When Is the Best Time to Harvest Honey?

When Is the Best Time to Harvest Honey?​

As a beekeeper, knowing the right time to harvest honey is a must. Perfect timing determines many things, including the quantity and quality of the honey you harvest. You should, therefore, watch the hive for signs of readiness for harvest.

Harvesting times also vary between commercial beekeepers and small-scale keepers, who focus on producing honey for subsistence purposes. But, irrespective of the size of your farm, you ought to understand basic beekeeping operations.

Beehive Record-Keeping: Tips and Advice

Beehive Record-Keeping Tips​

Whether beekeeping is a hobby or a business for you, regular beehive inspections are necessary. Without them, you can’t guarantee the most important thing — a healthy bee colony. However, beehive visits are useless if you don’t keep track of your observations.

Extracting Honey without An Extractor

Harvesting Honey without An Extractor​

The successful end of a honey flow is cause for celebration for any beekeeper. At this stage, there’s a supply for your bees to thrive on and enough left waiting to be eaten and sold. You’re ready to reap, but there’s only one problem — how do you get the honey out of the comb?

The way you choose to draw out honey is important as each method has trade-offs. Expense, time and damage to the colony are all considerations. Using machinery — called an extractor — to remove honey is one of the most common methods. However, it might make sense for you to opt for another approach, one that involves extracting without an extractor. 

How to Attract a Honey Bee Swarm

How to Attract a Swarm of Honeybees​

Catching or luring a honey bee swarm is a fine art. The spring season rolls in, and the anxiety comes with it. If it’s your first time catching a swarm, we have some valuable advice and insights for you.

If you’re an experienced beekeeper, but your luck has been pretty bad, there may be some things you’re unaware of. Bees are picky creatures and look for specific characteristics in their new home. Let’s delve deeper. 

How to Encourage Honeybees to Make Honeycomb

How to Get Bees to Make More Honeycomb

Honeybees carry out all sorts of tasks that are essential for the survival of the colony. One of these critical tasks is the building of honeycombs. Honeybees make honeycomb on their own naturally, to store the honey and pollen they’ve gathered. 

Usually, this occurs with little input from you, but there are a few situations that arise where bees struggle to build comb. For example, you have a weak, aging colony with no young workers to build honeycomb. No worries! There are several things beekeepers can do to encourage bees to build honeycomb at a quicker rate.

How High Off the Ground Should a Beehive Be?

How High Off the Ground Should a Beehive Be?

As with most beekeeping issues, the question of ideal beehive height yields as many answers as there are beekeepers. The right height ensures you, the beekeeper, can easily access your hives for inspection while protecting your bees from ground-dwelling predators like skunks and racoons. It should also be high enough to keep water out when it rains.

In this article, we’ll discuss the factors to consider when choosing the ideal elevation to help you decide what works best for you.

9 Benefits of Beekeeping: Reasons to Start Your Own Hive

The Benefits of Beekeeping

It’s amazing that one little insect feeds us, heals us, and teaches us without any intention of doing any of those things. The benefits of beekeeping depend on your objective. Are you looking to make a little extra money selling bee products? Are you looking for a hobby that’s not too intense yet offers enough of a challenge to keep you interested? Or have you heard the buzz about bee deaths and you want to do something about it?

Knowing what you hope to achieve from your project will help you weigh the benefits we will outline below against the required inputs, and then you can make a better-informed decision.

We’ll kick off our list with ways in which beekeeping benefits humanity as a whole, keeping the planet livable.

A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Queen Bees for Profit

A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Queen Bees for Profit

Raising queen bees can be an incredibly rewarding, educational, and profitable endeavor. The right combination of traits can give a colony a better chance of winter survival, increased honey production and resistance to pests and diseases. In the U.S, the average loss of colonies over the winter is almost one in four (23.8%), and that’s a national average. Backyard beekeeper losses tend to be higher than commercial ones, so their losses can be one in two hives.

To prevent future losses, beekeepers look for queens that will produce bees that don’t just survive but thrive despite the threat of disease and the chill of winter.

By mastering the art of raising healthy, strong queen bees, beekeepers can optimize their honey surplus, making the business of beekeeping more profitable and fulfilling.

Do Beekeepers Get Stung a Lot?

Do Beekeepers Get Stung a Lot?

The short answer is yes, they do get stung, but how often depends on several factors. The level of experience, protective gear, and the type of bees being kept all play a role in how frequently a beekeeper might get stung. The fact that we keep going back to the hive tells you that it isn’t too bad, so don’t click away just yet.

Just because the occasional sting is inevitable, doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to prevent multiple stings. That’s why we’ve put together this article, to explain what you can do to keep those stings to a minimum.

Feeding Pollen Patties to Bees in Winter

How to Feed Pollen Patties to Bees in Winter

Feeding bees during the winter months can be a challenging task for beekeepers. As the temperature drops, bees become less active and consume more honey to maintain their body heat. Pollen is used primarily for feeding brood which is why, in preparation for winter, bees focus mainly on gathering nectar, which is the fuel they need to stay warm.

Pollen bread, made from pollen and a little nectar by the bees, is usually stored near the brood. As the queen lays fewer eggs during winter, the pollen requirements by the colony at that time are very low.