Phillips - Beginning beekeeping: everything you need to make your hive thrive!

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First American Edition, 2017
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BEEKEEPING
BEGINNING

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR HIVE THRIVE!

Tanya Phillips

Introduction

Welcome to the amazing world of honeybees!

Until I became a beekeeper, I had no idea just how fascinating and intelligent honeybees were. Theyve survived for centuries using their keen senses of vision, taste, and smell to thrive and multiply throughout most areas of the world. Theyre one of the few living creatures that cause no harm in order to live their day-to-day lives. In fact, when they take what they need to eat for survival, they actually benefit others through their pollination of plants, in the creation of beeswax, and in the making of excess honey that we get to harvest and eat.

This book is designed to give you all the information youll need to get started with keeping bees and some of the best techniques to use for hive management as your colony grows from season to season and for years to come. Bees are truly remarkable and resilient creatures that I hope youll come to respect and admire as much as I do.

Every beekeeper has their own story as to why they started keeping bees. I read about a class on top-bar hives that was advertised in a Craigslist ad and thought it looked interesting to me. I thought it might be a fun hobby to try with my husband, so we signed up for the class. Once I committed to ordering bees and got my husband working on hive construction, I started researching beekeeping and joined a local county bee club to learn more. I learned bees were having trouble survivingand dying from something called CCDand suddenly, it wasnt about having a hobby anymore. I was on a mission to save the honeybee.

We began our ventures into beekeeping by rescuing bee swarms, and our apiary quickly grew to 20 colonies our first year. Weve easily doubled our numbers each year with swarms and splits. What started as a little hobby quickly became my full-time business.

How will your bee story begin?

Tanya Phillips

All About Honeybees

One of the best ways to become a good beekeeper is to better understand the creatures youre dealing with. Bees have become more and more important to humans in recent decades, and because their survival is constantly at risk, knowing more about the vital role they play in our lives will help beekeepers everywhere ensure they continue to flourish.

In this chapter, youll learn about the physiological changes that occur in honeybees based on breed, gender, and caste. Youll also learn about the importance of bees for human survival as well as how the colony functions as a whole. Its amazing how 40,000 bees can work together on common goalsall with the best interest of the entire colony at heart.

Why We Need Honeybees

Despite their name, honeybees do more than make delicious honey. Theyre also responsible for one third of the worlds food supply as well as the survival of plants and trees. And they might just be the best superorganism role models for Earths creaturesincluding humans.

They Pollinate Crops

Honeybees pollinate more than $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year. In fact, beekeepers rent out more than 2.5 million colonies each year for the pollination of about 90 different US crops, especially almonds, apples, alfalfa seed, and vegetables. These crops grow on approximately 3.5 million acres, and they translate to one third of our daily dietand honeybees make sure those foods remain in abundant supply. Bees are typically active no matter what season it is, meaning humans can rest assured knowing well have food year-round. But like any organism, honeybees also need food to surviveand that all begins with pollination.

They Pollinate Flowers

Bees pollinate flowers more than any other insect and more than any other plant. Surprisingly, bee pollination is actually an accidental process that occurs during the course of their natural foraging behaviors. As a worker bee moves from flower to flower, drinking nectar, she brushes up against anthers full of pollen, which transfer to the hairs covering her body. As she flies along, she begins combing the pollen with her legs and transferring it to the pollen baskets ( corbicula ) on her hind legs. During that process, she inadvertently drops some of the pollen back onto other flowers, causing pollination.