So you want to be a beekeeper?
Here are some pro tips and Dos and Don’ts I learned the hard way
By Mario Chapa
I was recently talking to a friend of mine who was thinking on purchasing a single beehive and start beekeeping. My first reaction was, don’t. Don’t start beekeeping with a single hive. You are most likely to fail. Here’s why; in the pesticide heavy environment we live in, even the most experienced beekeepers lose 30 to 40% of their hives every year. Granted those commercial beekeepers I’m talking about are constantly exposing their bees to farm pesticides, mortality rate for a hobby beekeeper is a lot lower, perhaps 10 to 20%. If you manage your hives naturally as I do, mortality rate is almost zero. So here are some tips on how to achieve that.
I have been a beekeeper for eight or nine years. By far the best tip I received from a mentor beekeeper was, get at least two hives. Many problems that arise in a hive can be alleviated or solved by adding a new frame full of brood and bees to your unhealthy hive. No beekeeper is going to give you one frame, and even if they did, it’s impractical to transport a single frame from one apiary to another. This is why; I recommend at least two hives to start, three is even a better number, but it always goes down to your budget.
Join a beekeeping club; don’t wing it on your own like I did. Before I joined a club, I started beekeeping on my own. I bought a few books and devoured them, read a few blogs and feeling confident I bought my bees online from an apiary in Georgia, me being in Texas, first mistake. It also was a bit late in the season but I thought that was not a big deal. I received three hives in the post office. Seeing the post office workers faces was worth every penny I paid for my bees, but I was equally nervous. I received three packages (more on packages vs. nucs below). Weather was hot, they arrived on a Friday to the post office and I got word to pick them up on Monday, so when I got to them they were already dehydrated, underfed and overheated and they had been almost a week inside their packages. Many were already dead. I sprayed water and sugar water on them to try to revive them and transferred them to my beautiful cedar made Warre hives with their peaking windows. If I had first joined a beekeeping club, like I did later, I would’ve gotten great tips on where to buy bees locally and who to avoid. Beekeeping clubs are essential to a beekeeper. You’ll meet great friends there and also get access to vendors, books, meetings, parties and mentors. Trust me; it will make your beekeeping experience much more enjoyable. It is far better to call someone when you are having bee issues that to google it. A beekeeper from your club would gladly go a take a look at your hives and help you fix the problems. Just make sure you have a cold one after!
I placed my hives in a property I had a few miles from home. It was a beautiful wooded area with a nice pond at the back, in other words, a bee paradise. I decided to place the hives in a somewhat shadowy area under some big pine and oak trees to “protect them from the Houston heat”, second mistake. Bees need heat to fight moisture and mold, and larvae need heat to grow. Bees can easily cool their hives by evaporating water and flapping their wings. Bees tolerate heat very well and need it to stay healthy since most pests die of heat at lower temperatures that the bees can handle, so heat is one tool bees use to stay healthy. Bees can also heat their hives with their own body heat and if needed they can rapidly contract and extend their wing muscles (without moving their wings) to generate even more heat. They in fact use this heat to smelt the wax they use to build their comb. But for bees, it’s all about conserving heat. Heat is a form of energy that is very precious to a beehive, and sunlight is free energy. So place your hives in full sun, no matter where you live. If you live north of the Equator, make sure the entrance is facing south or not facing the dominant winter wind, if this is not possible, then install a wind barrier for them. It is also a good idea to clear the are around the hives to facilitate the takeoff and landing patterns. Don’t place your hives too close to each other. Three feet apart is a good start.
After installing the hives and transplanting the packages to their hives, I went and saw them every day and took good care of them. I used to sit in a log in front of the hive and watch them come in and out of the hive. Then I would open the window and look inside. If you are a newbee, it is a great idea to have a window, that way you won’t be tempted to open the hive every day or once a week, neither of which you should do. Open your hives only once every other week at the most. Having a window on your hive, will let you quickly look inside the hive and not disturbing it or worse yet, letting that precious heat escape the hive. Just make sure the window is placed in any direction but in front of the hive, otherwise you will be interrupting the bee flow from landing and takeoff and you will get stung quickly. You can safely approach a beehive from the back or any side without disturbing the bees or getting stung (unless you have a hot hive). After many hours of observation, I got good at predicting what was going inside the hive just by looking at the traffic, how much pollen they were bringing and how fast they were going out. This was part of the inspiration that later led me to build a bee counter in Hive Genie.
I learned a lot just by spending time with my bees, but it was an uphill battle. Many bees died during shipping and because their numbers weren’t that strong they were very slow to draw comb and start laying eggs. But somehow I believed they were about to make it. After a few months, things were growing and comb was getting built. But one fatidic night, it rained so much that water blocked the entrance of my hives. Eventually, and I assume rather quickly, my bees suffocated or overheated to death. A few days later when I came back to the yard, as I was approaching the hives, I realized that no bees were bumping me (they usually bumped once or twice as I approached the hives). Then I saw no bees coming into or out of any of the hives and I immediately knew something was wrong. So much so that I opened the hives without a smoker or bee suit. It was then I realized many of my errors. First, my hives were tilted backwards, which you should never do because rain water will run into your hives and block the entrance. Always tilt your hives forward or make a drain hole in your bottom board. Even better use a screened bottom board.
