer. That’s because a new colony needs a full season to build up a large enough population to gather a surplus of honey.
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Is beekeeping the right hobby for you? Here are a few things worth considering as you consider beekeeping as a honey-producing pastime. Beekeeping environmental considerations Unless you live on a glacier or on the frozen tundra of Siberia, you probably can keep bees. Bees are remarkable creatures that do just fine in a wide range of climates.
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The approach for inspecting your beehive doesn’t vary much from one visit to another. Beekeepers always follow certain procedures and always look for certain things. After a few visits to the hive, the mechanics of all this become second nature, and you can concentrate on enjoying the miraculous discoveries that await you.
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A swarm of honey bees is a familiar sight in the spring and early summer. Honey bees instinctively manage the colony’s growth and survival by swarming.Immediately before swarming, the bees that intend to leave the colony gorge themselves with honey (like packing a box lunch before a long trip). Then, all at once, like someone flipped a switch, tens of thousands of bees exit the hive and blacken the sky with their numbers.
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Regardless of what style of honey you decide to harvest, you must remove the bees from the honey supers (beehive frame boxes) before you can extract or remove the honey. You’ve heard the old adage, “Too many cooks spoil the broth!” Well, you certainly don’t need to bring several thousand bees into your kitchen!
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The Apimaye beehive represents the next generation of the Langstroth-style beehive. Its impressive, award-winning design was engineered in Turkey and is now available in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Europe.It’s a thoughtfully conceived concept, with all kinds of built-in features as standard offerings. But what’s really important about these hives is that they are very well insulated.
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The Flow hive, shown in the figure, is an award-winning invention of Australian father-and-son team Stuart and Cedar Anderson. It’s basically an 8-frame Langstroth hive, but they invented a patented way of harvesting the surplus honey from the hive without having to smoke the bees and remove the honey supers.There is no slicing cappings off the comb, no spinning the frames, nor is there a need for an extractor.
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The majority of the bee hive’s population consists of worker bees. Like the queen, worker bees are all female. They are smaller, their abdomens are shorter, and on their hind legs they possess pollen baskets, which are used to tote pollen back from the field. The life span of worker bee is a modest six weeks during the colony’s active season.
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For beekeepers, it's all about the queen bee: Is your queen healthy? Is your queen still in the hive? Is she safe? But, what differentiates the queen been from the other honey bees? What makes a queen bee a queen? © Konstantin Gushcha / Shutterstock.comAll female bees start out the same way: from a fertilized egg.
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In the autumn of 2006, a beekeeper in Florida filed the first report of a sudden and unexplained disappearance of his bees. They didn't die. They just packed up and left. More reports of heavy losses (mostly from commercial migratory beekeepers) quickly followed. In subsequent years, beekeepers have reported losing anywhere from 30 percent to 90 percent of their hives.
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It’s every beekeeper’s nightmare: The queen is dead, or gone, or lost. Whatever the reason, if the colony doesn’t have a queen, it’s doomed. That’s why you must confirm that the queen is alive and well at every inspection.If you come to the dismal conclusion that your colony is queenless, you can do two things: Let the colony raise its own queen or introduce a new queen into the colony.
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Things really are buzzing now when a month has passed since you hived your bees. Or at least they should be. Perform your hive inspection, as always, looking for evidence of the queen (eggs) and a good pattern of capped brood, pollen, and capped honey. Adding a second deep hive body If all’s well, by the end of the fourth week, the bees have drawn nearly all the foundation into comb.
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You may not know the exact day that your honey bees will arrive, but many suppliers at least let you know the approximate day they plan to ship your package bee colony. If your package of bees is being mailed to you, about a week before the anticipated date of arrival, alert your local post office that you’re expecting bees.
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You can keep honey bees just about anywhere: in the countryside, in the city, in a corner of the garden, by the back door, in a field, on the terrace, or even on an urban rooftop. You don’t need a great deal of space, nor do you need to have flowers on your property.Bees are amazingly adaptable, but you’ll get optimum results and a more rewarding honey harvest if you follow some fundamental guidelines.
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With all the different beehives to choose from, how do you decide? Maybe you just like the look of one hive over another. A better way to decide is to determine the primary reason you are beekeeping and select the hive best suited for that reason. This table will help you make these decisions. Hive Checklist — Which Hive Meets Your Needs?
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