Honeybees
Last modified: January 24, 2012
We do lots of beekeeping stuff. Check out the links for some of our fun!
-Some basics
-The Queen
-Hiving a package of bees
-Random pictures of bees
-Honey and Pollen and Wax, Oh my!
-Swarms
-Splitting a colony
-Honey Super Cell/ Small cell beekeeping
-Honeybees under a microscope
-Protective Equipment
-Homemade Extractor
-Honey harvest
- 2009 Harvest
You lucky dog!
I became fascinated by bees as a little girl. My neighbors on both sides of me decided to raise bees, and I got to ‘help’. I always felt a little bad for the bees when we’d take the honey.
I’d love to try having bees now, but my DH won’t hear of it. Having the African bees integrate is a really possibility in Texas.
Oh well, thanks for the tutorial and great pictures.
Hello, this is Gail and Bob, second year beekeepers in NC. We made the commitment to beekeeping after attending a talk by Bob Alderink, a science educator at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. He introduced us to the Kenya Top Bar hive as an alternative to the more commonly used Langstroth hive. Since the Langstroth hive is a successful, efficient and beneficial design, it has been the choice of professional and hobby beekeepers in the United States for over a century. As a result, a beekeeping culture and business has grown around the availability of woodenware, preformed wax foundation, use of pesticides and portability of hives for industrial agricultural pollination. The objective of these advances has been to provide the beekeeper with more and more honey, just as the practices of giant feedlots have produced more and more meat. In the last few decades a number of pests, such as varroa mites, and bacterial and viral infections have appeared which the bees seem unable to surmount. Beekeepers are losing hives to Colony Collapse Disorder and science and professionals have no clear explanation. We learned that every third bite of our food came from bee pollination and that bees are an essential link in food chain of our other neighbor species. We decided to give back. We became student beekeepers.
Why Top Bar Hives? Honestly, in some ways they are harder to use than Langstroth hives. But they also have wonderful advantages that suit us personally. In other words, we take no position on which is better but look for the solutions in defense of the honeybee. We have two Top Bars and one Langstroth so we can compare and learn as we go. There is only one reason to keep bees- they need us to help them get healthier. They are fascinating, social animals who provide us, and the rest of the biosphere, with their services for free.
They entertain. They teach. Sometimes they sting.
More on our Top Bars next time. My teachers always said to keep it short, and those of you who aren’t interested in Top Bars can skip right over our names and go on to other entries. Life is too short to spend time on the unnecessary.
Hi I am just a newbie for bee keeping and i would like to tell you that your site helped me a lot in understanding on how bees are.
Gloria @ Honey Extractors´s last [type] ..Second Hand Beekeeping Equipment – Buying Guide