Losing my bees was a devastating experience for many reasons. First, bees are pets, so it is equally painful to lose a beehive as it is to lose a dog or a fish. Second, you realize what an idiot you are and that you should’ve joined a club. Even as a club member you will lose some hives, but at least you will realize you are not alone and that you are equally as stupid as the other beekeepers. Third, joining a beekeeping club and learning as much as you can before you get your bees will help you avoid some of the rookie mistakes I made, but don’t kick yourself too hard if you lose your bees, everyone loses bees. Having said that, you can certainly minimize loses. Fourth, to me the most painful thing was to realize that my bees didn’t die instantaneously, but rather suffered for a bit and I could’ve saved them if I had an alert in time. So I looked for a beehive monitor that could alert me if my bees weren’t flying. I searched in eBay, on beekeeping magazines, in Amazon, Google and there was nothing out there. That’s when I had my aha moment and decided to create Hive Genie, a beehive monitor that had the ability to count bees. This would be exactly the same as if I was sitting in that log looking at my bees. I sincerely don’t think a microphone would have alerted me in any way.
After five years perfecting the technology, we have also added quite a few sensors. Our latest version is what we call a sniffer. The sniffer is a sensor that is deployed in the broodbox. It has a carbon dioxide sensor, that will detect if your bees are about to suffocate, it also has a temperature and relative humidity sensor that will let you know how your bees are doing and a volatile organic carbon sensor that could potentially alert the presence of pesticides or foulbrood ( but we haven’t tested it in a real situation yet). Fifth, when you lose your hives, you will soon realize that you have to wait until next year to get bees again, that is really a long time without bees!
Finally, I was lucky thanks to my club and to the internet, to find an apiary close by. I drove, got a couple of nucs this time and tried to transplant the bees from a Langstroth frame to a Warreframe. Bad idea, that proved impossible and I also lost those hives. It is best to start beekeeping with the same type of hives everybody else is using, start with the standard. Once you are an experienced beekeeper, do as you please. For most of America, Langstroth hive is the way to go. It doesn’t matter if it is 8 frame or 10 frame. If you want to start with a top bar hive or Warre, just tag along with someone that already does that. But it is best to start with the most common standard. If you are in England or Japan, use the local national standard hive. By far, the most common hive type in the world is Langstroth, I would say almost 95% of the world hives use it, and there is a reason for it. It is very practical, sturdy, easy to make and easy to purchase. Most beekeeping tools and machinery are made to extract honey from these hives. If you intend to become a commercial beekeeper later down the road, it is best you stick to the Langs. I use 8 frame hives because it is the most compatible with the warre hives in terms of size, but 10 frames is probably a better choice. I also only use 8 frame deeps, no supers, this you probably can’t do with the 10 framer, they are way too heavy when filled with honey. But again, 90% of beekeepers use 10 frames. There is really no performance difference between an 8 or 10 frame, it’s just a matter of how comfortable are you carrying heavy or heavier boxes.
Should I get nucs or packages? A nuc is short for nuclear colony. It is composed of a small five frame beehive, usually you will purchase it in a corrugated plastic box. You will need to transplant it into your brood box. A good nuc is a fully working small hive. 2 frames of brood (at least), a laying queen and 2 or 3 frames of honey. Nucs take off way faster than packages because they already have comb and a laying queen and most importantly brood that will soon emerge as new bees ready to work. As these bees emerge, they will replace the house bees and send the older bees to forage for nectar and polen, thus starting a virtuous cycle, more food means more resources to build new comb, new comb means the queen can lay more eggs and there is also more space to store more food. Nucs tend to sell completely every season, so order them as soon as your apiary is taking orders, usually December or January. They will call you for pickup sometime in spring. Nucs are more expensive than packages, usually above $200. If you can, buy nucs to start. They will increase your chances of success. To transplant the nuc into your hive, make sure to keep the frames in the same order with respect to each other and with respect to the hive entrance. Pick a side and place the frames one by one into your new hive. Always handle bees with a smoker. This is essential to protect them and you. It is also a great idea to use a full suit, until you learn how to properly handle your bees and figure out if they are docile or not. I used to wear shorts and short sleeve with my milder hives, but always wear a veil. Shorts is also a bad idea, you will get stung in places that you shouldn’t get stung! And yes, every beekeeper gets stung many times a year. You develop some resistance to the venom, but it will always hurt. With a nuc, you may be able to harvest some honey on your first year, but always leave some honey for the bees. As I stated earlier, I keep my bees naturally. I don’t feed, don’t treat and don’t requeen. I rarely lose a hive, mostly once every three or four years when my queens get old and I miss opportunity to split the hives and then miss the swarm. For years I have had zero beehive loses, granted, I don’t move my bees as commercial beekeepers do. The catch is that I only harvest half of the honey. The other half is for the bees. My bees are super healthy. I have never lost a hive to beetles or varroa or any other disease. I have only lost splits that failed and I lost them to wax moth because the split went queen less or I poorly managed the space, placing a super when there was no need for it yet. Never add a super if the brood box has three or more empty frames. Bees need energy to manage space, empty space is a welcome sign for beetles and wax moth.
Packages on the other hand are made of two or three pounds of bees inside a cage and a mated queen that comes in its own little cage with a few workers to feed and tend to her. To transplant a package, simply shake the bees on top of your brood box, then place the queen cage between two frames, making sure you don’t block the screen of the queen cage, workers will feed the queen through the screen. Packages are cheaper than nucs, usually in the $100 range. The problem with packages is that workers have to first build the comb before the queen can lay. They also have to bring food for the brood and house bees. Bees don’t live long, except for the queen that can live three to seven years, workers live a few weeks. So the numbers in your package will only go down until the first generation of workers emerge, which is 21 days after the queen laid the eggs. Which has to happen after the comb is drawn which will take the bees a few days, so most likely half of your bees will die before the numbers start growing again. Which is why you will need to feed your packaged bees heavily until they are fully established. This will help them increase their chances. If you have old comb from last year, then packages are a good solution.
Once you have a few hives of your own, you can easily split them next year and double your hive count. But let’s discuss natural beekeeping and splits in another post.
Until then, enjoy your bees!
