There are a lot of good reasons to have a
few hives of honey bees around. For garden and orchard crops, honey bees
provide the necessary pollination so there’s something to harvest at the
end of the season. For a source of a natural sweetener – honey – there’s
no rival, and if the other natural products of the hive – pollen or propolis – appeal to you, then a few hives are certainly useful. Plus,
there’s the added benefit of having all the light you want from fragrant
and clean-burning beeswax candles. Sweetness and light in the same
package.
Indeed, honey bees
provide all of these services to their keepers. But they could, if
harnessed, provide them in surplus so you could not only produce what was
needed for the home front, but use the extra for bartering or selling to
be a part of the family’s income.
And taken yet a step
further, honey bees themselves can be increased and sold just as bees to
stock new colonies, as small nucleus colonies ready to buildup during the
season, or large, full-size colonies ready to produce in the current
season. Queen honey bees, too, can be raised and selected to thrive in the
local environment, like your open pollinated corn, or sold to other
beekeepers in the area.
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Learn to identify the queen (large, golden abdomen),
drones (large bee with huge eyes), and workers. All colonies should
have a queen and workers. Healthy colonies in the summer should have
drones. You need to know if your colony has a queen and can tell if
there is brood and eggs present when inspecting the colony during the
summer. |
A few hives of bees
can do all of this for their keepers, but there’s still more. Almost
nothing in the backyard continuously captures the imagination as totally
as a box full of fascinating, industrious, well-behaved and productive
bugs. If you ever open the box they live in you will get just an
inkling of what I mean. But open it twice, and you’re hooked.
Getting started, like
many new ventures, has a learning curve to be dealt with. The most
important part of that curve is assuming responsibility for the well being
of a living being under your care... not unlike family pets, chickens,
cattle or other friendly or productive animals. A beehive may appear
as only a box full of bugs, but a honey bee colony has a personality and
lifestyle all its own, and as its keeper you must learn its ways and wiles
so you do the best you can to protect it from the dangers of the bee
world, and manage it so that it is as naturally productive as it can be
without the stresses of industrialized beekeeping.
Moreover, as you know
full well, animals are variably susceptible to their own particular
problems, and each has its own special nutritional, housing and behavior
needs. Honey bees are no different, and if you keep this in mind the
recommendations to follow make perfect sense.
