How Many Bee Hives Do You Need to Make a Living?

Any type of business requires scale. If the operation is too small, the cost of producing one unit of anything, let’s say honey would be too high. So, even though each colony will be different, and each harvesting season will vary, the number of hives you need to keep a bee business going is going to determine whether you’re better off keeping your day job, or fully investing your time and money in bees.

Many experts suggest that a full-time income can be achieved with around 200 hives and at least 50 hives for offering pollination services. However, success in beekeeping heavily relies on other factors such as location, weather, and market demand. In this article, we will outline the core elements of a beekeeping business to understand how to turn it into a full-time business.

Bees, Neighbors and the Law: Navigating Apiary Etiquette

Like most of the animals we keep, bees don’t care much for our property lines. Most of the time, when they cross over to the neighbors, they don’t cause any problems. They fly over, collect pollen and nectar, and fly back without incident. If you have a beehive or two in your backyard in a highly residential area, you couldn’t plant enough flowers to feed them, so they’d wind up next door anyway.

Sometimes they’ll go to the neighbors in search of water, especially in the summer, and the site of all those bees can be alarming. Other times, your neighbor will get stung by an insect that may or may not be a bee and immediately point the finger at you. It’s therefore, in your best interest to know and understand your legal responsibilities regarding beekeeping in your locality.

This article will discuss the laws and guidelines that govern beekeeping in residential areas and provide insights on how best to foster a healthy coexistence between beekeepers, their neighbors, and the bees themselves.

Can Bees Sting Through a Bee Suit?

I don’t think there’s a beekeeper alive who has never been stung. Yes, beekeepers, despite their love and adoration for bees, do get stung. Does this happen when we have our bee suits on? Yes, yes it does. But don’t click away just yet, there’s some good news.

A bee suit is designed to offer protection from bee stings, but bee suits are sting-resistant and not completely bee-proof. Bees have a way of finding the smallest openings in a suit, and even the most determined bees might be able to sting through the material.

Cross Comb: The Issue with Bees Building Comb Between Frames

Cross-comb is a common issue faced by beekeepers, especially beginners, which occurs when bees build comb that connects two beehive frames. This improper construction can make it challenging for beekeepers to inspect, maintain, and harvest honey from their hives.

Typically, cross-comb is a result of improperly spaced frames or large gaps that allow bees to build in any direction they want. We’ll take a closer look at the reasons behind cross-comb formation and show you how to prevent and fix the problem.

Can There Be Too Many Drones in Beehive?

Beehives are complex ecosystems with different roles played by a specific caste of bees, such as worker bees, queen bees, and drone bees. Drone bees are the male bees in a colony, and their primary function is to mate with virgin queens from other colonies. While their presence in a beehive is inevitable, can there be too many drones in a beehive?

Having a healthy number of drone bees is essential for the species, as they contribute to genetic diversity by mating with queens from various colonies. In the wild, drones will constitute approximately 10% of the colony, although smaller colonies may not produce any drones. Drone production is energy intensive and ordinarily occurs when there’s enough nectar and pollen for the colony.

Since the number of drones is proportional to the colony’s size, a large colony may appear to have numerous drones, but that is not cause for concern. Too many drones can indicate issues within the hive, such as problems with the queen bee or the presence of foundationless frames. In this article, we will explore the importance of drone bees, their optimal population numbers, and the potential consequences of having too many drones in a beehive.

Beehive Mouse Guard vs Entrance Reducer

One of a beekeeper’s responsibilities is to keep intruders out of the hive. Sure, the guard bees make it their life’s work to keep unwelcome visitors out, but sometimes, our man-made beehives make their job difficult. The focus of this article will be the use of two tools that you can place on the hive to keep intruders out. They are the mouse guard and the entrance reducer.

Both of these tools serve different purposes in protecting and controlling your beehive. The mouse guard primarily prevents mice and other small rodents from entering the hive. The entrance reducer is designed to regulate the entrance size for various reasons, such as to help control robbing by other bees or pests. Understanding these differences and knowing when to add or remove them will help to protect your colonies.

Can You Keep Bees Without Harvesting Honey?

Before humans interfered with bees, they built nests in the wild, collected nectar and pollen for themselves, and managed to survive winter in countries with freezing temperatures. They didn’t have to worry about losing more than half their stores to a two-legged mammal with a saw. As long as they could keep away from bears, they flourished.

Then, we came along with our wicker baskets and hollowed logs, tricking them into setting up their operations where we had full access to their stores. We’ve been at it so long that it almost seems that bees couldn’t do without us taking honey from them. But that’s not exactly true. There are still colonies living unmanaged in forests and caves yet we don’t have honey dripping down the trees, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

Even though you could keep bees without harvesting honey, the bees still require management. In this article, we’ll discuss how to manage bees without honey as the key output.

Keeping bees can feel like hiring a contractor to redo your kitchen. Once the contractor starts, you can visit the site daily and complain every other day, but that doesn’t guarantee the work will be completed when you say so. When you get your first colony, either as a package or a nuc, it works like a contractor.

The bees have a deadline, which is before all the flowers disappear for the summer. Without that nectar, they don’t have the energy to build honeycombs. Without the pollen, they don’t have the food they need to care for their young. So they want to grow as much as you do, but they don’t control all the variables, and neither do you.

In other words, the answer to how long it takes bees to fill a brood box varies, from a few weeks to a couple of months. A strong colony can fill a frame every 2 to 3.5 days and fill a 10-frame brood box in 20 to 35 days. But no two colonies act exactly alike. Read on below for an in-depth overview of the factors that affect the speed at which the bees work to help you plan your brood box activities.

How Long Do Bees Live Without a Queen?

When a bee colony becomes queenless, its survival clock starts ticking. If you don’t act in time, they could turn hopelessly queenless with laying workers, and ultimately, the colony dies.

Bees do everything they can to avoid that situation. For example, when they sense that their queen is failing, they identify existing larvae that they can put on a royal diet immediately. Unfortunately, they can only make a queen out of very young larvae, so if something happens to the queen and there are no eggs or freshly hatched larvae, your colony could be in trouble.

In this article, we will explore the factors that determine the life expectancy of bees without a queen and discuss the various resources and studies that have been conducted on this subject.