A LITTLE BIT ABOUT BEEKEEPING

Honeybees are fascinating animals that play an extremely important role in agriculture. Keeping bees is a complex process that requires patience, lots of knowledge and a passion for bees. I keep bees and just watching my hive has taught me so much. For instance, did you know that bees will do scout flights to map out the area before taking off to collect honey and that worker bees don`t get set jobs - they actually start off with their job being cleaning the cells and then get put on different duties as their life goes on- the last job being foraging. You can obtain bees in different ways. Some people buy a “Nuke” which is a small box that includes a queen, worker bees and a few frames of larvae to start you off. However, I think the more interesting way is finding a swarm. This is the way I got my bees. Bees naturally swarm every year in spring. The queen will fly away from her original hive with half the workers to go and start a new hive somewhere else. They will clump together on a branch, or in my case, a cement mixer. The bees will probably only stay there for a week while the queen sends out workers to go and look for a place to live. People will post messages of swarms they have seen on a beekeeping Facebook page and if you want to start a new hive you go out to collect them. When the bees are like this they are passive and won`t try to sting you unless they are really annoyed so you can simply shake them of the branch into a cardboard box.  As long as you get the queen in, the others will follow. Here’s an interesting fact- The worker bees left behind in the original hive will sense the lack of queen pheromone and then they start to feed larvae royal jelly -which turns them into new queens. When they all hatch they will fight to the death, which will leave one dominant queen in charge of the hive. Don`t get yourself too worked up yet, before you start a hive you are going to need some basic equipment including bee boxes with frames, a hive tool and of course a bee-suit so you don’t get stung. When inspecting my hive I use a smoker to blow smoke across the hive.  This deceives the bees into thinking there is a fire nearby – they gorge on honey supplies, which makes them placid. It also interferes with their communication scents, making them less likely to sting. The basic principal is that you can’t harvest honey from the bottom two boxes because you need to allow the bees to have enough food to survive. This is also where the queen will lay her eggs to build up the colony. However once you’ve filled up the bottom two boxes you can add on a third box called a honey super. The honey is actually the bees’ winter food store.  So it can only be harvested in the spring when there is more nectar for the bees to collect as the plants flower. 
-Parker's Pure